art is someone else's illness

I want to thank the organizers, because obviously a ton of work went into this show. Working via one organization to be housed inside another must have involved many, many meetings that I would not have been able to endure given my low frustration tolerance. I drew on some Andrea Fraser tears today because… I am unable to cry about art & thinking through institutions is supposed to bring us to tears.

If I had a wall didactic in this exhibition… it would say that the last time I did a performance for NGBK I got paid three times the amount of money I am being paid today, and I was listed as a contributing artist to that exhibition, whereas today I am not listed as an artist in this show, and I have consented to a significant drop in the value of my work post pandemic, post inflation. But that’s okay. I have no attachment to being identified as an artist. Perhaps my function here is simply to be the edge… establish a boundary from which to work away.

I might add: If you’re not passionately updating your CV, you’re not a real artist. I was asked to produce a CV upon the invitation to do this… I had to laugh because my computer fried a year ago and the old CV$ were never backed up… I got to remember the process of abstraction that is reducing years of work into bullet points on a single page… the thrill of erasing work unworthy of mention because stretching truth is professional exchange… and celebrate again my choice years ago to walk away from public funding models entirely. I wanted to make work without much cost to me, but also everyone else. I had no desire to be an artist who only hung out with other artists as wards of the State, probably for my lack of aptitude. However, I think that this cultural isolation is a large part of the problem of art… so many people in art appropriate the idea of poverty as some requisite for art working.

Loose metaphor helps no one out of the mess of Enlightenment and the generalized superiority complex that argues itself her beautiful shadow. art is often naked violence, invitation to confuse the synthetic with the real, allowing representation to become a stand-in for yourself. It would be easier to speak if I felt art was attached to meaning. I find it impossible to register a field of people so traveled… having had so much time in university as being “precarious.” Poverty does not vindicate; deficit doesn’t produce, it leeches. If you’re asking me to name the problem of those choosing to suffer art’s bitter end I would say fanaticism.

Performance is a form of lying, the ability to snake around and then out of meaning. To read right in art is to do so glib without any emotion, unless it is stylistically full throttle screaming about minutia WHITE LIGHT NOT SOFT LIGHT the difference of which produces no meaning whatsoever. How does one become an object that recognizes the limits of its significance? How do you un-mark yourself here in art where everyone gets pegged? I will not be tasked with saying that we need more art when I have had enough of it.

The twilight of creative city arts budgets confuse many artists with the belief that all precarious workers had access to additional support in weathering the storm of covid capitalism. I have written that artist grants are often only welfare for rich kids. It is not hard to find any number of low income artists living far outside their means financed by families in the position to do so… nothing inherently wrong with this reality, but there is nothing interesting about it either. I render most artists alpha consumers, because even those working immaterial forms burn a lot of cash and resources upholding such ambitious brands. Moreover, grants are not given upon a need basis. Purchase on the feeling of being an artist in the practice of psyching the self upward. There is nothing remotely complicated about art. Hardly employed people in expensive clothes gather in a room normalizing the price of wall-wares. Fanatics seeking the easiest way to make history, tinkering without internal conflict, management via applied vocabularies.

I have written about the bodily exit working into objects. Meaning to hang the self against a wall… turning trauma into beauty maybe, but more likely, provocation into stasis. Art is where the potential to change gets stuck. It can only ever be itself, use value in terms for language games. Art lovingly facilitates the case against itself by corralling a mass of wound-lickers who decide that their scars might also be worth something—‘it’. The battle is symbolic because it always ends in some representational arrangement within the limited cosmos of National sponsorship. There is no post-national art because all art gets lost in this container. Art naturalizes the cordoning of the State.

Arts funding makes the relation of your work to the State not just some cozy symbiosis, but conspiratorial. Hardly employed people getting pity production budgets that most truly working people know nothing about, nor stand to benefit from in any way. Art working is another iteration of a professional managerial class, but unique in that they are willing to toil endlessly on a job that can be done for life. A mob before whom the only carrots to dangle are fast cash, and status (now faded into the even more vile celebrity culture). The production of such hot property will never be an act of kindness. It will never be aware of itself, inevitably holding space on a list of assets.

I do not think of myself as bitter, I think I am treating these things as disgusting as they really are: contributing factors to our time here in the end of abundance. I believe identity wars are trauma bonding, the means to punish-manage every relation. The biographical details used to frame work become bulletproof vests that keep the conversation away from what art does, emphasizing instead the inclusion into the schema of who gets to do it now as well. How Marina Abramovich, or Vanessa Beacroft (and so many like them), make living bodies into an asocial contract while all the gender politics around their work of working bodies into such scenes, obfuscate aesthetics's total disregard for people who labor to become art in this vacant confidence spiel.

My work was interested in art’s capacity to dehumanize a wanton worker… when a body is only good for making an image. After a time art becomes a shrunken world view. The way Jan.06.2021 insurrectionists, or protesters, became bodies whose sole worth was for making images inside liberal imaginary as a composition of bodies for elimination from the public sphere. Jan.06 got the cultural left to agree that protesting an election outcome is vulgar. They prefer to leave us with the truly existential destiny that our bodies are only holders onto of ballots during certain seasonal shifts. Fanatics do not recognize their state as puppetry. Art also surrenders to this looping theater of democratic lapses. Art is exclusionary. Let us keep these folk separate from our class maneuvering here.

