Fallout

“How can I save my little boy
From Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence” 

Russians- Sting

It’s that time of year again, the feast of samhain, the witching hour resurrection of spirits and classic horror video nasties on DVD.

I’m reminded of the time back in the early 80’s, when a psychological horror of a different kind consumed the metaphysical airwaves.

Back then, between ads for chocolate digestives and Danger Mouse, you could look forward to public information broadcasts informing you what to do in the event of a nuclear blast.

By the same guy who did voice overs for Barrett homes no less.




While the transmission of Threads in ’84, dismissed any hope that sanctuary could be sought in a cupboard under the stairs, it did instill the kind of paralyzing terror that would come to dwarf all the cheap thrills of late night Halloween horror.



I have youthful levity to thank for lessening the full gravity of days when bombing drills, meant my classmates and I  would have to hide under our desks.

But there was no escape, because it permeated culturally, everything steadfastly preparing us for annihilation, because even the our record collections echoed sirens songs for the end times. Everyone from Prince’s infectious carrion call to Party like its 1999 as a defiant final act of hedonism, through Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes which adopted the air raid siren from public information broadcast as it’s opening salvo.*

By the time warnings about the radioactive clouds from Chernobyl’s liquefying core, had settled over European pastures, nothing could mollify the terrible forebodings of the ultimate zero sum game.

There’s some of that sense of dread in this latest work I feel, reanimated in an era assailed by the toxic unraveling of a deranged mind,trigger finger poised over the final reset button, and venerated by a host of pious followers, rapture ravenous for the vindication that might be wrought from total annihilation.

As I said in a post back in 2017-we are living “the consequence of longing for a period when things were purportedly ‘great’.

Because along with the desire to relive all the illusory days of maga-nificence ,with it’s bargain basement but equally dementia addled Reagan, come all that era’s terrible distemper’s. The past is littered with as much gore as it is glory, and like the my favorite horror story-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein-reanimating the dead, can only ever bring with it the bitter stench of the grave.

*In writing this post, I was both nostalgic and a little alarmed recalling the chart fare I listened to of the period. The list could be compiled to make an End of the world party collection.

Prince-Party Like it’s 1999
OMD-Enola Gay
Alphaville-Forever Young
Ultravox-Dancing with tears in my eyes
Nena-99 Luftballons
Heaven 17-Lets all Make a Bomb
Billy Bragg-Between the Wars
Frankie Goes to Hollywood-Two Tribes
Kate Bush-Breathing Sisters of Mercy-Dominion/Mother Russia
Morrissey-Everyday is like Sunday
Scorpions-Winds of Change
The Clash-London Calling
David Bowie-When the Wind Blows
Sting-Russians
Peter Gabriel-Games without Frontiers
Duran Duran-Planet Earth
Mike and the Mechanics-Silent Running
The Fixx-Stand or Fall
Men at Work-Overkill

For your listening/watching pleasure, I’ve compiled the full list on YouTube:

Paintheism

“Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah”
The End-The Doors

“if art can’t tell us, about the world we live in, then I don’t believe there’s much point in having it.”
Robert Hughes-The Mona Lisa Curse

When I refer to my next series as “the Denouement”, I don’t just merely mean as an end to a trinity that began over five years ago. I mean it integrally. Entering this series, has felt like a final act, as if I am just some artistic documentarian on the end times.

And it’s been no stretch, I can tell you-I mean, everything feels like it is entering some sort of HBO grand finale now-even more underwhelming than Game of Thrones, because as apocalypses go, it all seems like business as usual.

An end of social norms, of known truths. Of civility. Of morality. Of intellectualism. Of culture. Of America. Of a future.  Meanwhile, the worlds lungs are an inferno, Ice shelves the size of cities cleave into the ocean, wakes are held for glaciers, and Russian reactors erupt, spewing isotopes into the ether, while the bloviator in chief, postulates the possibility of nuking hurricanes.  All this as the surface is scratched on a remote islands insidious underbelly, where an almost Schnitzler like cabalistic rite of passage, caters to the most vile of tastes and predilections for the rich and the affluent, as another head count for the NRA’s coffers and coffins, beleaguers the morning dreadlines.

It’s all too much to comprehend, particularly at 3am in the small clutch of fevered hours,when it can seem like the doors and windows are off their hinges and the tempests of chaos seem to rage through every vestibule of your mind.

