"Dada Death 2.0." Performance Art. Echo Echo Gallery. Greenwood Collective. Greenwood, Seattle, WA. 2017. Final Version.
We live in the age of Nefarious, an age of puppet kings and a lethargy that stems from the belief that we have discovered everything. But this is far from the truth, the truth is that we have become arrogant enough to believe that we cannot be excited, we believe that the same impulses that made us excited in the past do not and cannot thrill us. We live in an age that is more truly Dada than Marcel Duchamp and Andre Breton could have ever thought up, an age in which we are bombarded with the idiocies and indecencies of life on a daily basis. Perhaps shell-shocked is a better word, and waiting, we have become ossified and are ready to place ourselves into the machine. Even the smartest of us will sell his soul so he can eat. The age of the artist has passed and in its stead we have a sea of castrated bald white men, spouting the lines as if it was enough to memorize what Hegel or Jameson or even hooks said. We have forgotten the lessons of the first truly Post-Modern philosophers the Dadas had to teach us—we have forgotten how to fight, to kick each other in the eye, how a baritone belly-laugh feels and we have held our piss for far too long
Critical Theory, or rather philosophy was never meant to be the domain of School Teachers. It was never meant to be the tool for professionals to build their careers on. Criticism was always meant for the young, the artists, the poets and musicians the so-called practitioners—to feel the age they live in. Critical theory has become ossified and fat. It has lost the one thing that is unforgivable--a sense of humour.
We are filled with candy and all sorts of preservatives. Our houses and cupboards are brimming over with purple plastic-coated soft drinks and Twinkies. We are what we eat and from here that doesn’t look too good. Let us take a moment and look at the metaphor of eating, of what we eat. Let us take a moment to look at the Twinkies, Chicken McNuggets, and Coca Cola that we ingest. It has been said that the Twinkie is known to have a shelf life of many, many years. Open a Twinkie and you will find that it is an odd little thing—unexpectedly perhaps it is a moist even wet affair, it is a soft cylinder of unnatural yellow. Wrapped within this manufactured cake is a creamy filling of vanilla. Beneath the perfectly flat, flaky-golden brown base of each Twinkie there are three small perfect oblong holes. It is these small holes, the same on each cake through which the cream surprise has been injected. These holes are perfect, the same from one Twinkie to the next. It is their perfection, which we have come to expect in our enjoyment of each Twinkie. It is this perfect cake that we ingest, with the promise that the next one will be exactly the same.
Awhile back, I lived in Germany for a year. It was very interesting. I had a couple of art shows there and I made many friends there as well. The Germans are the kindest, sweetest people–especially the youth–at least they were when I was there. I hope that they have not been poisoned like Eastern Europe has.
However, my friend’s hearts were broken when I told them that, as Americans, often we synechdochically use the word “German” to mean Nazi in many cases. Especially in the movies.
The Germans are a beautiful people, but they were broken by their own history. Their psyches were shattered and now they suffer from amazing self-hatred and collective embarrassment for what they cannot escape as being part of them. Part of their story. Part of their skin.
There are no flags in Germany, very little examples of patriotism-especially on the boorish level that we might be used to.
One day, I was on the bus and this old guy wanted to apologize to me personally for what the Nazis did. It was a very uncomfortable experience. It was amazingly poignant and by the time I was getting off the bus, I realized that he wanted me to absolve him of the guilt of a child who ha seen the Nazis as heroes. Just as we are now taught as children to admire our policing agencies–as agents of order. This now, grandfather was forced to view the gypsies, Jews and queers as agents of decay, as the very rats that they had been told to see them as.
In Germany, this constant self-loathing is everywhere, but it is very subtle and no one ever really acknowledges it, not to each other, not in the open–perhaps to strangers, but in a very real way as a nation they have lost their sense of identity as purely good human beings. Initially, this was forced upon them from without, but ultimately it has become a part of them, but this happened long enough ago that now, many of the kids are running around in Nazi bike gangs. I saw those as well, in Frankfurt. They are kind of scary.
Borrowing a term, though not the same idea–from Friedrich Nietzsche, this move toward agency can be seen as being “Beyond Good and Evil.” It just is. In a way that is neither good nor evil–they have begun to take that anger and self-loathing and have started to make something out of it.
In the lifetimes of these artists (the artists of Die Antwoord) they have witnessed humans doing the most horrible atrocities–under the guise of society. They know how cheap and meaningless life is or can be. They understand in a way that we are only beginning to get a glimpse of–just how easily money trumps life.
The baby talk they spew is deceptive of the most vile, evil, shit that they are trying to warn us all about.
The simplism of their form is like standup comedy. It is like the bright, multicolored blotters that acid used to come on. A pretty, simple, wrapping for something that takes away your innocence and imparts knowledge of the shape of the universe and gives you a taste of the darkest and brightest candy-colored parts of your mind.
That is why I believe that Die Antwoord is so important–they are the best example of what is created after we as humanity have lost our souls and after we have lost our faith in everything– and believe me when I tell you that as a collective species–we have very definitely lost our souls. I thought it would have to wait until humanity realized that the universe was approaching heat death, for us to realize this–but at least in one way, we are a rather bright collection of animals.
