Well our summer campaign now moves to the Jämptland region and the town of Bräcke where Helen's family have a little set of cottages. We cannot paint here due to the clobber but I intend to focus on drawing in ink and pencil and on a large scale to boot and for this purpose I have built a new drawing board with which I can work on sheets of the french 20. Its almost too big for purpose this thing and it may not be possible to work with the inks sur le motif but my plan is to go out and grasp some scene or other in a vile and speedy hand and bring it back in for the ink work and see how we go.
I am writing from the glass surrounds of the conservatory that we actually helped build some years past. We are perhaps just four meters from an enormous lake which, due to the storm yesterday is as raj1 as anything; riotous and noisy but absolutely magnetic for the attention. I think it sets my endorphins off actually. To the rear and all around is pine tree forest at a height one doesn't find back in Roslagen. No neighbours or other structures, we are completely isolated. To achieve contact one can take the skiff boat to Bräcke taking some ten minutes or a rousing 15 minute trek through the pines brings us to our parked car. In terms of subject we are pared back to combinations of water tree rock house and sky, at least at first glance, but I will be trying to work in our themes even though I am considering this sojourn more of a training camp. Furthermore our recent intake of the burrows text2 is still being digested but at present I am feeling rather a lift of pressure just knowing that there are some professional minds thoroughly on the job of thinking out the alt right, and on this score I have brought along Alt Right from 4-Chan to the White House which is hardly right for semester text but I have to get it down, a bitter, colourless pill lets say. Weather their body of work has any impact on the mounting momentum of alt right mind stirring ahead of the election one can only hope. Every day we can hear from some source or other the flick of the zippo as the gas is lit3 and whats more we have the Russian report4 due to be published but it seems clear that Borris and Cummings have let the oligarchs in and have jumped onto their diamond encrusted band wagon. It beggars belief, this Cummings, especially if old burrows and M5 are accurate about his strongly held NRx beliefs. He wants to destroy society and he seems to be beginning with the civil service under the guise of 'a shakeup'! Birdnest! He must be, as we said, one of the most dangerous men in the world. And whilst we're on the subject how spineless are the tits and toffs of the British aristocracy to cave and pander to an oligarchy that actually threatens their way of life and politics and for what? Just to stay in petty power and rule over the ruins.
Anyway as we travelled past Sundsvall we were treated to monsoon quality rains which lengthened the trip considerably and worse luck I left my drawing board in the car when we hastily switched to the skiff for the final and very bumpy leg of the journey, but when we arrived ten minutes ago I discovered another board that I left here two years past so we will have work today after all and Ill go back for the big one tomorrow when the storm passes.
Todays attachment shows our go at the red meadow which we tackled last ditch yesterday evening. I have admired this particular field over the years, it seems to me rather unique. It lays at the koloden turn some ten minutes out of Norrtälje towards Väddö, a spot which we pass twice a day and so there has been ample opportunity to observe its development each year from the dandelion rash of spring to the wonderful meadow of red grass, lilac thistle and pale cow parsley. Every year it pains me when the farmer must annihilate this poor meadow and take it away in tightly wrapped plastic parcels, (what a fate) but this year I was determined to come away with a study and while I am pleased to have it, as usual we would need a dozen or so to do justice to the subject.
We found the going difficult to be sure, and look here it takes considerable minerals to tackle an open field and more still to come away with something of vigour, something of colour and at decent size (the above is approximately a french 25.) The issue really is one of momentum and our difficulty and gathering any, resulting in much of our precious time sur le motif spent re-learning the wheel, but that said we did glimpse the feeling of pure painting towards the end. By that I mean the state of having reached the painting in parallel with nature stage rather than painting to copy. In this elevated state nature is giving us the impetus to respond in gestures and salvos that are not shallow attempts to represent accurately but have an autonomous essence, in colour, form and movement, which in the final analysis achieves a far more sourcy representation that contains that extra ingredient; the 'echo', the 'it', 'soul', or 'energy', but as I say we only felt a glimpse. We need seasoning.
Let me recommend to you and anyone who may subsequently read this, a high quality curated information assemblage on SVT Play called London Calling about the Clash.6 It really is a peach for me but of course it is about much more than the clash, it sets out the social context and grim and hopeless seeming reality of London in 1979. Not a paradise. The reel featured many and varied speakers talking about memories of the time, the effect of the music on youth and of Thatcherism, all enigmatically rolled over urban stock footage of London. Look here, it was nice but what I thought worthy of reporting to you was the way that it showed a world just prior to the world of Neoliberalism capitalism that we have all come to experience. It wasn't there yet but we know what was to come.
