You know thinking back to all that Occupy business and how it ended reminded me somehow of a feeling I have had regularly during my doomed attempts to make a living through selling paintings. It is a feeling of apprehension on having come so far, to have worked successfully enough to raise hopes to the point where one arrives at some reckoning or test which determines everything and it is only there, at the very time when hopes are highest that the reality of failure comes into view. It is the moment I have often felt when after working down to the wire to make everything perfect, then you open the doors to an exhibition and immediately one senses that hope and failure have finally come face to face. Likewise the anticapitalists of Occupy Plymouth at the union march; in both cases the people weren't interested and where do you go from there?
Anyway, so occupied I have been by this, that and the other I have forgotten my duty to talk about the work. Forgive me, I shall endeavour to refocus and never let another post go by without a line on the Doing.
Today we took on a row of young birch trees in a bid to catch their winter maroon before the spring oranging takes over. The location is Ekerby, or at least it is on the Ekerby road which is the first left past the anchor.1 The road leads straight as a parris cue2 for a couple of kilometres where one travels deep into the fields then if one takes the right at the junction and follows the winding lane for perhaps five minutes or so we arrive at our location at the far corner of a field just as the road bears back right and eventually rejoins the 76.
Here we found a perfect setting to try and capture the winter effect birches. It is a small wood the extent of which one can grasp in its entirety from a short distance but on account of the density with which the birches were layed in there are hundreds of trees. We ache on account of the desloratadin3 and had not the energy for a hike into the wood so our study is a more distant view featuring the trees in the mid-distance and a scheme of brush bushes taking the foreground. In addition to the painting we continued with another message from The Wretched Painter, filmed in several short clips in which I give tell of what we are Doing and some general chit chat about the world as seen from our murky perch. I thought that I would feel much more uncomfortable than I actually did, standing in the field talking to myself to camera like a 'tuber', but really these days it's not so strange. A painter in the filed is far more of an unusual sight I fancy than someone filming and talking to themselves, so after a minute of looking around I settled into it but I always find that there is not so much to say regards the painting. I have no desire to explain the process and besides I find that I tend to sink into a base non verbal state when painting, I'm sure that's part of the addiction of plein air painting; to experience a different, deeper state. Not like some zen business, or yoga buzz, but just of Doing. Of looking and reacting, building and adjusting, modulating constantly, and this based not on words so much, rather a strange direct knowing. You see the angle of some bank then you do it. You sense the foliage of some bush needs to be more dense so you make it so. The movement of the land seems to go left, you make it go left. After a while of this one gets a little dizzy but it is a pleasure. Anyway we began the study and we'll return tomorrow for another go but right now I want to move on to something else. To something of a review.
With the extra time we have due to the pandemic I feel that some type of effort to review and re-orientate ourselves will be beneficial generally because after all it is hard enough to travel with no destination in mind let alone with no knowledge of from where we came. The review state of mind has also formed due to all our recent talk of Occupy after which I have increasingly felt the need to re-asses our motivations and rationale.
You know an awful lot of water has passed under the bridge since Occupy and our breakage of 2011 and while we have 'become a painter', that was very far from the idea when we began painting as a joke in the TAS project, so it is time to ask whether the radical intention behind our breakage still holds water? And a review is all the more necessary due the commencement of The Wretched Painter series which, even though it began as, and continues to be, a genuine message to my benefactor in London, who is indeed owed an explanation of sorts, it could evolve in something more, something that could be stirred into our Dignity Scholarship broth.
So lets have a look back. Just think of UK austerity, that dreadful Eton business and one that was battled against with horror and humour and a million memes but ultimately the bastards were reelected no probs. The Greek exit crisis where the austerity experiments there pushed to the limit, old Holmes called it a Mengler experiment. Think of the black lives matter movement and #metoo, and the parallel rise of the white supremacist alt right and their online culture seeping into mainstream. That time we could say was the time of the meme wars between the right and left which viralled around the world and were in hindsight, it seems, directed and egged on by the Russian IRA. All the while the data is harvested and the Obama administrations NRA were spying. Think of wikileaks, of Snowden. Then the big ones; Brexit! Trump! Nostrovia! This rough list, (which is only what comes to the mind of someone who doesn't even watch the news,) only leads our battered minds into the new fear of artificially intelligent algorithms and the dreaded automation which is the next bubble to borrow the financial phrase.
