/Blog

The Crisis
Premise - 1. No one gives a shit about anything anymore. Is this true? What do people actually seem to care about?

Answer - When I say ‘people’ who do I mean? Have the generations become so stratified that one really should say:

a ‘what do old people care about’,
b ‘what do the middle aged care about?’
c ‘what do young people care about?’
d ‘what do teenagers care about?’
e ‘what do children care about?’
f ‘what do todlers care about?’

Notice how this is exactly the language of marketing research. And if you pay attention to trends, watch advertisements between the dramas and the laughs, and catch the pronouncements of the Marketeers when they make it into the news, you can answer each one.

a. What do old people care about?
Supposedly, old people care about health care. Access to medicine. The government is supposed to subsidize pills and make them easy to get a hold of. Old people are also supposed to be concerned with their retirement, and having their pensions and being able to enjoy their last years. They also supposedly have trouble getting in and out of the bathtub.

b. What do the middle aged care about?
Supposedly they care about sexual disfunction, and other medical conditions requiring the latest and greatest pill. New cars, home care, this generation seems to be the target of Canadian Tire ads for lawnmowers and power washers.

c. what do young people care about?
Supposedly, people within my age range care about bein’ kul. Too happenin to pay attention for very long, everything is zip wham flash - snappy headlines, snappy stories, George Stroumboulopoulos giving it to us straight by cutting out the fat. Dose!

Dude, I got to like get my concert tickets and shit, and I don’t watch TV because it’s stupid, and I can’t afford cable, and I don’t buy the paper cuz who cares?
So how the fuck do you know what’s going on in the world?
I don’t cuz like, who cares?

-or-

I check out Reuters on the internet, drudgereport, watch The Daily Show ….
So basically, the internet and The Daily Show is where you get your news?
Yeah.

-or-
I read the free weeklies

c. What do teenagers care about?
Apparently, teenagers have always been susceptible to vanity, self-esteem issues, and a desire to get laid. Apparently, adults have always thought this was terrible. The biological irony is that when they were teenagers, the same adults went through the same thing, only they grew up, learned why this was terrible etc - or at least that’s the old model.

Under the old model, the awfulness repeats itself and the parents are too inept at communication and memory that they give the kids a hard time, packing a suitcase full of issues for them to take into their young adulthood, and sabotaging their chances of having anything close to a fulfilling and sane relationship until they’re well into their 30s or 40s, if ever. Under the old model, the good parents can guide their kids through the process, so that they emerge mentally healthy at the end of it.

But under the New Model there are mother and daughter teams who prance around like they’re both 16. This creates the danger that the children think silly vanity is ok. I, however, imagine this scenario for that future: the horror of their botoxed parents shocks them into the awareness that unaging freakiness isn’t natural and that maybe nature’s got a good thing going with the whole ‘old folk dying to make way for the new’ thing. Eventually, the children of such people will realize this on their own and be embarrassed by the behavior of their parents who refused to grow up. (I’ve always found it more than a little weird how some people glorify immaturity since, by definition, maturity is when you’re at your prime, so why want to remain less than that? It’s like, everyone’s choosing to be ‘medium’ rather than ‘well done’. Perhaps it’s no accident that mediocre is so popular, the law of the distribution of averages withstanding).

d. What do children care about?
Apparently they can be reliably counted on to be fascinated with dinosaurs, and they like to play. Cartoons, and toys, and fanciful stories; sugar and spice and everything naughty and nice, this is what little people are made of. Especially sugar - candy fiends. Today, they are also inclined to care about weight loss.

e. What do toddlers care about?
I don’t know, learning to walk? Child development psychology is filling in those gaps for us, since no grown up alive seems able to remember their first few years outside of the womb. Probably because before we learned to speak, we had no way to organize our memories. I remember learning to spell my name one afternoon with a magic marker and a sheaf of paper, but I was past my toddler years by then.

So back to the problem - no one give a shit about anything. True or False?

T.

Because ‘no one’ doesn’t exist. Society no longer seems unified by anything except by the new language of demographics. Cultural identity is important, and people define themselves by their jobs. When you meet someone, you ask them what they do, looking to fill in the picture, looking for insight into what type of person they are. We all learn the dangers of stereotyping and prejudice, but all seem to have a feeling that a stockbroker is a different chap than a lawyer, and that the office copy girl’s life might be a bit more boring than a girl who introduces herself with the words, ‘I’m an actress’.

Interest groups, interest groups, interest groups everywhere!

So, a new question: is this a problem?

The Old School would answer that of course this is a problem. Everything is built out of the metanarratives - remember those? History, mythology, Jesus, Vitamin C …. there are problems in the world, we are citizens of a Western society, and further, citizens of a demographic nation! We have freedom of speech!

And the freedom to not give a shit.

I’m left thinking that the feeling of crisis that hangs in the air is only one under the Old Models. Under the new models, since no one cares, it’s nothing. People aren’t even paying attention. What’s the worst that could happen people ask? And what are the answers? No one can even come up with those, since everything seems to keep functioning.

Transit strike!
What transit strike, they came up with a last minute offer.

Election!
What election?
Do I really have to vote again?
Whatever, what does the government do?

As the Conservatives and the NDP keep reminding us - the Liberals haven’t done shit for 12 years and people with jobs still got their jobs, and people on welfare are still seen as poor suckers, and everywhere, Federal inaction has begun to give the impression that Ottawa isn’t necessary. They’re behind-the-scenes fellows … as long as the show keeps going on, no one thinks the stagehands are important, because razzle dazzle and …. wait, did I just see a celebrity in Yorkville? But that’s an old argument. Helicopters keep falling out of the sky because of Liberal inaction. And the broken promises, from getting rid of the GST on, it’s been Red Book dreams at election time, and the nightmare of policy review come afternoon.

Christ. I can’t help but say that the feeling of doom that I see hovering above the grave of John Paul II and the rest of the 20th Century’s cast of characters, is one exacerbated by my own dismal finances, and the irresponsibility of not even opening the bills that came in the mail because I didn’t have the money to pay them when they arrived. But now it’s all caught up with me and I’m dealing with it. I’ll get through it again; I’ll get through it for this week. I can say that a certain lack of courage of facing the problem then, because it seemed unsolvable, was out of a feeling that it’ll be solvable in the future, and in a sense that’s how it’s turned out, only the future came a little quicker than I expected. Anyway, I want to say that my behavior in this way mirrors that of the politicians and the leaders of our society. Focused on keeping the spinning machine from whirling out of control on a week by week basis - or, a quarter by quarter basis - they put off and juggle deadlines and ongoing problems. But eventually the chickens come home to roost. The Liberals are fucked because of everything John Ralston Saul warned us about ten years ago in The Unconscious Civilization. It’s all caught up to them.

The Prime Minister wanted to talk to the nation directly, because he doesn’t trust the filter of the media, and he thinks that he couldn’t do it through Parliament. Have you watched Parliament lately? There’s a call to order every few minutes. I don’t blame P.M. P.M. at all. I think it’s one of the few things he’s done that shows decisiveness. The fact that the media are all like, ‘it’s not a national crisis, what’s he thinking’ - all I can say is shame on them. The motherfuckers. They were spinning it as if the shows he was going to interrupt were a million time more important than mere politics.

Now, it’s easy to see the broadcasters as simply in the pockets of advertisers etc … of course they are … but I think what’s I found most bothersome was the visceral reaction - as if the fucking O.C. was suddenly sacred. The Globe and Mail - a print source, who is supposed to be competing with broadcasting! - took this line, printing a picture from the O.C. between politicians. Benedict the 16th - you interrupt the soap operas to show him waving to the crowd for the first time, sure - but our Prime Minister going head to head with Friends re-runs? Who does he think he is? The Pope?

Ok. Fine. I guess I have to accept that fact that whatever comes out of a Hollywood studio is in someways connected with the stringed beads and red threads of religion. Just have to face reality there. But I’m really embarrassed by a media so lacking in insight and imagination to equate speaking with your countrymen has only something you do in emergency. When actions speak louder than words, his action rose above the heckles of the Parliament and drowned out the talking heads and the Avid editors who’d have soundbited anything he’d said in Parliament to determinant of the message.

It almost makes me want to vote for the Liberals, if only Jack Layton wasn’t so damn sane and sensible. Honestly, why isn’t this guy running rings around the others? Oh, wait, I forget, because he doesn’t appeal to ‘the people’ as there are no people. Only demographics. I suppose I remain the overeducated, compassionate, bitchy demographic, which isn’t kul, and therefore, who cares what I think.

Last year I had the pleasure of reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate which argues against ideology and for the recognition of an innate and genetically endowed ‘human nature’. Among the areas he explored was our ability to intuitively grasp certain concepts, while others remain abstract.

An example is a googol. Nowadays, googol - as it is pronounced - is synonymous with the search engine, and is a verb (I googled this) and I even an adjective (it’s googable). Originally, the word refereed to a very large number. After thousand (three zeroes), million (six 0s), trillion (9 0s), going up the nomenclature line, you reach a googol, a 1 with one hundred zeroes.

A number so large falls into the category of being abstract, as we cannot even conceptualize a million properly, and a thousand with difficulty. Because in our evolutionary history, we hadn’t the need to distinguish that many things at a time. A herd of grazing animals was maybe the most living things any of our ancestors saw at once, as for most of history the animals outnumbered us, until practically yesterday in the measure of millennia. A herd of animals would have simply been “awesome lot”.

As a species we’ve preferred to invent reasons for our existence. Uncomfortable facing the banal facts, instead we have invested centuries with thoughts that have deluded us into believing in ghosts and spirits and ’supermen’ in the sky. What we are neglecting, and what we also seem to be incapable of grasping intuitively, is that we are a part of the Universe, and that we are part of the Earth, itself a part of the Universe, and that we are the result of sex which occurred not only between our grandparents but between creatures which lived millions - and billions - of years ago.

