Art's Army of Naked Emperors

Look here. I am angry and I will share with you why I am angry. And before I start, please forgive some obvious hypocrisies...

There is a thing called First Thursdays, which in art circles means basically you may go and see a preview of some perversion or another, and drink wine that is meant to be free, but where they insist on you coughing up the overpriced "recommended donation" anyway. And that is the embodiment of exactly what's wrong with art today- not that there hasn't been a reckoning overdue for the best part of half a Century, mind.

Sorry I started at the end, as usual. BASICALLY what I have seen at these exhibitions is laughable and yet very, very sad. It's not the Shoreditch whores who amble around hoping someone will notice how desperately irreplaceable they are in their individuality, nor the garish creature that stalked attention dressed up as a Lichtenstein painting at one preview (I'm ashamed that I actually RAN FROM IT. But it was terrifying and I am very easily unsettled).
It's what's displayed and lauded there, mainly the work of young art "students"- self indulgent tripe they manage to evacuate from themselves. I also had a walk around Teal's uni and was a bit taken aback at the fact that the entire building sacrificed to their "creativity" was littered with scrawled drawings of vaginas and crap made out of corks. I had a particularly tepid exchange with some inadequate, who told me that her "piece" (scribbles on the wall of a real life office, complete with post-its and magazines hung up for no reason whatsoever) was all about "making something out of nothing". Erm...well done there. You successfully managed to give a rudimentary description of every piece of art ever made, and tar it with your own particular brand of MORON. When I drew attention to the fact that it was a bit sub par, really, she answered "it's not about being good or bad". What a way to take criticism. Instead of trying to face up to failure she just goes on and undermines an entire institution of evaluation necessary to make her choice of metier even possible. I told her this, but I think she was too baffled by the fact that someone had actually told her the thing she made was shit to even defend herself properly. It may eveb have been a joke. Yes! It was all a lovely joke and I can now move on and be happy and ignore the whole debate it sparked in my mind about modern art and the damned naked Emperor.

It is such people with not even the hope of a grasp about what they are doing who make up the "art" that's floating about these days. Every time I hear of some new contraption I hang my head in despair. Why, in the name of Duchamp (pun intended), are these people allowed the arrogance to assume that whatever thought they dress up in ridiculous deserves the title of art? If Moliere was right and the "gentleman should beware of the itch to write" then those disillusioned children definitely need to beware the itch to make just to avoid certain templates society has laid out for them. Responsibility can kill, or rather the means you choose to avoid it. Just ask Lautrec! They turn themselves into a stereotype just to fuel their own narcissism. Really it's a wider problem in our society, like Twitter it is a manifestation of the self-obsession that doesn't let us concentrate and engage with anything properly any more.

There have been interesting concepts and ideas recently perhaps, and some are intelligent I'm sure, but what do they have to add to the symptoms of value in the human condition? The humanity, creativity and slow progress to something that could eventually evolve to be perfection? Why have we stopped looking for that and now serve up period blood stained bedsheets in place of some kind of thing that we could find solace and hope in? Why are they all so focused on their would-be disestablishmentarianist (ha!four more letters and that would have been the longest word in the dictionary! WOO!) banality that they don't realise they have stuck themselves in a rut in one niche of one genre of art that every other medium of communication got out of already! But even if you ignore all my sentimental babble and brush it off with "o but you don't understand it..." (I could murder at the arrogance in that line) you still can't explain away the fact that all the things I see/hear of/google in the way of modern art, apart from the ones that are a direct pastiche from the great masters perhaps, are UGLY. And worse than that, UGLY ON PURPOSE.

I'm not saying that the pursuit of ideal aesthetics should be the only thing one considers when on the art quest- rather it should maybe be the incarceration of a zeitgeist in one medium or another. Or even better, a zeitgeist yet to come.

For example; I'm sure it is no coincidence that landscape painting hit it's climax in the 17th Century (in Europe, I mean) just before the general opinion turned against the pomp of the ruling classes and there began to be a serious clamouring for change and equality ie going back to rural basics. Or maybe how art was involved in bringing about the Russian revolution. See the Black Square by Kazimir Malevich. It's something I find personally to be stunning even though I think Rothko is a DOUCHE AND SHOULD DIE AGAIN, and some of his work appears to be practically identical to Malevich's. But the Black Square is so compelling because it was painted to pin down a feeling- one of apocalyptic hurricanes of change approaching. And now after all the slaughter and many more noteworthy historical happenings I can still look at that and be spooked by it. Though even through the terror of his dark prophecy, you can see the lighter cracks of a promising future in the oil. Goes without saying he was endlessly mocked for it, as the vogue at the time was brainlessly copying European portraiture and Baroque/Rococo styles apparently. But he said this "None of you will ever wander as far and as deep into the wilderness as I have, and there only can transformation take place. Rise up fools, and liberate yourself from the tyranny of objects!" Great man indeed.

