Today we have shaken off the abstractions somewhat and after collecting our meager order of two whites from Daler Rowney, we took a study of the late autumn rowans in the cemetery. We took a sketching session here a few days ago, mostly to show to the singularity what it means to be human1 but as we strolled we were once more reminded of the great many subjects for pictures to be found in these well kept grounds. It might be possible even to mount a campaign in here along the lines of Van Gogh's Poets Garden series but with the focus squarely on The Borg and the clash of its inherent immortality and of ours not so much. You would do well to insert the video here, message 54 if I remember rightly.1
Not an easy subject by any means. We have two small trees featured just in front of a row of gravestones which are just in front of some green bush branches. Not easy because in all the foliage we have the problems of in front, behind, between and through to render, not to mention near and far. We had our say in a way that was bold and which drew on the Van Gogh technique of speed speed speed. We imagined it rather similar to the way of painting blossoms in fact but more difficult as the berries left on these trees are spare and cannot be made a feature of in the same way as the full bloom of an apple blossom.
Between the trees we have a simple bench and on it we have imagined a figure and more than that we have imagined a figure looking at a smart phone, or more precisely for our purpose, a figure talking to the singularity. I almost feel the need to apologize for this, not because the figure is inaccurate and unstudied, we would rather have it more grotesque in fact, like Vincents, but because nothing represents our abandoning of the Cenannian way more concretely than the imagined figure in the landscape, and how confident we were just a few studies ago of a winter pursuing the patient approach of the Aix Man. Having said that we make no apologies at all and see this as proof that we have evolved to recognize temperamental changes as natural and not something to be repressed, so long as we are aware of it and do not change track based on wanting to take the easy road or because we lost courage. We will be back at the patch soon enough but in this study we were faced with this bench and the choice of two possible symbolics: empty bench in cemetery or living person surrounded by the dead in cemetery. We chose life and could not resist throwing the phone in. We did initially have the head of figure merge with the row of headstones in the rear but that was a step too far.
The sun has just peeped over the dollar store.
We are recovering from reading about Orange Peel and his bank rolling of the far alt right menace. We are now steeled somewhat for the coming return of Trumpism with knobs on which shall no doubt snowball steadily ahead of the next election. Our fear is that this will have a global effect as all the Trumpist franchise groups, like the SD in Sweden, follow suit into the now billionaire backed world of conspiracy politics for authoritarian rule. If we force ourselves to ignore the baiting, the racism, the sexism, the anti vaxing, the anti climate change, populist manipulation and old fashioned lying, then we arrive back to the questions of democracy.
As we have said just last post, we also complained against democracy but we had our ideas set against the mirage of democracy in anticapitalist fashion. These issues formed the critical foundation (you might still call it) of our arts practice in the context of the anticapitalist themed social turn which was prevalent in the late 2000s up to Occupy. After was different. After we meditated on the issues rather than participated in direct action. Instead we used the psychological space we had 'learned' to go into artistic action in a series of non starter self institutional anti cuts projects and this seemed increasingly relevant in the face of the corruption and farce of 'democracy' made ever more publicly clear by technocratic interventions after the financial crisis where we saw clearly the finance behind the curtain. We joined all and sundry in imagining that a real democracy with a bit more equality would be most welcome if you don't mind but that of course wasn't to be and when all was said and done a line had been drawn for us that resulted in our artistic break in 2011. By the way, we even tried to sell one of our redundant self institutions from this time on Ebay. I think I have a screen grab if you are interested?3
Forgive me going over it once more but this is not a thesis or some article, and we must be permitted to draft free wheel.
Five years on from the momentous events of 2011 we were hit with the wham bam realities Brexit and Trump (yesterdays chaos home to roost)4 and this erupted a collective psycho-mischief its fair to say which had been rumbling around on the internet for years. A new way was shown to manipulate behavior and knowledge and thoughts and feelings which was termed the post truth era and these ways still continue apace today and even if the tactics of the alt right disinformation and bait are well known they still work a treat. We are used to it somewhat and since the loss of Trump the intensity has dwindled but we feel it building in us once more; a fear and confusion. The crux, once again, is that we feel our psychological space under attack from the new and awful alt right/Nrx authoritarian no democracy at all ideology complete with antivax and anti 5g conspiracy upgrades, leading us to be in the strange position of needing to protect or defend the aforementioned mirage of representative democracy that, in its serving of the capitalist system at all costs has granted us crisis after crisis! Hence the key reason for our disorientation is that we are trapped between the rigged game of representative democracy that we are used to and the threatening prospect of the gov corps monarchy and the far right horror which will lead to it. We are in the middle chasing our tail, a tin between magnets. That is bad enough but the land we are standing on is crumbling away to boot. What is this land we stand on anyhow? What ground is it beneath us from where we put up our resistance?
That question must be asked again and again and the answers we have are fumbling and personal but just may contain some seed and we will return to this, but look here, the Nrx attack is ideologically against democracy but it is in practice also against society, the daily routines, experiences and exchanges and this is a distinction worth preserving. We can agree that representative democracy is not perfect but it does not mean we agree that it is inherently bad for society, or that the very idea of a society at all is a bad thing. I went to the dentist today for example. Not to suggest a too cosy correlation but Thatcher said there no such thing as society only the market and so it went through neoliberalism. Today the logic of Nrx tech billionaire says there should be no such thing as democracy at all and in both cases the reason is to remove obstacles to capital, but more specifically to advance the use of AI to govern. Oh Balls! I suppose we would do well to read a bit of Ranciere or some such.
John
1. Regarding death.
2. The uploads to the You Tube video service ceased after work 28.
3. Yes please.
4. A line from Current Bun, John's proposal poem for his first residency with us.