Warren Fry & Olchar E. Lindsann

In expressing our solidarity with the call of the SPART Action Group to Stay Home Make Art, the New Jersey contingent of the Post-NeoAbsurdist Anti-Collective would like to add a few words of our own, in order to suggest how one might deal with certain situations one might find oneself in, where one might suddenly (or otherwise) find themselves in danger of going somewhere to make art.
Let us suppose, for instance, that you have planned a relaxing trip to Oslo, when at the last minute you learn, much to your surprise, that you have been tricked into attending an exhibition—and somehow they’ve gotten hold of some of your artwork, too. Or that you are half-way over the Atlantic to give a talk at some event or other, say at a conference on extra-institutional art, organized by four associate professors in six universities, supported by three government and five corporate sponsors, when suddenly it dawns on you—you’d forgotten that you’d promised yourself to stop encouraging this wank-fest of intellectual backscratching and careerist condescension, wearing a Karl Marx mask as you studiously fill out your CV. Or let’s say that a monkey named Lord Charles, wearing a hat like Napoleon, has hijacked your plane, and is forcing you at knife-point to carry out some Cunningham-esque claptrap in a university amphitheater and to pass it off as a serious engagement with the structures governing our culture and society. (I prefer the latter scenario).
Or more banal, let us assume that you enjoy travel, enjoy art, and enjoy the two together, and do not want your perspective to become provincial or isolationist. (And, just maybe, a little bit of money thrown in for good measure.) Does this let you (or me!) off the hook?
Of course not.
But hypothetically, we’re here now. How do we prevent ourselves from oiling the gears, from opening up the cultural pressure valve once again? What do we do?
For one, refuse to make art.
Perhaps while on holiday I gather a number of friends—or friends of a friend, even one I’ve just met—and we have fun together, performing absurd actions and watching others do strange things; this will make all of our lives better in a strange way, and it is a kind of protest to playing out our lives by rote, to adhering to the social norms that regulate our leisure time—on a small, but effective level, it is a social intervention. BUT—call this ‘performance art’, put it in a gallery, find a few university professors to discuss it on a stage and a few art-groupies with floppy hair to consume it as ‘intellectual’ entertainment—and it is right where it ‘belongs’, there is a specialized discourse ready-made to receive it and consume it, used by members of the pedagogical establishment and funded by the political-economic establishment; and if we’re talking about objects (and maybe performances as well) members of the commercial establishment too, who are ready and willing to feed these ‘political statements’ into the consumerist machine called the Art Market, tailor-made to buy off the bad conscience of the upper middle class. Is it an audience or is it a group of people hanging out? Is it academic theory or a language of protest? Is it art or a way of living? Is this a career opportunity or a really sweet holiday?
If we are going to Stay Home Make Art then, we’d better address the other term in this statement too if we find ourselves suddenly away from home: we’d better make THIS place home, and fast. We must meet local creative andor political communities, perform or show with them, talk with them, we must come to care about the creative-social dynamic as it exists for them and affects their lives; and we must allow it to affect ours as well. Don’t stay in a fucking hotel; stay on someone’s sofa, in the home. If we are not STAYING home, we had better be GOING home. And this is not only true of artistic communities; to the extent that we can, we must learn about the city, town, or village itself, we must meet the people who don’t give a shit about our art or our discourses or even our attempts to make the world better. We need to remind ourselves that our discussions of Adorno and Debord and Dada and Fluxus mean NOTHING unless they change the way we live in the world, not just the way we talk to other ‘artists’. And we need to see how each community is different, and that no international discussion debating abstracts can account for the patterns of living and thinking that only local socioartistic communities can address with sensitivity and precision.
And let’s say we’re at this festival/conference/whatever, and the dog-and-pony show of ‘emerging artists’ are being trotted out one at a time to have their assets discussed in muffled tones; we are being treated to lectures or panels of decorated imbeciles discussing ‘political art’ or ‘collaborative methods’ as if they’re genres that one can take or leave, as if one could possibly work outside politics and social relations, using the very social irrelevance of most artistic production to promote the illusion of relevance or real engagement. What then?
Leave. Boycott Pretentious Art. Skip the bullshit, skip our own performance, our panel, and encourage everyone else to do the same. Go outside to where the smokers are penned. Go to the pub. There, we will find everyone else who refused to be taken in by the scam, having a real discussion, planning action or living art in the same place and in the same way in which they discuss every other aspect of life, discussing issues within daily life, and amongst the intersecting communities in which they live, not hovering above them. And what we learn through becoming a temporary member of this community, not an intellectual ‘observer’, we MUST TAKE HOME WITH US.
When we engage with this new home, we must bring our own with us. When we return, we take this one home. We don’t go on holiday to spread our own name, we go to learn new ones; we share the work of our friends with this community, and when we return, we share the work of our new friends at home; we don’t drop names, we collect them. And when we return, we continue to be part of that community, and vice versa. We engage in each others’ local artistic (or whatever) communities, we don’t leave those communities in our thoughts or our priorities in order to engage. The talks we had on holiday develop into projects, the audiences into mates.
Is any of this an excuse for Going Anywhere? Of course not, you are not off the hook. Rather, look at it as a form of contrition, for when you are weak, as we all are at times. When that happens, these are some ideas as to how to set it aright. But isn’t it better not to get yourself into trouble in the first place? When you make art, don’t travel; and when you travel, please, please, PLEASE: don’t make art. Travel as a person having fun. Don’t travel to work as an Artist. IT’S MISERY.