I can't tell you what art is exactly, but I can tell you that it becomes it. Either when someone sees it for the first time or hundreds of years later with the educated eye of an art historian cast over it or something, but it does not start out that way. This is why artists should be rare and the making of true art should be a sacred kind of pursuit, because art colours our history and civilisation all kinds of shades, and it takes a heroic person to plod off into that wilderness. So artists, please! Make something valuable, touching and worth remembering, something that is POETRY to the current pretentious masturbations of art that are at best only witticisms to be spouted at some would-be intellectual dinner party. STEP UP TO THE MARK. If for nothing else, just to prove Wilde wrong: art IS useful.

Whip of Whimsy II

More of the whimsy and small picture: why in God's name is there an exhibition for DISPOSAL ie things that UCL has been hoarding in the museums but thinks it should get rid of? They give you some stickers upon entry and you have to ax something-either the soil samples or hippo skeleton, or the formaldehyde critters. Why can't we just go around hoarding in peace anymore? Hold on to all the things that seem so unimportant you wouldn't even give it a name until you don't have them anymore. Like being a fresher, or Barney the formaldehyde geko. Here's some food for thought: Get some stickers and put them on the things unworthy in your life, and I mean when pondering from a place of NO SENTIMENT. You'll end up with a toilet, knife, fork, possibly a spoon and some blue tack. Blue tack is a dirty, unsentimental fiend.



To Be Polite
You dissolve into sand and make a mess on the floor:
Breaking up with anyone is always the same
trying to pry
Blue tack off the wall
praying it won’t make a stain.
Then trying to tear up the pictures,
lonely memory keys.

Rip them down and pick
The lock-
Make a statement to that wall!
Show it how you roll your dice,
And how they sweat hidden in your fist.
Next time you won’t be the parrot and say it back,
You won’t be the “i do” or “the one” for
One summer or a smile.
Attack taxes less than your charade
(True it’s easy to make someone happy
When they are afraid,
But it’s always easiest to make
Someone miserable. Misery
pulls its own weight).

The Whip of Whimsy

O what a spur!
Let's say our favourite quotations are CARY GRANT or perhaps that our influences are Rilke AND Byron. Let's be facking random. Things that influence us are definitely not selected on the base of needing to promote yourself, though. Just a small side note. And if you do name them then they are doing a pretty poor job of influencing you.

(I'm saving that critique for some chump whose gig I will attend tonight. His "influences" on musical myspace read like the "Who's Who Of The Most Commonly Misused Geniuses By The Pseudo-Intellectual". A long title for a list, but then the list IS long. I intended to go dressed at Nietzsche to make him feel ridiculous, but as I can't find an ostentatious enough moustache I'm just going to have to go in some damnably ostentatious head attire.)

NB I wrote the above about 2 weeks ago and saved in draft, because, most of the time, I am confused. So the chump has been observed, mind-ridiculed, and I have now semi moved on. Although, upon occasion I do find myself wandering about my memory lane and chortling about it looking out of the bus windows. People tend to move away to a different seat when I start up that ol' mental deficiency. You know, SMILING. ON a BUS.

Anyway, the whip of whimsy. If I had to say what influenced me right now I would say probably Parsley, my basil plant on my kitchen window sill. He is one hideous plant, speckled with disease and discolouration, but he has a jungle going on in there. In his little universe/pot. And he made it all himself! That is truly inspiring. He is the plantification of a crack addict, and he has himself some mould, some animals (disgusting, but I allow them. They may provide amusement for Catty) and an odd kind of hateful symbiotic thing going on with Basil, the parsley plant who dwells next door to Parsley. Eventually they shall make the journey to the bin, but for now they are in their Eden on my window sill, blissfully unaware that the fact I can't use them in my culinary explorations will end them.

Sigh. I think I'm really roly-poling down the ladder of interest at an alarming rate here. Mostly I do have things to report, I just don't. I prefer sitting on the 134 and debating whether or not I kind of stabbed my whole romaticised notion of being 'a basement writer', a 'closet feeler', in the back by trying really hard recently to achieve a career in it/ go out there and trumpet it. I wanted desperately to be a broken, lonely, little Parsley, working in a shop and scribbling my poetry on ripped receipt paper stolen from the till.

How funny that you can just buy into adulthood like that- it's so easy to sell yourself these days; one padded CV, one clear goal, one splurge on some pleasing faux Cath Kidston coasters. Your mistake will manifest itself in conversations about some kak 'celebrity' such as Zac Affron or whoever,which earned me affected comments from Yellow, laden with the connotations that I have turned into something monstrous and superficial. ESPECIALLY when I threaten to pounce on the Friendly Fires with the intention of interviewing them for my newspaper The Sanctuary, as they were in the queue for a club behind us. Or Carl Barat, also recently spied. Monstrous definitely, but then why not believe in all that? It's not like there is anything else to believe in, and there is so much belief lying about that can be usurped by the asinine. Asinine is so hot right now.

