Fats, Vitamins and Minerals

One of the interesting things about Eric’s blogpost for Sid, is how Eric interpreted Sid’s poetry on Luna as a (personal) reminder to “keep the faith in heresy alive.” Another matter of interest is how we have a thing for conversations with the dead.

With electronic mail rendering with ease the instant forwarding of feel-good propaganda, social networking services giving people tools to connect with other people around them as if they were totally inutile without such tools, vast systems of SMS servers receiving and transmitting millions of totally mindless things said because there is nothing to say, and discussions groups replete with lurkers aka academic cherry-pickers and appropriators - we are, in fact, living in the world of the dead. The Spirit of Resistance has passed away.

Trevor and I have given up on conversations with this “outside world.” With very very few exceptions, there is no more intelligent life left out there. This “outside world” is what Eric might call “artistic careers in complacency and oblivion, wallowing in the contentment of cows.” Eric’s “sila XXX”s would typically attest to the passive acceptance of the COW theory, and subscriptions as these are what keep the world grinding away, not to a halt, but to a bottomless pit of shallow social traditions (not only in the arts and the academe but in all disciplines). Life on the global farm is for sheep and cows, although I would suspect that these animals actually have more complex and interesting social traditions than humans.

The pit is likewise full of people who have something to say only if it links with profit or career. This is called “professionalism.” If the offer to discuss is not within the context of a career, there will be little or no involvement at all. You see, you can’t waste the time of professionals. So, it has been proven again recently that earnest effort to get a dialogue and a space going (outside of artistic, academic or professional careers) for serious discussion of urgent problems underlying the mental and creative lethargy of society is of no avail.

Gwangju Biennale people were supposed to have visited here during the Holy Week. I received an email from them a few weeks earlier asking for a visit. I offered instead an informal dialogue, and admitted that I wasn’t interested in biennales. But such fanfares, already embedded within careeristic pursuits of artists and what a friend calls the “art world ambassadors”, are the staple of stable (as in horses!) artists and their cherry-pickers. The informal dialogue, of course, never transpired. The shopping was more important. Not so surprising really, it happened recently with Websining, when Process/yon was canceled because the promoters of fanfares and “intensive promo” had taken over the committee.

Trevor admitted, there has also been “the lack of actions by a whole range of people whom one might have thought would be more sympathetic to activities set up for (everybody’s) mutual benefit.”
I told Eric, there are very very very few really intelligent and worthwhile people left out there to work and discuss with. Don’t waste your time on the “art community” - if ever, I’d guess that Sid is asking you, first, to give yourself a second chance, to write again (a craft which he obviously loved much, perhaps more than visual art), and second, to write - not for this fictional “art community” - but for those you love (which Sid seemed to do for you).

In a response to Roger Malina’s comment on my blog, I admitted that I like talking with dead people when the living are no longer capable of thinking outside their comfort and craving zones  - at that particular moment with Victor Papanek (Design for the Real World) and Milton Meyer (They Thought They Were Free - The Germans 1933-45).

“While I am doing this out of a renewed interest in the visions of people in the 60s and earlier, perhaps this is also something I need to do more out of the loneliness of the present time when there are fewer and fewer people to engage in real dialogues.”

If you are one of the rare and few, an outsider, heretic, will you ever cross over or will the mainstream carry you away?

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