How does an artist navigate these times then, is what we are doing enough or is it ultimately futile? Is the vantage point of being an observer, as desultory as being a passive abstainer? Are we to be like tinkers, commodifying the detritus of a socio political landfill, or alchemists forging the degrado into Instagram gold? Is art’s objective, to be just anthropological, a remnant from our own teetering Roman empire, for some future generation to point fingers and disseminate as some cautionary tale?

And round and around we go.

I read an article by Chris Hedges, The Artist as Prophet-in which he says “The artist makes the invisible visible. He or she shatters the clichés and narratives used to mask reality.” That’s some lofty burden of ambition right there, and he cites quotes from novelists like Russell Banks, and the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya, but perhaps more of what he has in mind carries with it the weight of art like Goya’s third of May, or Picasso’s Guernica.
Except, how can art change the paradigm if it is purely post script? Is art only simulacrum and how can it affect us and impart change?

I read with interest some years ago that the color pink, was being used in certain Swiss prisons following a study by psychologist Daniela Späth, as a sort of sedative.  “A certain shade of pink calms the nerves” she had posited, and in fact the statistical results bore out that the inmates were less aggressive, once their cells were tinted flaming flamingo.

For myself, I think I’d last five minutes before screaming blue murder, but my point is that if art, with it’s collision of color and of hue, form and concept is similarly a subjectively unconscious, sublime experience,  then any of its revelations must be transcendentally existential -like codified transcripts that effect us on a psychological level beyond our surface understanding.  A kind of passive aggression-or transgression if you will.

And so I believe that these times that we live in-as imprisoned and terrorized as we feel, and so focused as the wardens seem on imminent destruction-cry out for the retaliation of creation and the creative impulse, more than ever.

For artists, it can be our greatest act of defiance and our most integral role.

Conspiracy Weary

“Healter Skelter”-24″ x 36″ – Oil on canvas (2012)

“I saw Elvis in a potato chip once.”

Fox Mulder, the X-Files

Today marks fifty years since the strata was jolted by news of the Manson killings, and other than the brouhaha around Tarantino’s latest desultory offing, it’s barely warranted a footnote in the press.

Unsurprising really, and frankly warranted, given the eclipsing daily horror show in this country right now. Although, given that both eras represent discriminate murders, initiated by cult members and galvanized by the rantings of a deranged egomaniac, it could be argued that recent headlines could give those of half a century ago a run for their money.

Still, I note the anniversary because of the Man/son and the haunting of the American Madonna showcase, that consumed me through much of 2012.  Back then, bolstered by a literary diet that comprised things like the hefty volumes of Peter Levedna’s Sinister Forces,  Adam Gorightly’s The Shadow over Santa Susana, and every dank rabbit hole on the dark web-I crafted myself a tinfoil hat so tight, I almost microwaved grey matter.

That’s not to undermine the revelations I made during that particular artistic odyssey-I stand by what I said at the time, ” the connections around the Manson case are unfathomable and have far reaching implications not just on our lives, but on a level that defies understanding”.
It does however give me a micro speck of insight, into the malaise of modern conspiracy theorists; basement dwellers, pulling on threads so to weave a magical carpet, and comfortably seat their confirmation biases on.

For what began with conspiracies about the Kennedy assassination, Roswell, the moon landing, Manson -has mutated and become the provenience of alt right agitators from 4chan cesspits, promulgating batshit schemes about Pizza parlors and the Earth being flat.
Or mass shootings as false flag events where the victims are crisis actors.

When ultimately, it’s all just another spiritual quest for understanding, a way to mollify the shared human guilt of  barbarism.

In making Gods of our fears, and seeking sense of existence as a wasted byproduct for some omniscient grand plan…one discovers there isn’t any to be measured.

Killing is the ultimate zero sum, self destructive act where man is nihilist,and nothing divine.

You can read my musings from the series, in my book Rise-Man/son and the Haunting of the American Madonna, available from the following link or purchase a signed art print:

Man/son Art book

Healter Skelter Art Print

Enjoy the silence.

 “One cannot long remain so absorbed in contemplation of emptiness without being increasingly attracted to it. In vain one bestows on it the name of infinity; this does not change its nature. When one feels such pleasure in non-existence, one’s inclination can be completely satisfied only by completely ceasing to exist.”
― Émile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology

It looks like I'm staring off into the abyss, pondering the muddy expanse of the soiled nothing, but it's actually that first contemplative pause before something happens, in a space fertile with possibility. It allows the chance as the song by Depeche Mode said, to enjoy the silence.