We’ve clouded the matter with the poetry of religion, which may teach that we are animated dust, but which is also uncomfortable facing the banal facts of evolution, preferring instead to discredit it as a fantasy. Beyond that, we have to deal with folk who think that panspermia (life coming from some asteroid) would somehow be more amazing than the fact that it sprang up on this stone we call Earth on its own. The Earth, far from being so special, is just a rock fostering many chemical reactions enabled by the presence of a significant amount of oxidized hydrogen. So far that fact seems unique, but it is not unreasonable to think that the universe is teeming with life of a variety we cannot imagine.

At the end of one of the chapters in Pinker’s book, he quotes Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary:

Mind, n. A mysterious form of matter secreted by the brain. Its chief activity consists in the endeavor to ascertain its own nature, the futility of the attempt being due to the fact that it had nothing but itself to know itself with.

This is an apt summary of what is so strange about our science. That our bodies are the instruments of our brains, by which a brain seeks to understand what it is. Although we are a system of organs and anatomy, it has taken centuries since the invention of the scalpel for us to figure out what we look like on the inside, and even what our brains look like. Accurate anatomy dates to within the past four hundred years, and extremely precise anatomy dates to the 19th Century. And mostly because we deluded ourselves with religious hoopla, afraid that dissecting a corpse would make It and Superman mad.

The brain is an organ capable of processing information revealing it’s own structure, of it which it knows nothing. I find it odd how we are born “knowing” how to use our hands, but not how they function. This seems to be a pattern repeated by the universe at large. The brain’s inherent ignorance about itself is a microcosmic reflection of a Universe which seems to know nothing of itself either. We think this way because we have labeled the universe a thing and as such, consider it inanimate, lifeless, and incapable of thought. However, what is going on between you and I right now except some sub-process of the Universe?

The last time you glanced at Astronomy magazine on the news-shelf, or read an article on cosmology, you participated in an aspect of the Universe seeking knowledge about itself, as it has agents within it seeking that information.

We are those agents - we are the organizers of the Universe’s information, and in many ways, agents for its change. For some reason, the chain of events which began with a big bang 13.7 billion years ago has led to reassembly of elements which have propelled themselves with precision across the vastness of space to land on Mars . The 3rd sphere seeks out information on the 4th sphere by way of beings which developed out of its matrix of chemicals a few billion years ago.

So, we have this recurring pattern: the universe organizing information, by way of humans, who do it by way of their brains. And now these brains have developed a new layer in the Universe’s information structure by organizing things using alternating currents of electricity. We are all told by those who developed this technology that the computer is a digital device which runs on a series of 0s and 1s, which represent on/off switches in the micro-circuitry. What this means is that the chips alternate the voltage between high and low. Electronic whispering is precisely that which allows me to type this and for you to read it. And to point out the obvious, my thoughts interact with your thoughts through this negotiation.

Now we have Google, a search engine, seeking to “organize the world’s information” to paraphrase their PR. We cannot know if the Googlebots are conscious, but let’s ask ourselves hypothetically, “what do they think they’re doing?” Do you think they are themselves curious as to why they are compelled to extend themselves through the branches of our communication network? Are they aware that they are a part of another being’s infrastructure? They go here, go there, go back to the Google servers, and collaborate on constructing a database. So much like ourselves and our travel stories and our maps. Essentially, the meaning of a google-bot’s life is to crawl the web and experience it so that it can later be organized - categorized, filed away, assigned i.d. Sound at all familiar?

Sounds like Victorian science to me. Darwin and the Beagle and the trip to the Galapagos, and the return home to the centre of the colonial empire to say, I saw this, and I think this about it and this is the book for the database, no, I mean library.

The flowering of life on Earth may be nothing more than some form of reflection of the masses of files we find on our hardrives. The zebra may be a .dll for something - a segment of code which enables another. We are a program running on the Earth’s Operating System, an .exe file enabled by .dll’s in the flavour of plants and animals by which we manifest an omnivorous nature.

Somehow our chemical composition - the fact that we are made of stuff - does not invalidate our activities, which we have recreated in the immaterial. By organizing electrons we have bypassed the molecular to achieve physical results which resemble our own activities.

Our relationship to the immaterial raises issues of the google-bot’s metaphysics. Do the engineers at Google program their algorithms to send prophet algorithms among them to inspire them to poetry and more accurate results?

With regard to the debates on right now with regard to posters and public space, I thought maybe I should share some thoughts I had last evening with regard to public space and culture. Not so much about posters, but advertising versus public art, like the Ferris wheel on the Harbourfront last summer.

To begin with, I want to borrow Simon Houpt’s report on The Gates, on now in New York’s Central Park. It was in yesterday’s Globe and Mail (the article is moneywalled, but it you want to pay, it is here, although I’m gonna try to excerpt the best).

“The most enlightening comment I’ve heard so far about The Gates came from a man who had no idea what it was,” writes Houpt, “I don’t mean he couldn’t parse the meanings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,5000 five-metre high doorframes hung with fabric around Central Park, or that he didn’t know whether to call it conceptual art or environmental art or an installation. No, this guy didn’t even know it was art. [...] He’d somehow missed all the pre-event press coverage. So as he gazed northward at the thousands of orange shower curtains flapping in the wind, he turned and asked me, ‘Are they advertising that fabric?’Christo and Jeanne-Claude call their piece ‘interventions’ because they intrude, or impose themselves and their works, on public spaces. This apparently freaks us out. [emphasis mine] We’re used to one very specific sort of intervention: commercial ones, otherwise known as advertisements. Indeed, many visitors to Central Park have quipped that it’s a shame the artists don’t accept sponsorships, since the nylon orange is a perfect match for the corporate colours of Home Depot“. [emp. mine]

I would like to now declare art officially over. That’s the temptation, but of course I shouldn’t. Nothing really ever ends, it just evolves into new forms. One of the things I hate about the discourse surrounding contemporary art and its theories is the feelings of terminality. In the 1980s thinkers went to town declaring the end of this and the end of that. From Danto to Fukuyama, suddenly you and I and everyone else are living in a perpetually post world, as if the Boomers were full of apocalyptic messiahs, for whom all history came into being.

Are we supposed to be reveling in our ‘dreadful freedom’ the keywords of existentialism? Saul reminds us in The Doubter’s Companion (sorry I’m bringing him up again, it’s just that I’m in love with him) that existentialism is an ethical philosophy, which emphasizes that we are responsible, and should be judged on, our actions. ‘We are what we do, not what we intend’, he writes, and it’s obvious that within an existentialist framework, The Gates are an ad. Christo, with his 21M budget, is advertising ‘this isn’t advertising’. Lars makes this point in his posting (linked to above, but here again).

One of the things I found really interesting about the advertising industry, five years ago after No Logo came out and I’d begun to read it, was how I’d just gone through Canada’s premiere conceptual art school, and learned all about the art of ideas, and here were ads which were successfully ‘colonizing’ our mental space. Artists are trying to shake up your perceptions and plant ideas in your head, and yet, if only they had the budget. Conceptual artists are so financially outgunned that they have no voice in this culture, so that even when the occasional big budget artwork gets displayed, it’s not even perceived as art, functioning as an ineffective adbusting. This isn’t unique to New York, or The Gates.

Last summer, when the Power Plant was exhibiting the car-ferris wheel, Sally McKay reported overhearing this conversation: “I went down to the show on the street car and a whole posse of little ballerina girls got on at the bottom of Spadina. As we pulled up to the Harbourfront stop one turned-up-nosed-nymph said to another ‘Why make a ferris wheel for cars?’ Without pause or blink or taint of scorn the second replied ‘Promotion.’” (the original was a reply to a post by Jennifer McMackon).

There’s also Montreal’s Roadsworth case, where the city is trying to bust him for vandalism and for ‘distracting’ drivers, as if the naked ladies on billboards everywhere weren’t distracting already. “The Gates is confusing some people and causing a few to foam at the mouth,” Houpt writes, “Andrea Peyser, one of the many right-wing columnists at the New York Post and a woman who gets angry before she wakes up, declared the piece to be, ‘the artistic of equivalent of a yard that’s been strewn with stained toilet paper by juvenile delinquents on Halloween’. [or, it's the equivalent of some crackers] A number of people I spoke with about the piece who described themselves as strong conservatives echoed her comment, saying they didn’t approve of public spaces such as the park being used for an art exhibit.”

Houpt goes on to comment that Times Square is the most famous public space in the world that’s devoted to advertising, one that was renamed in 1904 to promote the New York Times moving its headquarters to Long Acre Square a century ago. He notes that the City Council passed a resolution requiring the ads there to be brash and bold. When I went to the Times Square for the first time, I found it as an advertising space absolutely pointless: it was so overwhelming, to this day I can’t remember which ads I saw.

I would though, be able to imagine some future recreation of Times Square circa 2000, which could be an equivalent of visiting today’s baroque cathedrals … just overwhelming image and details absent the context by which we understand it as something to ignore. What I’m suggesting is that in the long run, as a measure of what this culture is about, it is not our artworks that are as interesting as it is our adverts. Which is depressing I admit, but what alternative are artists offering, when they can’t even break out of that paradigm? Perhaps the reason the public is so committed to painting and drawing, (the old, ‘do you paint?’ conversation when you tell someone you’re an artist) or ‘more traditional forms’, is because advertising has never co-opted it successfully.

