-(-(ART))

While pondering one day whether or not I truly was an artist in its truest and purist sense I came to realize that where the character of the modern artist should be in my understanding there was a vacancy. I innocently set forward to investigate this lack of comprehension of a personality set that I thought should be familiar and my investigations that I hadn’t the slightest real, didactic thing to say about the character of the truly modern artist. By now my curiosity was seriously piqued and I decided undertake an attempt to outline the shape of the artist in the modern world.

There have been artists in the past who have dealt with the increasing stresses upon the individual in post-industrial modernity and they have been lauded as the voices of their generations. Andre Breton, Max Ernst, Man Ray and others defined the DADA and it’s thesis on the absurd falibility of the human experience in the shell shock of World War One. Their two fronted war against the constraints waged against the individual in the industrial and military industrial complexes and against the constraints placed upon the individual in the current art institutions made way for the next generation of war veterans which brought with it Jean Paul Sartre, Theodore Adorno representing intellectual disgust while visual artists like Robert Raushenberg represented a violently aesthetic disgust.

Things start to get fuzzy towards Vietnam. Maybe it was all the cheap acid. Art seems to be relegated to Rock music and reporters from the nether regions of the human mind, strung out on spiritual experiences. Writers like Hunter S. Thompson tear viciously at the last scraps of uncritiqued modern life. But it was Warhol whose perfect work created the very vacuum that I originally perceived. His fundamentally perfect critique on modern life heralded the cultural perception of what I now believe to be a sentiment of: “Well, I suppose there is nothing left to say.”

Musicians have hit certain notes which ring true of the generation. I would gather that we are bored and we are fucked and we are all looking for work.

I believe that it is defining why and how we are fucked that one could begin to identify the fundamental nature of what I will from here call an Anti-Art Culture. Anti-Art was introduced originally as a term to make sense of what the DADAists and Surrealists were up to. Anti-Art was meant to address the disparities in the fine arts institutions and art culture in general which they believed to be following blind orders of faith from the old guard of European art. I do not mean to use Anti-Art here in that way. I mean to use it in order to address a culture which is by its very structure adversarial to the development of a lifestyle devoted to artistic processes. I would like to further investigate this culture in three stages: indoctrination into Art as a marketing device, sublimation of the artistic voice for transition into modern Anti-Art Culture (i.e. militarism, industrialization and institutionalization) and lastly Pharmaceutical assassination of artistic tendencies deemed unfit for service in normal society.

Indoctrination:

I am unfit to speak of the most modern version of “child”as I come from a prior beta generation on which the first waves of the coming Technocracy was tested. My development follows that of Video Game consoles. I came into myself with the coming of the Nintendo, and as it came to realize itself and its appetites it defined for me my own appetites. Together we gathered more pixels and faster play and a third dimension and then a forth when the Internet came. When I wasn’t manipulating an electronic world I was being sent coded messages through the television to go out and buy plastic merchandise. This development happened in a kind of a bubble as I grew up in an isolated area with working parents.

These first experiences with Technology become abstract indoctrinations into the Aesthetic realm in which you can see virtually anything you want to see and if you wish to own it you can do that as well. Our first experiences with Art were to sell us toys and other assorted nonsense, to burden our parents with our illogical desire to spend the money they really ought to spend on things which will benefit if not our development, the development of businesses who do more productive work then to sell children bullshit that they don’t need by filling their heads with Mutants, transforming robots, cats which fight each other with lasers in space, mice which ride motorcycles on mars, a sponge which sings in the sea or radioactive turtles which, instead of dieing, actually become something like humans and they beat people up in the night.

Our generation came to acquire Aesthetic taste in a haze of lies told to us by adults promising us a world which could not possibly ever exist. I will not argue that this is not also the case for former generations as they were also inevitably sold a whole bunch of bullshit in their day. What I am trying to advance is the idea that we were subjects of a new kind of messaging and subliminal training into acceptance of societal coding. Our orders were to buy.

In the tender and traumatic phase between this indoctrination into a consumption oriented reality principle and the moment when we have declared our decisive first step into the fully realized Anti-Art culture of the “adult” world no mending advice is given on how to sublimate the plastic fantasies of youth into the task of fulfilling the expectation upon the individual to fill a meaningful and demanding place in society and so the modern individual is making the first act of free choice away from the subjectively normalized technological environment of the home under the strong influence of this institutionalized madness.

And then there is the time to choose. Ones choices are as follows:

The Military Option:

There is no more formal indoctrination into a fully realized Anti-Art Culture than Basic Combat Training. The mind is trained to repress the impulse to question. Questioning is a necessary pillar of practice in the contemplation of Art and of beauty. When the mind is trained only to accept (especially under the conditions that what is being accepted is particularly gruesome behavior which all warrants serious reconsideration) it loses its sense of comfort with the freedom of a question when the answer is unknown. There are only known knowns for the enlisted soldier.

