[Nettime-bold] Re: [Genius2000Conference2000] Cash outflow in full effect

["Nicholas Hermann" <NHerman@hga.com>]

++


I'm responding to Briggs' post of a few days ago, my comments are after
the ++ marks.

>>> baseekins@netscape.net 03/30/01 02:07PM >>>

MHHerman wrote::> 
> Every listserv is afraid of certain topics.  Which ones are we
afraid
> of?  


I am not sure what topics this listserve is scared of. I think perhaps
some of us have too strong of a desire towards polemic. 

++I go by the policy of doing whatever I feel like.  This way, you
don't have to make rules about what is OK.  If someone wants to write a
sad post about mental illness or homeless people, that's fine; if
someone wants to follow around a TV anchor and belabor them with
nonsense questions that's OK too.  Polemic is fine in moderation.  I
just use what I like, in terms of style, genre, tone, medium, and so
forth.  I think this is a good rule of thumb, for myself at least.  I
take satisfaction from good polemic and especially when it's directed at
corrupt people and serves to embarrass them.++

So, for instance, Cary's faux irony and resignation to being
"voiceless" is really a self-serving justification for a life of
art-world hedonism and networking. But does that mean that all of his
work is bad? I don't know. 

++I mentioned this before, in that the import and origins of artworks
are just as important as the qualities of the end product itself. 
Cary's shit is hip, saavy, sexy, and dada, (to certain sensibilities
which I personally don't have) thus some people like it, it works for
them as what they think of as art.  I give myself two pieces of advice
in such a situation:  one, there's no sin in ridiculing or insulting
someone else's artistic tastes.  If they're worth anything, the person
won't be hurt.  Only poseurs and climbers will feel hurt.  Second,
"judge the art in itself" is the number one shield that the art-priest
class uses to protect its sleaziest practices.  The same thing held for
the Inquisition:  contemplate the church in silence but never express
any dissent.  I don't believe in autonomous art, i.e. art separate from
the eco-systems of cultural production or what might be called the
processes of image production and interpretation.  The fact that Cary
wants to benefit from his academic hookups but pretend to be a free
radical is proof that he's a bogus shitbird.  He would still have us
believe that certain people--artists--for some special reason make
images that are immaculate of the systems.  That's bullshit, pure and
simple, and I'll argue that any god damn day or where.++

The last projects of his I really saw were several years ago, when I
had a kind of friendship going with him. I have to say, at the time, I
always felt kind of embarrassed seeing him present his work, because I
felt friendly towards him, but I thought his work was pretty manifestly
vapid

++Why do you think Sherman loved it so?  He saw a slavish, derivative
person desperate for art-status and anointed him.  All part of the mafia
artworld.  Moreover, most people are such dullards and saps when it
comes to judging serious art-attempts that the cheesy pandering worked,
and few rather than more saw the vapidity manifest.  Call it camoflaged
vapidity.  Manipulative gestures work on those suffering conditioned
incapacity.  Anyone who looks like they're special and in charge
attracts them, like sheep (apologies to sheep).++

--just a bunch of hip gestures to wow the rich undergrads in the VPA
program. Looking over the stuff you post Max, I don't think much has
changed, aside from that he's done a good job of incorporating more big
words and jargon. He is smart enough to know that the same loops and
spins he did for the teeny boppers in Syracuse are not going to play in
th!
e big city. 

++The important thing is the acrobatic desire to please.  Certain
improvements are requisite to MFA's trying to get to the next level,
i.e. awards and shit.  You need the same posturing attitude, but you 
must tailor your posturing to whatever benefactor, sponsor, or nobleman
you are seeking a living under.  Therefore you learn the big jargon they
like, adapt your art to such jargon, and present your work as a likable
continuation of their pioneering efforts.  That's the only way to get
support from an academic.  So Cary's development since SU has only been
to work other venues in exactly the same careerist way.  This can be
proven by any fairminded look at his career so far and the work that
he's done in it.  As for pitying him, I do, but I also pity the world
for the harm done to it and its people by a sickeningly reckless and
greedy art-system which has abandoned its integrity for cachet.  As
Conrad Aiken wrote, "at whatever pain to others," a good double-edged
thought that makes it OK to satirize Cary and his ilk.  Cary uses the
big lie, as I think academic art in general does.++

I remember Carry showing me a Tom Sherman video one morning in
Syracuse--I think it was early on in their relationship. I just thought
the guy was obviously a clown. He kept repeating "What is art?" or some
such phrase. The one time I actually remember meeting Tom Sherman I
didn't pay much attention one way or the other, because I was too busy
acting neurotic over my girlfriend. From reading his posts Max has sent
to the list, well, I find him a lot more odious than Carry. But I can't
help feeling a little bit of personal empathy for Carry. I've seen him
acting like a complete fucking drunken retard--I've acted like a drunken
retard with him. I have some insight into his emotional vulnerabilities.
So I think his work is pretty terrible, and I think he is pretty
fundamentally shallow and superficial, and he is very much becoming a
part of art-priest class, a subset of the managerial class, charged with
taking the teeth right out of art.