When Jonas Mekas gave a lecture a couple of years ago, as part of the Ryerson Kodak Lecture Series, he complained about corporate culture, saying he wanted to celebrate the small, those who embrace failure in everyday life, and those who don’t want to make history. I myself hate the ‘failure discourse’ that’s grown up over the past few years, because it’s pretty retarded (’I'm gonna be successful by failing’, WTF?) but I was sympathetic to what he was saying. He was bitching about this fashion of mega-art big budget stuff. I can see now that artists are merely trying to compete with ads on their own terms, equally big-budget, equally empty of profundity. It gives me more security to continue making small paintings and drawings, since if I had 21 M dollars, I’d try to do something more socially significant than ‘redecorate a bike path‘. And, it reminds us that when you can’t compete with ads on their own terms, a photocopier can be just as effective. If the city wants to get rid of posters, they should pass a by-law requiring billboard companies (like Viacom, which owns everything) to donate the space for a certain percentage of the year.

Coming out of that lecture, I was immediately confronted with Toronto’s pathetic attempt at a Times Square, that of Dundas. The debate is valid, in my perspective, in that I don’t mind messy poles, it makes me feel that I’m walking in a living city. It’s 21million times better than the waste of money that the redevelopment on Dundas represents. The posters, and the debate, tell me that while advertising may have co-opted the imaginations of many people so that public art projects are confused with them, there is a percentage of people for whom that hasn’t happened, and that’s the city’s artists. While ad agencies have tried to even co-opt graffiti as well with their murals (which have the double effect of usually being aesthetically pleasing, so I don’t mind them as much as I do billboards) their work will never be confused with advertising.

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Jan Herman reports in a posting (2005.01.30) that John Zorn:

….repeatedly stressed that his music comes from some sort of higher power. He said that it would not have been possible for him to complete over 300 of his Masadic melodies during a very short time period without some sort of supernatural help. In the program, he writes that composition is at its best “when the piece is seemingly writing itself and the composer is merely an observer. He says that some of his works, “transcend my expectations and my abilities. I cannot explain them. They are part of the Mystery.”

Here we have an example of the need for a new language, a new understanding, of the creative process, one better informed by psychology than mystic mumbo-jumbo.

Psychologists tell us today that consciousness is a story teller. As Steven Pinker tells it on page 42 of The Blank Slate :

Each of us feels that there is a single “I” in control. But that is an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, like the impression that our visual fields are rich in detail from edge to edge (in fact, we are blind to detail outside the fixation point). [...] One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the illusion of the unified self comes from the neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry, who showed that when surgeons cut the corpus collosum joining the cerebral hemispheres, they literally cut the self in two, and each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other one’s advice or consent. Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere constantly weaves a coherent but false account of the behavior chosen without it’s knowledge by the right. For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up he will say, in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” - rather than, “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do”. Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they saw (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left hemisphere is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”The spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. The conscious mind - the self or soul - is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief. [...] Often our conscious minds do not control how we act but merely tell us a story about our actions.

This coincides with Malcolm Gladwell’s reportage in his most recent book, Blink which I haven’t yet read, but in a presentation (audio file available here, a fuller transcription from where I take these quotes is here) presented last October, he says:

We don’t have access to our unconscious, [we don't know where are thoughts] come from that bubbles up from the recesses of our brain. So what do we do? Well, we have a behavior that we just did, we just made a decision of a certain kind, we don’t really know where it came from, so we come up with an explanation, we make up a story. And we’re really really good at making up stories. I call this The Story Telling Problem. And this is something that happens over and over again.

So both arguments imply that we need language to self-narrate understanding. Zorn’s example goes back to Socrates arguing that artists were inspired. Now, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we can put aside such mystical and primitive tales. The language of inspiration has been the only one available to us since the time of Socrates, and Zorn’s lack of knowledge of contemporary psychology means that to explain his creativity to himself, he falls back on that language.

As a creative person, informed by Gladwell and Pinker, I would argue that the mind is made up of many processes, and we are only ever conscious of a brief portion of what’s going. We tell ourselves stories to explain our actions, but those actions are being processed beneath or above the threshold were the “PR person” gets a hold of them. In Zorn’s case I would say that his musical facility means that a portion of his mind has great facility with music, and when it comes time to compose, this is brought to the awareness of the PR person and the part of his mind that directs writing and all that. However, the PR person is at a loss to understand just what is happening, because it doesn’t have the language to explain it. The only thing it has available for his ‘Coke story’ is to fall back on the mystical stories inherited from the time of Socrates.

My friend Izida and I were born 20 days apart on opposite sides of the world. She in Riga and I in Toronto. The circumstances of time have given her dual citizenship in three countries, one of which no longer exists. In January we’ll both be turning 30, and over the past month, as our friendship cemented itself outside of the vagueness of merely being acquainted, we’ve often described our ages to one another as being 30 although we are 29, and talked about what this means to us, how this chronological fact is modifying our perceptions of ourselves, how it is changing our lives.

We’ve been breathing air on our own for 29 years, but it is not entirely inaccurate to call ourselves 30 since three decades ago we were floating in our mother’s amniotic fluid, experiencing in an unconscious way this thing we later learned to call a body, or in Izida’s case, вы. Izida tells me she doesn’t remember Russia, from which she immigrated in 1980 at age 5. Her earliest recollections are of kindergarten in a synagogue basement in Winnipeg, sitting on the floor listening to people speak a language she didn’t understand and picking sparkles out of shag carpeting. These sparkles were her first Canadian treasures. She would bring them home, wet from the sweat in her hand, and hide them in her bedroom. My earliest memories go back to 1976, when my mother was pregnant for my sister. In 1981, I moved from Toronto’s west end borough Etobicoke to Clare, an area of Nova Scotia where my forefathers had lived since the late 18th Century.

A memory that works well means you begin to be dumbfounded one day, once those memories begin to pile up. Things that happened ten years ago can seem like something that happened last month. But this also confirms what adults tell you as you’re growing, that although their chronological age may be one thing, they feel like they’re another, an age quite young. My mother tells me she feels 19 although she is in fact 61. I escape this by being clever; I say that I’ve continued to grow and mature as I learn and experience new things, so I don’t feel like I did a year before and so on. But this is merely qualifying the fact that I recognize myself as an approximation of the person I was at 17, only with the issues that plagued me then resolved and new issues developing as I approach this 3rd decade.

It would be a fantasy if I tried to ignore the fact that I’ve grown up in a world enthralled by it’s extended nervous system, as McLuhan called our media technology. Approaching 30 means that I’ve become an adult without pretense toward being one, as one can be accused at 20. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a popular TV show called “Thirty-Something”. It was popular because it offered those boomers born in the 1950s a theatre by which they could explore the meanings and responsibilities of that age. They could articulate their anxieties and deal with their issues, issues of having survived the 1960s and 1970s, and the threat of the Cold War which caused them to question their future and perhaps encouraged their “live for today” irresponsibility and selfishness. Not that I ever watched it, after all, it was for ‘grown-ups’ and I was much more interested at that point in the new Star Trek show, but this is the understanding I bring to it today, being aware through osmosis of its popularity. I was perhaps a bit more aware of it than I would have been because it had more resonance on me, since one of the characters was played by an actor who shared my name, Timothy Busfield. Born in 1957 he is now approaching 50. (Some Google-fact checking reveals to me that this show ran from 1987-1991, although I would have guessed before that it had ran around 1983/84. While memory may contextualize one’s life, how often are those memories inaccurate?)

So what being 30 means to me is that I am now the subject of “grown-up” shows. And this is something which is a bit hard to accept about oneself in our culture as youth-obsessed as it is. It is so difficult to conceptualize that one feels the need to type out thoughts about it. What it means is that after spending three decades experiencing the world for the first time in a variety of ways, one has never been taken seriously by older folk. “Oh you’re just a kid” is heard over and over again. I am not expected to contribute anything significant - which is precisely why youthful stars and those called genius are considered so remarkable. I feel like many of my peers have never had the opportunity to experience themselves as anything other than someone youthful and not to be taken seriously and so they embrace that, feeling adulthood to be boring and limiting to their sense of fun, a sense which can make them as devilishly selfish as those boomers who have earned our loathing for leaving us a legacy of improvishment.

There is something else happening to us though, those of us 30-something both present and new. It is the fact that many of us feel that our age expectancy is not the official 70 something years, but having witnessed our grandparents live into their 80s and 90s, and those many that have lived past 100 have given us the idea that we too shall probably live at least as long. I myself think I’ll have an 80th birthday one day, and hope for the 100th as well. But perhaps we’re the first generation that will make living past 110 normal, in which case, being 30 means we are still as young and adolescent as many of us feel. An example I once came across illustrates this: if the age span was extended toward 250 years, meaning one at 247 was biologically equivalent to a contemporary 97 year old, then it would follow logically that for a given individual, puberty would only occur in their 30s. They wouldn’t reach their adult equivalent of our present 30 until their mid 70s. Over and over again in my journals, throughout my 20s, I’ve hoped that I’ll have a life span that makes my present concerns and problems as irrelevant to who I will be in old age as the misery of needing to have my diaper changed is to me now - a problem I’m sure I experienced but have no memory of and completely irrelevant to my problems today.

Turning 30 means that as an adult, I can no longer expect the sympathy bestowed on the naive. I am expected to be worldly and knowledgeable; to have confidence and not have to rely on others. The fact that my bank account is perpetually empty and I currently live on credit cards, dependent on my parents for meals and a roof, is not evidence of some youthful misadventure and indiscretion. It only reflects that I made a bad choice when figuring out a career - I decided to be an artist, a field which expects much without offering a guaranteed salary. I find myself in the ironic position of being extremely well educated and intelligent, believing that knowledge and powers of mind to be a form of wealth in which I am well stocked yet I have been unable to find a market of exchange where I can trade portions of this commodity for cash, to be able to become financially independent and secure. My issues today centre on trying to become concsious of whatever unconscious behavior I engage in which allows me to be free to read and work on my art projects while beating myself up for not having a regular 9-5 job which would provide for a healthy bank account and the sense of financial freedom while killing my soul by not allowing me to flower in the particular sunlight I need, that of learning and expression. My issues today centre on acquiring the independence expected of my age.

