Black Block!

Breaking windows and burning limos isn’t in itself, revolution, but those humans out there on the street, those multi-pronouned humans all in black, with their AntiFA flags, were doing important work for the revolution to come. That kind of action doesn’t build alternative structures, but they demonstrate what courage looks like, and their actions FUCK the taboo around property. How do we destroy capitalism if we are horrified at breaking a fucking window!?!

We can’t build a new world, the world we want, with the old rules and laws and taboos. Those are all there to protect the wealthy, to suck wealth from the masses, to oppress and destroy marginalized people and all who oppose them.

Fuck their rules! Fuck their taboos, their laws–all of which must be be judged by their consequences, and by nothing else! The rules and laws were made by humans; humans can accept or discard or make them new, as is fitting and just for all!

The Black Block today were out there breaking, not just windows, but the cordons of our thinking, of how we perceive our present world, burning the effigies of Property! I tip my hat to them–and thank them. I call them, Comrades!

Solidarity! Love! Imagination! RESISTANCE!

c2quvitwgaazj4c

#635 AntiFA #6

7″ x 5″ Watercolor, ink. Deep State decoded

View GALLERY HERE.

Theatre Resistance Plan, 2017 – 2020

Bitter 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…

View original post 2,806 more words

#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.)

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.

A fable

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.

John Berger: Who is left to speak for us?

So sad at the loss of John Berger. I would so love to have been able to meet, and talk and… just spend time, mull shit over with him. So few… like, almost none… of those who write about art, or even those who DO it… when it comes to thinking, and talking about it… who I feel like… get it.

Capitalism–and who got this better? –fucks up our minds–as artists. There is no model for what constitutes ‘success’ for an artist in this capitalist world, no collective model, but … like our art, that which we make for ourselves.

One less now… who did get it.

More alone than ever.
—–
Yesterday I went to Penn Book Center and bought a copy of Landscapes… opened it on the El on the way home… pages flipped to chapter 3. The Basis of All Painting and Sculpture is Drawing.

In March of 2015 I wrote THIS POST

I sat there the rest of the way home… and felt like John Berger was there beside me… holding my hand.

#622 – with page from Goby’s Journal: Stasi Trump Jesus and the Subjunctive Voice

18″ x 24″ Acrylic on wood.
Layering. Interested in giving an impression of depth, without resorting to geometric perspective. Pollock, of course… but also, the illusion that one is looking at something… both real, and mysterious, like Hubble photos, or electron microscopy… in color. right click on photo for more detail.

View GALLERY HERE.

… I’m thinking of using this piece of a packing crate for a frame. Paint it black.

_____________________________

Goby’s Journal: December 23, 2016

Stasi, Trump, Jesus and the Subjunctive Voice

In an age when anyone who hears us speak, in person, or through social media, students in our classrooms, our patients or customers–when anyone might feel empowered by the Trumpocracy, to report you, to troll you, to try to get you fired, blacklisted, kicked off a plane…
It would be well, were we to revive the long neglected subjunctive voice.
To polish our skills at not quite saying what we mean.

If one were to imagine oneself, say, in 1956 East Berlin, one would find ways, even in front of a class, of speaking to those who “had ears to hear,” without giving cause to those who would take you down, were they so inclined. Which brings to mind–that phrase, “those who have ears to hear” — the language used by Jesus in the Gospels: speaking in parables. Jesus, too, lived under a hostile power. How much of that language was made to pass safely through the Roman occupation?

We aren’t at that level, yet… of Stasi, say… where no one, not even our most radical friends, can be trusted, because anyone can be made to be an informant. Let them only describe what will happen to your children, your aging parents, should you refuse. But this is where we are headed.

I have heard stories. Some reported in news, some seen on social media. Would that it were true that nothing of the kind had happened to anyone I know.

Be careful. Don’t say anything in private you wouldn’t say in public, cause… nothing is private. Learn from poets how to say more and less and other than what you mean.

Putin Trump Heidegger The End of the World

Why would Putin love Trump… other than oil, I mean?
What Heidegger was to Hitler, Dugan is for Putin

The Most Dangerous Philosopher in the World ?

<Dugin thinks Trump’s victory is a monumental strike against the “globalists”, whose candidate was Hillary Clinton – the same language that you can easily find peppering conservative American websites like Breitbart News, Drudge Report and conspiracy king Alex Jones (a particular favorite of Dugin’s). He thinks Trump’s victory was a kind of “revolution” started by American people and should lead to worldwide defeats of the globalist agenda, draining the proverbial “swamp” the world over.

Dugin doesn’t stop there, however. His visions of what Trump’s victory means go into the apocalyptic and civilization-changing:

“We need to return to the Being, to the Logos, to the foundamental- ontology (of Heidegger), to the Sacred, to the New Middle Ages – and thus to the Empire, religion, and the institutions of traditional society (hierarchy, cult, domination of spirit over matter and so on). All content of Modernity – is Satanism and degeneration. Nothing is worth, everything is to be cleansed off. The Modernity is absolutely wrong — science, values, philosophy, art, society, modes, patterns, “truths”, understanding of Being, time and space. All is dead with Modernity. So it should end. We are going to end it.”
>http://bigthink.com/…/the-dangerous-philosopher-behind-puti…
Dugin thinks Trump’s victory is a monumental strike against the “globalists”, whose candidate was Hillary Clinton – the same language that you can easily find peppering conservative American websites like Breitbart News, Drudge Report and conspiracy king Alex Jones (a particular favorite of Dugin’s). He thinks Trump’s victory was a kind of “revolution” started by American people and should lead to worldwide defeats of the globalist agenda, draining the proverbial “swamp” the world over.

Dugin doesn’t stop there, however. His visions of what Trump’s victory means go into the apocalyptic and civilization-changing:

#619

20″ x 16″ Acrylic on canvas
There’s no message here. Just colors. Useless… because, to pursue what is of no use, in a world where nothing is valued, and everything is used…a world where Death, with all leaders and all parties as its agents, uses us all, this, in itself, is an act of defiance and rebellion.

View GALLERY HERE./>

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this:

Rate this: