You can see I’m getting very bored. I’ve put half of this on this blog and the rest is on artandmayhem so none of the other OSAS’s come up here and wring my neck…
This is a great point for me to try to articulate something that I don’t think I’m doing at all. It’s like trying to explain Spanish or playing the piano or growing cell cultures. But it makes a nice break, from trudge typing through long slow meandering interviews - that seem to make about as much point as a bloody cricket test match. Green. White. Sun. Red ball. Yellow bat. Green grass stains. Yes its all good, yes its all no good. It’s no good, god its good. Not. Gaaaah!
I like Elizabeth Grosz’s last biofetish explanation of ART. That it’s some animal fecund thing. I heard that and saw glistening bits of Bataille and Deleuze sparkling around my head in a sensuous excess of autumn leaves and really drippy pink sticky flouro oil paint. Multiplying madly. Creatures create. Creatures do shit that makes no sense, that is not economically rational at all. It is not deterministic and the rationality is one that is aligned with process rather than product. Like playing solitaire or stupid board games. Lining up leaves or collecting blue things, or having a reproductive system based on menstruation. What kind of evolution is that?
I’ve been meaning to read Popper’s later work - the one where he goes ‘they took it too far, my anti-determinist thing - those pesky humanities philosophers - I just wanted a more flexible framework for understanding experimental change - damn those postmodernists’. but, yeah, I get distracted. I’ve been meaning to get back into the studio too.
So art could be, can be, has been anything, right?
So why do I cringe when some sad fuck at some party comes up to me and says, yeah, err, I’m kind of an artist, you know, I do this stuff where we organise information and…. (and like, he works in RETAIL or something)???
Why do I cringe when I walk past that nice dykey cafe with tall the well publicised ‘queer art exhibition’ that makes me want to rip my fingernails out?
Part of me, does after all, embrace bad art. I love the excrescence of it, the towering piles of shit surging from people’s small minds and inept fingers everywhere. At a certain point, bad art makes less sense and does less damage than bad surgery, or bad writing, or bad computer programming. And it’s often easier to ignore than bad music too, and it lasts much less than bad acting.
I decided to go to art school about a decade ago - when that book ‘the artists way’ came out. I heard about it from a North American woman - who used to go to the same community college painting class that I was attending. This was great - because self-help books are always far more fun when read out in a Californian accent. It was a fantastically cheesy tome, playing on the romanticist myth or the artist - and constructing the perfect authentic self - based around notions of autonomy and imagination and play. And then it was such a best seller that when the sequel came out ‘the artists way at work’ no one really seemed to notice!
But yeah, I bought the myth of authenticity, or autonomy, of serious play, and I still do. (you know that line at the end of Foucault’s the order of things about Humanism – being like a face drawn in the sand that gets away by the tide of history? – THAT SCARES ME). I’m just a bit more knowing and cautious about the structures whereby that’s managed. My own art training was in painting, at a reasonably traditional school (well, modernist) - which I attended - mainly because there was no HECS on the then diploma course. Actually at art school I was barely interested in painting at all - and could hardly draw, and barely learned, but painters seemed to get the best deal, and my friends were in painting so that’s where I stayed.
I probably learnt more about paint afterwards. And I learnt, not only the technical stuff, but also the imaginative stuff, how minds and experiences are formed - while forming - and are - while not entirely constructed by language - then certainly mediated - by - not even language - but ‘meaning making structures’. I think that meaning making structures - are patterns and habits and forms of play by which we structure our interactions with our selves, our own thoughts, our own bodies, the spaces around us, the materials we have. The stuff we touch and shape and use.
In terms of THE ART PROJECT - then I have to write about my metier - my media/speciality - because that’s the one that I know. I’d call myself a painter - just because I’ve had a reasonably serious relationship with paint for the past ten years. There are certain words that I only know in Spanish or French or English -and certain sensations, expressions, states that I only know in ‘paint’. I know what type of gestures, consistencies, colours and marks make me happy or sad or awkward or anxious in the same way that certain sounds delight my ears - or certain physical touches arouse or repel me. I know painting like I know my own body, or my (ex) lover’s body. The texture, my habitual movements, the ones I fight against. The bits where I fuck up or fail or stumble -and where things flow and fly like magic.
Maybe this is why I’ve hardly been near my studio for the past month. Can I still call myself a painter, when I’m not painting? And how long can that go for? I’m spending more time wrestling with words at the moment. My sex life, rage, tears, grief, hysteria, pain, joy, lust etc. – contorts itself inward and gets hammered out on the keyboard as my bum hardens on the seat below me. Fine stuff but it’s not paint. There’s no drip, no odd gestures. No flays of pink, no flinging of Payne’s grey. No working up of yellows and greens with the right bits of oil, no transparent slicks, no sacred muds. This time my thoughts aren’t being worked out in the movement of arms and legs. No pacing up and down before my easel, no panting. I’m not even listening to music. The thoughts get pushed right down. I try to walk them off – because I need to feel this space, this stillness of words. It’s not painting. It’s not mad movements in space with some coloured semi liquid – semi solid hanging off and object in my hand, or smeared across my elbows and hips, on my face, in my hair. Hopefully some of it ends up spread across a surface that arbitrarily ends somewhere. The only rule for painting, is that you use paint, or something like it. Like using letters or a script if you’re writing. That’s it. I wouldn’t call myself a writer if I wasn’t writing, so why call myself a painter if I’m not doing it?
