No Photo
I was pointed towards the link below recently by Rae Story - an interview from the past / from a location
No Photo
from the past / with film clips from the past . . . A past is @ times all too present and incorrect . . . Life @ art is
No Photo
Link - http://www.greenroomutd.org/people/michael-mayhew
No Photo
warming up / blue skies and all . . . putting together some bits for a proposal / looking at water / the source of
No Photo
identity . . . life . . .
"It's all been done."
No Photo
Before
Is resistance futile or fertile in this environment?'
At the time it seemed a good idea, a strategy to get the higher education and so the funding system to take onboard other forms of expression.
But what are these other forms of expression and how are they to be expressed.
What it has turned out to be is an institutionalisation of creativity, with an 'assemblage of doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts', to quote Greenwood, making a living out of a scientific approach to the expression of ideas.
But who, we are not offered names just a line of titles to point at and scorn, there are so many 'doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts' there is no room for artists, no room for simply being, one has to be a doctor, professor, critic, curator or a cunt', which there are many.
It's an industry, a mafia, a league, a club of Englishness / A breed of middle classness that has shaped a careerer path for itself, and because of this it has a need to defend itself from outsiders, in this case the artist.
This approach, almost a psychotic impulse, to frame, control is all so English in it's approach to colonising life and in this instance 'art'. Labeled liberal it performs far more fascistic than that ~ 'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.' This sounds like most institutions I arrive into and experience and do you know what, the 'assemblage of doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts', that criticise, moan or betray the system that they are employed by is sickening or is it that the 'assemblage of doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts' experience being unarmed by the system they are party to and fear retribution for challenging the 'system'.
How puerile is that?
More to do with the feathering of a very large nest, sustaining a comfort and a hierarchy of language, an approach and possible process.
I inherently know this approach, being English myself and also having experienced the 'English' abroad, a location when one experiences ones national attributes in an almost pure and perverted form. The expats become even more English than home English, when located within an environment of foreignness, the others, never there's, the English abroad seemingly embody that which has seeped into their nurtured veins and they become that which is unadulterated loathing of anything foreign.
Time and time again I have experienced the 'English' developing a need to implement foreign policy of ownership, hierarchy and propriety in any landscape they find themselves in. There seems a need to shape the society they are placed in, presenting in, working in into a shape they can justify as being like their own, because we do it better, we the English know better, examine our history in business, science, diplomacy, art and war.
The English.
The education system is a microscopic embodiment of what we are, it has and will drum out of your soul any idealism that was born out of youth, it will suspend any thoughts of challenge or change that are born out of a desire to discover your own language of expression. Play the game and the English are very good at 'games', but most often rigged.
All fine and dandy, the games one must play in any society are complex and as English we spend far too much time pointing or shit free fingers at the 'other'.
I am part of a generation who bought in and sold out within the need for the mass industrialisation of education.
Having got our own way and systematically moved what has become branded as 'Live Art' in higher education, the question being begged to be asked is; what are we left with?
From conversations with academic come artists or artists with a rigid bent in having to formulate ideas within an academic frame work, potentially restricting forms of expression, the words I hear are that performance thinking and so the praxis of has become formulaic, due to the rigidity of academic teaching structures.
No shit Sherlock.
This brand of expression that I was saddled with early on in a developing career has become increasingly impaired, it has to fit, one has to talk the language of the academic code for ones praxis to be integrated into the 'main stream'.
That rings of fascism to me.
In one conversation I was informed that institutions find my approach too 'anti-institutional', which simply harks of fear of challenge and debunks reference to artists being challenging, that's the art - stupid.
There are no rules.
That is what was so encouraging about engaging with a festival called National Review of Live Art - forms of expression were wide open, one didn't have to rigidly stick to the known, one could throw oneself into the vat of the unknown, swim in the turbulence of investigation, engaging with potential, discover the radical.
Nothing to be done.
It's all been done . . . .
to death.
Maybe it's human nature to secure, bolt and tie it all down because we need the assurance that we're in a position of authority - security, securing a minimal future of the self by institutionalising the potential for the freedom of expression, that would shake everything that you know or thought you know to its very foundation.
By placing art into an institutional battery farm that 'assemblage of doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts' maintain a position of worth as framed by . . . who / what.
A generation sold itself to sustain itself and nothing more.
The rot has set in as we chase the need to maintain / the wrong decisions made / the wrong deals brokered / liberty sold and shafted as hordes of the middles classes become 'doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts' and forms of expression become sucked into the facile make believe world that the 'doctors, professors, critics, curators and cunts' think they're making a difference.
You are ~ but it's the same difference and limits life and art.
'A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.'