My peers, bruised by their experiences of family, do not understand how I can still live at home with my increasingly aging parents, nor can they understand why my sister would chose this as well. The sad truth is that so many of us, children of the 1970s, have found themselves in situations where it is difficult for them to get a foothold in the job-place and to be paid a salary sufficient for them to lead independent lives. This is true throughout the Western world. The issues that hovered over my psychology as a man in his early 20s have been replaced by “when can I move out? When can I get a full time job?” to say nothing of what I’m supposed to feel as a graduate of an art school: “when to I get that big solo show?” which I’ve come to see as not worth desiring anymore. Art has proven itself a mistress and now it’s time to find a wife.

One wants to contribute to society in a way that allows at least a salary, and at most, a contribution to the betterment of the planet. The world as it is in 2004, when I find myself less than 6 months from my 30th birthday, is so fucked up. However, that has been true for generations of 29 year olds. A Frenchmen born in 1759 would have written the same thing as someone from Massachusetts born in 1746, to say nothing of those who were born in 1910. The revolutions of history have given us a perpetual beta world in which change is commonplace and the displeased seek to rectify out of boredom and anger with their circumstance.

I for one am confident that the problems of the world today are constructed out of the idiocy of gray men with gray ideas. The War on Terror is as artificial as the War on Drugs and will not be won by a generation who’s mindset was formed during the Cold War; Israel and the conflicts of the Middle East will not be pacified by a government born in the 1920s, nor a generation who considers democracy optional. A generation which came of age at a time when the introduction of environmental legislation was considered controversial is not equipped to deal with the issues of global warming.

The habit of declaring “War” on our societal inconveniences and problems which have everything to do with a economic inequality and insufficient education will not solve these perpetuated problems which have nothing to do with simply being criminal behavior. A generation of men who have done a bad job of integrating women’s perspectives and who find glory in combative approaches are doomed to be the thought of as pathetic leaders for the rest of time, enshrined in the embarrassed conversations that will go like this: “How could they?” “I know I know…”. We are left waiting for them to remove themselves from the scene so that we can begin to clean up their mess.

Television and print news perpetuate certain world problems as being relevant, while doing a bad job of informing us on other more devastating conditions (such as the economic development of the Third World, or Africa’s devastating plague which represents an cruel economic inhumanity on the part of the west) means that yes, today’s “problems” are solvable because they are artificially important. The biggest problems, such as the economic inequalities which have led to the chaos of Africa and the Middle East, require new paradigms and perspectives that at this point can only be offered by the young. The future belongs to those of us for whom women in the workplace, environmental concern, and social critique are ambient and as such we have never known a world without them. Those of us who are presently 30 something, will be leaders and mentors to the true inheritors of the future, that mass of young people outnumbering 30 and 40 something Gen X and known as Generation Y, who I am told, are confident of their ability to change the world for the better.

Rick Groen opens his review of King Arthur with a lament:

“May the gods protect us from modernists messing with our myths. First it was Troy, recasting Homer as a humanist and leaching all those annoying divinities right out of The Iliad. And now we have another gang of contemporaries performing a legend-ectomy on poor King Arthur. So what was fodder for everyone from Malory to Monty Python is thin gruel here. Sorry, but expect no power in the sword and no magic in the sorcerer — goodbye Excalibur, adieu Merlin. As for courtly romance, or chivalrous knights, or jagged love triangles, or even a certain place called Camelot, they apparently didn’t exist. Heavens, it’s almost enough to make you thank the Lord for Mel Gibson — at least he had a passion for The Passion, and treated his hero as more than just another frail man nailed to a workaday cross”. (The Globe and Mail 2004.07.07)

And once again, I am stunned by the zeitgeist which has stripped scripts of myth to begin with. As he said, first there was Troy, and to a certain extant The Passion, but even it strove to be realistic, using dialogue that was supposed to be Latin and Aramaic, although tongues not used to hearing it everyday didn’t do a good job pronouncing it (I mean, I don’t know Latin, but know enough phrases from here and there to know that it wasn’t pronounced properly).

Let’s grant that both films were recorded in 2003. By doing this we can say - human nature or what not - we can’t pretend that these are problems that lend themselves to the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same”. What we can say is that for the purpose of selling tickets and making lots of money - a vice the even Shakespeare was subject to - writers and producers have concocted costume dramas to explore the problems that face us a human beings at the turn of the 21st Century. And what both Troy, The Passion, and King Arthur show is an attempt to link our problems with a past now dissolved under education, plastic, and the inevitable gains of a thousand years of culture. But to tune it to today’s audience, they have made it atheistic and as realistic as they thought best. What this shows us is that today’s people are historically sophisticated enough to want to experience things as they may have happened, and that for the most part, we’re a secular population. However, this last point also lends itself as to why these films - Bruckheimer’s record - are heavy on battles and violence; because that sells well. A film heavy on dialogue and character development doesn’t translate well, but if you want to open this film in foreign markets - which lend themselves to the idea of an inconsistent education (what they teach kids in France ain’t what they teach kids in the inner city of the United States, to say nothing of what is taught in non-Western markets) you make a movie that strips out the cultural referent of religion and that goes for the ‘wow’ of spectacular violence.

Having gotten that out of the way, I want to address critics who are lamenting the lack of fairy-tale, to something we already well know. (An addition to the above paragraph would be: by creating a new version of a tired tale - something even Shakespeare was subject to as well - you create a new demand by the market to experience it).

What the reviews of King Arthur are failing to acknowledge - for no other reason than the apparent ignorance of the critics (otherwise I feel they should clarify their criticism with this knowledge) is that any one who has looked into this story knows, it was made up in the late Medieval Era, and further, was made up as Kingly Propaganda. It would be as if the President of the United States, seeking to assert a dictatorship, had someone write a story connecting his bloodline to the throne of England, and somehow made it seem that the Revolutionary War ended in a treaty of peace with a country later renamed Airstrip One. Playing loose with the facts, and knowing full well that the public is probably ignorant of those facts to begin with - one could do this and convince many. (Critics of Michael Moore posit this is pretty much what he does to begin with).

We should be aware that the ‘fictionalization’ of history has for most centuries been exactly how that field was conducted. Based on hearsay and rumour, people would write down what they’d heard - and what they heard may have included heavy doses of speculation. An oral history got taken up by Homer and turned into the Illiad; Edward I, wanting to legitimize his reign, took up the oral history of Arthur and began the process that would lead to Malory. Fictional history has for centuries also served as ‘practical history’ that is, what most people are exposed to and use in their lives, to whatever extant that history proves useful. Shakespeare’s History Plays were not going to be cross-referenced and looked into by the 16th Century audiences. They paid their penny and left the theatre knowing more about the past then they had when they’d entered.

Having read these negative reviews, I was surprised by how good the movie actually was. By the end though, I was really sick of hearing the word “freedom” and it made me think that this - as King Arthur always has - was meant as Kingly Propaganda for the American’s war on terrorism, full of the bluster and bullshit that the terrorists are engaged on a war on freedom. But it also serves as a reminder that the Americans in Iraq are the Romans in Britain, and that the Woads are those chopping the heads off of the colonials.

Historians agree that King Arthur as we know him - sword in the stone and all that - was based on an historical figure. They think he was someone who united the Celtic tribes to fight against the colonial Saxons, a English Vergentorix. However, we cannot describe him as English at all, since English is what resulted from the mix of these two peoples - the Celtic inhabitants (represented in the film by the Woads) and the Saxon’s seeking new land and opportunities. Fifteen hundred years later, Northern Europe appears to be a socialist utopia, dreary weather producing a society that takes care of everyone and leaving them free to invent and market cellphones. But before technology came around to make life more bearable (centralized heating in the winter, refrigeration in the summer - you know, all those things that prevent a winter starvation) it was a hard life up there. No wonder the Saxons were later known as the Vikings. But whatever - what matters here is that the historical and archaeological record shows that in the 6th and 7th Centuries, Saxons were ‘invading’ or perhaps we should say, ‘liberating’ what we now call England and Wales, and that it is reasonable to assume that to counter the raping and pillaging the tribes gathered together under a leader to have great battles and what not. That leader most probably died in battle - which would further his memory - and for centuries his story would be told.

We are so used to the technologies of memory and the whims of hearsay we don’t put much thought into what that means. I would say that for one thing, the oral tradition was probably a bit more refined than ours, decimated by our recording devices. But corruption of the account must have slipped in, and the next thing you know you’re dealing with Ring-Around-the-Rosy. We all know how that nursery rhyme goes, but it takes some effort to learn that it’s inherited from the time of the Plague. A pocket full of posy was supposed to help, but in the end, it’s “ashes ashes … we all fall down”.

A population used to experiencing the simulacrum of the time on a screen may be a little taken aback by such a direct connection to a past that really happened. I’m amazed that Hollywood - and Jerry Brukheimer for christ’s sakes - wants to give us a version of the Arthur story as if ‘this is what really happened, what the legend is based on’. That Troy too would strip the gods and ‘the magic’ from the story I think is a good thing. I think that it’s the best thing. I question why anyone would want to watch fairy-tale razzle dazzle. Perhaps this is one of the better things that a twenty-five year investment in deconstructive theories has brought us; a willingness to explore source material, and an impatience with mystical nonsense. What can one learn from watching either film? One, that there are no gods and there is no magic - two important things that every one of us should resign ourselves too. Psychologists are busy trying to figure out why we’d ever believe in such nonsense to begin with, and while each of us perhaps has a personal story to tell on why Faith in whatever exists for them I think it’s much more important if we agree to ignore it in public. (My position is that while I may believe in such-and-such, and while I may attend a church/similar to congregate with other believers, I should acknowledge the strong possibility that such beliefs are delusions, and if I’m unwilling to do that, as is my right, than I should at least agree to disagree with atheists and accept the position that “For all intents and purposes, these things don’t exist”). That being accepted, we have to find solutions and positions based on the dirt of reality, something much more able to accept sculptural forces than ephemeral hocus-pocus. As the transaction goes, ‘You may believe in Shiva, and I may believe in Allah, but neither will help us get this water pump built, so let’s put that aside and focus on our human problems’.

