Category: Political

Every work of art, every poem… is an investment

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from October, 2010

I walked down Passyunk to 5th, and then to South and the Eyes Gallery. 42 years ago, Eyes had been open… maybe a year. A proposal to build an exit from I95 to South, fought and delayed for years, had driven away old businesses and made rents cheap: perfect for Artist Urban Pioneers like the Zagers.

1968, I walked into the Eyes with my wife, then five months pregnant with my oldest son. We left with a birth announcement, a wonderfully visceral silkscreen of a newborn, Oct. 29. Ezekiel Zager. A few months ago I came across this print and thought of how many photographs, mementos, drawings that I’d done, had been lost over the years. Not surprising if Julia and Isaiah had lost the last of these. Today, being the 29th of October, I walked the mile or so to the Eyes Gallery. I saw Julia, who now manages the business there. Said, I may have something you’d be interested in… and took out the print, gave it to her.

She thanked me… and remarked on my Spirit Stick, and seemed pleased. It was like returning something that I had held in safe keeping–but was never mine. I can visualize the image without it.

This is what life is meant for… to return what we’ve been loaned, without ceremony. No one ‘owns’ anything. We don’t always know to whom or where to return what we hold in trust. It’s a great moment, when we are able to to make good on the loan.

For me, every work of art, every poem… is just that. Returning what we’ve be given… for temporary safe keeping. The interest… how I’d understand the parable of the talents in the Christian bible… about interest on the talent, not as profit… but creative investment. We give back… with what we have created out of ourselves from the seed of the gift.

Art in Service of the Empire…

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When I’m intensely involved on new art, the pleasure expands way beyond the time spent physically working on a piece. I walk down the street, imagining what I can do next, experimenting in my mind. I try this color combination and that, discard one idea and take up another. Thinking in both images and words, and not quite either, the one flipping to the other and back again. Then when I get back to the easel, it’s all visual.

I feel somewhat conflicted. I love painting… working with color, but it takes money and space. I see work in museums that I admire, but am deeply troubled. They belong to the elite. The monied elite. They are the property of those who would own every THING and every ONE, who are destroying our public schools, growing fat on their perpetual wars, privatizing every last vestige of the public commons and with it, any sense of community not owned and made serviceable to their interests.

I’ve looked at paintings I’ve done, and destroyed them—because I could imagine them on the walls of corporate board rooms. . I play with the idea that I might go back to doing nothing but constructions… and that, with materials I find… not even Modpodge. Wire and nails from the street and junk yards. What kind of artist am I, that I depend on working within the supply and material conditions of a system I despise?

How am I any better–pining for a nice well lit studio–than those capitalist feeders who produce huge expensive works with grants and contracts gained by doing stuff to entertain the Empire’s ruling class?

Do You Make Art?

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See the links below on Art and Capitalism

and the COMMENTS.

In the age of Zombie Capitalism, pleaset–tell us your thoughts. What is your experience with the gallery to investor system?

Have you considered, or tried alternatives?

Yes, we know–artists have a right to be rewarded for their work, but why do you think the capitalist market is the only way? Why not turn our creativity to imagining a new and better world?

ACTIVIST PASTS, AUSTERE PRESENTS, QUEERED FUTURES: AN INTERVIEW WITH EMILY DAVIDSON

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“Imagine a new relationship to every aspect of everything.”

“Capitalism has fallen; Art must be redefined.”

“You get to pick your gender when you come of age, but feel free to change your mind.”

“Living together is still hard; Art makes it better.”
Posted on Art Threat. 

Art & Capitalism: The Privatization of Creativity

“Real creativity is the ability to change the world together.”

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PRIVATIZING CREATIVITY: THE RUSE OF CREATIVE CAPITALISM

” Real, deep creativity can never be achieved as an individual possession but is always a collective process, bound up with values of equality, social justice and community. ”

” Creativity must embrace its tradition, potential and promise as a key part of cultivating critical, revolutionary communities that resist capitalism, colonialism, gender oppression and racism and create fierce and sustainable alternatives within and against the status quo. Creativity is, in part, the way we refuse our current “reality” and, in a very small and often abstract way, propose or model something different. When creativity joins, supports and critiques social movements for radical change, or when it helps imagine and build the post-capitalist society of the future in the present, it is at its very best. “

Discussion Group: Open Invitation to Artists and their Friends
A-Space, Philadelphia
Saturday, March 23. 7:00 PM (see link below)

Black Garlic Chocolate Cake with Raspberry Sauce and American Racism

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There is just nowhere, it seems, where you aren’t going to stumble on something where you might never expect it–a recipe for a cake, like a bloody swollen thumb, an ‘innocent,’ in the sense of being almost certainly, unconscious, — simile–packed with some of the ugliest assumptions about black people, and white fear.