++I concur.  Who gives a fuck about some young artist's feelings? 
Artists are not a class or a professional association I have pledged to
break every law of decency to defend.  That's the Jenna
Elfman/Scientology way.  Fuck them, they're greedy, harmful, inept, and
deserve to suffer the consequences of their thoughtless actions.  Who
cares how great or sensitive or anything else they are.  Art is a
privileged title, not a predestined claim.  It doesn't matter how
desperately you want or think you need to be an art-priest.  I say fuck
you to all of them, without exception.  Moreover, that's what the tragic
cycle demands, in case Eryk's reading this.++

I agree that the section Eryk pointed out sounds nice. But it's kind of
just rhetoric. Maybe I'm being too hard in my evaluation, because I
know, for example, that Carry really made an effort to have "100 works"
before he turned 30. Carry has always been a pretty relentless, career
driven artist--for him to be preaching some sort of laid back,
zen-inspired approach to art smells fishy. And I don't even really like
the section Eryk pointed out, to be honest. Those are all just
art-world/poetry-biz plattitudes. 

But I am in a round about way getting at a topic that maybe we are
scared off on this list--that is, how separate are we going to allow art
to be from the oppressive institutions that facilitate its production
and which it in turn bolsters. 

++I don't fear this topic, I love it.  It's at the core of Genius 2000
and my way of understanding Genius 2000.  I have decided art is not
separate from those systems at all.  Harvey has no excuse for his
leftist pimp lifestyle at Syracuse, no excuse at all, though probably
many sentences of his are both correct and informative.  You can't go
half way in this regard I think.  Eryk has rejected the star-system of
production and reward in net-art, preferring to earn his lucre by
selling a poetry book.  Keep in mind that as US citizens we are all
guilty at birth of the genocide of the American Indian people.  We
benefit from it every single day.  There's no way to get out of that
guilt.  Ultimately, they are separate questions:  where you get your
money and what good you do for the commonwealth.  If Cary was a child
pornographer but made great cognition-enhancing media on the side, he'd
still be judged on both counts.  So, I judge Cary to be corrupt in that
he uses the corrupt artstar system shamelessly, but also because his
work does nothing sufficient to be called undermining of that system. 
These two actions are not coincidences, but I judge them separate.  So I
don't have to worry about assigning guilt by association.  I'll clarify
on this if anyone thinks it's shaky.  It's an important part of my
thinking so I'm sticking to it.++

The academy/grant system promote a star system in the art world that is
very much involved in maintaining our suicidal economic system.
(Additionally, the academy/grant system tends to promote mostly just
tepid, cautious work, or silly, surreal work, or ironic and resigned
work--almost never work that really, seriously questions the
institutions). I have basically turned my back on the academic poetry
world for two reasons--one, I can not in good conscience continue to
participate in a system that is dedicated to helping to manufacture
consent for the ruling class. That's the political reason, but it is
pretty closely tied to my artistic reason, which is that, so long as I
am trying to achieve a career as an academic poet, I will always be !
forcing myself to pursue only a kind of work that other academic poets
are comfortable with--which means bland and middle class. 

++This pretty well clarifies my idea here:  you reject the academy for
its corrupt nature, and you reject it because it hinders your
art-practice.  Cary has courted the academy because he's not bothered by
its corruption, and working within it does not in his view harm his
art-practice.  Judging from the outside, I judge his embrace of academia
as a demerit, and judge his art separately while noting its enslavement
to the art-system and its weaknesses born of that enslavement.  In this
manner I grant him some benefit of some creative doubt, but not enough
to absolve him either of his institutional crimes or his shabby art.  So
I think the autonomy from institutions questions are openly dealt with
and satisfactorily answered on a case-by-case basis.  In general, no
academic people are interested in actually being creative.  They want to
please, to get ahead, to acquire status.  Fuck the exceptions with the
bathwater, no one owes them anything.++

When Carry points out that Nike has coopted the word revolution and
then uses that as a basic for refuting activism, he sounds absurd. Sure,
mouthing the word "revolution" sounds a little silly when it has become
an advertising slogan for Nike. But how does that excuse us from trying
to help the very real Nike workers in Asia and Latin America? A lot of
the art world seems to be wearing blinders--there are people who are
involved in movements to end sweatshop abuse, and over the last couple
of years, they have seemed to have some success, even. But they won't be
successful so long as the corporate media is able to maintain a hegemony
over what kind of information is acceptable. Carry's whole "my voice was
stolen before I was born" schtick is a kind of high-end,
psuedo-intellectual exercise in the manufacture of consent for the
corporate elites--it isn't chance that artists who go around talking
about how futile it is to question the ruling class tend to be the
artist who get t!
he social pretiege, the grants, and the tenure positions. 

