Mahler and Freud

There was a meeting between Freud and Gustav Mahler in Leyden. We know little of what happened between them, but that it had something to do with a crises in Mahler’s relationship with Alma. And that he was reconciled (for a time), with Alma, and wrote no new music after.

There is the angel-whore thing for women. And the fool or genus thing for artists. Or there used to be. For those of my generation, artists will understand how the two are related—though women had only the option of afflicting themselves with the former—excluded from the latter.

I’m speaking of artists with high aspirations. I don’t know if that exists now, at least not in the same nativity as it once did, as though aspirations of the highest order transcended economics and politics and class… and gender. I come from that generation.

And I am torn asunder by the conflicts between what I’ve inherited, and don’t know how to handle or transform, and what I’ve come to know and understand about the dependency of most, if not all, of what those aspirations and what they meant, on the economic and political forces that largely shaped and almost entirely controlled how they played out in the real world.

One version of the Mahler and Freud and Alma story, is that he gave up, or got over, or whatever… the neurosis that was the cause of his sexual impotency… but also, the source of his musical creativity.

I don’t know that younger artists think this way—or can imagine such a conflict. Though I think it still exists, but in an emergent form I don’t understand. I mean—the drive to make art, and to more than that, to make it MEAN something…even if you have no clue that is, or how to do it…other than following some inappeasable inner guide. That. Will. Not. Let. You. Go!

The angel and the whore. Everyone has the capacity to make art. And in any world I would want to live in, that would happen. No one should be denied the opportunity, the exposure to the art of the past—from all cultures and traditions! So I don’t stand in judgment. There can be no just gatekeepers in this utterly corrupted capitalist, colonialist world.

But is everyone afflicted by this … “aspiration?” Is it no more than market ambition, in the guise of a wish for an impossible posterity? Or momentary “fame?” … better called, notoriety? Or only those of my generation… still infected with something we can’t possibly describe or understand in these new conditions?

All I can say is… I would never give up whatever craziness or neurosis I’m burdened with, no matter what inflictions that might entail—if it meant, no longer being able to make art. Poetry. Literature.

Alma can find someone else to fuck.

Is there a Capitalist Aesthetics?

In reading some of the essays and criticism on HYPERALERGIC, an idea began to form… don’t know where to begin with it. I mean, the idea that there is an aesthetic force to capitalism that has been internalized, infusing and corrupting the machinery that guides artistic vision & produces art. I mean something more and other than marketing–how the utterly corrupted gallery to investor pipeline determines what and who will be recognized and rewarded, and who and what will be rejected. Yes, that’s a part of it–in as much as artists are influenced by their belief that this is the, or even ‘a,’ measure of success; I’m thinking of something deeper, placing capitalism in the operational place in the visionary machinery occupied by kitsch for Clement Greenberg. There was clearly something I was reacting to in Greenberg—his capitalist historicism–the idea of progress in art and how it serves to first exploit and than erase everything and everyone outside the privileged circle.

I’ll have to give this more thought.

Posterity Art & the Artist in a post-capitalist world.

Putting the last few posts together.

I started muddling with the question of how, if we give up, or can no longer believe in the possibility of posterity–of how this effects what I do as an artist, given the central role this idea has played through the history of Euro-American traditions?

The problem was, I was thinking in terms of the individual. Such that–where an artist might once have imagined a future where his (not so much, if you were a woman) art would find a place, even if rejected in his own lifetime.

Perhaps that qualification (not so much for women), unlocks the puzzle. I mean, the way that idea has played out in the marginalization of women and minorities in the arts–because it has been part of a struggle, not for immediate recognition alone, but for a place in a mythic future. A struggle for and against erasure from collective memory–the arts (again, in Eruo-American traditions), being a repository of that collective memory. Every art museum is evidence of this.

So maybe it’s the struggle for collective memory that is my real interest here–a merging of personal identity into an imagined future collective one.

Isn’t this what we mean by ‘posterity?’

Understood as a field of conflict in the class wars, rather than primarily a struggle for the individual to earn a living, makes all the difference. The struggle to earn a living, then, to find a place for one’s art in the world, becomes something much greater, and the question about posterity–and how we are to think of our art in absence of this idea, isn’t about the absence of our belief in the future, but the necessity of erasing what that has meant up till now, if we are to begin to think clearly about the place of art in a post capitalist world.

