JUL07/18
To: claz
Subject: Hi it me lets shatter art wit memes

Hi Claz,
I’m doing okay at the moment. I have a chronic back injury that seems to be born from nerve damage in my lumbar spine. So I am in the midst of reconfiguring my relationship with my body. It is turning out to be quite important for me, I think. I just want to start with a small passage from an manifesto by MTL: “Art as we know it is corrupt, exhausted and weak...we strike art to liberate art from itself. Not to end art, but to unleash its powers of action, imagination, and beauty that have been held captive by the artworld. Art does not dissolve into so-called real life. Our surreal spirit is less that of breton’s European vanguardism than Suzanne Cesaire’s freedom dream, mindful as it is of the ongoing histories of slavery, imperialism, and debt. Art here opens directly into our ways of existing and working together. How do we create spaces that counteract the multiple forms of oppression that structure our relationships? These are inseparable from how we reproduce our lives in a material sense, whether we think of an occupied park, a collective house, a city-wide network or the planet itself. Art challenges us to respond to this question with direct action for which we ourselves are responsible rather than any preexisting institution. We strike art as a training in the practice of freedom.”

And a meme:

FB:https://www.facebook.com/socialpracticemafia/
Insta: @socialpracticemafia

I really agree with your assessment on how a lot of art spaces feel. I don’t really know, but I feel like a lot of the art system is registering the present social, cultural and economic ruptures/fractures/reorganisations; and then its core nodes/institutions/platforms try to position and articulate themselves as self-conscious and critical, whilst remaining a self-inclosed universe of pompous, ivory-tower like-mindedness. I can see it - a swathe of bespeckled heads atop turtle neck skivvy-necks; oversized power suits; murmurings derridean; barrel-bellied angel investors; culture vultures; microbangs…..oh shit yep...and...I see me in the corner...damn fool.

Bougie wougie, bougie wougie.

This half-aware, money-guzzling monster speaks a strange language - a combination of left-wing cultural discourse, esoteric psychobabble, internet-speak and corporate lingo. It always avoids attacking the forces of capital because it is proximate to them. So it has to be elusive, slippery, hard to fix and lock down. It’s really important for those who wish to properly monopolise art culture (mostly blind actors playing predetermined roles on a predetermined stage), that they use syntax and language that cannot be understood by those who are deemed unworthy of ‘high culture’.  

Decentred centreness: a body bodying embodiment and concrete and sex

Wherein hides the form? What formation can be given/forgiven? What of the insideness of the inside? Can the naked renaked? Time is a vessel without walls, and so are we.

I wrote this silly example to highlight firstly that I have participated in and continued this language regimen, and secondly that it is insidious, especially when it is scrawled on a legitimating white wall. A word-salad vapid and resigned, but powerful still - powerful in its excluding.

I feel like the internet is a really important space here. In some digital user-interfaces and communication-channels voices can overlap, bounce back and forth and attain political inertia. Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) in their 1994 manifesto Electronic Civil Disobedience (http://www.critical-art.net/books/ecd/ecd2.pdf), argued that power had been deterritorialised due to the digital network and critiques of power in electronic space, are just as important as those in physical space. I think we need to understand the networked nature of power, that governmental and corporate systems have codified/digitised their power and continue to tactically encase/trace us with media and algorithms.

My voice, my face, my body, my history is a living code-piece, an info-atom; and they have copied and pasted and rewritten it.

I love memes, because they can provide these ephemeral and situational attacks on this kind of networked power. I feel like the meme-world, even though it exists within the constraints of the internet, has become a new cultural commons (an online parliament, if you will), where we can critique, remake, revalue and reappropriate what creativity, art, beauty, performance, ‘the artist’ etc mean. I feel like we need to interrogate current art movements and build regular moments of political rupture and transformation. Memes, being easily-accessible, widely-disseminated and mutative, can really help to build digital ‘events’ that corrode capital realism and its iron grip on the cultural industry. 

You know, it just feels like this weird polyvocal conversation/criticism that can: build digital-community; create popular forms of communication; pique curiosities; reveal ironic contradictions etc 

Let's do a little meme reading….(one of many possible readings)

Superficially, it’s true right?

But like, you know when you go from the exhibition/gallery space to the bathroom and you stare at a palmolive pump soap leaning askance against the mirror, and think ‘Omg, is that piece for sale?’. Yeh well that. 

Abstract pieces can resemble experimental kitchen cabinets or statement curtains made from fly-screen or wrongly assembled ikea lamps. So that also.

But, if we peer deeper, we do find more to speak to. We see that much of post-conceptual, abstract art exists/acts/performs in gallery and museum spaces as interior decoration/accessory. Which is to say, that these pieces do not necessarily antagonise the white walls (and people) that surround them, but rather complement and collude with them.

The art system is a complex place that includes profiteering galleries, academic institutions/platforms, civic and educational engagement programs, radical activist spaces etc; it is a messy assemblage filled with jagged antagonisms and interactions. There are certainly elements in this system that dominate, and do so with the material and structural support of the industries of cultural-capitalism.

This meme focuses on how artists partner with the dominant/core elements of the system, producing vogue cultural artefacts that sit comfortably within the norms and protocols of the established/mainstream art infrastructure, both material and ideological.

I don’t mean to say that new political formations, which could powerfully tap and redirect art talent, cannot arise from these structures. But, I have noticed artists (myself included) navigate this space - the push-and-pull between radical art activism and ‘high culture’ art capitalism.

Some are beckoned by the taste-makers and gallerists of the 'high art’ luxury economy. Others enter the Byzantine maze of the art academy - track it's crooked path, regurgitate it's dull signage, flick open its rusty gates. Others construct peculiar art-personalities online, within the capitalist architecture of social media (guilty). I could keep going on and on and on and on. There are so many ways that art practice and activity is circumscribed by the prevailing logic of capitalism.

It’s scary, sometimes contemporary art feels like this monolith; all of its discourses and economies and institutions are so fully incorporated into the current capitalist order. 

London artist Kulendran Thomas, made the quite dramatic claim that: ‘Contemporary Art faces a potentially terminal crisis. Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things. The realisation that contemporary art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment.’ (https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17872666)

Maybe the circle can be broken. Do I sound like Scar?

But, to come back to the meme, do you feel like an interior designer? Do you feel like a decorator - a commodified cog in a very beautiful machine? I do, more often than not.

Spin, spin, spin, win, win, win.

Anyway, I have talked a bunch, and not fully responded to all the things you said in your email. I would love to talk more about all of these things and also address some of the positive and direct ways that we can interrogate art and curation. But I will leave it here for the moment.

I love you lots and lots and send you all of my magic.