Greetings once again.
Is there any news with regards to sponsorship?1 Money is very short at my end and I am running low on titanium white, yellow ochre and I need dark blue at the very least and if funds were not an issue I would add mars violet, indian yellow and a few greens. I can scratch around and find a few quid but any help, even a student discount would be welcome.
Ever since I began painting with high speed impasto some five works previous, I have not spared the tubes as Vincent says and I would hate to have to revert stylistically to the sparse style at this point. It would be better to extinguish the paint supply and take up the pencil like I did for the TAS.2
You know it happens quite often that the subject for the next picture is discovered while at work on the previous and that proved to be the case again when, on a pause from working on the Cut Grass3 picture recently I had a walk and discovered numerous fine piles of stacked trees. The location is the hunter’s lane which is behind the red house, which is at the back left of the field as you look from the road. The house appears from a distance to be just another conformist stugan but as you approach it on foot you can feel the mysterious shake and buzz of electric power which reveals its function and owing to its deriliction I selected it took a wiz at the rear. I glanced up the lane and decided to have a look. Now, I have been up the hunters lane many times and have taken numerous views for SAS from that way but that is no reason to not look afresh, I have never understood those who never re-read, re-watch or re-visit. I have read Oblomov countless times and find something new on each occasion and so I was delighted but not surprised to find the up lane area dramatically changed with the left side of the lane almost completely lined with majestic piles of pine trees which were felled by the buggernaught storm of January and awaiting collection. Bring out yer dead!
Each pile must have been made up of some 80 trees, layered like a set of ten pins horizontal, installed one after the other and each pile rising up perhaps four or five meters to positively tower over one who walks the lane. I cannot tell you what impression this made, it truly is a sight to take breath! A sublime scene which, as I explored its extent, began to evoke in me the awe that I have heard others speak of in relation to some religious monument, Egyptian tomb or Serra iron.4 In addition when the late sun shines on the cut end discs they radiate with a hue of orange which one can almost hear.
I say that I was not surprised to have found difference but I could not have imagined such dramatic and sculptural scene or the feelings I felt at its wake. And atop this cake of emotion we have a symbolic cherry; the life and death pictorial metaphor of dead trees lying on the edge of the forest in which they grew and lived for decades. In today’s view I underplayed it, only really hinting at it with a couple of pines poking up over the stack but I want to work on it a little bit more, tease something out and the location is certainly worthy of revisiting. Maybe the best life and death metaphor is simply vertical and horizontal.
The actual composition was one of dozens on offer and I spent a good deal of time wandering up and down the lane sizing up this one then that one with my new frame.5 Eventually I plumbed for this view looking back down the lane which recedes away to the left and off to the electric house. The trees plied high on the right, young bracken on the left, the path accelerates towards us. Again the gospel of speed was delivered and I managed to get this out in two hours with the drawing figure being added in the studio. There is a certain energy and a tone that reflects the scene but I can only wonder at Van Gogh’s variety of marks and lines achieved in the heat. My guess is that it comes from a very assured hand, a pure hand for which doubt does not exist.
You know I often feel angst when thinking about our five themes. I am still of the opinion that it will lead to better pictures but this time of ours, well it all feels a little dangerous and it is so even as I stand alone in a field in Sweden. What is the danger? What causes the fear? Is it what is happening in the world of countries, money and psycho men? Or is it what is happening in my mind where a whirlwind, topsy turvey alt right imaginary is eating my own?
Trust me, nothing would be more pleasing than to keep a basic work diary, discussing the delights and discouragements of the work only but there is more on the boil in our post truth pot and the whole sodding business has been on my mind in an increasingly disturbing fashion and occasionally even teeters past the tipping point from thought to panic. We have it on our minds at the easel, perhaps that is the best place but I think not - the easel is a place for calm and as Van Gogh wrote, "the time of reasoning and reflecting must precede the decisive action. While doing it there’s little space for reflecting or reasoning."6 Well judging by today and the volume of thought I had milling around the noggin about Trump, Putin, Brexit, and a rogues gallery of orrible tories making snide comments. I perhaps should have stopped and meditated or something. The stress and even the shame at having let these thoughts run me was perhaps why they did not get a mention in the above but when all is squared away we must realise (as does the most Sunday of therapists) that it is better out than in.
So out it is. Look here, how cruel and unusual this far alt right situation is! I tell you this it feels like a very different animal compared with the task of critiquing neoliberal capitalism that I was programmed to perform through my privileged avante garde education,7 which now seems so intellectual and safe. This new thing is so difficult precisely because I cannot fit it into the story of leftist critique of power and domination that I am used to. Now we face the equally grave threat of contemporary fascism to go along with the threat and crisis of good old fashioned capitalist exploitation but as I mentioned the former is a symptom of the latter but lord knows I am no expert - would it be any easier if one were?
