What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" II [Draft/BETA][Preface]

[Video link to US Military propaganda exercise sent by Jez]

What Is the Soul of Occupy?
By Paul McLean

II

Robert Henri: Snow in New York, 1902
Source: Artcyclopedia; photograph by Michael Weinberg  

>>
Do some great work, Son! Don't try to paint *good landscapes*. Try to paint canvases that will show how interesting landscape looks to you - your pleasure in the thing. Wit.

There are lots of people who can make sweet colors, nice tones, nice shapes of landscape, all done in nice broad and intelligent-looking brushwork.
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- Robert Henri, The Art Spirit

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America is one of the few countries where May Day, the International Workers' Day, is not even a holiday – ironically enough, considering the fact the date was chosen to commemorate events that occurred in Chicago, during the struggle for the 8-hour day in 1886. During the cold war, the idea of unions signing on to a statement like this would have been inconceivable: in the 1960s, unionized workers were known to physically attack Wall Street protestors in the name of patriotic anti-communism. But the collapse of state socialism has made new alliances possible, and, in making common cause with occupiers, and the immigrant groups that first turned May Day into a national day of action in 2006, working-class organizations are also beginning to return to their roots—up to and including, the ideas and visions of the Haymarket martyrs themselves.

[Later, in May, in Chicago]

The words might be diplomatically chosen, but there's no mistaking what tradition is being invoked here. In endorsing a vision of universal equality, of the dissolution of national borders, and democratic self-governing communities, nurses, bus drivers, and construction workers at the heart of America's greatest capitalist metropolis are signing on to the vision, if not the tactics, of revolutionary anarchism.
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- David Graeber, "Occupy's Liberation from Liberalism; the real meaning of May Day"

BACK IN TIME

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another calendar year

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to all
the times have changed no more
we are certain to fall

the future seems worthless
society to blame
the price is out of reach
american con-game

there's such a pattern of thought here
it's like i'm just another rock 'n roll fool

i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dismal
for us in mid-thirties
the general opinion
never escapes gerdes

there's such a feeling in my room
it's like i'm in another part of the crowd

the future r.stevie
may well give up the fight
i want to go back in time
i want to go back in time

the future seems dreadful
it's obvious to me
the times have changed no moore
we can certainly see

there's such a lack of emotion
it's like i'm justanotherrock'nrollfool

the future seems dreadful

©1986 r.stevie moore

[PREFACE]: ...Pondering the soul of Occupy, considering art and spirit, reflecting on the "American Spring."

It was a beautiful day today in Bushwick. After writing much of the day, I made my way to a backyard BBQ at my friend Wilson Novitski's pad a few blocks away. R. Stevie Moore was there, enjoying the festivities. Wilson, who's a member of Moore's touring band, introduced us, and we chatted. They're preparing to embark on an extensive European tour. Wilson and I will be embarking on a side-project while he's traveling.

Sometimes, a story like Moore's has a happy ending. Having spent a bunch of years in Nashville, with some knowledge of the music business, mostly due to proximity and through friends, I feel qualified to comment. The multinational corporate music industry, as it has evolved over the past couple of decades, doesn't give two shits about true bloods like R. Stevie Moore. He's a DIY American music phenomenon, and a lot of real people around the world get that. Tonight, as promised, I came home and looked up R. Stevie's music. I did, and some of the videos will accompany this text. The linkage seems appropriate.

∞

As the day is ending, I am also thinking about an exhibit of Mark Tribe's new work at Momenta, potent digital prints of virtual landscapes. I dropped by the opening a couple of weeks ago, and have thought about them a lot. Tribe's virtual (in the process) + actual (in the output) rich, micron-thin scenes cross a line dimensionally. It's one thing to visit a theater and watch Avatar, Lord of the Rings or Star Wars, to witness the now-digitized, imaginary cinematic reality approach the one we know is real. Baudrillard makes more sense every day. The "set" or "stage" is now a still-in-use antiquity, displaced by a scenario that borders on trompe l'oeil, evolving out of game map design. The immersion factor in the Gamer medium has pushed the trajectory redefining pictorial nature as much as anything that happens in any sort of conversion or fabrication shop. The confrontations incited by Tribe's landscapes for art on some levels are shocking and new, even if they are a long time in the making, and emerge from purely plastic praxis, from several painting traditions and technical seams.

