So much of art these days just seems like improper masturbation to me. I don’t want to become the curmudgeon or cynic that so heartlessly dismissed/dismisses my own efforts. And I think I differ in that instead of not caring about art, I care about art too much. But seriously, have you read an artist’s statement lately? Especially from someone either coming out of an academic situation or trying to appeal to the academics? It feels like the academies have slowly become degraded. A vocabulary representing meaning has replaced actual meaningfulness. The words that were supposed to communicate meaning have become more important than the meaning itself. And without the actual meaningfulness we lose context. And without context we become vapid. We become an un-unified theory of everything.
There is no language without deceit.
– Italo Calvino
The same could be said for any discipline. I guess I just care the most about art, because art was supposed to be spiritual. “The best Immediatist agitprop will leave no trace at all, except in the souls of those who are changed by it.” [More Bey.] But it’s not enough to just say, “All art should be Immediatist,” because while better than ejaculating on the wall and calling up your PR firm, that is not what I am proposing. Bey says, “The game’s payoff lies in its ability to escape the paradoxes & contradictions of the commercial art world (including literature, etc.), in which all liberatory gestures seem to end up as mere representations & hence betrayals of themselves,” emphasis mine, and if you know anything about immediatism you know he means representations of the immediate, the real, the actual, the pre-capitalist, the pre-structural. But I mean to say representations of meaning. Just as many Christians have come to worship the text instead of the God who presumably authored it, we will continue to make attempts at words that will give authority to what essentially amounts to some vaguely aesthetic abstraction of our desires.
Examples will come when I figure out a way to give them without totally shitting on their parades.