The alt right though, is it not rock n roll politics? Not because it's cool but because it is rebelling against a perceived stifling, up tight, constraining, old fashioned force in society which they call it the "Cathedral". This term was coined by a gentleman by the name of Moldbug and it seems this Moldbug is the chief theorist of the alt right imaginary along with that fella who lived above the cream shop in Leamington. Perhaps theorist is too much as his work is apparently factually inaccurate but an influential writer certainly. I only know this because of a screen to screen I took with Old Burrows during which he gave me the choice of some of his sociological gleaning from the alt right field.
The "Cathedral" it would seem is, for Mr Moldbug, a leftist conspiracy of the most intricate and successful kind which has taken over the world for the past hundred years and now has us all whipped like a church run town. Well having not done the booknotion I cannot paint a picture but I can say that one of the pillars of this "Cathedral" is the system and effect of academia; social sciences, critical theory, the university generally, arts, humanities, some harmless study of twelfth century verse...all it seems is rounded up and and penned into the "Cathedral". It would seem then, at a glance, that proponents of this "Cathedral" idea use it to define and better target, a society which they hate! A society they see as weak and constraining and its some joyless rock n roll thrill to tear it down and all this to the cheers of the baying hardcore in the crowd: white supremacists, bitter republicans, accelerationists, and tech billionaires. The cheap seats are occupied by normal working class folk either manipulated into it or have a hankering for the authoritarian. What is playing on the stage you may ask: The Memes!
Why is the "Cathedral" so perswaysive... because it rings true is some senses..but look here, it rings true because the work of exposing the capitalist system and workings of class privilage and injustice is the work of the critical left all along, think of baurdeiu and to suddenly lump all elements together in the Moldbug fashion well the only way it can be taken seriously is if it was backed by some powerful folk indeed, which he is, and look here from what external position does he perform his critique of critique anyway? He's in it but while the object of critique of many thinkers is critique itself the thrust tends to be towards the democratic, Moldbug's weak thrust takes us backwards on the path, back to a pre democratic authoritarian distopia. Why go to all this trouble to make such twists and turns? It seems clear to me that Mr Moldbug has been egged all the way on and flourishes in the pestiside drenched world of the alt right.
But let's be clear this rock n roll rebellion is not of the youth8 if anything it is more like a rebellion of the older generation and once again when thinking on the alt right we have the sense that things are upside down and back to front but the rock n roll element is also how the alt right parties can keep on growing even in the face of scandal. Groping, slurring, lying, abusing....its rock n roll! Get your kicks by riling up the liberals and at the same time create another chance to cement the identity of the 'base'. And 'the liberals' is a particular construction, perhaps it is partly the same part of elitist liberalism that has been the object of critique by leftist thinkers all along, but also the post war consensus of 'political correctness', 'identity politics' and 'multiculturalism' are despised and rejected.
The idea is simply 'fuck all that shit' and the psychological glue that prevented this view shaping society or rather helped keep the neigh sayers quiet, has failed or been destroyed, or a bit of both. You know, growing up there was always a sense of a necessary respect for others and for difference but that was always accompanied by a sense of 'fuck all that shit', a kind of 'down the pub' attitude that was always corrected the next day when in contact with society. Well the pub talk of yesterday is political reality today and is it any surprise that so many of the supporters of the alt right come from working class white stock? People who perhaps never voted before or threw in a half hearted vote to their regular or traditional option, which would likely be Labour. This imaginary set of working class people is who the radical left casually imagined might one day storm the palace with them. Well it seems the psychological damn has burst and any sense that as the 1st world we owe a responsibility and debt to the rest has gone and the void is filling with injustice and seething anger and to boot the only societal narrative left is authoritarian nationalism. Russian eyes are smiling! It seems the greatest trick the Russians ever pulled is to help give people the platform and confidence to give voice to the dark feelings and desires that have been inside all along, and as the Oxford report11 tells us the strategy of the Russian's is not only disinformation but of amplification.
Yes yes but the point I want to make is that there are also less Machiavellian reasons why so many people support the alt right. Maybe the darkness would be kept in a natural check if the story added up. It is after all possible to imagine how a politics based on all manner of continental and post colonial theory can be accepted/tolerated by all comers so long as they are done right by in terms of the stuff needed for a happy life. But that has not happened and injustice is in the air and once again the genuine culprit, the crisis of capitalism, escapes scott free.
Well however we divvy it up Mr and Mrs 'fuck all that shit' have found a voice on the alt right and it's telling them what they have always felt was true. And we will see where it takes us.
In thought,
John
1 No money is available at this time but an application has been made for arts council funding with the decision expected in November.
2 Refers to drawings made during the Torpoint Art Service residency.
3 Work 31
4 Richard Serra, known for large scale steel sculptures.
5 John gave his previous frame to the little girl in Work 28
6 Quote taken from letter 226 To Theo van Gogh. The Hague, Friday, 12 or Saturday, 13 May, 1882. vangoghletters.org
7 John studied art at Newcastle University
8 There is in fact quite a high number of young people supporting SD
9 See: The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States, 2012-2018. Mentioned also in Work 15 -24, paragraph 3.