As the year comes to a close, it's no accident that the piece I'm planning is about the heralding of a new dawn.

In the other spaces in between, I've been reading Chris Hedges new book-"America the farewell tour." Distressing raw meat for a series that is peppered with ill omens hurtling us towards the end times. Take me at my sarcastic best, when I say that if his previous tome-"American Fascism" is a side splitter, this one will put you on the floor. 
At any rate, the irony isn't lost, given that it arrived during a four day power outage, while a place called Paradise burned itself out of existence. Lest we forget the horticulture tips in response,procured from the odious shitgibbon in chief.

The whole thing left a somber cloud that hasn't loomed as bleakly since Cormac McCarthys the Road.

In the face of what Hedges propounds as Durkeim's anomie in real time, it's hard to see a way forward, to not sense that all of our tomorrows shall be a continued assault of cyclical traumas, imposed by the will of a small dogmatic proportion of the populous, intent on nihilism, subjugation and extinction.  If my previous series-Purgatorium-was partially informed by Artaud's essay -"Van Gogh, the man suicided by society", then this one ascribes to a society, in essence suiciding itself.

Whatever hope then, can only come with the vast expanse of ideas, from the reflective silences pregnant with possibility. 

Otherwise, the only sound left to hear will be humanities final death rattle.


. 

Death Rattle

“We are all bound thither; we are hastening to the same common goal. Black death calls all things under the sway of its laws.”
Ovid

“The gormless and the baying crowd right there.
They can’t get enough of that doomsday song,
They can’t get enough of it all”
David Bowie-The Next Day

Another skull.
One more deaths head dug up from the boneyard- commissioned on this occasion-but no less symbolically apropos for the dark times we live in.

When has that not been the case I ask myself?

Its not just my default anymore.
Death is prevalent. Everywhere it seems-because I believe the 242 year old experiment called America is dying.

Or has a suicidal streak running through it at the very least.

It could be these Divided States of Angst. You’ve felt it-that permanent unease we find ourselves in now.
Where acidic cauldrons froth over daily, and drown everything with toxic rancor and insanity.
Where another deadly school massacre, draws pious platitudes from crowing gun fetishists in tinfoil hats.
Where a swamp is substituted for a malfeasant cesspool of corruption, calamity and chaos.
Where every right eye is turned blind to the trashing of democratic norms in favor of trash talk.
Where Nazi’s and Russian despots are ‘fine people’ and the FBI is ‘treasonous’.
Where celebrities and sports figures ought to remain silent, when there is a game show host in power.
Where Evangelicals lament the downfall of Christian family values over a coffee cup, but endorse candidates who are adulterers with an appetite for porn stars and children.
Where an Intel dossier detailing a Presidents penchant for pissing prostitutes is ‘fake news’ but a pizza parlor harbors a Satanic, ritualized, child- sex /murder, cult…

To Mars.

And it’s not just the rank hypocrisy–it’s that there is a faction that seems fervently intent on hurtling us towards some cataclysm. Certainly, The Evangelical Taliban positively creamed its chaste gusset when the bloviator in chief, sought to recognize Jerusalem as Israels capitol. No doubt fulfilling the apocalyptic wank fantasy of every Christian jihadist, hungry for judgement day.

Because making America great means no greater cause than eliciting ‘Liberal tears’, even if the outcome is we are all annihilated in a tweeted, nuclear, maelstrom.

Sitting at the celebrating Bowie concert last week, singing along to songs performed by competent stand ins and his still sizzling former band, it hit me that part of the challenge now feels like the very best of us-the generational voices that would propel us forward, the thinkers of the enlightenment and champions of cultural change, have been replaced by the very worst of us.  Hitch, staring down the barrel of a cancer that would consume him said that he not only feared that he would have to leave the party, but that the party would go on without him.

Except the party ended when the life and soul was gone. Death took him along with all the other vanguard, free thinkers of his generation, and left us with the odious. The avaricious. The volatile. The dogmatists. The bullshitters, brainless barbarians and fools.

With almost uncanny timing, I write this as it’s announced Stephen Hawking has passed.