But, I will say this. That because we are humans–and because everything we do and say is always deconstructed and creates a universe in which its opposite is true–that Die Antwoord is also a band that is equally about hope. I know it sounds like a contradiction and, in fact, it is–but it is just as true.
The fact that we as humans need to have things wrapped in shiny, plastic is why I also believe that something like Pop is the most perfect medium for conveying the things that art needs to say in this day and age. It, like the obscene, baby talk rap lyrics–it is the perfect form for communicating the nature of the void. In baby talk expletives and candy-coated color-fields. To answer your earlier question, though–yes, artists need to live–but artists also really need to be able to convey their meaning–they are all blind men and women describing an elephant view of the universe.
I think that things evolve–different things make sense in different eras–in the era of the Pre-Raphaelites (which in itself was a conservative reaction [alors--you now have groups of artists seeking inspiration from a movement that was already retrospective in its original incarnation]) or the Mannerists, etc. the “Pretty Vacant” was invisible (just as there are forces that are at work now, that we can’t see, because the connections are not yet visible)–it was there, but could not be seen–meaning then was conveyed in purely narrative forms and by way of symbolism–but as happens in any system–entropy increases and things that once did–no longer make sense. We are beyond mere narrative; we are beyond mere representation, we are in an era of terrible beauty and pop conceptualism.
Truth does not change, that is the kernals remain the same and we float around them and it is our perception of what the truth is changes over time. That sounds obvious, but I want you to bear with me for a moment. We perceive, naturally that he universe remains the same, which is actually not true, stars die and we move around the stellar arm of the milky way, bu, in essence much of what we call the universe, at least, appears mostly the same--but truth now looks nothing like it did to the first women and men. We scoff at the logic systems of the earliest philsophers, can't believe that astronomers thought the earth was the center of the heavens and even the moderns seem outdated to our post-postmodern sensibilities, so we understand that our sense of truth changes--we could not expect to agree with a cave-person on even the most fundamental of things.
I want us to focus for a moment, especially on our perception of things--the truth in things, right now the public at large, is being taken through a period in which we are being asked to look at everything that we held true just minutes ago and to rewrite it, to alienate ourselves from it and to look at it through new eyes--for better and often for worse. I tried to explain this to a friend like this. Take a painting that was created by or for the priests at the Palais des Papes in Southern France--before the Renaissance, a painting that was made as a pure celebration of the majesty of religion--that actual, physical painting is the same now as it was when it was painted hundreds of years ago, it is constituted by essentially the same atoms that have made it up since its origin--it is a monadic whole--maybe some of the pigments and therefore the colors have broken down as they breathe in the oxygen of the ages and take in the light of candles and later, flourescents--but otherwise they have not changed in any significant way. But, what they mean, what they signify and how we perceive them, I guarantee you that, that has changed. And I guarantee you that can be said of everything, from the functional Ancient Greek objects that are now sitting in vitrines at the Smithsonian to the religious paintings of the past, and this is especially true of any text that you might find, from a painting to a book or anything that works with signs and significators.
The way these things are seen change through the ages--their essential meanings have changed and yet the objects themselves have not. Now, let's put together a little mental exercise, if you were to go back in time, if you had a time machine and could actually do this, and you stood in front of one of the paintings in the hallway at the Palais, you might have a moment of awe, you might feel the pangs of nostalgia for an earlier age, you might even have a religious moment, but I also guarantee that you would not see the artworks in the same way that the people of the 11th century saw it. You would not suddenly understand the meaning of that age as somehow inherent in the painting standing before you, you would not be able to even see what that truth was supposed to be. Just as you can only imagine now how that work was meant to be seen by the artist that painted it originally.
But that truth is still there, would still be there for those people, even if they were suddenly sent to the future now. As is the truth of the Renaissance painters, who dissected the work and saw its limitations, just as the Papists who saw it as sacrilegious, just as the Enlightenment saw it different and just as those tin the future will see those paintings, however they see them. But the objects have not changed and those truths--all of them have always been there. It becomes clear therefore that all truths that are applied to an object and even an age are all always inherently present in an object or indeed anything--all truth exists at once--simply waiting for us to discover it. Truth, all truths are always there, waiting to be discovered--like the skins of an onion, unwrapping over time.
We live in an age of unprecedented change–things are dying off every day–not making it to the next era.
8-tracks, Xerox paper, the clicking sound of movie projectors, film-strips, forty-fives.
If you see any of these it is because nostalgic forces are in play.
Last night I painted a landscape, it was a very nice landscape. But, I wanted it to be more–I decided that it just didn’t have the gravitas that I wanted it to. So I decided to rectify that and I gave it a title that conjured up images of not just “sturm” but also the mightiest “drang” that anyone has ever experienced! In words, I threw in allusions to Herakles and Ovid, I forced everyone who read the title-card of this piece to ponder their own mortality and question the meaning of not just their own, but everyone’s existence. However, despite all of the poesy of my heroic words, despite the finest ink and most expensive acid-free paper, ultimately, what I had created was really just a fucking landscape. A very lovely landscape. But a landscape all the same.
We live in an age of unprecedented change and there are nostalgic forces in play.
"Dada Death 2.0." Performance Art. Echo Echo Gallery. Greenwood Collective. Greenwood, Seattle, WA. 2017. DadaDeath Sepia Version.