Fires, flood, rivers of blood, we hardly know what to believe. There's been the fake news menace, now the bloody pandemic and soon 5G's hidden in a tree!4
With a little historical distance however, does it not look more and more clear that the decade of the 2000's critical art experiments with semi fictional institution building seems to be a precursor of the post truth era? The artists and activists discussed in young Sholettes Dark Matter, the Collective Phantoms of Old Holmes, the CFU5 and may we include the gentle Open Council, (one of hundreds of self institutions thrown into the pot), all shared and capitalised on the idea that society and its institutions had dissolved to the extent that it became possible to successfully fabricate the online presence of a functioning institution and act within it to create a little reality. This became possible due to 'the times' and how they unravelled in a million ways, but in our arc it was due to the damage done by a rampant, 'war on terror' flavoured neoliberal capitalism and its drive to globalisation, the privatisation of life and tighter and tighter surveillance, but crucial to the context is the way that this politics coincided and was bound up with the rapid growth of telecommunications technology. All the playing with the internet which created the utopian spirit of open source creativity and free culture, and subsequent and rapid monetisation and corporatisation of it, the introduction of smart phones which brought about a next level of connectivity and usage in parallel to the rise of social media. Behind all this was the ideology of participation and the game of numbers, a social turn in art and business which in hindsight seems just a huge campaign to get us using and hooked on the tech. In this farcical advance the online world was ripe for parody by an increasingly overtly anticapitalist set of artists and because on the internet all is reduced to the screen it was easy. An aesthetic level playing field where one can appear to be what one wants; a bank, a university, a council, it's all just graphics, imagery and the right tone with the language. Remember the Yes Men? It seems that as this all developed people realised that they could actually transform their once fake or joke institution into something 'real' and behave accordingly. This accounts for the growth of the 'socially engaged' practices in the later years of the decade if you ask me, when the joke was old and there was 'real' work to be done and then all the buds blossomed in Occupy.
All of this has been taken up and pushed to disturbing ends by the alt right where reality is just what you make it, nothing is certain. People say it is the Baudrillard6 angle that they have piggy backed and that is true but it needs to be understood in the context of the institution building works of the 2000's. While we're building our story can we not begin to understand the 'post truth era' as a whole, the entire decade from 2011, as a bridge between worlds, from neoliberal capitalism to automation? From capitalism to post capitalism? A decade of crisis, catastrophe and pain, a collective burden, a labour we have all shared (some more than others) as we continue to give birth to the new world of AI automation. And look here, it has been a difficult birth and what's more it is an arranged marriage, an unwanted child! Let us not forget that technology is imposed on us, I don't remember anyone voting for 5G or social media, or the internet for that matter.
Well that all seems a little schematic but we must think like this at times and so in this scheme of transition we must ask what is the critical art response to the coming automation? Many and varied one would hope, but our own line could be thought of as a reinvented individuality of sorts, a covert expressionism if you will, in resistance to the bad collectivity of the Borg and its algorithms, but all that only very thinly, we don't know much about automation, is it a place where individuality must be performed and constructed, a real self institution?