Landscape by Mark Tribe

Maybe the question posed by Tribe is one of virtuosity, if not veracity, which is why I included the Henri quote above. There are many other artist texts that could be referenced here, to expand the scope of an inquiry along these lines, like John Ruskin's volumes, or the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting, for the implications of Tribe's accomplishment are significant, stretching into metaphysics and math, new philosophical spheres and ecological theory. Where the conversation about what's at stake in the new showpieces of Mark Tribe meets this one is at the juncture of spirit in creation. But the theoretical convergence between the two threads could generate a dimensional cloverleaf of connections, raising new points about the hand of the artist, the viewer's eye, material and immaterial, the collaborative role of the machine, reality and artificiality, and more, more, more. I will only start with a review of Tribe's show, although I would like to get to that in depth sometime. For the time being, I feel like we can just push this layer back with the Marc Chagall one. Chagall made very different sorts of landscapes. If Marc was merging art and soul, Mark possibly is merging art and sentience, which only seems soulless, or at least Creatorless, while being a collaborative creation of man and machine. To get a feel for how those two sets (Tribe's & Chagall's) juxtapose, we should consider derivation.

John Ruskin

∞

According to the latest reports, the derivatives market now tops out at $1.4 Quadrillion. You would think all those entrusted with our collective economic welfare would be shouting from the mountaintops, right? This is, after all, pure madness! I guess a few people are, but who's listening?

Click image for context.

∞

How to draw leaves (Mustard Seed Garden manual of painting)

Moving on, I haven't been able to think of Tribe's new landscapes without thinking about the recently deceased Thomas Kinkade's paintings of non-actual landscapes. When we learned that Kinkade's death involved booze and valium, the collective response to the post-autopsy report news was sort of crickets, rounded out with new revelations about a contested will, and some pretty spiteful clips in various comments threads around the art blogosphere. The story had a relatively tiny media life, relative to say Michael Jackson's overdose, or Whitney Houston's. Artists drinking and drugging themselves to death fits the romantic stereotype, but Kinkade got no love for his rock'n'roll demise, at least that I'm aware of. Dash Snow comes to mind, for a relatively recent comparison. The dichotomy, between Kinkade and his now-spectral artistic Others, is to me compelling. Kinkade was attacked ferociously for his overtly Christian revelations, his grandiose self-assessments, his marketing practices and his pictorial niceness, while these similar tragedies, at least in the mechanics, similar, received very different sorts of attention. The Other art world, the one that in New York celebrates the achievement of a Mark Tribe, reflexively denigrates Kinkade's. It's an old, but odd story. Is it worth a few paragraphs of rumination? After all, what's an artist's life and art worth? I guess it depends

Dash Snow

∞

Thomas Kinkade, "Bambi's 1st Year"

I came across one of Kinkade's Disney paintings via Artfagcity, and remembered Kenny Schachter.

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For a long time," says Schachter, "I had no idea art and commerce were bedfellows. I thought art had this exalted function, that it went from the realm of the mind through a studio and into a museum, ready for people to experience transcendence. Now I believe it's the opposite. The only discourse accompanying art is about money, and it's the most disgusting, sad thing. But I can't change that world in a Sisyphean way, so why not join in? I play the game, but I try to be as much of a virus as a sponge.
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- "Kenny Schachter: Confessions of an art hustler"

London dealer Kenny Schachter in his booth, with works by Ross Blechner and Alex Katz [artnet - click the image for context: Finch on the Armory, 2005 (LOL)]