Intelligence, along with bastions of education and science are now vilified as ‘elitist’, substituted with a brain numbing diet of  TMZ, X-Factor, Fox News and Jerry Springer to occupy the vacuous mind of the plebeian. Little wonder then, there sits a President, perfectly suited for the National Enquirer generation.

Perhaps when they switched on the Hadron Collider it caused a fissure in the space time continuum, and we hit an alternative timeline,  a timeline where every virtue was turned on its head.  Indeed, the year that elected America’s greatest aberration and folly, brought with it a mass exodus of figure heads from every station.

Some might even say 2016 was akin to a rapture.

I really hope that notion leaves some Evangelicals as alarmed as the rest of us are feeling right now.

Except, I remind myself that in that same week as I watched Bowie’s guitarist, Gerry Leonard, lean over his guitar like a little blue rinsed granny, while a crowd of aging fans stormed the stage,  Guillermo Del Toro took an Oscar for his monster movie- ‘The Shape of Water’. As did the horror movie ‘Get Out’ highlighting racism, and finally Bowie’s great friend-Gary Oldman,  for his turn as Churchill in a movie fittingly titled for these times ‘The Darkest Hour’.

it’s a welcome rejoinder that as artists of darker themes, the torch falls to us.

Because as barren as it feels right now, we are on fertile ground.

Back to the past

“History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history.” ― Jean Baudrillard

So what am I listening to? It varies depending on the tool for the job; something high octane when painting from the waist, or a slow ambient morsel for the steadier hand.
Here I think I might have been listening to EMC 2 by Big Audio Dynamite, from back when I was a randy, spirited teen in the 80's.

Thrusty then.

I find music can evoke almost immediately a memory or emotion. Its like discovering a wrinkled old snapshot found between the pages of a favorite dusty old book.

So as you can tell, I've been thinking a lot about the past recently. Not just as fuel for the new series, but because I believe its the kind of yardstick we all measure the present by.
As Byron once mooted, "All times when old-are good" and it made me think of why this country finds itself teetering on the abyss now, the consequence of longing for a period when things were purportedly 'great', an embittered society caught in a nostalgia loop craving simpler times-although arguably-simplism is the reason for the season.

The cultural zeitgeist saw this coming a mile off. Or market forces, forced the market-I don't know. Remake after remake of seminal 80's classics-Total Recall, Fright Night, Robocop. Or shows that depict a marked nod and a wink like 'Stranger Things' or 'Halt and catch a fire'.

Except, like this sad sack poster version from 2011, all those remakes are utter garbage, a shoddy facsimile of something once unique-a piss poor pastiche. Or like a certain would be Biff Tannen-a con in a bad wig if you like.

I don't much.

As with my painting- '80's Hit', we've elevated a period of our historical past to myth, when the truth is the hardship and turmoil of those times are what made those things culturally resonate to begin with.

No doubt Jean Baudrillard was right when he cited the infantilization of society through media in his book America, is used to nullify and desensitize our senses from the true modern day horrors, making us ever more pliable, ever more detached.

All the same, the world is likely going to hell in a deplorable handbasket, and I have a full dance card between now and years end, so onward even as we go backward.

Hell is truth seen too late.

What a week ,eh?  A week in which it seems the world has gone utterly barking mad. In the proliferation of editorials and post-mortems it’s hard not to cast this period as America’s final obituary. Hard not to fear the cataclysms and horrors the future holds. Hard not to see the dark specters in the hard lessons of history. Hard not to feel like Nietzsche’s crazed ragman, raging at the sky.

All too easy in fact, in a blighted year that has already been so fucking wretched.

As an artist particularly, its all too easy to retreat to escapism and impartiality, after all-I’ve heard it said that “being divisive, is bad for business old boy”.

Except I see nothing but complicity in silence.

Art-NOW more than ever- has a responsibility to turn a mirror on the unraveling shit storm that will prevail over the coming years. And it may be the only democratizer and means of expression left to those who may fear retaliation for speaking out.

And I will do my bit, as I always have to put my brush where uncomfortable truths lie.

To that end, there is my new series, a direct follow on from Purgatorium, called Paradiso-Edens Fall,a title that may give something of an insight into my dark intent.

Then there is the bridge piece between the two, “Leviathan”-(pictured above) which takes its title from Thomas Hobbes book of the same name.

I shall also be making an announcement about a piece which shall be showing at Gregorio Escalante’s wonderful basement gallery shortly.

