Artists! Wake up!

For how long have I been saying this? The author sees the symptom but refuses to name the disease. Of course he does: he’s a part of the system! “But of course galleries need to make a profit….la la la ” The very structure of capitalism turns art into commodity and erases all other values. The whole damn system is rotten! Artists have to be creative in more than making art; we need turn our creative energy to imagining another reality, another world!

Artists who seek commercial success, without thinking about how this system works, are complicit in their own exploitation.

Artists–become activists, become a revolutionary force!

From ART NEWS, Go Pro: The Hyper-professionalism of the Emerging Artist, by BY Daniel S. Palmer

In today’s art market, objects are created and judged like stocks. Illustration by Victor Juhasz, 2016. ©VICTOR JUHASZ

The American Hologram! Playing Everywhere–NOW!

Obama would have been a great president in another America, of another time. An America that never existed and a time that never was. But he believes in that America. He believes in its essential decency, in the fairness of its rules. He believes whatever problems and failures exist are best remedied by following those rules, that in the end, we all really want the same thing, and if you are willing to give and take, give and take, it will all work out for the best. Obama believes with all his heart that he is in a Frank Capra movie.

That if you persist–all those bad Senators will eventually see that Mr. Smith was right all along, and Mr. Potter, like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, will carry Tiny Tim on his shoulders and give poor Bob Cratchit the fattest Christmas goose in London…er, America.
Obama lives in an impermeable bubble made of money. Made of people with money. Nothing will ever pop it. But he is a good and honest man. Really, he is.
Ms Clinton, on the other hand–has no illusions about what that bubble that protects her, that has lofted her to power, is made of. Otherwise–she will do pretty much what Obama has done.
Preside over a country ruled by a tiny elite, overseeing the perpetual flow of wealth from the bottom to the top.
Senator Sanders, however, has glasses, with one glass sort-of clear, and the other (the far-seeing glass–the one sees across the wide wide seas that surround us)… with the same movie playing as all the rest of them… the American Exceptionalism movie, with John Wayne saving the world for Democracy…er.. for American investment. The other eye, the Roosevelt eyeglass, understands, that to save Capitalism, you have to be brave, you have shuck off the taunts of “Socialist!” … just like Franklin did.
Oh and there’s a little Eleanor in him too! He has a fierce belief in justice! There are some Bad Things about America, like racism. He did what was right when he was young (and I say this with all due respect… no irony here), but of course, the way to fix it is to put those Bad Bad Bankers in their place! To get the economy turned around and money in the hands of those who actually work for it. That will take care of that Bad Racism for sure! The racists… once they see they have equal access to the American Pie, will become as pure in heart as Young Bernie ever was!

And there we have it… the American Hologram. Which projection do YOU live in? Whose happy delusion make YOU happy, when you think — how wonderful it is to be able to vote for your very own Moviedream!

Subtraction Theory: The Future of Capitalism

The Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

Over on The Real Movementblog Jehu has a timely post that carefully evaluates the so-called post-capitalist notion as erroneous. He begins with the worn and obvious quote by Zizek ironizing the notion that “it’s much easier to imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism.” As Jehu says, “I have been reading a lot of writers who are trying to prove Zizek wrong by imagining a society that might be loosely categorized as post-capitalism — a term I personally detest.” Read his post: here.

Marx in the Grundrisse sees the future of capitalism as the End of History, or as he termed it the monopoly capitalist was ultimately seeking the elimination of space and time in a global system of absolute control:

“In as much as the circuits which capital travels in order to go from one of [its] forms into the other…

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Life Drawing–that erases the received reality

I’m convinced that drawing is the mother of all the visual arts, and while that usually entails, figure, landscape… representational work. I’m interested in working outside of those boundaries. What we’re trained to see–is too politically constrained, that artist’s renderings of ‘realism’ recapitulate and reinforce multiple levels of the status quo, & claim by default to being the one and only and forever reality. When the ‘IS,’ when what we have, our political status quo, is hell bent on the way to ending human life on this planet.
I’m thinking… how to explore different modes of drawing–life drawing, that don’t ‘draw’ on geometric space or figurative realism… yet are as intensely involved in that visual transformation from eye to paper as traditional techniques?

This is an aesthetic dimension of my interest in the place of art in late capitalism. How… is something I’m working out my art, rather than theory.

#447 Subsummation of the Human.

This comes as a feeling that pressed to become a thought, or a thought that sought to become an image. I sketched a face in soluble ink. Efaced with watercolor. Still there. Subsummed

#447 Subsumation of the Human — #447 10×8″ water soluble ink, India ink, water color.

I seldom do figurative art. Not in my finished pieces. I draw the human figure… obsessively, from bones to flesh and back to bones–images of the human. But that isn’t what they are–the drawings. It isn’t there, the human, and in my finished work, what is human remains, not quite invisible, most often as little more than an unintended suggestion. Broken into fragments. Or traces and debris of our passing.

That isn’t a plan. I’m not rendering some idea I have… I don’t know what it is, other than it emerges from some primal conflict, deeply, inexorably personal. It permeates my art–how I work, how I think about it. I know that it has to do with how or why I spend so much of my private, internal conversation explaining, justifying–as though I stand before some perpetual tribunal–that has demanded, without asking (I just know)–that I’m called to account for what I make, for the very need I have to make art, in these conversations where I go endlessly back to the beginning. Do I even have a right to call it… art? To permit myself…?