To the edge that produces us… rich people, what do they want from art? they want it to be meaningless. They want its dull spectacles to confound and cage in some kind of Rapture. Art is religious, needing artists as supra human entities. shelter the artist however you may within this belief of possessing such a special self… she becomes no less exhausted by the task of producing more and more visual pollution. {steps out from podium to repeat: visual pollution} Expecting that the artist must be giving herself over as some kind of Christ-figure is the plot line that keeps so many young artists lost. Art the religious experience cannot leave the fanatical, thereby prone to isolationist strategies of self preservation via reproduction.

freedom without any sense

Tongues wailing about—that these freedoms yield something for everyone:

a politics that will not keep you alive.

When I talk about politics, I want to be clear that I do not mean electoral politics until of course they become mired within the mass of identity and its preservation of class alienation. When I talk about politics, I mean the whole mess of words meaning to be everything yet delivering nothing. Be it the lame politics of vote-shaming, be it bold accusations of class reductionist, be it how much some people get paid to teach students stupid… The way some women find their religious expression of the veil to be of public concern rather than preservation of a private life. The ballot box is for bullying most of the time. These special measures serve no one but the rich who will have us vote on nothing substantive. Ballot boxes manufacture the majority by keeping conversations dreadfully small. Which budgets need slashing in the name democratizing art further? Politics are dead, but what life is available only retreating into art? Kool Aid chugging something so quietly powerful that can only be felt under WHITE LIGHT never SOFT.

I never find sport in trading covert barbs

I am not smothered in bourgeois reserve

If I am going to be hostile it is open never to interpretation

I cannot breathe in the repression of emotion among suburban types, lives only lived in clouds

—the rage with which they spend their moneys—on such obscure misery.

every conversation become transactional Measuring up

Basically, art

I am dressed for stand down orders only I am not here for the fight

selfies with gatekeeper police

a fire extinguisher grows its wings

I never beg to be recognized as my own terms.

Arguing that “the ‘I’ will only do artistic labor” is not my cause, because it is this art labor racket that fractures art from the real. Did you live alongside someone who wasn’t offered BBK’s 5,000 Euro parachute in covid capitalism? Sex work solidarity for instance—artists were only work-restricted—sex work among the truly poor was outlawed entirely. Instead of police offering a social worker… some program of help, women were fined for being non-nationals without windows of bureaucracy for jumping from… Why not extend KSK to sex workers? And bricklayers? Don’t all freelancers deserve health care they can afford? The loss of contracts for so many craft workers is what makes this sudden de-industrialization of Europe, and Germany specifically, so deadly. Why is it that artists get to lie constantly about their income to receive greater benefits? Let us extend the luxury of post-fact economy to those who live only in bitter truth.

Remember that there is supposed to be beauty in how differently we see things from one another

Art is the easy way for liberals to feel polarized… to get a charge from the lukewarm pool of nihilism

the fanatic takes on bodily exhaustion, monetary expense and social humiliation to prove his role in belonging to such a passionate mass

a solitary self shattered across social media

some football fan setting cars ablaze, others overturned, the fanatic escalates

mass formation psychosis running toward abandonment—ecstasy or suicide

I don’t grieve art not working

I will never fade into tribalism but I will always honor the danger of the idiocy among those who do

confused by the split

or the bold presumption that this splitting comes from a pure space

rather than an uncomplicated shedding of a person designed for elevation

take your art and kill you with it crocodile tears

the accrual of wealth is sociopathic

bodies become instruments

for the soul who wishes only to be spread the whole world over

Art gets invoked as the pathetic excuse for an otherwise useless existence

the fanatic doesn’t need art to make sense or conclude in some material reordering because the fanatic has no self to lose

what I found among artists bailed out from covid was how little understanding they had for low wage workers foreign to bureaucracy leaving them with day old bread tied to a fence

others I knew hoarded the opportunity, indulging in this sense of artistic poverty… someone with a vacation house took the money and went seaside, others who have contract work entitled themselves to this bonus, a couple took their combined 10,000 euros and renovated their kitchen. I don’t have a lot of friends, I don’t ask people what they do with their moneys, these are just things people offer up conversationally.

artistic liberty to defraud.

All of those flatten the curve home office protocols did not apply to truly working people whose health is always ignored by the state.

Studio space and month long beach vacations

only home to grieve about property values… my dear artists it just depends upon how middle class your expectations of life were… I still feel like I have stolen most of my life away from what was supposed to have happened.

fanatical about art, some defend it’s every movement all the while hating every opening because it excluded them from the realm of precious consideration.

sincerity is not your angle, best you start working the class out of you

You don’t have to agree with someone about the existence of god to understand god as a factor in their evaluation. But the huff and hatred of anyone who has a god or attempts to exist within an external system of right and wrong… External from those post structuralist cartwheels of the soul into nothing… art is Europe’s compulsion to homogenize, a scheme manifest by its fanatics.

Europe dulls our world with art

sewn up sock puppets at rest if not cored by the hand of another

Is there truth to speak in an economy of fantasy?

Forgive me for taking a job I don’t really believe in

forever treading water

I refuse all narratives of artists being graduate level educated & “poor”

I refuse all narratives necessitating artistic experience gathering—all artist residencies should be converted into permanent refugee housing.

Berlin museums should become warming centers, free of charge regardless your work history because the heat is on already

I do not support the idea of granting artists the right to free money for the mess of their desire manipulated into an apparatus of business-only function. I do not applaud these traditions. I do not appreciate the artifacts they produce… separatism absolute

hide money until its inevitable liquidation

the heart of an idea cored

here in Europe the birth place of heterosexuality