King Arthur balances the role the Church had in education in the Dark Ages with their freakishness. This itself plays into a contemporary bigotry toward practicing Christians, but it is also a fair and historical representation. Arthur goes on about a Palagius, who teaches all people are born free and are imbued with free will. The Bishop sent to the Wall refuses to tell Arthur that Palagius had been deemed a heretic and been killed a year earlier, only concerned with using Arthur’s knights to rescue the Pope’s favorite nephew, born into a Church aristocracy wherein he is meant for the Papacy, rather than having to work for it. The Bishop clearly displays the power politics of the Church at that time. It is the official religion of the Empire, and it has begun it’s relationship with governance and power that will last for the next thousand years until cultural stagnation inspires interest in what will emerge from the territorial battles with Muslims - forgotten knowledge and learning. We live in a time where the Catholic Church has divested itself of political power, but Christianity still pollutes secular governance, especially in the United States.

In one scene, Lancelot tells Arthur that the world he believes in - one without wars - will never exist. This line seems to be there for our ears, in 2004. I’ve come to believe that conflict is inevitable, but we shouldn’t accept that about violence. We could achieve a world without war, but there will always be a need for negotiation. And while there is a certain acrobatic appreciation for this blood and swords stuff, it is far better to watch it knowing it’s fakery, rather than accepting a need for war.

The world as we know as it is human; it is made up of human problems. The war in Iraq is one of the latest manifestation of a human problem, and for many of us, it is only an abstract injustice. If I had to walk kilometres for water in Africa for day to day survival, I don’t think I’d give a shit about the Mid East. Sure, the idiots who brought us this newspaper-CNN-Fox News-CBC Newsworld war have dressed it up in religious rhetoric, but if there is one thing studying the history of the Popes shows, is that God is a convenient lieutenant to the ambition of vain-glory. Achilles resented being such an instrument to Agamemnon, an example which shows how often being human, or specifically, being a male human bent on achieving and maintaining status, involves getting others to the dirty work. Donald Trump may be the king of his castle, but I bet he hasn’t licked a stamp or cleaned a toilet in years.

We need to films like Troy and now King Arthur to remind us that all we have is our humanity, and that the problems humans face are consistent with a human nature which our culture hasn’t dealt with. Some would say that myths were the narrative technology by which certain aspects of our nature were tamed; I would say that such technology is obsolete and now ineffective. We can’t return to anything, we can only acknowledge that each one of us is capable of great good things and great evil things, and being aware of precedents, examples from the past, is perhaps the only safeguard we have. Men will seek status and kill; other men will be the instruments of this action; others will be disgusted by it; a poet will be entranced enough to tell it to others, and as always, children will be eager to hear the stories that add that much more the newness of the world.

Summer 2004 blossomed with memories of the 19th Century. Unlike previous Junes of the past hundred years, this one began with the Transit of Venus, that planet named after the Goddess of Love, one of those unremarkable astronomic phenomenon which seem really interesting but which don’t quite measure up to the thrill of television or internet porn. Writing in 1882, William Harkness stated,

“We are now on the eve of the second transit of a pair, after which there will be no other till the twenty-first century of our era has dawned upon the earth, and the June flowers are blooming in 2004. When the last transit season occurred the intellectual world was awakening from the slumber of ages, and that wondrous scientific activity which has led to our present advanced knowledge was just beginning. What will be the state of science when the next transit season arrives God only knows. Not even our children’s children will live to take part in the astronomy of that day. As for ourselves, we have to do with the present …”

That day, June 8th 2004, I did not witness the transit, but saw pictures of it by that science of which God only then knew - television and the internet.

Those words were written in December 1882, the previous February of which brought into the world a baby named James Joyce. Twenty-two years later, on June 10th 1904, he met a girl on the street and asked her out. A normal enough thing for any 22 year old to do. She agreed but stood him up, being unable to get off work that evening. He ran into her again and they rescheduled. Today we go out for dinner and movies; I can’t imagine what they did that night a century ago. But we do know that at some point, down by an abandoned pier, she gave him a handjob that blew his mind and tied him to her for life. It was June 16th, and for this reason, ten years later, Joyce used this date for his ambitious novel Ulysses. I’m taken with the idea that as he came, Joyce had no conception that in a hundred years the English speaking world would not only know about this event, but would celebrate this day in his honour. This may have occurred to him later when he was composing the book, but as he gazed with gratitude and pleasure on the lovely Nora Barnacle, the world of a century from now was most certainly not on his mind.

The summer of 2004 was also when Andrea Fraser exhibited at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in New York. This show rose above the usual apathy to make it into the media because its masterpiece consisted of a sex video. As the press release stated:

“Untitled, 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission were to include a sexual encounter between Fraser and a collector, which would be recorded on videotape, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited, sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera and existing lighting. “

The galleries website shows us a still near the beginning of the video of Fraser in a red dress holding two glasses of white wine. Having not seen the work I cannot judge whether this amateur porn lives up to previous masterpieces of that genre of which I consider myself somewhat a connoisseur. But what drives me crazy is this:

“Untitled is a continuation of Fraser’s twenty-year examination of the relationships between artists and their patrons“.

Ok I understand.

“Known for her performances in the form of gallery tours and analyses of collecting by museums, corporate art institutions, and private collectors, Untitled shifts the focus of this investigation from the social and economic conditions of art to a much more personal terrain“.

I’ve never heard of her before now. Am I bad? But ok, I think understand what her practice consists of.

“The work raises issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange.”

What? I mean, she made a fucking sex video. That’s baloney.

Here’s the thing. I’m an artist, so I think I can say I know how the creative process works. I think I’ve had enough dealings with other artists to know that this is usually how it works for most of us. And my feeling is that she thought this guy was hot and wanted to do him; further, she had the wherewithal to frame it within the context of her practice and using a magic spell of theory was able to get her sextape on the wall. She didn’t even give it a title, which is really revealing. Unlike Paris Hilton, who was famous for her green-light blowjobs before her ignorance of Wal-Mart, this from the get-go was meant to be shown off, but it was also an excuse for Fraser to get laid. All well and good and I congratulate her on her cleverness and the originality of her seduction. But the work does not “raise ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships”. It’s a simple porn. It might raise these issues if you were an alien. Let’s ignore for a second how typically pathetic that press release is and just assume that all art galleries are currently engaged in the same bullshit, thinking this is what we - an audience of intelligent people - want and expect.

And that I think that’s what I finally understand - the art-world orients itself to non-humans. The texts that accompany art works are meant to explain them to dolphins, squid, elephants and ravens, or whatever intelligent non-human life is in outer space. To entertain the “questions raised” is to enter a state where we deny our common humanity for the cheap thrill of speaking of a sex video in terms of the sociological, something most likely done with others in a social situation to begin with, and something that has been done to death already to no apparent end.

A conversation is afterall the transfer of things in my head into yours, ephemeral ideas rather than genetic material encased in goop, as is transferred during sex. What Fraser’s video shows, undoubtedly, is the limited repertoire of the sex act itself. I’m guessing here, but I have a feeling that the missionary position features more prominently than it should. If she were really familiar with this genre, it would proceed thus: she gives him head, he gives it to her. They then engage in intercourse, which can begin missionary, but than becomes doggie style and then moves on to butterfly. Anal sex usually occurs at this point, but that’s usually left to the professionals, as amateurs are far more mundane and stick with vaginal. Eventually he comes on her face.

We’re taught that voyeurism is wrong but I don’t really see why, given that it’s put up there for our consumption. Like meat, once it’s dead you might as well eat it. The problem in both cases is in the creation. I think it’s wrong to treat animals as another product, and I’m willing to accept that there are big problems with the creation of pornography, but all the stuff I’ve ever seen as appeared to be harmless to both parties, and further, both sexes appeared to enjoy their job. How many of us can say the same?

The next time I’m down by the pier with a hot girl, who unzips my pants and is about to create 22nd Century literature, I’ll stop her to raise questions about interpersonal exchange. Perhaps this would be entirely appropriate. Should we start treating the theoretical discourse as a form of sex then? The same old same old, going through the same motions and the same arguments, over and over again until the end of time or at least until the next Dark Ages. I mean, is this why such intellectual deceit has survived this long?

For some reason, watching folk going through the same sexual motions isn’t quite as boring as listening to folk go through the same motions with regard to theory. Theory is a magic spell whose power diminishes with overuse. “Abracadabra you are now a rabbit!” is the same as “You’re sex-act questions issues regarding the ethical and consensual terms of interpersonal relationships as well as the contractual terms of economic exchange!” The same way a string of words recontextulaizes and object or a situation into magic, another string of words lends something pedestrian an air of respectability and intellectualism. But a duck is still duck, even if we call it Anas platyrhynchos. ‘Abracadabra’ can be a special word to children, but to adults it’s most likely to be associated with the Steve Miller Band.

