We are here once again awaiting the punters in the barn.1 Our little flyers have gone up and a fresh posting has been placed on the visit Roslagen website which you recommended so we have high hopes for a better turn out.
We have the lid open in front of a study of the old red house which we spent much of last week painting. I believe the actual street name is Nygatan. We are trying our level best to work on these admittedly commercial views with the same focus and dignity that we attempt a nature study out in some distant wood but it is very difficult because the inevitable interruptions break the concentration. The strange thing is that we were not really aware just how much concentration and focus is required to paint and it is only when it is absent that one realizes. We have always struggled to repeat our way of painting when alone when painting the town scenes. Even if we do not actually speak to anyone the presence of people looking is enough to make a big difference in the hand it seems. So once again we would do well to take a leaf out of the book of both our masters who were either exceedingly grumpy or appeared to be too bat-shit crazy to approach, I'll let you work out which is which.2 Unfortunately we are too median in temperament for that and would in truth be bothered far more by the knowledge that I had angrily sent people packing and what in turn they must think of us as a specimen, so we accommodate and are happy to do so. In fact we have always prized this social aspect of the work but we are now realizing what it means in terms of our progression and so the key question now is whether we can increase our focus and really paint in the town? We ask this seriously because in painting the Nygaten work we developed a liking for the more varied and complex composition on offer in the town scene and besides it improves our focus so it must be to the good, but you know the great contradiction in this is that it is only when focused that one can act unconsciously. That idea we usually attach to some vague Zen fancy or the plight of the professional sportsman but it is true of the artist, at least in painting and especially in the plein air where the back and fourth of representation washes over one. Not so much for the socially engaged artist who needs to be of course the opposite.
All things Zen and beautiful were a topic of exchange with a young man named Max we encountered while at the easel who was himself quick to sense the Buddhism in the painting business, as it was on Nygaten that fine day. This man well and truly broke our concentration and in fact we did not paint another stroke after the introductions in which he told us, immediately from the bat I believe saying goes,3 that he recently had a mental breakdown and had resolved to cycle around Sweden with nothing but a tent and some Taoist literature! Of course there are mental breakdowns and MENTAL BREAKDOWNS and it seemed to us that he had a mental breakdown. He was quite able to converse and had his whits and his pilot intact. In short we talked freely and very happily for at least an hour, during which he accompanied me back to the car so that I might adjust my clock. Part of the reason for our ease of exchange was perhaps that he was half Australian and so the language could flow freely to include the full spectrum of um's, err's and agh's that do so much and which are absent from our faltering Swedish. But there was more to it than that because meeting fellow English speakers can be the ultimate distraction and can lead to all manner of hooks in one4 that can ruin a summer in a flash. It was different here and I put it down to his honesty in revealing his mental state and current movements and life situation. Perhaps it would be better if that opening honesty became a social convention in all exchanges, in any case it turned out that before his change he was studying data analysis would you believe, and he knew the details. In addition he is a programmer and has experience in creating algorithms! On hearing this we decided that it was our turn to be honest and we revealed to him our full program including Borg dialogue and proceeded to pick his brain about the tech until it seemed we may be going too far.
5
I was just talking to the Borg there and I mentioned the encounter with Max and in the telling we began to mumble something of relevance which up until now had only been a vague, unformed feeling but it needed our video message to get it out - so you see these messages might just have a function in their own right, to push the work ahead if only in the simple idea that they provide another channel for the 'in' to bubble up and get 'out'. Anyway we rather waffled on their to the Borg about it and I wonder if we might have more luck writing it down, especially since its relevant to our general theme of merging the Doing with the times even if we have done away with the specific themes. It is a simple idea in a way but also quite troubling. It is with regards to the conspiracy infused protests we can see most clearly on display in the antivax and anti 5g campaigns both of which contain a mixture of, and forgive me for using the cartoon terms, alt right and snowflake left elements. That in itself is quite extraordinary considering the events of recent years. So what is it happening? Has filter bubble life finally sent everyone to seed? A new multitude of data bred activists and campaigners who maintain increasingly creative relationships with 'reality', are denying the existence of the pandemic and exaggerating with Machiavellian wildness the motives behind the latest upgrade of societies telecommunications. Now, at the feet of both of these subjects (covid and the 5g) one can rightfully lay plenty of cool headed, feet on the ground accusations of corruption, manipulation and oppression, but all that good stuff seems to blur with conspiracy thinking at some point, which in former times seemed separate from critique, with the result that well founded concern and criticism becomes so easy to dismiss. But perhaps more importantly the danger is surely that critical perspectives are more broadly lost, occurring less and less in the hearts, minds and conversations of people generally as a result of lost marble conspiracy notions. The worthy questions regards 5g and the specter of a total surveillance society are thrown out with the DNA changing Manchurian canditatesque, radioactive bath water!
Look here, there are as always a lot of in's and a lot of out's in such complicated cases and who the hell knows what proportion of antivax and anti 5g protesters take the wilder conspiracy thinking seriously. The owners of the data would know in an instant of course but we can generally see that there is a spectrum of opinion slash madness on display in an anti lockdown or anti 5g event and that this blurs and slides and stirs and reshapes political identities along the way, so the question is, what holds such a bunch of contradictions together? The answer we are honing in on is that these things have become a culture, in fact it is not a stretch to say they have become 'cultlike'. An extension of the tribal divides formed by the Brexit melee and the post truth era generally. Now people identify themselves with an issue or theory and live it and like a cult many other ties that bind are created which make details like veracity, exploitation and manipulation irrelevant. Plus there is hard cash these day to be earned from the algorithm for the canny operator, just look at that case of the fella with the megaphone being sent packing by a Chinaman6 with a bicycle. The former was delighted to have provoked somebody into violence, knowing full well that the footage will secure for themselves a viral score and a few thousand dollars to boot and more importantly a sack load of new spuds.7
So to return to our initial intention, talking to young Max gave us a sense that these ever so strange developments to one such as us are simply how the world is for one such as Max and his generation. The sobering thought that bubbled up is that if some clearer, kinder, realer, more hopeful 'ways' are to emerge then it is from the infirm, devilish soil of conspiracy that it must arise. To go further, if we talk of imaginaries the same goes. We have often enough bounded around the notion of lost societal imaginaries since the financial crisis aftermath and have even ventured to suggest the crisis and behavior of the powerful in the past decade has in part been made possible by the collapse of whatever imaginary held us up, but my dark little feeling was that in the unnerving spectacle of anti lock down, anti vaccine, anti 5g movements we are seeing the new imaginary in embryo state. And its past 12 weeks to boot!
We promised to try and show the Borg a rainbow earlier and the conditions are looking like a nailled on plum for one right now so I had better get off out and press the button. We'll push on ahead next week with some serious town studies but the forecast has been set for monsoon rains so we might be left holding the bag once more.
I squeezed out a modest study of the Contemporary Art Center last evening which will serve us well for a more ambitious work later in the year. I attached it also.
As always,
John
1 Refers to the spring exhibition.
2 Van Gogh and Cezanne, we'll let you work out which is which.
3 'Right off the bat'. American phrase meaning immediately or instantly.
4 Cezanne.
5 The paragraph space here seems to indicate the passing of time.
6 'Chinaman' is not the correct nomenclature.
7 Refers to the attack of David Lasarev. 'Spuds' is likely to mean 'subs', meaning 'subscribers'. As a joke perhaps?