The best analogy for my artistic metier (painting) is sex. Not only because it tallies nicely with Liz Grosz’s animal play kind of thing, but also because there’s a lot of cultural attention given to sex - and its something people can identify with. Sex is constantly fraught with anxiety, failure, incompetence - as well as intense joy, crazy pleasure - mad terror, tears, weird smells and messy fluids. I can’t really say that our culture allows much space for that sort of thing at all - I mean even food has been gourmetted within an inch of its life - or dulled down to scary bland industrial pap. Most food experiences in anglo industrialised societies are intensely simulacral - we’re just consuming a bunch of signifiers, rather than having some sort of rich physical interaction with stuff that could have an element of surprise…… I think that’s why I’m also fascinated with pornography - because it represents an increasing cultural colonisation and commodification of what has been a reasonably private and largely secretive experience. Look at the way vulvas have entered the regimes of public bodily maintenance - with every second beautician offering bikini waxes! Even scrotums and perineums are part of consumer cultures personal maintenance. How many men getting a sack and crack wax check out their own perineum in the mirror? Its not that easy! so why do people bother? and what has this got to do with art? or OSAS?
I’d like to think that ART - as a culturally contested zone where desires, play, surprise and rules get mediated. Of course this means that any activity that is ‘avant garde’ is placed immediately in a position of recuperation within consumer culture and this is largely what ART institutions are designed to do: manage creativity so it can be harnessed and projected back into the capitalist imaginary. The specualtive art market is just the financial fetishizing of this very significant cultural role that ART actually plays in consumer society. I also think that ‘outsider’ art is just as implicated within capitalist cultural management as anything else. And I don’t see kitsch as some sort of quasi-primitivist authentic parallel universe. I think shunting art into this little space of ‘outsiderism’ often just facilitates the acute conformity, either of the individuals concerned, or of the society that champions it. The most bourgeoise boring fucks in the world wet themselves at the idea of the artist as ‘enfant terrible’, and the real tragedy of genuinely madness – is that mentally ill people are incredibly boring. There are few surprises in a solid word salad.
So I think art is implicated with capitalism. Artists do operate largely as extreme sports entrepreneurs. Most of us are just fledgling bits of the petite bourgeoise who find new forms of real estate (from squats to warehouse apartments), new fashion (obvious) new communication systems (blogs, podcasting, film) and other accroutements. And also new forms of self sufficiency. Artists work from home, work odd hours, don’t unionise, don’t separate themselves from their work. We’re a perfect model for the new TEAMCREW corporate slaves of the new knowledge economy. Why is it that so many artists either come from middle class (open minded but cautious parents) families, or drag along huge suitcases of their aspirational class resenting baggage?
I shouldn’t be so cynical should I? Why do I cane the avant-garde – when so much art, especially in Sydney is not even aspiring to being avant-garde? Its just really drab flat stylised shit – that’s about as transgressive as a misspelt cappuccino in a country town? You know the kath & kim stuff on Glenmore road, or the evil evil toadlike shit of Pro Hart & Charles Billich, that sucks the soul out through your eyeballs. People reckon they are “aussie heros†but people also vote for John Howard. There’s no excuses for confusing demagogy with popularism.
I think its because the avant-garde still represents the capitalist imaginary and its an imaginary that still holds true for most people – and almost certainly for the readers/contributors of OSAS. How many of us are scraping by the fringes of academia/curatorship – or some other little fucked up corner of the knowledge economy? (Who else is living off a trust account? Or an inheritance?) Just on the edge of some nice hidey hole – that we try to despise while clinging to like a life-raft as we drift on the sea of precarity… Hell! there’s no way I’d say no to a lectureship or some nice curatorial position – would you? Isn’t OSAS also about creating our own circulations – our own new niche that can allow us to wedge our way into the systems that exist. I’ve heard that a couple of uni lecturers now mention my BLOG in their art writing courses. It gives them easy kudos to be talking about blogging – when they only publish where they can earn DEST credit points, and it might help me brow-nose my way into the odd guest lecturing scam – where I get paid to be the officially sponsored freak for an hour. Queer theory anyone? Would you like it illustrated or served with Deleuze? Then I can say I’m an artist, maybe show a coupla slides from some naked whacky performance piece – but no, not my oil paintings. No that won’t quite do, will it?