Suffice to say that figuring out what arouses the disdain of "the art world" is not an either/or proposition. To be embraced or rejected as an artist of worth is the traditional game. To be widely hated or loved for one's art is a derivative phenomenon borne of a multi-tiered matrix of cultural, political and economic compositions, associations and constituencies. History plays a part. What of the conditions, and what of conditional currency? Achievement for an artist is not merit-based, as such, for the requisites of art are as fungible as the market's money, or so the marketeers might have us believe, today. Perfection of style is certainly no more a paramount quality, in the de-skilled art topology. Specificity isn't enough, in a global art spectrum, it would seem, now that media- has been front-ended to it. Newness is hardly sufficient, when everything has already been done, and reproduction operates as an embedded mechanic. Popularity, if that's one of the "sins" Kinkade was guilty of - finding a niche amongst the Red State petit bourgeoisie - is clearly no boon to an artist's finding traction with the critical sects, who mostly reside on the coasts, in nominal Blue States, often inhabiting prestigious academies. Confessing, and other psychological purging devices require additional features, as the progression from WACK! to Tracey Emin to Ryan Trecartin continues - this is certainly no more the mediating territory of the Catholics, connecting dirty man and the divine. "Likes" and "Dislikes" are tribal, personal, collective, universal and fluid. The art world is not usually as savage as Hollywood, when dismembering one of its own who somehow sins too greatly - like Mel Gibson - but over time, the effects can be the same. Once big-time artists still fade into the shadows of disenfranchisement, due to campaigns of character assassination conducted by modern day artsy Machiavellis. Such artists never die. Their auction prices tank.

Tracey Emin, "My Bed"

I only wanted to broach this art state topic, not to whine, but with the "emerging" artist, particularly the emergent Occupy artist, in mind. An "art world" that cared about the next generation of artists would set about to clarify what greatness requires. Instead, what we have is an oppressive and artificial art world, an industry that is not much different than the derivatives market, which presently warps every facet of civilization. Both are mad. Both are abstract iterations of the extraction/exploitation monster-of-many-names. Both stealthily tap into the roots of all of human value and meaning, converting to the medium of value and means. As a leech taps blood through the skin, both tap the soul of man. Neither even pretends to be fractionally justifiable anymore.

Ryan Trecartin

While the derivatives market harvests millennia of accrued value from the world's civilizations, great and small, the "art world" is in the end only a harvester of soul. While neither seems to be, both exist as speculative enterprises hinging on the maintenance of brutal regimes of ownership and, in varying degrees, slavery. 

#iofthestormpt3

How has Occupy art fared in the dangerous waters of an art world linked inextricably now to the derivatives market? I would say, fairly well! Why? I'll be vague and poetic, coded and encrypted. Or at least coy. ...Because for the most part Occupy's best art practitioners have conducted their wildest experiments in the subterranean refuges where the establishment, conservative artsies (of course, they seem anything but "establishment" or "conservative" at first glance) fear to tread, by adamantly refusing to aspire to 1% artist status and by choosing media to make and/or transmit the art that they're doing which doesn't exist on the art world radar - and simultaneously therefore enables these for-now pure-hearts to evade the vainglory of the celebrity art star machine. Finally, all bitching aside, the constant hammering of ideologues from the various anti-art camps in Occupy has actually helped constrain the emergent Occupy school, from selling itself into slavery to the Superclass and its collaborators.

View Separately

#iofthestormpt1

It's a milagro! Keep in mind that Occupy art sprang to life at the "art world's" Ground Zero, more or less, in NYC. When I introduce myself as a co-organizer of Occupy with Art at art events around the city, artsies usually ask, "What's up with Occupy?" If only they knew.

But, you can't hide that candle under the proverbial bushel, forever, right? Too bad time is of the essence, timeliness being a major concern of the contemporary art world, which has the luxury of institutional patience on its side, and the power to shun into extinction. Or maybe not. When big cultural institutions are co-opted into pervasive Ponzi schemes, like the global finance markets, they cease to possess the agency of determinism. At such moments, it perhaps is better to be small, mobile and invisibly networked, capable of surviving without visible means of support.

Caption: "Capital L, capitalism, private property in love?"

...It's funny isn't it? The most important art in the world right now is being shaped by wholly misdirected instruments in the War on Terror.

