Theatre Resistance Plan, 2017 – 2020

melissahillman's avatarBitter Gertrude

There is no more powerful tool for changing ideas, shifting cultural zeitgeist, and resisting authoritarianism than art. While theatre is not the biggest bat artists wield, our impact on the culture is not nil, especially if you include community theatre and school plays, and we must. Resistance to the Trump regime is the most crucial political battle of our lifetimes because this regime– and the zeitgesit behind it– stands to undo progress in every area of our society. Trump, Pence, McConnell, Ryan et al are actively seeking to impoverish you to enrich themselves, roll back every civil rights and workers’ rights gain of the past 100 years,  eliminate every consumer protection, eliminate the social safety net, and pretend you begged them to do it. It’s telling that the very first appointee of the incoming administration was an amoral white nationalist, and the very first act of the new Congress was…

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#92 Beauty is Where you Find It

Another older piece, an assemblage of debris found on the street around the Ox, the collective warehouse in Kensington, where I lived in 2012. This isn’t a celebration of decay–but of what I imagine we must do: reclaim from the ruins of capitalism, a vision for a new world!

(I don’t want to call these ‘assemblages’ anymore. My motives are not those of Rauschenberg, who I think, was the first to use that term. I don’t use ‘everyday objects,’ I use debris, the decay of consumerism, and my purpose is transformation. I was thininking: reclinations, a portmanteau or transformation, and recycle.
It would be nice if I had photoshop, and could make the background neutral.)
92-assemblage-beauty-is-where-you-find-it
View GALLERY HERE.

Titles

I’ve started adding titles to my work.

No, these titles weren’t on my mind while I was making these pieces. They’re partly tongue in cheek… but only partly so. While I don’t think metaphorically when I work–don’t think in words much at all, beyond… “where did I leave the cap to the cadmium yellow?” … I feel, deeply so, the conflict between what it means to make art in this time, feel deeply the impossibility of escaping the grinding jaws of capitalism that inevitably turn whatever an artist does into a commodity, reduced to exchange value. There’s no escape — the most explicit anti-capitalist, revolutionary call to arms–can expect no better fate, its message reduced to a decoration on some wealthy collectors wall. Better oblivion. Better to burn them all.

…better still… to do what I’m compelled to do.

I will not give anyone else the power of judgement over my work. If you think my art merely decorative, serving no revolutionary purpose… these titles express something of why I think you are wrong. To explore the pleasures of the eye–with a clear conscience, does mean having that eye turned to the future–to a world on the other side of capitalist domination and all the evils sheltered within it–a world whose form we cannot yet imagine, let alone see.
This is a conflict rooted deep in my heart and thoughts, it fills my perception of everything in this present world. I do hope… whether I’m successful or not… that the visual pleasures of my art, however slight, may in some way keep alive the faith… that there exists more than what we see now, keep alive the hope of revolution, faith in what we will build when we are free from these Empires of Money and Death.
So yes, the titles are a kind of joke… but serious joke, nonetheless.

#634

22″ x 22″ Acrylic on panel board: Queer Hero Riding a Bull with Yellow tail, rescuing Color from the Dark Night of Capitalism!

#634 22 x 27 framed.JPG


View GALLERY HERE.
Beyond numbers, cause somewhere lurking in whatever drives me to make these pieces there’s a mythological convergence of self and world, waiting to hatch from the egg of True Desire.

A fable

images In a world far away, and far into the future, Plant Beings are engaged in a prolonged struggle with an invasion from intelligent, conscious, self-replicating machines. The plant beings have been desperately attempting to find where these machines came from, in hopes that this will give them a better understanding of how to deal with them. The machines are taking over the planet, exploiting it’s resources, raw materials they use to build production facilities they need to replicate themselves.

There is no competition for these resources, and the plant beings cannot understand why the machines not only seem to want to use the raw materials, but to colonize and enslave the plant beings. Their research indicates that the machines must have inherited, if that’s the word, this impulsive habit, from whoever or whatever had first made them–along  with a habit of gratuitous cruelty, inflicting pain seemingly, for it’s own sake.

The machines–the Plant Beings now believe– understand themselves to have a calling to replicate everything they know from the history of their organic creators. and to manifest this in their relations with whatever forms of life they might encounter.

Made on a now, dead planet, they were sent into space, the peaceful, Plant Beings believe, as the continuation of a soon to be extinct, organic life form–as a techno-evolution of the species that made them.

Their makers, of course… were us. Their planet of origin, the long dead planet, Earth.

Not to This We Turn But When #630

I understand better what I feel when I think about the Consolation of Philosophy. Are we not as Boethius was, at the end of a world he could nor surrender, yet unable to imagine what might come after? I understand better, why I turn away from either, ‘realist’ fiction, or representational figuration in art; that world is no longer real—and no attempt to represent it now can hope to succeed.

We can look back at the works of the Renaissance, of the Enlightenment, like Boethius at the gateway of the Middle Ages looking back at the Classical world he knew was gone, hoping, through his translations, that he might preserve some memory of what it had been.630.
This is our Dark Age. But the old world is too much with us, museums and libraries filled with its ghosts. We need to find the way to what is to come… but there is no way. No path. No prophetic guiding word or vision. And yet—if we wish to break free from the death grip of the old world, the death grip of endless repetition of the same, with word, or gesture or image, we have no choice but attempt to render—to image forth—that world we cannot yet imagine. We have no choice but to try, and fail. I see myself coming to this realization in my work—that what I’m doing, is bringing out an image of the new through the ruins of old—though only the ruins will be visible. Like Beckett, that’s the failure that draws me closer to the goal–failing better.

View GALLERY HERE