It seems we may have reached too far out of our manor and beyond our brief once again. What good are these stories? Let's just say that it seems perfectly reasonable to see how the critical decade of political art practice of the 2000s led to and culminated in Occupy after which the game is changed. We have said as much before and also the excellent young Yates7 hammers the point home claiming that socially engaged art came to an end with Occupy. Our breakage though was based on more than just occupy, it was about the need to mark the change in the story of capitalism, about making a marker and basically it was about the impossibility of going on as before, because due to the dark Eton mess8 of Austerity, as before was never no more! New times new art. Naturally, property developers would look for their art suckers to prepare the ground, and the luxury goods contemporary art market flourished in part because austerity did not effect the rich so much but also because art became a good bet, a safer bet for investors. I always remember old Burrows, who at the time was researching the super rich and the new butler class, saying that it was much safer for investors to rock up to the Goldsmiths degree show and give the rub to three or four artists, buy all their wares, give em a hundred grand and see if they float; its prospecting! And even if the artists become dumped stock, they've still got it made - just have a look at that Bankers Guide to Art program by Ben Someone.9 So the business of art went on but any talk from government of the social benefits of the arts was gone but in our work and rationale we are talking about critical art, with radical intent and anti capitalist motive. It is from this position that we call for a break. A break to mark the shift in worlds, a break from the theories and practices designed for the old world and a break in time, an escape attempt from the contemporary. By the way did I mention that we applied for the Aarhus conference on critiquing contemporainety in 2016? We failed of course and they had a lucky escape because I had planned to turn up as Cezanne in full costume and perform a reading from the TAS project which would not have fitted with the exceedingly contemporary art line up. I had hoped for a little south west solidarity from 'data' Jeff Cox10 who was chair but no cigar.
So to my mind our rationale of breaking still seems very logical for the reasons we gave in TAS Work 2311 but I am also reminded of the stalwart Ranciere and what he said about the cycle of critique. Its a nice little chestnut that he casually tossed out to the art world in The Emancipated Spectator about the way the machine of critical theory runs by revealing the secrets of the world to us imbeciles and at the time when the latter begin to catch on the machine turns another cog and the theorists once again reveal the new reality to the imbecile public. Ranciere uses the example of spectacle12 and the hidden reality behind images but the idea seems to fit our breakage; we once gleefully announced, 'look, society is so broken we can just create our own institutions out of thin air and no one can tell the difference, ha!' Then this freedom to work with 'reality' becomes widespread and is taken up by the far right with great success and now we say 'wait, look they are just making up their own reality, don't believe it, we need to stop and think and root our feet to the ground'. Indeed, from within the whispy abstractions of today we have a craving to build something solid, on a good foundation and not get carried off into all that online memery but is it too late? Is that too conservative? But look here that whole critique and recuperation idea is a little old world is it not?That scheme relies on 'experts' being listened to and a power willing to pander somewhat to keep the wheels turning. Today it would seem that both of those conditions are no longer being met with critics and experts, whose very existance as people to be listened to about what is happening and what has happened, becoming a key target in the war against democracy fought by powers for which recuperating critique is not on their to do list. Populism is their game. Doing things the "people" want as opposed to what social theorists, activists, protesters want, of course, only when it suits them and only until it doesn't. So there is an interesting comparison to think of between recuperation of critique and the superficial pandering reponses of a populist power (blue passports),13 but look here, it may be that the phase change to automation may be so profound that the cycle stops, the network is complete and we will conduct our avant garde musings from a hollo deck!14 One thing is for fairly sure and that is, that today a populist politician can create and announce what the "people" want and then just do it; a performance of critique and recuperation. Check mate is it!? Hope not, but recall that moment when May15 announced that "you the people" are sick and tired of all the dithering over Brexit, sick of the indulgence of parliment...etc' well that is it: they announced what they wanted the people to think and acted accordingly.
Well, despite the paranoid abstract musings regards the powers that be we can objectivly say that through the pandemic we are going through some unprecedented changes. We are all divided into our little realities and now have been shut up into our coups and for all the talk of a new and good togetherness coming post pandemic I fear it will only be expressed from within the 5G enabled AI automated surveillance state that will soon be with us, and whether it is via the 'bamboo curtain' or the 'hot dog wall'16 we certainly shall all be in that together! That is no conspiracy by the way, it's plain old automation. There are the conspiracies of course regards 5G and at the present the connection between the 5G technology causing the coronavirus. David Icke has got it all sown up and thanks in part to his live broadcasts people in the UK have started attacking the mobile phone masts. It reminds me of Don Quixote attacking the windmills, very chivalrous.
