Old drunk

If I had my way, I wouldn't let anyone go to art school if they were under the age of 25, perhaps 30. Yeah, yeah, I'm sounding like an old cunty mature student, but seriously there is something in what I say. I look around my class and I am not impressed. None of them have much of a clue what they're doing. There are maybe one or two who have potential, but the rest are a waste of space. The only reason they've got so far is that the institution needs the money. Ye gods, you should see the dreadful shit they come up with, and the dreadful justifications that accompany them.

Yes, you little shits, you know what I'm talking about. Like most things, it's fucking obvious.

Exciting!

I got the best compliment ever last week: 'Hanging out with you is like hanging out with Doctor Who.'

A possible introduction

It seems to me that the true artists of our time are philosophers. I have no time for the sterile arguments of the professional philosophers in the universities, politicians whose axes are ground very fine indeed, who only exist to serve the status quo. I speak of the philosophers of living, those who have something to say to those who would be human, truly free and independent, and reject the tyrants both without and within.

Art in the media

We all know how badly art is treated by the media: all braying donkeys and piles of rubbish and my five year old could do that. However, it didn't always be that way. About a hundred years ago, the media had a lively interest in contemporary art.

During the Armory Show in 1913, Francis Picabia was the representative of the French avant-garde in New York. One art historian has counted more than a thousand references to Picabia in the local media during the Armory Show and Picabia's one-man show at the 291 Gallery, which opened two days after the Armory finished.

The Armory Show opened on 17 February 1913. The day before it opened, the New York Times devoted a page to Picabia under the headline 'PICABIA, ART REBEL, HERE TO PRESENT THE NEW MOVEMENT'.

References in the press to Picabia include, but are not limited to, 21 January, New York Herald; 22 January, City New York American; 26 January, New York American; 2 February, Minneapolis Morning Tribune; 9 February, Nebraska Journal, Minneapolis Morning Tribune, World Magazine; 16 February, New York Times; 17 February, The World State; 20 February, New York American, New York Globe; 23 February, Kansas City, Chicago Tribune, New York Press, The Sun, Philadelphia Record; 1 March, Newark News; 3 March, The Sun; 8 March, Chicago Morning Post, New York Evening World; 9 March, New York Tribune; 14 March, City Tribune; 16 March, New Orleans Times, Philadelphia Inquirer; 17 March, Chicago Examiner, Hartford Daily Courant, New Bedford Mercury, Philadelphia Press; 18 March, New York Herald, New York Times, The Sun; 19 March, Chicago Examiner; 20 March, New York Edition, New York Mail; 22 March, Brooklyn Eagle, New York Post; 23 March, The World; 24 March, New York American; 25 March, Chicago Morning America, Chicago Tribune; 26 March, Nashville Democrat; 28 March, Chicago, Chicago Examiner, New York American; 30 March Atlantic Republican; 6 April, Minneapolis Tribune; 10 April, Brooklyn Eagle; 18 April, Brooklyn New York Times.

In the feature articles, Picabia sets out clearly his philosophy of totally abstract painting: Amorphism. 'Photography has been a great help in forcing art to realise its own nature, which does not consist in becoming a mirror to the external world but in conferring plastic reality on inner states of mind.'

And Nietzsche again

Let the most heroic souls question themselves about this. Every smallest step on the field of free thought and the individually formed life has always been fought for with spiritual and physical torments: not only moving forward, no, above all moving, motion, change have required innumerable martyrs, all through the long path-seeking and basic millennia of which, to be sure, people don't think when they talk, as usual, about 'world history', that ridiculously small segment of human existence. And even in this so-called world history, which is at bottom much ado about the latest news, there is no really more important theme than the primordial tragedy of the martyrs who wanted to move the swamps.

Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and of a feeling of freedom that now constitutes our pride. But it is this very pride that now makes it almost impossible for us to feel with those vast swathes of time characterised by the 'morality of the mores' which antedate 'world history' as the real and decisive main history that determined the character of humanity – when suffering was a virtue, cruelty a virtue, dissimulation a virtue, revenge a virtue, the slander of reason a virtue, while well-being was a danger, the craving for knowledge a danger, peace a danger, pity a danger, being pitied ignominy, work ignominy, madness divine, change immoral and pregnant with disaster.

You think all of this has changed? You who think you know man, learn to know yourselves better!

Nietzsche against contemporaries

May the living forgive me that occasionally they appear to me as shades, so pale and sombre, so restless and, alas, so lusting for life – while those men then seem so alive to me as if now, after death, they could never again grow weary of life. But eternal aliveness is what counts: what matters ‘eternal life’ or any life!

Something in Wellington to go to

Which reminds me, if you're in Auckland, do go and see Matt Hunt at the Ivan Anthony Gallery.

Where art belongs, the video

Rose and I made a short video of Where art belongs on Saturday. We did it in one take without any preparation, so you'll just have to put up with the long pauses and constant ums interspersed between me blithering about something other than what the camera is pointing at.

And that's it! The show's over, and it'll soon be painted out. That is a very pleasing thought. It did get somewhat obliterated on Saturday night during Shoji Hano's awesome performance up there. I snapped Tao Wells just after he'd covered every available surface in the green loo with big loopy scrawls, and even signed it, the narcissistic bastard. I thought that was extremely funny – and that it was a good thing we'd already shot the vid.

For Rose

Here are links to CoBrA artist Karel Appel's Musique barbare from 1963: 'Paysage electronique', 'Poeme barbare', and 'Le cavalier blanc'. Appel was also involved with the situationists.

Also check out the Continuo blog.

Situationist presentation

I did a presentation on the situationist idea of the spectacle at school today. I printed out a nice situationist comic for them to look at. I wrote 'Never work' on the whiteboard in large capital letters. I faced away from them, dropped my pants, and read my presentation. I even managed to get the word 'cuntish' into it.

We had quite a good discussion afterward.