Now the other reason that I think this effort was assembled is to draw a parallel with today and the rise of the far right on mainstream life and given these two similarities to today context I was wondering if we might be at the beginning of an attempt to forge a new special partnership; just as back then we had Thatcher/Reagan to spearhead neoliberalism for the bankers are we to think that Johnson and Trump are to take us into the wilds of NRx ideologically based oligarchy? Disaster politics is it? Ethno national gov corps is it? Well the borrows text lays out some of the visions of this ideology but they do well to point out that these may well be exaggerated ideas, red herrings to trigger smaller more achievable state along those lines, but what of role of art in new oligarchy? It certainly wont have the privileged role cut out for it over the neoliberal era where art still led a path to be recuperated from 1968 to the commodification of counter culture and many other examples right up to socially engaged art and the saga of participation. Does a capitalism run by, and for, a set'a7 oligarchs need to recuperate the critique of the avante gaurd? Far alt right powers do what the people want but not the people of a progressive left but the folks who want the wall built and that is not quite recuperation is it? No that would seem more like responding to what is popular at any given time; build schools, build hospitals, contracts for the mates and on they go surfing the opinions, managing the outrage until election. Do we really expect any different? Has it ever been different? Would a left populism operate in similar fashion? More questions we cannot answer and probably would do well not to dwell on, for the good of our real work but I will say this regards the change in power, that it feels different when watching the procedures of politics in the media, there is a different attitude of those in power, or is it perhaps because 'real' power has left the scene and bun fight populism has filled the void? That was the view of old Burrows when some years ago we took a screen to screen to discuss art and the alt right. His view of the Brexit melee as the countdown approached was that "real power doesn't behave like that" and 'it' is absent. Watching carefully, but absent. Maybe like in the Greek crisis?8
Anyway if burrows and M are right and the oligarchy prefer chaos and disaster rather than the controlled and secure state then the role of art is entirely changed and, as usual, some new ways are needed. Recall that Postscripts to the Control Society text, Gilles writes that the next generation must discover the nature of their enslavement and the weapons to fight it? Well indeed; in the post truth era - what weapons? In the wild west gangsterism of oligarchy - what weapons? In the era of disinformation - what weapons? Against societal gaslighting - what weapons? Against data science led populism what weapons?
Well I would first ask what weapons stopped the tide of neo-liberalism since Maggie and Ronald buddied up? None. There is a sense that the tide is coming in whether we like it or not, whether we have weapons or not. Is it better to work out what to do once the tide is upon us, better to build intelligently than to fight? Well who knows, we're all just drops on a windshield, but if the oligarchs are content to let us all squabble and get on with it, maybe the fight is well worth it. If the increasing chaos of the world is due to power withdrawing from politics then how much farther down the pan could the world go before 'power' feels the need to step in again?
Who knows, who knows, who knows but we have our fingers in the art pie and I for one think that perhaps the artists need to retreat to the shadows and work on the imagination a bit. This would let activists tackle activism and let them develop closer relations with the experts and public intellectuals rather than artists. This sounds a little categorical but of course the three aforementioned positions could exist in one person potentially I am just saying that some separation, some defining, although too old fashioned, may be of benefit. We are now saying something the opposite of what has been the aim in critical arts and humanities subjects for some 40 years at least, that of the overcoming or erasing of disciplinary boundaries, just think of the terms associated with this work: multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, alter-disciplinary. Think of how 'art' has been inserted into the sciences, medicine, law, the military, all in the name of collaboration. All good work and often necessary but times have changed and now. In the context of post truth populism and data science led disinformation politics, far from the need to unfix and dissolve seemingly restrictive categories, we could do with establishing a few more roots and certainties could we not? Not one step back9 though, rather than conservative retreat I imagine an exciting and challenging project to redraw disciplinary boundaries; to know 'whose who' and 'whats what' for good and all! Perhaps one may even suggest that in the good emancipatory cause of collaboration and disciplinary hopping, the potential of art has suffered or stuttered or has been stunted. What becomes of art that seeks to merge with everything else? This is a mega sized can of worms to be opening when we barely have time to tie our shoelaces but the answer may be found by following the strand of young Yates Makee and his 'post occupy condition' in which art dissolves into social movement making. The imagination is not a given, it needs to be created and that said we simply must bring this to a close. I rather think that the momentum of the lake has caused us an outburst, like the way that salt extracts moisture, but now it is high time to accept and enjoy what is in front of us. To the Kayak!
A handshake,
John
1 A slang word used in the north east of England to mean angry, volatile, crazy.
2 Killer Clowns Techno-Fogies and Architectures of exit: Urbit and Neoreactionary Imaginaries
3 Gaslighting. A 'zippo' is a hand held device that produces fire, used to light tobacco products.
4 It is not clear what report this refers to.
5 'M' possibly refers to the co author of the Burrows text.
6 Made by Göran Hugo Olsson from Lund.
7 Error should read 'a set of...'
8 Refers to the post financial crisis collapse of the Greek economy followed by strict austerity measures which were widely thought to be an 'experiment' to asses how the society would react.
9 Possibly a reference to the slogan of The Poor Peoples Campaign: Forward Together Not One Step Back.