One response to the End of Posterity–making art on the brink of human extinction, is to deliberately make work that is fragile, perishable–even to incorporate its destruction into the art.
In thinking about doing silverpoint, I felt a small bubble of elation, in realizing I was doing just the opposite. Silverpoint is one of the most durable of mediums. It’s metal embedded in powdered stone, and can be done on wood or Masonite. It will hold up for centuries. Long after the last human as turned to dust. How satisfying!I will make art for the posterity of my imagination.
Category: Goby’s Journal
Silverpoint
This is such a natural, inevitable transition–from my ink and ink wash drawings to SilverPoint. I’m too old, the learning curve is too long, and I’ll never have access to press and facilities, the acid baths … no way, or I’d be into etchings. But SilverPoint opens to the kind of effects I’ve been in love with since I first saw reproductions of Piranesi’s prisons. Work I’ve done with pen and ink are suggestive in this direction. I especially like the Silverpoint will endure for centuries… when there’s not much hope human life will be around even for another 100 years. Kinda like, Fuck you, capitalist pigs! I’ll just make up the “posterity” you’re working so hard to kill off. 
Or from my pavement series
So I spent my food money for Silverpoint ground and a stylus. I have more than enough excess weight to get me to my next SS check!
Sketch, 1974 Polish bar Margaret-Orthodox
40 years ago… I carried drawing pads everywhere I went. This was one of the regular patrons, a little bar with a Polish name, now a produce market. I had been making pottery for a couple of years, and this was about the time I gave up on painting. Convinced I would never be good enough.
Now that we have no future…
We know we will die. The courage and nobility of the human spirit resides in our ability to think beyond our individual lives, or the lives of our generation.
This is a question that first lodged itself in my thoughts during the Cuban missile crisis, standing at the back of the concert hall listening to a teacher from the music school at Wichita State play Bach’s Sonata’s and Partitas for Solo Violin to an almost empty auditorium. The countdown to doomsday had begun.
This is what it comes to… I thought– all the great accomplishments of our species: the art, the music, poetry… nothing. Less than nothing… to those whose only rapture is power and money.
What do we draw on now that we have no future? Now that we know that there will be no posterity to take up the work we have begun?
A question that has become a ghost I cannot exorcise. The ghost that will be all that is left of us. The ghost we have already become.
#86 “…and watered heaven with their tears” 40×20 Acrylic and mixed media
Illocality: Joseph Massey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Massey beautifully erases the distinction between nature, and the random clutter of parking lots… fragments of human artifice. One is never left with the false tranquility of contemplation of the “natural world:” The observing eye in these poems is not passive, or restorative of some lost numinosity of childhood, as in a Wordsworthian sense. Sex shop signs, bricks, asphalt parking lots, broken glass… and the windows themselves, through which the world is perceived, sharpen senses to a cutting point, prick one’s body into a wakeful anxious dream. They pry open the mind to an awareness of things–things… pregnant with ideas that exist beyond words.
Life with No Future
a mood is not something you can pin to a point in time. It’s traced over the course of a day. Or weeks. Or months. Or years. Like weather–there will be seasons, there will be storms. There will be, now and then, blessed breakthroughs of sun and light. So it’s no good, telling yourself… or anyone else, that your mood is this or that.
This was a day that began with near panic attack anxiety level. I suppose it got better. Acute blurred into chronic, if that’s what you call, better. I need dystopic reading material… to distract me from this dystopia I inhabit.
No, it’s not all in my head. It’s out there. Everywhere. I’m just registering it at sometimes what approaches near suicidally acute levels… than, like I said… it blurs into a more general miasma.
It’s completely beyond my comprehension–why anyone would choose to have a child now, given what they are likely going to endure.
Life without a future. There is no future. This is all we have. All we’re gonna get.
We Who came of age at the dawn of R&Roll
All the stuff from people two generations younger, on how much they got from Bowie and what the aging and passing of generations of pop stars born within a year or two of my own entrance to planet Earth, meant to them. Lennon, Dylan…et al.
I was born 1941, the day the Nazi’s invaded the USSR. I’m an artist filled to choking with debt to the past and no clue how to deal with it, but to use it for my own vision against the stream of recent history. 50’s rock of my teens broke down borders for me, I discovered, not David Bowie–who came way later when I was in my 30’s…but be-bop and cool jazz. The Beatles, the rock of the late 60’s and first couple of years of the 70’s were like movie soundtrack to my 20’s –while my own head was all Bach and Josquin du Pres and Palestrina and late 19th C, early 20th Modernists–artists both literary and visual. My overwhelming sense from all this is that, as an artist, I have no place in history, and not a sq mm of space free from it. I feel like a Lost Generation of One
Cold! We are aliens in this universe.
The human body adjusts well to heat… if one doesn’t spend much of the day in AC, or going in and out, hot to super cooled. And you can stay out of direct sun, and be where there’s at least minimal air circulation. But the only way to adjust to extreme cold, is with layers of clothes. The cold will kill you. And it doesn’t fuss around about it. Three hours is like, max… and you won’t notice it much beyond the first hour or so. In cold like we have in Philly now–not even that much time (Siberia, Antarctica…hell, Ely, Minnesota!–minutes!) .
Dress warm, peeps.That’s the real voice of this Universe you think you’re a part of.
It’s saying: die!
Without that thin blanket of air around the planet–we’d have joined up with the Universe long ago.
Look up at the stars. They’re plenty hot. But most of what’s out there is near absolute zero. It’s telling you, you don’t belong. And won’t last long, either, by its reckoning.
Yep. We’re star stuff alright. Wrap that thought around you and walk out naked into this night… and see how long it keeps you warm… or alive
#222 & 221, inverse
Playing with colors. Each an approximate inversion of the other in hue and tone. #222, ink and water color. Continuing my exploration of what I can do with water color… a medium I’ve not more than dipped into… but finding I love … being in love with color, how could I not be? Like being a student! Would I have been able to do this in a water color class? Maybe Debi Riley’s! Check out her blog–beautiful work, and a natural teacher.
If it’s not play… if it stops being play… get a job at something that pays.
View GALLERY HERE.
Art and Revolution
In a better world, there would be no need for artists to sign their work. Material support would not be tied to a competitive system, and confirmation would come from performing and making and doing, without the destructive, enervating conflict that comes from confusing satisfaction with one’s work with social approval and economic status. On that level, the distinction between craft and art would vanish—as the satisfaction that comes from work well done would fall equally to all who contribute to the benefit of the community. Art would not be a specialty of a few—but a gift nurtured and shared by everyone. Those more dedicated and gifted would serve to teach and empower others.
The capitalist systems of exclusion that corrupt the arts and those who are called to them—the gatekeeping function of galleries, critics, investors, and yes—schools of art, which combine to work from earliest childhood to destroy the seed of the imaginative impulse before it can germinate—which works to marginalize, impoverish or reduce to servitude all but the smallest number of those who survive the culling—having lost its economic and political purpose, would crumble and disappear.
Aroused from the drug of the Capitalist nightmare, every artist, poet, dancer, actor, musician… would be a revolutionary
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 