To quote Hobbes-“Hell is truth seen too late.” , and for me there is no more critical time but now to tell it.

My (grand)child could paint that.

Upon seeing his young son Paulo's scrawls, the aged Picasso remarked that he had spent a lifetime trying to paint that way.

It's a favorite anecdote of mine, and if it's seemed that I am oft completely adverse to abstraction, then I've done a disservice to my love of de Kooning, Auerbach or Guston.

And if I've remarked that abstraction comes from a point of cynical ineptitude, then I am definitely doing a disservice to the third generation of Gough's-as my grandson so effectively proves here, with his total, unselfconscious, immersion into this massively epic painting which he annotated as "birdies, tcheees (trees), buzz, sky, fog (frog)" .

Naked contemporary

Here's a quick nude study in oil I did today just for fun. I think that I could spend my days in painted contemplation of the human form, I suppose it's the transcendence of adulation, the depth of just merely relating or some such wank.

Talking of playing with yourself, Huff Post had an article today entitled Top Ten Artists to watch. Unsurprisingly, Bruce Helander almost creams his gussets with genuflection,over a selection that wouldn't look out of place in a Home Depot skip or Fukushima landfill.

David Ellis-'True Value'

Notably in the list, was the only figurative piece by artist Peter Buechler, although it's hard to actually label the piece figurative, since he has chosen to decapitate the study leaving an empty featureless, muddy gray background.
Which on reflection, is probably as near a testament to the whole sorry travesty of contemporary art as one can get. I dare say he wasn't thinking that when he painted it, just cynically playing to the gallery no doubt, but with dross like Will Ryman's 'Roses' endorsed as a yardstick by the White House National Endowment for Arts, what hope is there for the future of Art.

Fukushima

So I read that Fukushima has finally been elevated to a level seven-the same par as Chernobyl then-that's good. Apparently, level seven is the highest category for a nuclear event of this kind-I imagine there is no higher grade for when your hair falls out and your internal organs begin to bleed from your orifices.
It's difficult not to be paranoid about radiation-paranoid as in Glenn Beck paranoid. You can't see it, you can't smell it, but it's there ever waiting to be a shadow on your lung-a goiter in your thyroid.
EPA monitoring reported a spike here in San Diego, and for the last three days both Lani and I have had streaming allergies. Could it be...?

I recall reading once that back in the 50's, when they were still trying to advocate radiation as having hygienic properties, some bright spark thought he might stave halitosis by swilling radiated water daily. Eventually his jaw fell off.
You know what's worse than radiation-Googling about radiation!?!
Fukushima is happening because of a new world order conspiracy. Or It's project Blue Beam. Or It's Aliens. Or HAARP. It's divine retribution. It's the second gunman on the grassy knoll. It's the man behind the curtain. The jet-stream flies right over our house.

There ought to be a public health warning about Googling before bedtime.

I long for the days when radiation meant a different kind of webslinging.

With great power...except in this instance, it's not some smiting deity or shadowy government, we are all responsible, because we never demanded anything else, just as long as we could still plug in our wide screen TV's and have hot running water...

We never learn.

Sarah Palin

Sarah Palin thinks the arts are frivolous.

So bereft of intelligence is this repugnant, homecoming spleen queen, that she completely lacks the faculty to contemplate the sense of irony in that statement.

Do you know why Palin hates the Arts? Because as I've written before Art is "...an ever evolving amoeba that continually redefines itself, but can define whole cultures with a flourish, visualize the future dreams that are the foundation of empires, encapsulate a human epithet or a profound moment in world history" Basically then, everything this troll lacks in understanding, everything that is counterpoint to the Republican dream.
Why does the media here continue to give a platform to this ghastly woman? Because she is the the dribbling mouthpiece of extremes that a certain withered arm of the tabloid is ravenous for?
Because she is some homegrown champion of a Pleasantville,white supremacist, time-warp?

Perhaps.

For me she represents everything that is currently stagnant about America-myopic, vapid, self obsessed, indignant, unrepentant, draconian, toxic-a catchall chasm of bilious soundbites bathed in the star spangled banner of apple pie,scripture and poison.

To waste another adjective on her behalf would be to give her more credit than her twisted sense of the universe could process, and yet there she is undeniably squatting on column inches like Snooki, or some other piece of cultural excreta,but that's what it is to be fodder, that's what it is to be truly "frivolous."