Revolutionary Narrative

Revolutionary Narrative… what makes a story that does more than rearrange the conventions we use to reinforce our assumptions about the world? How do we find our way to stories that refuse to confirm our expectations–but rather, shatter them with the unexpected–not simply of ‘incident’… of what ‘happens,’ but of the very structures of reality?

Someone I once knew challenged the merit of Joyce’s Ulysses because it doesn’t exist as a completed whole. His argument went something like this: in the thousands of minor and some not so minor differences in the existing manuscripts and proofs, there is no way to decide what a definitive, authorial edition would look like. What we have, then—is a collective assemblage representing no single aesthetic vision, and therefore, does not exist as a unity. Setting aside arguments for how collective, even accidental productions, might come together as unified systems—which is how I would have responded at the time—the more basic, and unexamined assumption here, is the idea of unity itself—that there can ever be such a thing as a ‘whole.’

There is no such thing as ‘a’ novel. Or poem. Or story or… as a single, aesthetically (or otherwise) coherent, systematically organized structure or system, such that every part relates to every other to create a unified, and unifying whole. And it is this, not because there are as many readings as readers, or because every possible interpretive translation (all interpretations are translations) is necessarily limited, that we can never comprehend a literary production as a whole—as convincing as these arguments might be—but because there is no such thing. It does not exist. That is not to say, Joyce’s Ulysses doesn’t exist. It does. In different versions, and each version is made of parts that are always greater than any hypothetical, always inconceivable whole. I say ‘inconceivable,’ not that we can’t conceive of the possibility of an aesthetic whole—but that it will be impossible to point to what that might actually be. Sort of like the way we talk about God. Imaginable in general, but inconceivable in the particular. Or for that matter, how we think of collectives of power… of the State…which has more than a little in common with the way we think of God.

Art in Service of the Empire…

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?

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

“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.”

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)

Discussion Group: Art Beyond Capitalism

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

Poetry & Art on the Brink of Extinction

from December, 2009… waiting for the end. When OWS came along two years later… I was ready.

I had this feeling once before, on the third or fourth day of the Cuban missile crisis, standing outside the door of a nearly empty auditorium on the Campus of Wichita State University, listening to a member of the faculty playing a Bach partita for unaccompanied violin. This time, it doesn’t go away. It comes over me every time I look up at the sky.
Below is a comment I tried to leave to a post on pas au-delà, but there seemed to be a problem with the system. As it’s something I think about every time I hear someone complain about Obama’s failure, I’ll post it here. But pay a visit to Matt’s blog–and buy someone you love one of his beautifully crafted cutting boards for Xmas.

We need a revolution… but of what kind?

The problem with blaming Obama is it suggests that, whatever it is that’s wrong, the right individual in the right place, is going to be able to make it different. Even if there were truth to the cliché that the American president is the ‘most powerful man in the world,’ his power is still limited to stirring the soup; he can’t cook up a new reality. His power is borrowed–it belongs to the whole vastly complicated network that created the mess in the first place.

No president is going to start a revolution, and nothing short of revolutionary change is going to get us out of this. I say ‘revolution,’ because I can’t think of a better word–I sure don’t have in mind any historical example I can think of. Not going to help to turn the pie upside down, put the one’s on the bottom on top, but same old pie. And it’s not going to come from the top down. Before power corrupts, it blinds. Even the prospect of destroying all life on the planet isn’t enough to penetrate the belief of those used to having their way, the belief that they are in control, that whatever comes, they–if no one else, will be able to tough it out, to survive and prosper.

I don’t have a picture of how that ‘change we need’ is going to happen, but I’m damn sure it’s gotta be big… bigger than the industrial revolution, bigger than the emergence of nation states… something equal to the neolithic agricultural revolution, the beginning of settled urban life and our invention of the gods. In a way, our imaginations are still dominated by that vision–whether or not we hold to any of the great mythical systems that grew out of it. What we need is nothing short of starting over, of building anew from the ruins… (is this, perhaps, the ultimate challenge to artistic vision…?) trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to have a second chance. We have turned ourselves into collective infants–a two year old–who out of terror and anger at the failure of the gods we invented to define and lead us, are about to destroy everything in a final uncontrollable tantrum.

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