A long drive
I went on a long drive recently.
My favourite way to drive from Melbourne to northern NSW is inland, west of the mountains.
Everywhere I drove I fell in love. That kind of deeply in love that I usually reserve for humans or really nice jackets. Every town I passed I wanted to stop and capture the buildings, the communities, the gorgeous landscapes of golden gum trees and distant blue mountains...
I immediately began wondering how long it would take me to paint these vistas and whether or not it would be worth it or maybe I should just try selling photographic prints instead.
This transition from creative, generative desire to cost benefit analysis happened, and always happens, without my notice or intention. All of a sudden I find myself guesstimating hours labour and cost of materials and wonder how I got there.
I am not alone. Every artist I've spoken to has had the same experience. And the same shit feeling about it.
Last year when I was just beginning to think seriously about Sam Woud Brand, I had the idea that I wanted to price things on a sliding scale according to how much the buyer could afford. When people asked me how I would put this into practice, I said I would operate on an honour system and just trust people to be honest about what they could pay.
People looked at me as though I were insane. Everyone from immediate family members to passing acquaintances. They were all very concerned that I would put so much trust in the opportunistic and deceitful masses. They were sure that I would be taken advantage of, and more to that point, they were certain the business would fail.
When I tried to explain that none of these things concerned me, I was met with unanimous disbelief. I was suprised and disappointed that I couldn't find anyone to share my excitement about experimenting with the structure of my business.
The thing I found most perplexing about all these conversations was the urgent sense of fear. Maybe they were afraid for me, afraid to see me fail? I mean, I can sympathise. Failing at capitalism means not having enough money to take care of yourself. It's a threat to your survival, but my creative practice has never been my meal ticket, and explaining that didn't seem to quell their fears.
I find the impulse to monetise so depressing. I hate that this subconscious shift happens in my mind every time I have a creative idea. I don't want that to happen anymore. I don't care what the cost is. Stopping this automatic switch flip is more important to me. I don't care if that means my 'business' will be a 'failure'. I am determined to decouple my creative practice from capitalism. I will make a concerted effort to deprogram my brain from its toxic influence. I will clear one tiny space in my work life where money doesn't drive my decisions, and I will see what grows there.
If I never make a cent, at least I'm taking trash and turning it into something useful. At least I'm doing something I love. At least I'm making things that bring other people joy. At least I get to build something with my hands. At least I get the pleasure of giving something my care, attention and effort. These things are all rewards in and of themselves. If I have to work three jobs to keep doing art for free, I'm okay with that.
From the outside my creative practice might appear to be crochet, knitting, sewing or printing. In fact these are just a means to an end. My real art is joyfully failing at capitalism.
This Is Hell
George Monbiot being interviewed on the This Is Hell Podcast about escaping the wreckage of neoliberalism:
We’re seeing several things happening all at once. First, those who were exposed by the crisis of 2008, the great supporters of the neoliberal narrative, seeing that no one was coming up with a coherent challenge to them, doubled down on that narrative and responded to the crisis with neoliberal austerity, further controls on trade unions, further tax cuts for the rich, further deregulation, the whole neoliberal agenda. They just intensified it.
Other people recognised, as many now do, that the philosophy has been a catastrophe for human beings and for the rest of the living world and are desperately casting around for a response to it, and unfortunately in most cases, the response has been to try and reclaim some kind of Keynesian social democracy, and it’s just not going to work in the 21st century. Partly for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, but partly also because it tries to stimulate a growth based economy, and when your economy keeps growing on a planet that is not growing it burns through the environmental boundaries, and that’s what we’re seeing happening world wide at the moment with climate breakdown, with the loss of soils, with mass extinction, with air pollution and so many other crises that we’re facing as a result of perpetual economic growth, so we really need a new system.
But then the third response has been to say 'politics just isn’t working for us'. Part of the neoliberal approach is that you shouldn’t do things through politics, you should only do them through the market, that politics is dead. Well if politics is dead then people can’t pursue any political solutions within democracy. And so they say, let’s choose to follow someone who’s outside of politics, someone who isn’t part of the usual political establishment, someone who tells us that we can triumph once more. And so you then get the election of demagogues and fascists. Donald Trump being certainly an example of the former.
We see fascists rising in one form or another all over the world at the moment and this is a response to the political failure caused by a doctrine which says basically that governments should step out of the way, that there shouldn’t be any effective political response, governments should not try to change social outcomes. And so people see themselves falling into disaster and say well government isn’t helping us, we need someone who's completely different from any government we’ve ever seen before, and that someone is a fascist or a demagogue.
This is a very dangerous age and it’s because we have failed to produce a compelling and positive and inspiring restoration story with which to replace the failed story of neoliberalism that we see the rise of fascism, and so this isn’t just a nice thing we might do. We might think ‘ooh let’s tell a better story and we might have a better politics’. This is an urgent quest to find a story which fills the gaping hole, the great vacuum into which the fascists step. If we want to stop fascism from repeating what happened in the 1930’s, we urgently need to tell this new restoration story.
PODCASTS
Dear Alex,
Here are a list of my favourite podcasts, what they're about and some of my fav episodes :)
Beautiful, moving, thought provoking stories and interviews with artists and weirdos. This might be my number one absolute favourite. You should listen to The Pandrogyne, an interview with Genesis P-Orridge, and Another Planet, an interview with Clyde Casey also known as the Avant Guardian.
Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything
This one is broadly about life, but lately has included a lot of stories about technology and politics. It's funny with a slightly paranoid point of view and blurs lines between real and imagined by mixing and giving equal weight to traditional interviews with fantasy scenarios. A recent good one is Art Districts, about the gentrification of minority and lower class neighbourhoods by artists. Also recommend the series The Dislike Club, about his problems with social media and New York After Rent, about living in New York.
KCRW's Here Be Monsters
This one reminds me of Love and Radio. Usually each episode is an interview with one person about a journey 'into the unknown'. Some of my favs are The Near Death of Sir Deja Doog, The Evangelists for Nudism, and Deep Stealth Mode (how to be a girl).
This is a podcast about the intersection of the internet and life. It's real good. Check out Storming The Castle, about an anonymous surrealist prank call artist, Zardulu, about another anonymous reclusive artist and her pet rats, and Stolen Valor, about people in the US who dress up as veterans to get free stuff and the people who hate them. That last one really blew my mind. Really interesting stuff about identity.
This one is basically a podcast biography. Emil tells the story of his life and it's pretty interesting. A lot of stuff about drugs, music and philosophy. He alternates between biographical and music episodes. I haven't listened to most of the music ones but love the biographical ones.
Enjoy! :D
Extraordinary Rendition
Article from We Make Money Not Art
"After Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA launched a program of extraordinary rendition to handle terrorism suspects. In the name of the ‘global war on terror,’ some 136 individuals were secretly abducted, transferred from one country to another, imprisoned, questioned using the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and sometimes killed without any legal oversight, charge nor trial."
The work is a book of documents and photos following the journey of those people abducted by the US government and documenting what little trail was left behind.
It is fascinating and unnerving and I highly recommend you read all about it here.