To say that art world is ambivalent to occupational art is to say that it is only so, because the Name-architect-designed "art world" has no other choice. And the lack of choice exhibited by the Bigs in relation to Occupy art and artists is really of itself an entropic non-decision, but a decision that amounts to self-immolation disguised as professionalism. Rome is burning, but there's no smoke, and as the culprits would have it, no smoking gun. Even though the acrid odor of conflagration wafts through the Ivory Tower, no one inside wants to risk being on the wrong side with Occupy, because if global revolution doesn't pan out, and no one actually believes it will, the 1% are hardly known for tolerance for defectors and dissenters, except when sparing them revenge serves as Kabuki theater for the mob, a sign of mercy from above. The "art world" is hedging. "Fuck'm for the cowards they are," sez MILO.

∞

In the final assessment, every society gets the art, and the criminals, it deserves (to paraphrase Lascussagne).

∞

Painting by Howard Finster

Since I started the "Soul of Occupy" sequence, I've been mulling over Howard Finster again, and by extension those pop musicians who helped direct celebrity to the Reverend, David Byrne and Michael Stipe (both of whom now are "artists"). Finster makes one wonder if determining artistic viability in the Big Scheme might be reducible to insider/outsider trades. Is who makes it and who doesn't a function of the prejudices that pervade the institutional avant garde, expressed as revulsion at its designated or specified cultural, social, political Other? If only the matter were so simple, a binary oppositional configuration (one for which many types of solutions exist). In actuality, the suspension of all art in an indefinite "every" state allows for some hierarchies to consolidate agency for one art over another, with fairly minimal resistance, especially since the selectors are few and enthusiastic in their tastes - or easily directed. Plus, we shouldn't ignore that ugly feature of the "art world," which is its perpetual need to have someone else who is acceptable to laugh at. It's a relic of the Court.

Which doesn't really apply to the kind of the phenomenon that R. Stevie Moore represents. Who can explain the calling of an artist, especially an American one? Like Pollack, they never come from New York. Avital Ronell comes closest, for my money, because she can differentiate between stupidity and calling.

Avital Ronell by Bart Nagel

One nagging question behind these myriad art variants/deviants perhaps is how can "art" apply to them all? For amplification, I might suggest a peek at a Pinterest "pinboard" I found that offers examples of art installations. The media push for artists to adopt Pinterest as a marketing tool is on, another Myspace/Facebook/Twitter-style hype job in the works, leveraging software to the wetware to drum up market share via investors who want to see user data, for ad databases, which is another story, but as early adopters, let's play. Scanning the images in the cited pinboard only expands the conundrum, especially if those samples, imagined through their jpeg reproductions, are placed in the same set as Finster's gardens, which are now only relics, like acrylic on board shrouds of Turin.

By Chen Wenling ["Repinned from Freak by Brian Colquhoun"]

For the last ingredient in the contextual gumbo, to preface our second phase on derivation, illusion and corruption, without much elaboration, I'll throw in Google glasses (which I'll get to in the next segment), and the 8-bit Google app for the map tool (an April Fool's joke LOL). Don't you love Google? Isn't Google creative? Re: the Google glasses, I don't think I'm worried about Google being a broadcaster/analyst/collaborator in my optics mechanism. I mean, Google is not a harm doer, and we are just so lucky they exist, right? We can trust them with all our data, which is to say, the electronically transmitted stuff of our thoughts, movements, relationships, memories, communities, visual complex - right?

