Tag: Politics

Breaking free from the Art System

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I want to post a second comment I left on CLCLARK’s blog on Luhmann’s system theory, Systems Serve only Themselves. This has been a concern of mine for some time, expressed in several previous posts.

I see several problems with art as an autopoitec system. The first being, that ‘art’ is an artificial construct. For this, it might be enough if it were more narrowly defined, say… “Euro/Anglo Art.” It’s been a project of art history to treat art as a universal—even while concentrating almost exclusively on European traditions until the assimilating of Japanese, Chinese, African and “primitive” styles by European artists forced the door open to the rest of the world. This greater inclusiveness, however, was more in the nature of colonizing the European idea of art as a universal, drawing on products, which, in their own cultures, served a wide range of activities, and were in no way part of something, neither their makers nor those  who these objects served, thought of as belonging to an autonomous system analogous to a Western idea of ‘art,’ a process not unlike the transformation imposed on European religious objects in the development of the idea (or system) of art in the West.

Also, as autopoitic systems are differentiated from their environment, but subject and responsive to outside perturbations, these responses can be absorbed in their development. With organisms, other forms can be physically absorbed and incorporated: viruses, mitochondria. The point I’d make here, is that what we mean by ‘art,’ is not just a system responding to other systems, but one—perhaps even more than any other—that has incorporated them into its DNA. The Western ‘art system’ co-evolved with capitalism, patriarchal institutions, hierarchical value coding, in such a way that these are more than external systems that use or perturb it, but are embedded in its generative structures.  This is what informs my question about finding a place as an artist—outside that system. Escape from the controlling subject: “Art.” Deteritorializaion from the master subject and its self-cloning powers. Thinking of Deleuze… escape from the root, to the rhizome!

 

Galleries, Museums, and The Great Art Frameup

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It’s increasingly clear to me that the way museums display works of art (and most galleries), alters them as surely as if the curators took brush and paint and wrote messages of ownership across them. What we see in a museum is filtered propaganda, honoring the structures of power, wealth, and those who control it, drawing life from the art and using it like a drug to induce a state of awe and subservience, not for the art, but the invisible powers that assembled the display. How grateful we must be, that all this was gathered for us in the marble halls of these mausoleums–a gesture of largess from the wealthy investors for us to view. Where would we be without them! As though the artists (who in their lifetimes, would have been lucky if they could afford entrance), were mere labor, expendable, like the workers who tunneled under the Hudson… 14 of whom died in its construction…and not a one of them named, ‘Holland.’

As though this art would not exist, certainly not for us, but for these glorious prisons.

What is wrong with this picture, is not the fault of the museums and it’s keepers… they are merely playing the roles assigned to them–cleaner and less bloodstained, but comparable, nonetheless, to the police and soldiers, prison guards and executioners of this Empire of Money and Death.

Impossible to imagine in these cathedrals of art, that there might be an other way–where people don’t surrender their creative lives for adulthood, and art flows from the lives of the people, present everywhere and in everything we do and make. Where artists don’t have to compete for the one spot in ten thousand where they can live by their art, and everyone can have works of art beside them, not just the wealthy.

 

Capitalism controls our very imagination–that we cannot believe anything else can exist. How then, as artists, can we let ourselves serve these robotic masters!

No Revolution without Art! No Art without Revolution!

 

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

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

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe 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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End of Sovereignty: Bare Life and the Coming Civil-War?

This speaks to my anarchist heart. Yes and yes and yes–oh, and so much more! (see my comment following this post, for how this connects with my art!

Agamben at one point choses to explicate this notion in reference to the included/excluded people within and outside politics:

It is as if what we call “people” were in reality not a unitary subject but a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the set of the People as a whole political body, and on the other, the subset of the people as a fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies; or again, on the one hand, an inclusion that claims to be total, and on the other, an exclusion that is clearly hopeless; at one extreme, the total state of integrated and sovereign citizens, and at the other, the preserve-court of miracles or camp-of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated.6

Isn’t this the state of exception of migrant immigrants everywhere, a multiplicity outside the law, outside sovereignty, the inclusive excluded of the wretched, the oppressed, and the defeated?

And THIS:

“And in a different yet analogous way, today’s democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also transforms the entire population of the Third World into bare life. Only a politics that will have learned to take the fundamental biopolitical fracture of the West into account will be able to stop this oscillation and to put an end to the civil war that divides the peoples and the cities of the earth.7”
And THIS is why NONE of the candidates, of either party, will move us one footstep beyond square zero!

…is why not one of the U.S. presidential candidates, of any party, will move us one single step past ground zero!

S.C. Hickman's avatarThe Dark Forest: Literature, Philosophy, and Digital Arts

…the sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes over into violence.
– Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer

When one actually thinks about it, rather than just spouting rhetoric from some ideological mythology of the Left or Right the problem of immigration in our world is about Sovereignty. It’s about the emerging war against boundaries, limits, and finitude in politics, science, philosophy, the arts, and gender. In politics it’s about immigration, migration, and the sense of breakdown of nations and their paranoiac reactionism against imaginary and perceived threats to their own integrity and sovereignty. Same in the sciences we see explorations emerging in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information and communications converging to form a global network society that will break free of political and social constraints and provide a larger framework and platform for such politically motivated notions as transhumanism that…

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#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?