How this is connected with using the human figure, I don’t know, but I know that it is. Had I all the years of a younger man ahead of me, I don’t think that a lifetime of analysis would be sufficient to uncover what lies buried, something powerful enough to have kept me away from the one thing I’ve always wanted to do–for almost 40 years.
But it’s more than personal… or should I say, more than my private demons. As though this most private struggle has reformed itself into the one subject central to everything I make. How I can feel human figures in the most abstract pieces that come from my hand. Has become their struggle. Something pressing to emerge, pressing toward freedom. Or is it the subsummation of the human back into that state from whence we came? My not distant death linking itself to the coming extinction of our species?

Once more: art and capitalism

This is a post I left on Wet Canvas– a great resource if they confined themselves to technical questions, or were free from beholden to the status quo when posts ventured into more substantive questions about “Art” I think my welcome on this webpage is likely going to be short lived.

I know I have to tread carefully here. We have to live, to find a way to support our art. That’s a given. What’s not a given, is how we go about that, and–living in this Empire of Money and Death–what that means. And what it means to be dependent on utterly corrupted and corrupting gallery to investor pipeline.

There have to be other ways. Especially when you think of how that has come to define “success.” A form of success guarded by a system of gatekeepers, programed to exclude all but those deemed, first and foremost, most likely to produce work that will accrue in monetary value–as a commodity. Aesthetics comes in second.

How can one blame the gallery owners? They have to play the game–attract people with the money, the “investor class,” and are pressured to select artists they think will pass that test.

And for artists, the pressure begins with the first sales. What if they want to change course? To experiment? Bring something so unlike what has passed the market test that the gallery has no choice but to politely suggest they do more of … you know, what they’ve been doing.

Unless, for the very few, whose names have become the brand, the commodity.

All of which leaves art as entertainment for the oligarchy that’s won its wealth by exploiting workers, stealing the raw materials from “underdeveloped” nations, and by the profit of endless war. I mean really.. what does it mean to earn one’s living producing work to decorate corporate Human Resources waiting rooms… other than to have submitted to being nothing more than another something-less-than human resource?

Is art only to provide decor to the killer class? And ‘success’ reserved only for those who are willing slaves to their masters?

How do we defy the gatekeepers–all of them? The critics who are no more than servants to this same predatory system? Who have so successfully restricted women, blacks–anyone outside the presumed Western canon?

Capitalism destroys art. Capitalism corrupts and destroys artists. How do we find a way out of this?

Why can’t we pool or resources–draw on, encourage and help to develop the artistic aspirations of our communities? Create collectives where we can control how our art is used, and provide mutual support as we develop alternative ways to distribute our work, and alternative ways to support us?

I have a limited interest in arguing these issue, though I will be patient to explain them. What I would like, is to find artists who get it: who know that the whole “success” system is rigged (like the American USA election process), and any one artist, no matter how talented, has about as much chance of being one of the ‘winners’ as wining the lottery. And the effort to be one of those, means making oneself into a brand, and one’s art into a commodity. A total betrayal of everything that it means to make art.

The only existing alternative.. is… to go commercial.

I would prefer to give my work away to whoever wants it. I can’t. So I offer it on a sliding scale. Art that is only available to the privileged is a perversion. Thing is, can’t do this one by one. We have to create collectives, work together to create a wholly different mechanism. To become a part of the revolution. Cause if we can’t replace this late, zombie capitalist system… we are doomed to extinction. Cause they are hell bent on destroying as much life on this planet their power permits.

What are your thoughts? Again, I’m not into arguing this. If your only take is defending the status quo–pass go, go directly to EXIT. But if you have some inkling of what I’m saying here, and share my discomfort… maybe we have stuff we can talk about.

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American (U.S.A) Elections: to vote or not to vote?

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The U.S. is a world power. Our politics is not just about those within our gated borders. Presidential elections insulated from the consequences of our global exploitation and the MILLIONS who suffer and die because of U.S. policies and actions, are exercises in a kind of mass psychosis, a manufactured, hallucinate dream. We give all the candidates a free pass on this… “maybe we can pressure Bernie to do a little better on Israel” “So what if Hillary fucks war criminal Henry, she’s a woman!”
You want your vote to matter, make it matter for everyone! Until we do–it really doesn’t matter. Better not to vote, cause for the planet and most of the humans and animals, a collapse of the U.S. political system would be the real “lesser evil.”

This election reminds of those big protests in Israel a couple years ago. Israel’s occupation and brutality … like it didn’t exist. It was all bout jobs, economic inequality… la la la. Peas in pod.

Americans (U.S.A) don’t get it. The economy–all the good stuff Bernie stands for, bull shit, without including the rest of the picture, the rest of the world. It’s all one thing. A spectacle! The U.S. military occupations, the endless wars, the support of murderous regimes like the Saudis, Israel… all part of the same system that’s given so much power to so few, that’s fueled income inequality. If all of that isn’t tackled and dealt with, neither Horrible Hillary’s pitchy patchy incremental shit, or Bernies fake socialism are gonna be nothing but window dressing.
A great, tragi-comic farce.

Imagining Posterity

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.

Now that we have no future…

#86 When the Morning Stars

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

Life with No Future

images 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.