So, basically, with a few ambitions I've really done that- within a week. But don't pretend you haven't noticed them around, the scenes that steer towards the tides that made me mad. I guess one problem is I just never saw the crime in how being can make you miss counting all the stars, while you have the chance. Your ONE CHANCE. I've spent myself occupied with the smaller picture.

An (Accusatory) Crayon To Tar

Response to the statement: (paraphrased) "you shall not be remunerated for your poem about "money" BUT you will receive pride for having been published" Yes. Very much paraphrased. It was a lot more concise than that.

A careless mirage of crayon on the tar

strikes me like a snake-

I forgot the forceful minds that took me here

Who told me to write about “money”

And offered me pride instead of “money”

And were ashamed they had no “money”

To wash away the creep of it.

I seldom reach the grain that drew the spark

Out from the ground.

I like to whittle the edges,

Make a picture and

Picture it through the sound-

A rainbow on asphalt maybe, or

A pear shaped like a child.

These things make me happy

When I fail at really going to town.

DID YOU KNOW that soon there will be baby-shaped pears for £5 at the local supermarket? The most recent addition to the novelty fruit market, if you believe in such a thing. That's what happens when the birds and the bees and the pears get bored and let us play at it for a while.

I think Bukowski would rape them.There has definitely been too much of him lately. A scene of unexpected debauched anal rape springs to mind, which I read with the best part of Blue's refined family in the room. I felt dirty and plagued. Women that book is called. Charles is making me less articulate, I can feel it. Nevermind winning by manymanymany points at Scrabble recently. I should like to play the him at my new invention FONETIC SCRABEL. Swords out, pistols at dusk.

Hail, Misanthrop!

My mum said to me today that she hates students because they have a feeling of superiority she cannot abide. There was a boy, years ago, who met her while visiting me here. He sat on our balcony and told her how "we are the elite" and that "where we have been we have been taught how to be it." My mum didnt really do school and worked and worked instead. She is someone now. But having a boy who had it all thrust at him from angles unknown to her drink himself stupid on her balcony, throw up in her toilet and pollute his mind under her roof telling HER that HE was the elite struck a nerve and she did not forget it.

This elitism is a twisted trait to have as a human being- a using others as stepladders to make yourself feel taller, using yourself as a tool to fall into line with an ego who never was your friend. I think people are wonderful and I think i have always held them a bit in high regard. It ebbs and flows this opinion- I am not without my seasons. Well I think highly of them compared to others I've met who believe "90% of the population should be burned". We are sick and marvellous and should not be cinders. It is a child's view-a very short child's view. And who would the child be without this 90% that make it so happy with itself? We hate eachother and hate ourselves, we selfdestruct and selfindulge and my god is it good to do so- provided you know some obscure artists and bands to segregate yourself from the surplus population all about doing the same thing. That you try hard is a given, and that you are afraid. Doesn't matter if you would base yourself to lay with one of them just to feel your height, you my child, are one cut above the rest.

The people that I see in denner...I should by rights feel very stroked in my special ego place. I especially enjoy the bitching of the past-it older women in laguages I understand but with motives I do not. What drama that makes for.

Here are my top 10 daily-Dennerites:
1) Gremlin man. Yes you, with the huge droopy ears and frightening visage- who cough and splutter, run in panting like a wild beast to buy your 30p beer every morning 8am sharp. You are a punctual fairy tale.
2)Whiny girl and anorexic mum- I enjoy your straw hats/ straw bags and all your things straw. You are a peadophile's wet dream.
3) Junkie who likes to play with his false teeth- the suction noise it causes are so very sickening. I resist asking why you have a complete set of false teeth at the relatively tender looking-age of forty.
4) The obese lady who gets all the 50% off meat- you wear the same stripy top and leggings EVERY SINGLE DAY. You do not smell, but they are not flattering. I have some questions for you.
5) Mullet-man who enjoys tidying the shelves ferociously. You do help us, but you are a little weird. But I believe in sayings, so best not look you in the mouth, horse man.
6) The at-home woman who is astounded at finding the same toothpaste and things she has "at home" dwell at the shop also. I want to tell you there are many toothpastes of the sort. And you are quite mad.
7) The english-haterman.You screamed your disgust at the filthy "englis rag-pack" the "root of all modern and ancient evil" unprompted into the silent tram at 7am, and then turned up at m yvery own till 2 hours later in a white lab coat and bought 10kg of flour. Suspicious.
8)The clairevoyant. You are strange looking it has to be said, but your way of keeping your dog barking outside all through your sejourn at the shop so you know he has not been dognapped, is INGENIOUS.
9)Miss rollerblades- every daily shop in your roller blades. And you have never even knocked over any wine bottles. I have. 9litres of red wine look like a massacre.
10)Lady with the hair in traditional looped-roud-head plaits. You came in twice in two different dresses the same day to buy all the same things. I liked both of them.