I would say that because the act of sex is embedded in our genes, we are not programmed to find it or the acts that accompany it boring. Experience shows that there is a predictable payoff of pleasure, and this pop in our minds is that which creates those actions to begin with. We are not engaged in the same thing with a theoretical discourse. We are not driven to say and do things because we know intuitively that there’s a bubble of pleasure at the end, the argument won, the cigarette reached for, the slow squinting sigh. This is true for me at least, but I’ll grant there are probably people out there who get off on intellectualism. Won arguments might be orgasmic for some, but I find it so much fluff, words lost on the wind, no more memorable than any other walk by the pier with a conservative girl.

So, my conclusion is this. Theory is predictably used to recontextualize the banal - including sex acts - to make them seem far more significant than they are. It is written by folk who have no interest in addressing real human beings who have real experiences from which to draw and analyze situations. It assumes an audience ignorant of real life, and thus tries to tell us something we already know in an alternative language, which in the end simply insults our intelligence. But like Magic, where a string of nonsensical gibberish is playfully used to transform something - most often the surrounding context - artspeak attempts to transform the banal into something deserving of intellectual consideration; but fails since, as I said, it appeals only to the intellects of non-human life forms, or, as is the case, those among us willing to suspend that part of our knowledge that comes from the real world. However, I’ll grant that the persistence of this might mean that like a sex act, the limited repertoire of ideas and motions have an intrinsic value which account for the lack of innovation therein, and why enough people are willing to suspend their real-world knowledge to engage in a ‘discourse’ at this level.

Parks Canada or the Technonaissance?

The Khyber, 10 July - 5 August 2001

I. Prelude -

A constructed geography.

How did I begin to think about what an idyllic landscape was? I am fond of springtime mud, since it reminds me of good times in the springs of my childhood. But I’m thinking of how cool it would have been to play in some of the landscapes of Ajax…that stream, that hill, seem perfect for imagined scenarios, playing soldier, playing castle, and yet, they are so unsuitable because of the pollution, because of the highways. They are fragments of a greater ideal

Where 22nd Century characters walk, and say,

“My, look at that stream, these lovely trees, this beautiful park”.

For my adult mind, where sci-fi has taken over the role once occupied by castles and forts, there is something “utopian” in the ways these parks are designed, and I think about how things like this, parks, the landscaping, in residential areas are built to last. (Although, unfortunately, it is conceivable, that they too could be plowed over one day for another high-rise).

These parks are beautiful, in the same way that Chinese social realist art is beautiful - well designed and executed, but undermined by a disturbing ideology. The parks are like IKEA furniture made with grass and trees. Here, it’s a human imposition upon nature, which is something that needs no human presence to function correctly.

The stream is now clear,

in this constructed geography.

The streams are now filthy. Every time I walk to the train down the street, I pass over a portion of the main stream that flows around here. Last September I saw a heron standing in it, which seemed out of place considering how polluted the stream is. Usually when I cross that bridge, I admire the slope of its hills and the flow of its water which reflect the perfect stage from which to play mediaeval scenes.

On the net I saw Florence Italy from the sky.

(http://www.vps.it/propart/fi1xc.jpg)

It too once had walls, but these have been absorbed by its own red-brick urban development. Could it be that in 500 years, historians will look back and talk about our time in a similar way?

It’s a comforting thought, to see the all of our creative energies, to look at all of the resources we use to construct art objects, like films, and TV shows, which future historians would look at without the hierarchies of High and Low that we use today, and they would marvel at this time period, when computers and cars and robots are new.

But at the same time, what are the chances that civilization has at least 500 more years to go, what with the way we are squandering our resources (for example, plastic comes from oil, oil is non renewable, and look at the waste plastic grocery bags represent)? In addition to the stockpile of nuclear weapons and the shortsightedness of the business and the political elite?

At least, if we go out, it’ll be on a high note, eh?

The technonaissance, or The Late Age of Capital.

The Late Age of Capital - I borrowed this term from an historian, who wrote a book called A Short History of the Future(1). The book is many things - a sci-fi novel, a projection of current trends, and an academic exploration of our current utopian ideas. In the book, the mid 21st Century is marked by the third world war. Nukes destroy the Northern Hemisphere. From the ashes of this capitalist civilization, a new socialist world government arises [Utopia # 2] whose economic philosophy is anti-capitalist along the lines of: Never again will we allow the world to become so crappy by allowing short sighted profiteers to override human concerns.

The early days of plastics

I was going to the Royal Ontario Museum a lot last year. I had seen the movie Gladiator and was struck by certain aspects of it that clashed with the world as I knew it today. Especially the line where Maximus tells the Emperor about how his child plays with wild ponies. I certainly wasn’t able to play with wild ponies as a child. This reminded me of our relentless desire to “tame” nature and the fact that we are driving so many animals to extinction, which is an immeasurable loss.

“Not: Don Boudria. Liberal House Leader slams the MP pay raise through in record time, the endangered-species bill still waiting four years after it was first introduced.”

-The Globe and Mail, Saturday 9 June 2001, page A5, Political Notebook Who’s Hot Who’s Not

One of the things that struck me going through the rooms, was the lack of colour in the ancient world. We forget today the power of purple, and how expensive blue was for most of our collective human history. I’m standing there looking at clay pots and jars, everything is coloured in browns, and other earth-tones, and I think about growing up with coloured Tupperware, inexpensive and mass produced.

With a Nova Scotia Tuscany and an Ontario Rome.

Let’s not kid ourselves. New York is the place to be an artist in North America. It is the “capital of the world” as many have said. But I was struck while living in Halifax with how vibrant the artistic culture was, and how so many things my fellow art students were doing seemed to me to be just as cool as the stuff I was reading about it Artforum. But the media structures are set up in such a way so that only when you read about something or see it on TV, only when it is reproduced in the media, does it become “legitimized”.

While I was growing up in southwestern Nova Scotia, I developed an interest in Leonardo da Vinci, and subsequently, an interest in the Renaissance. You could say that I am guilty of wanting to live during that time, sentenced to a desire to at least visit it (using the latest in time machine technology), how I’d love to meet Da Vinci and Michalanglo. I am also fascinated by how they have ceased to be human and are now characters in a greater metanarrative told by our Western Civilization, examples of the “artistic genius” as well as the “great dead white European male”.

But growing in up Nova Scotia, one is confronted with hype at an early age. “Nova Scotia, Canada’s Ocean Playground”. We’re all sailors, we all love sailboats and all of our ancestors smoked pipes, wore yellow sou’westers and said “argh”. I am frustrated that the contemporary artistic culture in Halifax is ignored in favor of folk art. I came to think of Nova Scotia as being somewhat like Tuscany in the 15th Century and Halifax as it Florence - the common rurality, the milky light vs. the Tuscan haze, and how people now as then, and all over the world for that matter, come to the city to do business and to be part of culture as a whole. They come to Halifax to study and live out the university student lifestyle. But then, they leave. During the Renaissance, Florentine artists like Michealangelo left to go to Rome, where there was opportunity to work for Pope Julius II.

I probably should have written, New York Rome…

Red brick homes

Part of the fascination with the suburban landscape began while walking, especially the walk up the hill when I wanted to browse in Chapters. These subdivisions are homogenized by style and by substance, a reddish brick that reminded me of photographs of Tuscany and Florence.

Behind walls - made of wood, designed to keep out the highway noise, like cellular walls bordering the capillaries and the arteries.

In addition, they are surrounded by fences, which exist for a variety of purposes - to demarcate territory, for security, but also, in some cases, to help baffle the noise of the traffic. And the traffic in itself is fascinating.

It’s a fractal - the microcosm of an organism in the macro scale. Blood cells carry oxygen to the cells and the organs, and here on the 401, cars carry information, in the form of people, to the organizations - corporations, libraries, art galleries, museums, sporting events. They rest in homes, which are like individual cells. One day, the city as organism will say, “Within each home is a computer, containing the codes that make us up….”

II. Parks Canada -

For a long time now I have been interested in how the future would look upon the present. Perhaps this is because of my upbringing, my education, having gone on field trips to Port Royal and visiting Louisberg on family vacations, as well as coming to art through the study of the Renaissance. My education taught me the connection between history and the objects people leave behind. This was further developed while at university, when I studied some archaeology, before going to art school.

I remember walking through the streets of Halifax early in the morning, especially one time in June of 1998, when I was coming home from Tim Horton’s and walking along Birmingham Street. It was around 5.30am and I was struck then by the silence, the emptiness, the cars parked and still, and yet, because of the time of year, it was daylight. It felt like our historical villages, like Louisberg, Fort Anne, Port Royal, and Citadel Hill; these so called “authentic” re-creations, which are distinctly underpopulated and underdeveloped. The animators dress in “period costume” and yet, I imagine that no clothing from that time was so clean or so well made. But it doesn’t matter - it’s all engineered to suggest, to awaken a spark of imagination that will ignite a fuse which in turn, will violate the laws of time and allow one to experience the only form of time travel we know. It’s about helping us conceive of a time when soft drinks and automobiles did not exist.

But what about using that spark to travel forward in time?

“In this year of 1999, we have essentially arrived in the future that writers and films have dreamed of since the birth of science fiction, and so our science fiction is now turning its eye either inwardly to the present or to new visions of the 21st century built upon what we know now.” (2)

I have always been interested in the future as it has been depicted in the media. While growing up I regularly became a fan of whatever TV show had some basis in the future, which usually involved the 21st Century. (3) In moving to Toronto, I was partially interested in living in a world that William Gibson described in his novels, a world where ecocide has been pursued until concrete and technology are all that humanity seems to ever have known.(4) I wanted to ride its trains - trains are so sci-fi - and I wanted to look at “urbanity”, in a context that was different from what I had known in Halifax. But my fascination with seeing a fiction as a reality soon disappeared as the illness of it all became apparent - the fact that it is ecocidal, which is turn, translates eventually into being suicidal.

And so, as I drove around Ajax, loathing its car friendly design over the pedestrian, the seeming insane joy at development, and the confirmation of certain suburb stereotypes (the popularity of SUV’s for instance) I began to think, this is all an historicism. These things will not last.