Exit through the Taco Shop.

The Artistic "community" here seems besotted with a recent appearance of an alleged Banksy, on the wall of an Oceanside Taco shop. I've made my growing distaste for the artist known as Banksy here before, so ground covered (or wall), I've said all I want to in that regard.

I wasn't going to further add to the mire then, except what perturbs me most about about this whole thing, is the attention that's being expended in the question of it's authenticity.
Is it a Banksy?
Isn't it?
Who the fuck cares..?

For all his supposed anonymity, the hype surrounding such shameless attention whoring ensures cultural ubiquity to the point of it's authenticity being moot.
Indeed, even after Banksy's P.R office (a subversive street artist with an agent and PR dept-doesn't this strike anyone else as a glaring contradiction?) has dismissed the piece as a fake, the media here continues to flutter around the wearisome question of who the forger is, like flies around a fresh,shiny turd.

What we end up with then, is a poor duplicate of a puerile artistic degenerative, now holding the rapt media with column inches and some skewed perception of ingenuity.

Meanwhile, sales at the Taco shop have doubled, which says it all really.

Exit through the Taco Shop.

Can I have cheese with mine.

The Con in Contemporary

"a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”-Albert Campus, describing most Abstract Art.
This past week, I've seen an abstract that reminded me a smear I once saw on a toilet wall at Milton Keynes bus depot go for $5,000 at a downtown gallery.

Today I discovered that a reproduction from a San Diego 'artist' of Bosch's Earthly delights cut into odd jigsaw pieces had been sold for $25,000 on EBay.

Is it little wonder that I grow despondent daily, about the kind of patronage afforded philistines here?

And Another Thing-Support Living Artist's

No artist alive, savors the prospect of what is value hiking art posthumously.

It's a reprehensible practice-one which probably came most famously to the fore when Van Gogh's Irises sold for $53.9 million in 1987-almost a hundred years after his death.

The stereotype was truly caste from that moment-that of the artist suffering madness and destitution throughout life, until the dead bones lay ready to be picked by auction houses like so many vultures descending.

From great suffering comes great art is truly one of the biggest, most tragic misnomers that has seeped into the social consiousness...the romantic notion of the artists garret. Except...there is nothing pure in poverty.

Of course,one mustn't villify Denmark's most famous son for his wretched tale, doubtless had he enjoyed the patronage he sought so tenaciously throughout his lifetime, then he may have lived to a long and productive old age.

Art as a form is a vital entity, constantly evolving through its endless paradigm shifts of social and cultural change, often informing the latter. It's presience and ubiquity is the foundation of culture, and it flourishes and replenishes itself because of the effervescence and passions of new and fresh living talent that invigorate it.

At a time when the economy is looking down the barrel of a double dip recession, its more important than ever that living artists are not marginalised by lack of patronage and resources, and made redundant by investment brokeradges and collectors of antiquity. Art may have a rich history, but it needs a rich future, and so many artist's I know live below the poverty line.

To that end, I've been wanting to produce a logo for sometime, that myself and other artists could utilize,to best express that. This then is the Support Living Artist's Foundation.

So please use the logo on your websites, on your art auctions, as signatures-link to this page , make patrons aware and let modern, living art become currency again.

Support Living Artist's.

And Another Thing-The Empty heART of the abstract confidence trick

I grow irritated daily by the number of downtown gallery's I see, paying lip service along with wall space, to bad abstract drivel. Its a masquerade, the artists who paint it are cynical beyond reprieve-and know it's bilge, as do the galleries that peddle the load of old Pollocks to begin with. It's contrived, like a bad mime act, except the patrons buy into the whole Van Gogh travesty, because they'd rather believe the smears they are coughing up mulah for, to be the work of a misunderstood genius, than what they are, which is no more tumultuously cathartically conceived than if the artist had partaken a paint enema.

There are a few practitioners out there that escape my ire- god I could wax lyrical about old school abstractionists like De Kooning, Bacon or Kitaj for hours, and more closely, I count one abstract artist as my friend precisely because he understands the process of deconstruction, and what it takes to master it.

Unfortunately,a large percentage of abstractionist's are no better than con artists, layering paint with pretension when they should use apprehension, or better still-a flame thrower. The work is neither brave, illuminating or relevant-at best a joke that leaves you feeling dumb, because you think somehow you ought to be laughing with the laugh track, when in fact it was a crappy punchline, that was delivered badly.