Now who can look at this list and declare their hatred for humanity? Sometimes I am moved to tears.Sometimes I dream that I will go up to a group of strangers, ask for a light and imply a real one but really mean a metaphor, sit down and tell them everything about me. And then just leave and they'll remember me for not just being a failing monster.

Ketchup

kI have not written in ages, there have been too many things afoot.
1) The isles of Orkney where we drove 12 hours to see the whales I was determined dwelt there: they do not. Magnus and Magnus (apparently everyone is called Magnus) told us that Old Sam Jenkins or some such goes out on his boat everyday and in 30 years has only seen them thrice. O the disgusting lies of the Scottish tourist board.
2)Spain with Blue and famille. I met a tiny catling in a bar, she was shaven and missed an eye. I plotted all manner of things in my head so I could take her home, another one to add to the Miss-meow collection, having acquired the first as a reaction to my "swine flu". In the words of Lulu-love "the ultimate impulse buy".
3) Denner work. in switzerland. in their equivalent of asda.It is the place where the mad congregate; the OAA (over age anorexics) prostitues, the men who talk instead of thinking, the woman who does her shopping everyday in roller skates. I spend 12 hours a day trying to rise above, pretending the boxes of goods I open to fill the shelves are all Christmas presents and I am excited to see what's inside. I feel like I smell Denner on me, I even dream of my fly rescuing endeavors, where I try and save the ones who persist in crawling over the cheese/yoghurt in the giant fridge and freeze to death. It's their idea of heaven. As everything, they are ever determined to get and stay there.

Anyway, as I said I have not written in a while. maybe it's because some things are sacred and I feel like I would have to save up for years to have enough of anything-skill, thought, eloquence- to stamp it onto something. I think what I mean really, is that I wish I would write more these days; write it and feel it less. Switzerland is not treating me kindly, and I miss my Mr Blue. I couldn't really find the words to wring for the emotions that are just sitting on their little throne and at present wish me to suffer. But now, an itch in my fingers, a hum through me and TADAH I am a vocation.The breath catches purple when it has something to say, and I know my voice has changed.Changed itself, or been changed by a riot or really "feeling it" or something cruel. I don't know yet.
This preserving of thoughts is only an arrogant self-love anyway. And I do hate people who love themselves. Shouldn't trust people who fall in love so easily.

Mirrors In Switzerland

O a mirror! The delights thereof! Thanks to it everyone knows precisely what they look like, and have no idea who they are. And why should they, when they define themselves by their glass twin?

Mirror
I can stare at your bambi brown,
and return to my base coordinates;
stare at spiderweb capillaries
made from something strong enough
to keep the thoughts in-

I can't help but want for rain
to water me, and let me
grow roots. Then
I could have all the secrets spring up
around it, like mushrooms
in the bark:
there's magic in them.
Like when you listen to tears
and turn your world into a singing carousel;
or who you are when the chips are down and burried-

We spend our days staring at each other
centimeter glass and one dimension away from another
who we wish would know herself better.

Tonight back to merry london and my blue. I have done what I came to do,found and secured my job, which now I desperately need having lost many pennies missing many flights and being caught travelling black (swissism for being on public transport without a ticket).

The weather was the moodiest part of the trip, one second shining and smiling, the next thunderous. Although I know more than I did before about weather; walking through thunder and rain in skimpy sandals when it's warm can feel like holding your feet into an angry sea. It's quite beautiful really, the arrogant resilience of it. I think if it could only wipe Switzerland clean of it's people then this country and I could be very good friends. It was lovely watching it in the sunny rain. The light shone through the drops and lit them up like prisms. It looked as if God was sending us diamonds. It looked as if he might exist. There was a man with down syndrom sitting on a bench playing "My heart will go on" on a flute in front of a tent containing some art by the Bahnhof. A little kinder egg surprise of art in the middle of the city to watch, from my secret park&-green-tea perch. Like I said, Switzerland and I could be very good friends.

I even know it well by now: all it's public buildings smell the same- of stern authority and bleach- and flowers decorate every remote tram station in their pots. Sometimes it's quite unsettling to see them there so purposefully. They seem important signs somehow; flowers to commerate the dead. The suicides. There are many of them littering the tracks here.

But I like to think that they are there for all the people who wander their sterile streets thought-screaming "JUST FUCKING LOVE ME" into themselves. Sick with a needy virus.
I have their germ.