Working with AR whiz Mark Skwarek has me seeing the virtual+actual landscape differently. I've been playing 1st person shooters since Marathon, and it informs my view of info-eyewear/lenses. To reduce the tool to nuts and bolts, or more to the point, dollars and senses, the Google glasses thing is a product thing. The really nutty science is happening in labs that are developing eye replacement/displacement technology, along with a bunch of other stuff that might make you nervous, or set your brain on fire. Real $6 Million Dollar Man stuff. [Wow. Actually, Steve Austin would be a joke on Wall Street these days, right? $6 Million is spit in the wind compared to $1.4 Quadrillion!] Anyway, what Mark, and some of the other folks in AR, have me thinking about is the urge for men to use the computer to offer man an alternative to story part of history, in relation to the environment. What I'm referring to is the strata of our consciousness that looks, say at a mountain, and calls up a set of data - name(s), events, spirit(s), people - that over time have come to be attached to a locus. I'll return to this in a later segment. For now, since we're sited more or less in Lower Manhattan, for the purposes of exploring the soul of OWS, where does this "New Aesthetic" overlay or composite layer leave the buried dead, such as the slaves who built the foundations of NYC, as we now know it? And what of those who were here, when the Europeans first arrived? 

I'm turning the spoon. It seems to me we seem to be at a crossroads, perceptually.

Steve Austin (doll), The Six Million Dollar Man

When we started discussing "What Is the Soul of Occupy?" we premised the discussion on OWS being at a turning point. The truth is. I think, that OWS was and is only one more indicator that people are up against some very serious problems, and we know it. These problems seem impossible to fix, without big changes. Virtual solutions won't be sufficient. Actual ones are necessary.

Before we get there, maybe the question is, do enough people still know or care what "actual" is anymore? Beyond actuality, is what's inside us, individually and collectively, my and our spirit, urge us strongly enough to accept, much less manifest, profound systemic change?

Sometimes art has answers to questions like these, because sometimes the answers are either right before our eyes, or accessible only through the inner eye, or "I." Artists have proven to excel at looking, and seeing, at the world and to the self, but also at translating vision into forms that can be shared. While there's still time, we should try this course, with all our might. Otherwise, it's not easy to make art, while you're on the run from the end of the world.

Think Cormac McCarthy's The Road. When it comes to that kind of all-over reckoning, as the Clint Eastwood character in The Unforgiven growls, art and "'Deserves' got nothing to do with it."

New peace sign?

[NOTATION: The text will establish dimensional architectures for equalizing like subjects, unlike subjects, subjecting both equalized sets to triangulation, demonstrating how they can be used or misused, indicate potential problems with flattening actions, and generally confronting false assumptions about equivalencies in 4D models of collaboration. "Art" is offered as an indicator, or base subject *and* subject set. This construct can apply to phenomena that are, due to language constraints, both particular in meaning and generic, as in the reference to a domain.]

Update on Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:18PM by admin

[An ana-response from Adbusters?]:

[LINK]

[EXCERPT]:

Three years after the May 1968 uprising that swept the world, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault observed that a key strategy of power is to “appear inaccessible to events.” Power, Foucault argued with a nod towards 1968’s failed insurrection, acts to “dispel the shock of daily occurrences, to dissolve the event … to exclude the radical break introduced by events.”

Forty years later, in light of Occupy, Foucault’s observation still strikes home. Despite achieving the impossible at unprecedented speed – sparking a global awakening, triggering a thousand people’s assemblies worldwide, and giving birth to a visceral anti-corporate, pro-democracy spiritual insurrection – Occupy is now struggling through an existential moment. Our movement has been dealt a blow: our May 1 and follow-up events have been dissolved by power; the status quo has shown itself to be far more resilient than many of us expected.

Now a passionate debate is emerging within our movement. On one side are those who cheer the death of Occupy in the hopes that it will transform into something unexpected and new. And on the other are patient organizers who counsel that all great movements take years to unfold.

Comments

[#jez3prez]

" Virtual solutions won't be sufficient. Actual ones are necessary. Before we get there, maybe the question is, do enough people still know or care what 'actual' is anymore?"

This question has guided much of my meditations of late. While the economic system demands a certain level of productivity from its workers, it also thrives on a level of apathy. The question as it has come to me is "If Occupy aspires to liberate the 99% from their apathy, is this even possible to achieve?" The aspect of will or desire seem to be a crux, especially since that level of participation does not seem possible without coercion. I have heard that the necessary percentage to effect systemic change is 15% of participants (rames that unsubstantiated fact for what it is). So, an ethical question: should the 15% who do care change the system for everyone? Will they wind up being coercive by necessity?