As someone who works methodically for hours to approximate the visions in my minds eye, and express my inner soul like I truly was excreting paint, the mockery of a certain abstract art strikes me as no less of an insult than if these swindlers had pissed on the shoes of my children.

And Another Thing-Brow Beating

"Eventually I'm going to be run over and completely forgotten by the people who paint big-eyed children"Robert Williams

Whilst at some sterile mall somewhere the other day, I was drawn to the promise of starting 2010 early by enlivening it at a calender kiosk.

Amongst the tat of doe eyed pups, Twilight vampires and Irish valleys was the obligatory 'art' section, consisting of Thomas Kinkade, Louis Royo, Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell. Perhaps its something to do with the ever homogenization of modern vacuous culture, but It struck me that the public's perception of what constitutes 'art'- which is to say relevant art-is ever diminishing. I had to ask myself, is that a bad thing?
I am reminded of a time, when the section would have been consumed by the usual Impressionist stalwarts and Mucha art nouveau flourishes. The elitism of high brow gallery's took the lions share of wall space, and if there was any concession to so called low brow, it was through artists like Norman Rockwell and Beryl Cook. Of course there was also Dali and Giger to keep us purists happy, veritable sore thumbs, able to traverse the gaping chasm between both camps with imagery that defied category and the technical virtuosity of an old master.


This isn't to say, that I don't find work like Kinkaids excreble-I do-I decry most modern tastes and long for the days when art isn't relegated to matching the curtains- but because I do, does that mean that it ceases to exist as a yardstick to current cultural ideals? As such it probably inhabits the same space as a Hogarth three hundred years ago, or that poster in the 70's of a girl in tennis gear flashing her arse cheek. People-unfortunately, are just not that deep, and time, seasons the bubble gum on the sole of history's shoe with the value of artifact.

An artist friend of mine was once leveled with the charge that their painting was to art, what Merlot was to wine, which was only amusing until you realized how many bottles of Merlot are sold everyday.

Art-it seems, no longer exists in an oppulent bubble for the sniffy borgeouis, and like that tremendous scene in Sideways with Paul Giamatti, loses nothing in its flavour when consumed in the context of a fast food joint.

And Another thing-Con Art

'I kept hearing David's plaintive cry, "I just wish something would break soon."' relates former manager, Kenneth Pitt in Marc Spitz's excellent new book- Bowie biography.


Reading those lines, its the Bowie I connect with the most. I think of him there, mired in pre-fame anonymity...'down on my knees in suburbia, down on myself in every way...' he would sing later on the 'Buddha of Suburbia' title song.
For nine years he schlepped himself around every dead beat, dead end repository, starving for his gravy, but still an indomitable talent never the less. Pre Ziggy, he couldn't even get arrested let alone a break. What spurred that self belief? Certainly he wasn't delusional, but in the face of such endless disappointment, I imagine he must have believed that he would die in the obscurity of his Beckenham roots-demons dance you to the precipice of defeat so many times as an artist.

There go I without the rest.

Robert Williams-the godfather of pop surrealism, makes some rather wonderful observations about the artists lot in this months anniversary edition of Juxtapoz too. A soundbyte every two sentences, I could pour over his eminently quotable delivery for hours, or at least every time I take my leave to the bog, which is where I do a lot of my ruminating in all honesty.

To paraphrase: 'In the last 30 years, the most gifted have had to make do with occupations as commercial artists. The fine art establishment has purged itself of beautifully executed imagery, and Art has become what Marcel Duchamp hoped for-whatever the artist points as Art.'
Though his consternation is largely pointed at the continuing adoption by the elite for abstraction, its a valid point that holds more than a cistern of water, particularly when you consider the most recent excreble contribution by post modernists figurehead, Damien Hirst, and the inevitable legion of platinum gold card collectors, that will be fawning over his shabby,Francis Bacon knock offs.

Capital "A" Art is a con, and I suspect the true artisans are those practitioners such as the Hirsts, Emmins, and that guy who glued elephant shit to a canvas whose name escapes me now. Those artists that parlay any true draftsmanship for the shock value of the emperors new clothes, and good for them-art history is littered with as many poseurs as it is Van Gogh's, auteur's rather than artists-why not give a kick to the establishment, take the money or even the Monet and run as it where. There is no honor in the artists garret, believe me.
For myself, I imagine that means I've taken the lesser road then, part of the marginalized that Williams advocates, but still no less hungry for that break as Bowie was in his suburban ennui.

