These Dying Days Art in the Post-Industrial Age

JB / GF

Part 1 The Problem

So modern galleries and spaces should be destroyed at once. They are philosophical black spots. They do not aid our pursuit of knowledge. They unhinge the true pursuit of art – the understanding of the world through mysticism and logic. We must not forget that churches were the first art galleries. Confusion leads to commerce leads to celebrity. We buy what we don’t understand.

Art was once solely useful to God. Now it’s only purpose is to hold value in an unstable market. There is not much difference in this. The markets are omnipresent, wrathful, mysterious and jealous. They are the God of the Old Testament.

A Catholic Mass is a sorbet for the mouth of art. Only through ritual do we tear away the false layers of society.

The Readymade is akin to the Atomic Bomb and like science we wish that we could uninvent it. It blew everything up and placed us in our own version of Mutually Assured Destruction. Development stopped. Art stagnated. We could not go forward.

Modern art is conceptual because it fears labour. The art of the fine brush stroke and the representational is the art of the workingman. The man who can learn and refine his skills. Conceptual art returns art to the special or mystical – it is the mental capacity of the artist that is for sale. The ultimate commodity. When the mystical left the content of the art it had to be repositioned inside the artist for it to have value.

Pure graffiti is not freedom of expression. It is a memorial to people lost to poverty. If you take a simple train journey across any town or city in Britain, on walls they sit. Every name, every tag screams out ‘I was here, remember me. Lest you forget.’ Now street artists deal in irony to spiritually white wash the meaning of protest. They leave their email addresses to get more work. Graffiti was more spiritual when it was racist.

Who put Bella down the witch elm?

We are witnessing an era when digital reproduction has changed art. No one has ever lived through an era where it was possible to add a kitten to the works of Van Gogh or a spliff to the Mona Lisa. The result is reduction of art to object. An ironic reinterpretation that removes the sacred from the art and results in removing the sacred from everyday life.

Art in terms of form will always take precedent over its function. For many centuries art celebrated religion but with the death of God and the birth of R Mutt, old forms were resigned to the realm of underart or nonart, a hobbyist pursuit. Even worse, the ones we considered good were pensioned off and placed in galleries. The viewer taking the role of a dementia sufferer, almost instantaneously forgetting the art once it was seen.

To spend a life representing life through art is a living death. Art must become part of everyday life as a tool for understanding existence.

Part 2 The Solution

We are in such a position to have killed God and our selves. Modern neuro-science shows we are not agents of free will or even single souls. We must restart art by understanding its ability to liberate us from our masters and saviours. Churches and politicians all flatter our need for a sense of self. True liberation will be a return to the forest, the animal self. Art must take us there and then be discarded.

Art should never leave the home of the artist. How can anyone have an understanding of the art without an understanding of the artist who makes it? It should only live on the memories of those who are asked to see it.

When the artist invites the viewer to engage with the work of art, he or she takes on the role of doctor, with the aim of curing some form of philosophical malady in the viewer. To do this the work needs to be able to cut through the conscious world. It needs to provocative. This is now the only viable role of artist and viewer.

Similarly the role of the viewer must be to discern the occult afflictions of the artist within the work. The relationship is therapeutic and when the therapy is successful the art becomes empty. There cannot be intimacy in a gallery.

Art should be covered. Art should be hidden. It should be treated with shame. Eventually it should be forgotten and then lost. Like all things it should become a justified victim of entropy. A Picasso rotting in the woods. Shit on by owls and used as shelter by a family of foxes.