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.

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

Firefly Action Medical

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ABOUT:

We are a group of people in and around the Philadelphia area. We are trained street medics, nurses, EMT’s, wilderness first responders, artists, herbalists, trauma counselors and generally people interested in the health and well being of our communities. Members of this collective have been involved with providing medical support at direct action, activist camps, street protests, and disaster relief situations. Please take a look at our Points of Unity to learn more about our values and the ways in which we organize.More resources for taking care of yourself and others coming soon!

POINTS OF UNITY:

+ We affirm that demystifying and democratizing health care skills and reducing our dependence on profit-driven medicine and police-involved emergency response is vital to building long lasting movements for Liberation in our lifetime.

+ We acknowledge that the idea of “safety” is relative and complicated

+ We believe in building interdependent ways of being with one another that do not replicate the oppression that isolates us in the first place. We see our work as acknowledging and resisting intersecting systems of oppression — both in the world and in our relations with one another.

+ We believe in the principles of harm reduction and practice and support diverse forms of healing that are consistent with each individuals understanding of their own needs and values.

+ We believe our liberation is tied to that of others and we take on this work in solidarity with collective resistance.

+ In all these above points we stand in solidarity with the evolving international traditions of street medics.

CODE OF CONDUCT:

1. We do no harm. We make every reasonable effort to give treatment that will not negatively affect the health or well­being of our patients. If no such treatment is available, no treatment whatsoever is given.

2. We work only within our own individual scope of practice, while trusting and respecting the abilities of the other medics in their work. We explicitly inform patients of our own qualifications and limitations.

3. We obtain clear and explicit consent from our patients and anyone affected by our care for every action we take as medics, including any physical contact or while performing any procedure. If a patient in an emergency situation is unable to offer consent for treatment, as through a lack of consciousness, we strive to take whatever action we believe is most essential to their well­being. We respect patients’ right to refuse any treatment, advice or transport to any medical facility.

4. We maintain our work areas as Safer Spaces, and actively challenge the perpetuation of any form of social domination or oppression. This includes, but is not at all limited to sexism, racism, transphobia, ableism, classism, ageism, and other forms of oppression. We cultivate an awareness of our own privilege and work to create a welcoming, safe and comfortable space for all, while directly calling attention to any actions of other medics that perpetuate oppression.

5. We respect and actively protect the privacy of our patients’ and the confidentiality of their treatment to the greatest extent possible. Without our patients’ consent, we do not allow photography, videography, audio recording, or any other non ­private record of our patients’ care.

6. We practice exceptional sanitation and hygiene in our work as medics and in our working areas. This includes using appropriate protocols of Standard Precautions and Body Substance Isolation (BSI) in caring for patients through gloves and other means, as well as thoroughly washing and/or sanitizing hands, surfaces, supplies and containers when they may be contaminated. If a medic suspects that they may currently host any readily transmissible disease, they do not act as a medic until the risk of transmission is abated.

7. We maintain a continuity of care for all of our patients. We do not leave or cease caring for any patient until a treatment is completed, except to transfer the patient’s care to another medic of equal or greater qualification – or to prioritize the immediate and urgent care of a different patient in emergent need, when no other assistance is available.

8. We organize ourselves horizontally, without institutional hierarchies of command, experience, credentials, ability or level of involvement. Every medic has equal power in all decisions affecting them.

9. When acting as medics, we remain neutral. The primary role of a marked medic is to provide care for the injured or ill. We do not attempt to direct the actions or personal choices of anyone else for any tactical or political purpose. We do not participate in any ideological or political action while marked as a medic..

10. While working as a medic, we recognize our responsibility to maintain a positive and calm atmosphere.While on duty, our interactions with patients’, other medics, and passers­by are guided by trust, respect and solidarity, in the same way that those qualities are essential to our own standing in the community. Rather than telling others to do something, we ask them. We request rather than command. Patients in our care are treated respectfully and are spoken to or with. We do not gossip about or judge any patients in our care.

11. We all benefit from an orderly, clean working space, and we all contribute to keeping it in that condition. If we re­organize any materials in a medical space, we make every reasonable effort to inform the other medics of those changes.

12. We do not use intoxicating substances while on duty and we do not tolerate the use of intoxicants or smoked tobacco in any medical space.

13. We are all capable of learning and improving our skills, and recognize that we all make mistakes. Each of us remains accountable to any guidance or correction, and we receive the input or critique of other medics respectfully, with good faith that our common goal is to provide the best possible care.

14. We understand that when anyone is marked as a medic, they are considered to be on active duty, and their behavior is accountable to this code of conduct. Should we wish to act outside of the principles in this code, we remove all markings or other indications of our role as a medic beforehand. If any medic acts outside of this code, they may be held accountable to the other members of this group, local medical  protocols, and to the respective community.