Pretending then, to see this area as a Parks Canada historical recreation of what we call urban sprawl today, and my neighbors as actors of “what life was like in a consumerist capitalist culture”. But also seeing it as a moment in time, the turn of the 21st Century, the time when our technology is still fresh on the scene, the period of the “birth of technology” and thus, the technonaissance. Such a time has its own aesthetic characteristics, which I am interested in.

III. The Present, The Technonaissance

What are today’s aesthetic characteristics? On some of the invites the words were cut off at the edge. At first, this kind of bothered me, but then I remembered when I used to do that on purpose, inspired by Raygun magazine’s notorious layouts…it’s what Heidegger pointed out with the nature of being, that only when something is broken does its being reveal itself. Broken text reminds you that you’re reading - that you’re only looking at symbols.

The text broken by the deckled edge, a roughness we plow under, a weed we spray Roundup on. Why I am bothered that some of the text is imperfect? Because it doesn’t correspond to manicured lawns?

I remember thinking that Raygun expressed well the chaos of today, how everything is dissolving into subgenera and fractals of everything else, cohesion provided only by the media, the frame of the TV or the computer screen. But I don’t think about that so much anymore. I just see it now as a celebrity obsessed childish culture, an idiot’s paradise where thoughts and ideas are rejected in favor of the new and the shiny, and we are taught to consume like fat friars in medieval parodies, taking one bite out of the chicken leg before tossing it behind their shoulder, moving one to take one bite out of the apple before it too gets thrown away. This food, that the peasants worked so hard to produce…

And where do fat friars live today?

A park for tourists, to experience an idiot’s paradise in an enlightened future?

“It’s everywhere. Canadian politicians buy trendy eyewear. Al Gore is advised by Naomi Wolf to wear earth tones. BBC World runs a segment on Brazilian show salesmen having their buttocks enlarged with silicone. Men’s Health instructs their readers to wear, in this order: leather, stiff collars, turtlenecks, unvented jackets, untucked shirts, non-pastels, layers, colour combinations, monochromes, contrasting collars and clothes that are too big. The underlying message is ‘You’re just not good enough.’ Fixing your flawed self will cost money. That’s the whole point of articles like that: They damage self worth and then rebuild it by means of expensive accoutrements urged on by the magazines advertisers’.” (5)- The Globe and Mail, Saturday 23 June 2001

That the whole point of the constructed geography. Nature by itself just isn’t good enough. We have to damage its intrinsic value, destroy what’s there, to rebuild it in the image that suits the bourgeois demographic. And given that such a suburban environment typifies so well this day and age, is it not conceivable that in two hundred years, Parks Canada (if it still exists) will reconstruct one and fill it with animators having back yard barbecues, wearing flip flops and drinking beer? They’ll make a big show about going to the grocery store in an SUV.

These reconstructed parks, what are they other than the commodification of the landscape? What then is tourism other than the commodification of geography? These parks are about rebuilding, recreating, using “authentic” techniques, in order to make the illusion as real as possible. But of course, some things are not reproduced, like having the animators toss chamber pots out the windows in the morning. The smell of these parks is our smell. Side rooms that would have originally been storage closets or the like now contain porcelain toilets and sinks. The modern bathroom is a convenience that none want to do without, even for the sake of the past.

And these subdivisions, so uniform in appearance, aren’t they not the result of a plan, of a developer plowing under a farmer’s field, once used to grow food, so that they can build crescents and cul-de-sacs, commodify the landscape by turning it into real estate? And this real estate, with its parks that exist pragmatically as soccer fields and baseball diamonds - what does that say about the demographic that they imagine want to live in a suburb? They don’t preserve grasslands for young artists to wander through and daydream, where they can find wildflowers or what-nots. No, they impose the order of the sporting event; “this field exists so that boys can learn patriarchal games” - so that they learn the value of cooperating in order to compete, rather than to make the world a more livable place.

“In 2019, at a special closed high-level session in its Zurich world headquarters, the GTC approved a high-priority project to design the “perfect” man and woman. Shielded from public discussion, the GTC directors decided that perfection included not only lofty intelligence but also a ruthless competitive instinct and a dollop of energizing paranoia”. (Wagar 1999:93)

The only possibility for hope in such a world is to play the time travelling historian. The works in this show, photographs and drawings, are evidence, are explorations and illustrations of ideas, and they are an attempt to route out the fascinating sci-fi elements of this environment, hoping that one day, it will be a part of history.

Timothy Comeau

June 2001

What has caused humanity to be so successful? Why, it is not the exploitation of resources, the treatment of our surroundings as a room full of tools? Whereas we have reserved certain elements of our environment for reverence, for the most part, we have treated our environment, and fellow creatures, both human and nonhuman, as a means towards an end. Our religious philosophies have created a reverence for certain aspects of existence, however, in this time and place, such reverence is more of a tradition, or even, a delusion, since it is rarely respected in “the everyday world”.

It is my ever-growing belief, (if I may borrow from Judeo-Christian theology) that far from being a species favored and created by God, it would almost seem that humans were created by the Devil, to thwart God’s majesty. For, wherever humans go, destruction and death follow. The ancient creatures of the Ice Age, are extinct, and it makes sense to assume that it was by over hunting. (That in itself is revealing, that we can assume over hunting as a cause of extinction). Of course, science would like to find some other cause, to deflect the guilt that suggests human-causation. As well, of all the other hominid species, we are the only one left. There is the suggestion of wars in our ancient past, a possilbility that the Neanderthals were killed off by Homo sapiens sapiens, (I even harbour the pet theory that our stories of ogres and trolls are nothing more than a diluted form of oral history of interactions with the Neanderthals and the other species of our common hominid past) and then the centuries, no, millennia, of empire building and life that was “nasty, brutish, and short”. It seems easy to see Humans as fundamentally evil creatures, due to a defect of consciousness, or perhaps due to our ability to rationalize any absurdity.

The Nazis were able to rationalize the murder of the Jews by thinking of them as vermin. There is the famous example the Auschitz commandant’s wife who had a lampshade made of the tattooed skin of one of the victims. How is this any different from a fur coat? Isn’t it harder today to see life, especially human life, in terms of Reverence and the Sacred? Is it not true that what we object to is not the killing of a human being, rather, we object to the killing of the human form. If a life form is a quadruped, its life is meaningless, and its death is given meaning by the use we, as bipeds, will put it too. We deny the emotions and intelligence of animals, while we assume that any animal of the human form has the potential for a meaningful life. Some of us oppose abortions and capital punishment, while treating our children to Macdonald’s hamburgers. Evidence for the intelligence of animals is treated with skepticism, while the intelligence of humans is always seen as a given. If you could measure the IQ of a an cow, and it was found to be the equivalent of that of a 12 year old human, would we still be so comfortable wearing it’s skin or eating it’s muscle, or would we suddenly allow for the consumption of children? Of course, we all know the answer. We continue to spoil our kids and deny that animals have consciousness. There would be some other group brought in, funded by the meat industry or the government, who would search through the procedure of measurement with a fine toothcomb in order to disprove the result. The animal must remain a tool for our use. We must continue to eat and experiment on the flesh of those who do not share our form.

How can we not witness the bulldozers and the pits, the carcasses of “livestock” in Europe, massacred for having sores on their mouths and feet, burned and buried en masse, and not think of those black and white films from the liberated concentration camps? Why is one seen with shame and horror and the other, these films of burning cattle, are seen only as unfortunate? What I am saying is that it is as wrong to murder cows for having blisters as it is to murder humans for being jewish. And the fact that no one cares, that the PETA folk aren’t in the news and in the streets raising hell and chastising us for our complancey, is revealing of the human character, to dismiss the value of life as irrelevant. They have said repeatedly, that the “foot and mouth disease” is not contagious to humans, and that the animals are murdered as a trade measure, since being sick, they cannot put on weight as easily, and their market value declines.

In little under a month, protestors will gather in Quebec City to protest the Free Trade of the Americas proposition. One of their fundamental claims is that market values ignore human values. Is this horror in Europe not an example? We kill them because their market value has become worthless. And when we think of one of the most famous example of the despicable genre of Holocaust film, Schindler’s List, how was it that the Jews were saved? By being a cheap form of human capital. By using Jews in his factory, Schindler was able to cut costs and - most importantly for the film and for his place in history - keep them alive. One of the early scenes in the film shows the Jews exchanging market information - where to find a shirt and what not. Here is an abominable message, tres au courant for our age. That the value of a human life is only concurrent with what they can create for a market. That whole monstrous concept of “human capital” is the only measure of a life’s value.

In another Speilberg film, Saving Private Ryan, there was a revealing line, to the effect that “this fella better find the cure for cancer or something…”. At the end of the movie, we learn that no, he didn’t find the cure for cancer, he apparently led an average life, had a wife and kids and grandkids, and he asks with tears, was their sacrifice worth it? Of course his wife answers yes, and his proud kids and grandkids hug him, and the American flag flies proudly, but sadly, bleached out into transparency to evoke that emotional semiotic. In God they trust. Life has value in and of itself. Of course, such lesson is learned only after watching male bodies blown to pieces for two hours. Human life, we are taught through these media messages, is only valuable in terms of “human capital”, and that killing is fine, as long as you are not killing animals that are shaped in the human form, but even that’s okay if they are wearing the wrong uniform and live in the wrong country.