And Another Thing-Twatting

I absolutely believe that conversing through so called 'social network' sites such as Twitter, Facebook and Myspace, spells the downfall of literary discourse, to my mind, it is the proverbial (without verbage) inbred, retarded child in the basement, spouting inanity and mundanity, whilst masturbating before a window into the high street. It has no value for posterity, is the most puerile exercise in solipsism, and could for all 'intensive purposes' be the measured distemper of an orangutans toilet habit.
It is the preoccupation of narcissists attempting to elevate the mundane trickle of seconds to meaning, or those celebutantes who complain about photographic indiscretion whilst flashing more than a crotch shot across the digital highway.
Still, I am predisposed to the notions that perhaps Burroughs-were he alive-might have indulged it's streams of consciousness and draughted his next novel with its users asinine drivel, and that Eno once proposed that it was possible to have one brilliant thought a day.
If this all smacks of excuses, it probably is, which is to say that I am weak, and realise that an antique will end up collecting dust in a museum, and that my nose was never made to be detached in spite of my mush, so I have caved and am now the recipient of a 'twat', or a 'twit' or whatever...may I surpass the dirge it was made for. Still, in five years-really, who is going to 'remotely' care:

http://twitter.com/davidgoughart

And Another Thing-Margaret Thatcher, the death of the British Empire

'When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag, and carrying a cross...'
Sinclair Lewis-1935
Fifteen years ago, an intransigent, extreme and archaic, dictatorship was ousted from office by her own party, following an elected third term in the UK.Though its true to say, that the beginnings of Margaret Thatchers terrible reign, brought an end to a period in the seventies of union discontent, it also brought with it a harsh and cold winter which lasted twelve long years.

During her term in office, Britain endured the Falklands war, The Westland Affair, the end of the coal and the shipping industry, the privatization of the railways, BT, the electric and water boards, the beginnings of the end for the NHS, the reinstated Taxes- Poll Tax (abolished in the sixteenth century), and inheritance tax (a tax which ensures you still pay after your death) , eight million unemployed (the conservative estimate after the book cooking of training schemes).Education cuts and Mad Cow disease (CJD), the re-emergance of puritanical censorship with the moral guardianship of the nanny state. Hillsborough, Dunblane, Charring cross, race and poll tax riots in the streets and a further polarization of negotiations with the IRA. Even my own hometown of Liverpool was abandoned by the Iron Lady to what she proposed as a 'Managed Decline'

 
And whilst the maggots flourished and grew complacently bloated, the poor became more emaciated, and what they call the class divide in England became a chasm.
As the country descended further into the bowels of Hades however, the machinations behind number ten maneuvered, and I watched as a tearful Thatcher was removed from Downing street. It was the only emotion I ever saw her betray.The dark days of the right were numbered, and there was a sense that the working class-through music, through art and culture, were on the move.

 

It's hard for me to reminisce the hope and promise of those times-but when Labour swept in again after so long, with D-reams song 'Things can only get better', it felt like watching life reanimating a corpse.Of course, history has shown that hopes are in vain, that the mess left in the Thatcher years was too far reaching -lopping off a limb is no good when the cancer has spread, but at the very least, the Conservatives were viewed as an aberrant joke-a terrible wrong footing that was the catalyst for the end an empire, a country were it was twenty five years too late for its terrible former premier to be diagnosed with dementia.

I prefix this, because in the insanity of the birther movement, the spitting sloganeering of the teabaggers, the endless, impending, end of days fervor of the evangelists -I see all too well, the failings of my own countries past.
 
The dark unwillingness for change-an unwillingness, that comes spitting the vitriol of judgment, cloaked between the pages of the bible and a pocketful of race hatred. An angry mob, without a taste for irony, resembling the fascist diatribes of the 30's, much more than the institution and leader elect, they are demonizing, all stoked by their own ignorance and those special interests, who balk at change simply because they may end up a little light on change in their pocket.

Perhaps its as Churchill once said, a country does elect the leader it deserves, but having seen the terrible legacy of the Thatcher years, and those still being cast by the long shadow of Bush, it doesn't behoove one to imagine the kind of cretinous demagogue that could be borne from the bastard offspring of a Limbaugh and Beck.