There is a chain of command which is implanted in the enlisted soldier’s mind and never at any time does that chain of command allow for any serious contemplation of what one ought to do because if the question were taken to a Non-commissioned Officer your concern with the allocation of your labor would be quickly relieved and you would be told precisely what to do. Under these conditions I would postulate that the skill of making individual decisions atrophies though I provide no documentation and my own personal experience runs quite contradictory as I have proven myself to be a rather impulsive decision maker who clearly enjoys making said decisions independently of others. I would not submit myself as a typical member of the armed forces.

During a time of war the impulse to see life as art is sublimated not by command but by survival instinct. If one were to look on the atrocities that man does to his fellow man with a lens of pure Artistic reason their heart would be melted and rendered black by the illogical and often psychotic violence that man is capable of doing unto other men’s bodies as well as their minds.

To see life as beautiful in a “war type scenario” would border on indicating mental illness.

Option #2- The Service Industry:

Even if you choose either of the two other options you will inevitably end up in the Service Industry at some point in time.

In the new world trades and professions are dead. We hock cheap wares at one another now and this is our only real trade as Americans and it binds us steadfastly.

When you work in the service industry you either stand at a counter or waltz about a restaurant or a hotel or any number of unsanitary places where it is your task to either serve people the things that they saw on TV and now either want inside of their mouths or in their living rooms… or both or to clean up the unnatural environments which are magicked into existence by the Corporations for the selling of these cheap and gaudy wares.

Many from our generation have not hesitated to call this reality principle “wage slavery”and in keeping with this tradition I will accept it. A circuit has been created in which a good deal of numbers pass through every citizens accounts but those numbers are often not in the same account for long. A barrage of bills came with the Age of Convenience and money seems to go as fast as it comes for most.

Working for tips at a restaurant buys one little time to devote serious effort into artistic contemplation because most of the individuals day is sold away while the part that is left is divvied out to both completing the beurocratic personal responsibilities but also self medicating the internal anguish that is suffered when your youth is worked away for someone who would never speak to you let alone touch you with an un-gloved hand and you are left with nothing to show for it except empty cigarette packs and unfinished Artwork that was left incomplete when the individual was diverted by these tedious fucking jobs.

But I digress.

The Service Industry is a fine place to while away one’s youth. Nearly every drug you could need can be found there.

Option Three – Secondary Education:

The getting of degrees is very chique in the modern world. One is almost socially intolerable without one. Option Three is very popular amongst those who have chosen either of the other options prior to seeking this new deal. They were a sign of upward mobility, but now that everyone has mobilized upwards we are all crammed at the roof and inundated with knowledge that is incompatible with the constraints of the real world.

One can stave off all of the fundamental flaws in the other Options while in a University. In fact nearly all responsibility can be waved off and success could still be in sights.

Whatever field of study one might choose there is always the relief that one knows they are getting a rounded education in dealing with social hurdles towards a concept of success. One becomes familiar with the debasing critique of one’s elders. One learns very socially valuable lessons in keeping one’s mouth shut until it is one’s time to shine.

The largest advantage to the Third Option is that if one so desired they could, under the umbrella of institutionalization, keep a relatively reasonable glimmer in the possibility of a realistic life as an Artist, though presumably one’s instructors would convince one otherwise by bringing to light the stark evidence that Art, in the modern sense, is not a safe career bet for reasons that will be discussed further later in this paper and that it is best to consider an education in Art an education in how to create the same subliminal messaging that we were subjected to as a generation, to become a facilitator in the rise of the commodification of Art and to have to fight tides of other fellow graduates for ever so few seats on this evil boat which is set to sail. In all fields other than the Liberal Arts creativity is discredited on account of how the individual is not a professional and not capable of having an idea that is more well formulated than the idea’s of the professionals who have previously laid out the rules. In mathematics and science this behavior is necessary. In philosophy however this tendency has been the spark for many inter-ego altercations.

One might wander between all of these Options in the course of a modern life, in fact it would be normative behavior, but always there is the anxiety that is derived from the reality that almost everyone (save for the Stars) will die working for one or the other and by the time that death comes there will be no new and interesting things to say about the task at hand. These lives are so unsatisfactory to those who desire to find a social order that declares Art as its only true principle that some form of refuge is necessary to compensate for the emotional disorder of settling in to a life inside of a fully realized Anti-Art Culture. Which brings us to the third arch of sketch of this so called Anti-Art Culture.

Diagnosis of the Artist as a Degenerate and the Medicating of the “Problem of Modern Life”

Where before the many complications in the living of life were dealt with in lengthy expositions on existentialism or in visceral visual art pieces now the individual is directed to internalize this discontent and to seek a diagnosis for it and to furthermore have the issue medicated so that the individual can resume productive labor.

It is not unusual now for pharmaceutical indoctrination to begin as early as the first onset of character, when the child first starts to exhibit behavior which is good and truly their own. If that behavior happens to be unfit for participation in the institution of grade school then medication is now routinely offered. For example, the tendency for children’s thoughts to wander towards the plastic fantasy they have ingested at the television while bathing in flourescent lighting and listening to the bored regurgitation of facts from teachers who know that ahead of every child is really only the three aforementioned Options is now diagnosed as ADD or ADHD and there is a whole market of drugs provided to these squirrely ones.