Last night I made garlic bread out of my not quite fresh baguette from Food not Bombs. This morning, I looked at what was left–and thought, French toast–pain perdu. Why not–tasting in my imagination… umm, savory garlic under the sweet syrup. This sound so good it must be a thing–so I Googled “garlic desserts,” and sure enough…

The one that caught my attention–black garlic chocolate cake with raspberries. Wow. Sounds FABULOUS! There was a little personal story on how the cook worked up the courage to try this–she had never used black garlic before, and the idea of sweets with garlic was new as well.
And there it was. Looking for a simile for the anxiety she felt about this. Like “walking down an unlit alley at 1 AM. In Detroit” she wrote.

And we all know, of course: Detroit = Black.

This, in a recipe for … um, chocolate cake. With garlic. Black garlic. Her unconscious must have been pounding at the door to looking for a crack to leak this one out.

I had been ready to link this article, and the recipe–it sounded so good–I love somewhat unusual combinations that keep making things to eat an endless adventure. But no…not with that line ticking away inside the cake. The assumption, so clear, that everyone who read this recipe would share, both the fear of dark alley’s in Detroit, and know, without thinking about it—without necessarily even consciously, think: Detroit/Black, and if confronted, would vigorously deny having the least taint of …

Didn’t someone somewhere say something about “the unexamined life?” Maybe he was thinking, not about the person whose life was unexamined, when he said, that life would not be worth living: how our unexamined assumptions, when they become a part of the social fabric… make lives miserable for so many others. And if this is what our unexamined life does to others, what is our life truly worth?

When it’s cold Poetry will warm your soul and make you angry and change the world.

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I was going to a poetry thing outside the Masonic Temple but woke up all snuffly and its way hard to blow one’s nose when its this cold and I didn’t want people to see a poet with icicles dangling from their nostrils so I decided to stay home and drink hot chocolate but if you see poets outside the Masonic Temple stop and listen to them and take their handouts which will be poems and not invitations to the next demonstration though I was going to put invitations like that on the back of my poem-handouts because this is a fucked up country in a fucked up world and we have to keep coming out to the streets and shouting and chanting and making people so angry they will be almost as angry as we are and will wake up and join us and change this world which is what poetry is all about waking people up and imagining a better world so if you see poets outside the Masonic Temple north of City Hall here in cold cold cold Philadelphia stop and listen and take their handouts and then invite them someplace warm and non-corporate and buy them hot chocolate because they are very brave and dedicated poets and I love them very much and am sorry that I woke up snuffly — I wish I could be with them.

Discussion Group: Art Beyond Capitalism

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Discussion Group: Open Invitation to Artists and their Friends
A-Space, Philadelphia
Saturday, March 21. 7:00 PM

Tentative agenda

Art Beyond Capitalism: Distribution and Support for Artists Outside the System

Consensus for discussion on items below
Consensus for facilitator
Consensus for note taker

A group discussion to explore the place of artists in our commodity-investment driven economy

Introductions:
Tell us your experience with galleries, selling, finding support for your work.

For discussion:

What questions or ideas would you like to add to the list below?

Define what ‘success would mean for you?

Do you believe the best art/artists will always rise to the top? Why? why not?

For women, and POC. what has been your experience with the present marketing system?

Is there any alternative to the Gallery-to-Investor pipeline?

Individual versus collective alternatives

Do we want to meet again to continue this discussion?

Links to posts on Art & Capitalism

Poetry & Art on the Brink of Extinction: 

Art and Capitalism: there has to be a better way:

STOP SELLING YOUR ART!

Making Art Outside the Machines of Power:

Art Artists Posterity in Post-Capitalist World