You know sometimes it seems that the gap between the respected academic and the maverick conspiracy theorist (David Icke is a good example) is growing smaller and smaller. But I am not so surprised at the conspiracy theories about coronavirus, 5G or anything else. For me though, the extreme versions are of great use to the promoters of the technology who can most likely show that the situation is not as the conspiracy theorists say, discredit them and that in turn makes their mere use of 5G to bring in their total AI surveillance society seem reasonable in comparison; just business. Is that not how the far alt right have benefited by being branded nazi's? It is too easily dismissed and the sinster politics that they do peddle seems tame by the exagerated comparison, even if they are nazis. So calm heads need to prevail but will they?
So whatever review we conjour about radical art and the world, the reality now is pandemic lockdown. All indoors! I would like to think of it as the reverse metamorphosis of society; the butterfly returning to the caterpillar grub form to eat some more leaves before metamorphizing once again when the time is right, but when is that and into which world? By the way all that talk is apt for the DS strategy of sheltering and the cubbyhole notion, who could have thought our idea for post truth sheltering would become a global policy? And so in this our second season, with events unfolding in such a way as to have accellerated the demise of capitalism, the question of what comes next and how to be free within it is closer than would otherwise have been but is it too soon to call for metamorphasis? Capitalism has been paused but will it return to how it was? Or will it shut down? When I pause my old television it shuts down automatically if I don't return, but look here for all the talk of post capitalist automation and the world without work we surely are not that far advanced are we? We certainly need to have a read with regards to these claims for automation and for that matter the whole sphere of thinking regards what the next phase of capitalism is likely to look like but naturally we have not the time. We should however go so far as to draw up a list of articles and books that can go some way to painting a picture or at least a contour sketch of the thinking, but now it is high time I killed this scattered entry.
How easy it sounded to simply present a review but there is just too much going on to see it clearly and it is going to take a few more posts to get through it, so we'll pick it up next time. Now I need to quickly record a message for the benefactor Dave who has to my surprise actually watched the Wretched Painter videos and has assured me that he would like to hear more about our rationale of breakage and the sheltering work of the DS. You see he invested his money not on any of those old notions but purely based on the sale of nice little oils and so I doubted whether any of these ideas about radical art mattered to him but I thought I owed it to him to show what we are Doing as he does still retain a 25% share. Also because he's still Howard Hughesing it17 in Dalston we might provide a distraction.
Bests
John
1 Travelling towards Älmsta on the 76.
2 Manufacturer of billiards equipment, renowned for high quality snooker cues.
3 Desloratadin is an antihistamin drug.
4 5th generation internet transmitters are sometimes disguised as trees and cactuses.
5 Copenhagen Free University. Influential critical art project running from the 2000's which pioneered the method of self institution. John researched self instituional art practices at the Open Council in Newcastle 2008 - 2011.
6 French man who thought nothing was real.
7 Yates Mckee
8 Eton mess is a traditional English dessert consisting of a mixture of strawberries, meringue, and whipped cream.
9 Ben Lewis
10 Dr. Geoff Cox, co founder of the popular Data Browser idea books.
11 See Torpoint Art Service, Work 23, Art Theory Books and Firewood.
12 Guy Debord talked first of this society as spectacle.
13 A key demand of many old people who want the country of Great Britain to be on its own again.
14 The hollo deck is a feature of the Star Trek. It is a perfect virtual reality simulator.
15 Theressa May, British Prime Minister.
16 Unclear referrence. Perhaps an oppossing term to the Chinese 'bamboo curtain' using a stereotypical association between the USA and hotdogs.
17 A slang term for living in full lockdown? Howard Hughes was a billionaire tycoon who was famously reclusive, suffered from obsessive complulsive disorder and germ phobia. John may be using this reference in connection with the pandemic lockdown in reference to one of Hughes reclusive episodes in which he lived in a darkened movie screening room for several months continually watching movies and never leaving.