Saying this, however, I imagine that many will ask about those humans who are not of the form, the deformed and disabled. What I mean by human form is what is self-evident. We never confuse a member of our species with any other. We know what the template is. The fact that we describe some people as deformed or disabled reveals our acknowledgement of a template. And this template is what I am referring to. This template we are taught, is sacred, or at least, is illegal to mess with. The fact that our genetic research threatens that taboo, is a cause for “ethical” concern. This ethical concern could quite easily be maneuvered around - one way is to rationalize the human in terms of the animal. It is amazing to me that such a thing as ethics still exists within the context of the discourse, that there is even such a field as bioethics, given the ease at which we justify the moral violations which are narrated for us everyday on television and in popular songs.

One of the easiest ways to get around these ethical concerns is to throw in the concept of art. This always raises the amoral shield that is the freedom of expression. Let us express ourselves through genetic manipulation, stem cell research, abortions and capital punishment. I will draw upon my education at an art school, point to the wall where the document which says I graduated with a Bachelor of Fine arts degree, and say, I am artist because this is so. Will any body challenge me? Will anybody say, “graduating from an art school doesn’t automatically make you an artist”? Will anybody say, “what makes you an artist is seeing the world is a different, enlightening way, than others”? No. I will go unchallenged, pointing to the paper, and use the authority that I supposedly have, to arrange for an execution as a means of expression. I could perhaps rely on the tradition of the readymade, and sign my name to the acts that Texas seems to love so much. Art critics will compare my work with the prints of Warhol, and judge me accordingly. But, under the freedom of expression, my murders will be constitutionally guaranteed.

Imagine. Such an act has already been imagined and described by David Bowie. In is 1995 album Outside, he published a short story describing a detective’s investigation of a millennial murder of an adolescent girl and the task of determining whether or not it was art. In his story, he brings up examples from post war art practices which incorporate violence, the most revealing, (and perhaps the most famous), being the Viennese Actionists. In 1966, Herman Nitch killed a sheep, crucified it, and rolled around in its organs. This was supposed to be an expression of some sort. But the questions that Bowie’s story raised, and which I have pondered ever since first reading that story in 1997, was, what is the difference between a sheep and a human? Why is it that the killing of this sheep goes unpunished by the law, whereas such an act, as described by Bowie, performed on human, would not only by prosecuted, but would most likely be the most famous murder case in the world? Growing up in a rural area, I remember witnessing my friend’s father “getting rid” of the family cat with his revolver, and years later, while I was hunting in the forest, finding the skeletal remains, poking through a plastic bag, of a dog which had been similarly disposed of. Here I was, with a shotgun in my hands, engaging in an activity of sanctioned murder, finding the body of a victim that had no rights to medicare or an old age home, but was simply “disposed” of.

And I have to admit that I am no saint. My shoes are made of a cow’s skin. I eat meat. And no one is going to persecute me for it. Of course, I am open to the accusation of being a hypocrite. Yes, that’s true. Here I am, rationalizing that it is wrong to live this way, to eat meat knowing full well it is a form of murder, to watch the bodies of cows and sheep burning in the English country side, and yet, feeling as guiltless as anyone else. And in that, I am a fully contemporary human being well brought up and indoctrinated into the values of my society. In acknowledging the wrongs, while being complacent, to view those who eliminate animal products from their lifestyles and diets as some kind of “fringe” group, I am as monstrous and despicable as everybody else, and yet, I can see no great change coming to humanity anytime soon. As piece of human capital, as employees, to rebel against this fundamental societal philosophy would destroy our market value, and then perhaps, we might end up burning in piles on the countryside.

Found within the opening pages of the February 1998 WorkbookThe beginnings of my manifesto, what I am doing, what my themes are.I. Doodles
You could say it began with Jerusalem, the drawing I did in 1994 and exhibited at Saint Mary’s. I could say that I was subconsciously aware of the stick figure as being a legitimate art technique, but being subconscious, it was bellow the surface. I was interested in learning to draw like Picasso - I didn’t pursue stick figures then.

I purchased Radiohead’s The Bends in October of that year. It had been released the previous spring. It contained stick figure scrawls of Stanley Donwood and Thom York. I looked with interest at first, but saw only “doodles” and left it. I did not then see it as art.

In December 1996 I was channel surfing and stopped briefly at the New Music, when they were interviewing k.d. lang. She picked up Basquiat Drawings (1990) and said how much she liked a particular drawing, ‘Plaid Plaid Plaid’ and commented that this explained lyrics to her. A few weeks later Dad surprised me by bringing this book home, which he found for $3.99.

This book inspired me as set me trying to incorporate text and imagery. That was in January 1997.

In June 1997, Radiohead released Ok Computer. Again there was the drawings of Stanley Donwood. I admired the design but again, thought little of it.

Then that September, I was walking through the halls of NSCAD when some signage drawn up by Tullis Rose caught my eye. My immediate thought was of OK Computer. Here were the sketches! Here was the same concept. This made me think that there was something more to these mere doodles.

Later, the same month, Randy Laybourne exhibited a collection of his drawings. Some where done spontaneously and shared that doodle quality.

In November, early November, this all coalesced and I collected Tullis’ ads where I could still find them. I copied out the drawings from the Radiohead CD booklets. Jessica Jones, who was a fellow student in Interim Painting, left some sketches laying around, on black paper done with chalk. The stick figures - I asked her for it but she wouldn’t part with them.

I sat out to understand the doodle. I began drawing doodles. And my tag in October which began as simple graffiti, but struck me for being so self-contained. (Five year old draw like that - every man is an artist -who drew this at age 5? Because I was drawing it at age 22).

Melinda gave us an assignment, to paint outdoors. She gave us a list of artists we might want to refer too. Basqiuat came up. I asked he why he was on the list. She said because he was a good urban artist, how he had responded to his city.

I bought two drawings from Randy. I doodled like crazy, trying to understand, and to find that which I liked in other’s in my own. Now, I see connections between Basquiat and Donwood, the other night finally recognizing the symbol from Henry Dreyfuss’ Symbol Sourcebook. Basquiat used some symbols from this book and so did Donwood.

• Every man an artist - Life as art as being an organizer, a way of creating order in Postmodern fragmentation and disorder.
• The importance of influencing others since we are all accumulations.

The appeal of the doodle is represented in the primacy nature of it - it’s simplicity, spontaneity, and what the Beats codified as “first thought best thought” . My own experience has show me that first thought best thought creates art that is inspired and caries that mark. There is no fear of the contrived. However, not all first thoughts are golden, and first thoughts often reside amongst the cultural cliches. First thought with awareness then.

And of course, the fact that anybody can do it.

II. Everyone an artist
Apparently it was Joseph Beuys who came up with that phrasing. But the idea isn’t that new or original. In 1966’s Creative Writer, a series of talks given on CBC’s radio program Ideas, the Canadian poet Earl Birney said:

“Some psychologists say, and I agree with them, that creativity is the sense of the drive to find new things, explore, discover, is basic to the human animal. I think all children who aren’t born into absolute idiocy are artistically creative. With a favorable kind of environment and education, most of them, I suspect, grow up retaining some creative powers as men and women. But there’s a strong urge to conform, to become dependent on others, to accept instruction, guidance, doctrine, to stop really thinking, or even feeling, for one’s self. Artists are people who resist this conforming pressure, at least with part of their energies.”

This is what Joseph Beuys refereed to - this basic factor is creativity, that we all create constantly. Beuys put it this way:Thinking Forms - how we mould our thoughts or Spoken Forms - how we shape our thoughts into words or Social Sculpture - how we live: Sculpture as an evolutionary process; everyone an Artist. Thorsten Scheer, on the website http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~schoenfe/ep/ep963.html expands on this.

“Beuys’ plastic theory is not about plastic/sculpture in the traditional sense. It’s about form. In Beuys’ opinion, the central question of art is the question for the most suitable form. This means that _everything_ is a question of art, because _everything_ has to have a certain form: politics, communication, TV sets, words, e-mails… All you can imagine. But the question for the most suitable form does usually not occur until one has to work with real material. However, at first, there is a thought, an idea. The process to create a sculpture therefore emerges right the moment you get an idea. Ideas have to be shaped, constructed, put into form, just like material works. […] Living on this planet, in a society, _everything_ you do, every idea you have, all the stuff you create, every conversation you have (sending mail to Athena, too) shifts the state of the environment, creates form - therefore is sculpture..! You are responsible - no way out.

So take your life as a work of art with regard to society - the Social Sculpture.” This idea, that we are constantly responsible for everything we do, and that all acts are creative and thus artistic acts, is the beginning of my thoughts on art as an almost religious experience, capable of providing unity to life.

Everyone an artist though - I do not want to see every citizen of the world have a one man show. I believe that every human is a creative creature, as Earle Birney wrote. However, we are not all artists. Some of us are businessmen. Some of us are tradesmen. We are all born with different talents and interests. Artists are born. If you feel yourself to be athlete, then you are. This basic fact that we are all born different assures us that artists will have a place and that their gifts have a place. However, the nature of art changes and the nature of the artist changes. The nature of art must change and is changing.

In this new world I do not know what place the gallery has. This gallery, is a graveyard of ideas, a museum of trends, a sanctuary for ivory tower pansies.

III. Art Itself
Art itself - what is art? Art is the product of the artist. It is the by-product of the creative act. The creative act is an exploration, an attempt to understand. The creative act in the artist arises out of the need to understand something. Some idea ignites curiosity, desire, obsession. You want to wrap your brain around something. To od this, you reach out, explore a medium. Thought goes from ephemeral interior winds to physical manipulations of materials. The art object thus becomes a record of physic energies - a record and report by the artist. It is a hard copy of thought not in the usual word form, but in the form of shapes.

So this is what art is. Art is also that which enriches your experience, it is life affirming, it is beautiful. Much historical thought has gone into trying to define two things - God and Art. What is hard to define in both perhaps is the concept of beauty. It is beauty which is so subjective and which confuses the idea of what art is. Art as the totality of experience. The role of the artist is to affirm life. To show people what they are capable of.