++If it stinks, it's rotten or at least stinky.  There's no mystery
here, except the ignominious falseness of the people who work their way
up through the stink-pit out of cowardice and envy.  I mean, this shit
should be obvious and the fact that it isn't is the quotient of
revolution the world needs.  It is currently illegal to point your
telescope at Jupiter, draw the moons at various times, and conclude the
earth is round.  It's illegal; you lose money and freedom if you do it. 
Sherman makes sure of that, but he can't do a thing if you tell him to
go write copy for Home Depot.  People must be fought!  Power is secret
in the US; there's no one to hold responsible.  So choose one like
Sherman and make him pay for all the shit he's implicated in.  That's
why I wanted McCord to show the tape at SU but he seems to have decided
agin it.  Everyone wants certainty, wants the daddy-judges to decide
everything clean and simple.  Problem is the daddy-judges are rotten to
the lining of their robes.  It's up to the outsiders and losers to rise
up and set things right.++

On a personal level, maybe it's hubris, but I refuse to accept that
kind of powerlessness--"my voice was stolen from me before I was born."
Fuck that. I was born talking, practically. If I'm going to take
seriously my role as a poet, I sure as hell am not going to cop to such
a position of weakness. Emily Dickinson wouldn't have been such a
pussy.

++I think it's a moral obligation not to accept it.  If you do, you
imply that everyone else should, and this is how artists evade utopian
imperatives.  You were right Briggs that art-priests want to keep
everyone else hanging in suspense, waiting for the nest award ceremony,
an refuse to talk liberation, self-sufficiency, cooperation.  It's
against their profession to do so.  They ignore utopia by saying shit
like "I was born voiceless" , "The millennium cannot be written, it has
already been written for us " (Beaudrillard in 1999, the fuckface), and
blah blah blah.  Fact is, just by being geniuses and loving humans we
will bring utopia.  But accomplishing our utopia is not required; all we
have to do to discredit the art-priests is keep up the attack on their
specious, self-preserving rhetoric.  We have to call them out into
public is all.  They'll fight us all the way but they simply can't win,
that's the lesson of human genius.  Saying "I am voiceless" is like
burying your talent in the ground; if you do it you'll lose even the
voice you do have.  It's a sin to bury your talent in the ground.  It's
selfish, cowardly, greedy, and slavish, no act for a person of dignity,
talent, and genius.++

But I also realize not everybody has the astonishing ego that I do. I
also realize that some people find it realitively easy to get accepted
into the whole artworld-poetrybiz system--the sort of networking that is
required is natural for them. I can't say for sure that I'd be so
uncompromising if I actually had the ability to compromise. One thing I
decided a few years ago as an artist was that I was going to use all my
weaknesses of character just as surely as I used my strengths. 

++In a different society, might not your weaknesses be strengths? 
Isn't the meaning and power of negative capability 
to negate the concept of weakness?  Personal guilt falls away when you
come clean, acknowledge to all your shortcomings, and pursue utopia
anyway.  Along the line maybe you smash the evillest emperor that ever
lived, just by a particularly good pamphlet you scribbled out and got
printed.  Ego merely has to bathe in the waters of justice.  You think
MLK wasn't an egomaniac?  Of course he was.  But by the grace of
negative capability, he transformed his flaws as if by magic to
unlimited power.  Hence Genius 2000.++

I really don't think we should automatically reject anybody who is
successful in the artworld or in the literary world. I mean, most of us
have had at least some success in that world, and I think most of us
have benifited from it, too.     

++Automatic no, but suspicious yes.  In a system having reached an
advanced state of corruption, the ability of any participant to remain
critical or salvage an independent life is ultra asymptotically
approaching zero.  I judge case by case, and the way I judge is by
saying "What do you thin of the Video you fattened art-fuck?"  Of course
they all believe in their own integrity, their artistic anointing, so
they ignore such heckling completely.  Then you keep the heat on until
their bubble no longer protects them, and you see what they really are. 
You have to attack art and the artists that make it.  Part of the reason
I'm so pissed off is that none of these artschool fuckers will even
attack me, or rather, they attack me (my haircut, my spelling, my
psyche) but they won't attack the Video or anything else I've done. 
They are afraid to go on record with an articulate, reasonable critique
of the Video, because they know that they can't win.  So they stall,
ignore, say no comment.  There's not an artist on the planet that isn't
duty-bound to watch and publicly react to the Video First Edition,
anymore than there isn't a US voter who isn't bound by the Constitution
to defend freedom and impeach GW Bush.  They're just not doing it, so we
have to make them.  Even if we're wrong, even if we can't make them,
even if we shouldn't try to make them, we are pure as children when we
demand that our questions be answered.  conventional measures of
civilization don't apply to us.  

Hope this makes some sense.  It's the only and best case I can make for
radicalism, and I think it's a clear reiteration of the merit of
radicalism since humans started keeping records of arguments.++

Your pal Max
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