Join the new world

Let's examine a few themes regarding art and the eRepublikan. Think of this as a guided museum tour at an Exhibition called "Quinn's Imgur Cellar".

Imagine you've just been to the cafe with your friend Alice, where she had you drink something labeled "Drink Me!". And then you agreed to eat something labeled "Eat Me!". Now you're feeling better - and worse - than you did before. Also feeling both bigger and smaller at the same time.

OK then. Let's get started!


We'll look at a number of images. Then I'll write clever-ish things that I may or may not have stolen pretty much randomly from Derrida. And perhaps you'll think about it, or it will spark something. Enjoy!


Everyone knows Pablo Picasso once said "Bad artists copy. Good artists steal." But did you know he also said "Everything you can imagine is real." ?





A by-now-banal reference, with a subtle re-write ("movie" instead of "moving"), to the situationist critiques of Debord, Vainegem, Lefebvre and, to some extent, Baudrillard. It's banal because we're so far inside the spectacle nowadays that it is no longer a critique. It simply and accurately describes an objective "reality" which is both virtual and indistinguishable from that "society" which Mrs. Thatcher sought to disggregate from reality and to replace tout corps with market forces: a game at which she and her fellow criminals have very nearly, but not entirely, succeeded.

So, is this old situationist canard art? And if so why? And if not how could it be?


The paradigm of the beautiful rests on reason, which is an absolutely indeterminate but maximal accord (ratio, balance) between judgements. Such a tipping point cannot be represented by concepts. It can only be presented.

The paradigm of the beautiful, of art, is not an idea. It is a singularity which players produce in themselves in conformity with an ideal. To the extent that this ideal is produced in the presentation of a singular thing, such an exemplar can then form an ideal of the imagination itself. Imagination "is" the faculty of presentation.


The value of presentation supports our entire eRepublikan discourse. And as PQ and others have noted, a player can understand the faculty of the imagination only on the basis of the "without" (the gap, the less-than-nothing, the what-is-missing) and in the process of a truly free play. A player cannot accede to the beautiful in eRepublik without valorizing front-and-center presentation as free play of the "without" in the putting-into of presence.





"Art is the elimination of the unneccesary." No, not Stalin. Picasso again. They (the Burning Sensations, I mean, in Repo Man) said that Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole. But you know, he probably was.

Anyway...

Photographs and cinema are (to less-and-less of an extent) mechanical reproductions of a reality. They can be considered as art that depends entirely on a market. Nobody cares about my photo or video of my dog Quinzy until I turn it into a scene from a startling horror show or nature documentary. (Those who follow me on Facebook, stay tuned!)

But yes, these "non-plastic" arts defined a new kind of front-line, a trench of art further "advanced", historically speaking.

Its uniqueness, the being-only-once of this type of imaginary exemplar, and its claims to authenticity, increasingly bogussofied in our more-and-more virtual (non-)societies, now gets quickly taken apart in a practical manner by any player with the least amount of enthusiasm for seeing-into.


As such, this modern break and its further e-breaks and i-breaks forced millenia of religion and ritual, centuries of the aura of "high" art, to stop hiding: art "is" the political, as such.

Reproductive arts breached the orginal structure of the the relationship between art and artists. The foundation of their praxis shifted from ritual to politics. This was a crisis that arose contemporeneously with the origins of socialism, which reflected and refracted this crisis in art: the flutter of Lenin's waistcoat, the Battleship Potemkin, Nietsche's typewriter.

More than a century later, artists still flee the negative theology of art-for-arts-sake while the various formalisms including Dada, the Situationists, the Modernists, the Pops and Ops and so on, refuse to acknowledge any political role for themselves or to analyze objectively the market conditions in which they must endure and persist. I was telling my friend Jude at dinner the other night that the only art that can be "free" is singing your own tunes on your own front porch to a close circle of friends and strangers. Heh!


So, here we have Dr. Fate, masked, anonymous, who warily and ironically demystifies things with respect to reactionary ideologies and the fetishist ritual, cutting through the crap and clearly stating his mission, to the comical surprise of a startled player.





The e-masses advance, wave upon wave, into the bright future of e-communism, into a time when e-nation-states still exist due to game mechanics, but are irrelevant within the great liberating horizontal autonomy of a fully democratized, fully e-alive international cooperative network.

Inspired by SFP-thought as strengthened by the inexorable revolutionary praxis of the Bear Cavalry, as a strangely militarized Ravel-like musical theme swells and swells in repetition after repetition, the tip of the e-proletarian-revolutionary calligrapher's pen inks over all historically-irrelevant reactionaries, revisionists and fuddy-duddies with a hilariously funny tattoo of "All Reactionaries are Paper Dragons".


LOL. A paradoxical but obvious consequence of the quest for beauty in the age of politics is that ideal beauty and the ideal of beauty are no longer "for sale" under a "pure" judgement of taste. There is clear cleavage showing between the beautiful and taste, or more precisely between a player's ideally beautiful and "pure" or "refined" taste, between callistics (the general enjoyment of beauty) and aesthetics (the "professional" study of fine art).

Former SFP PP and revolutionary art critic Leon Guitierrez' stolen and re-purposed version of an iconic poster from the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution intimates for us, in an amusing and pleasurable way, that these two domains are fixed in their separateness. There is the aestheic-norm-idea: how accurately does my sister's drawing of a horse capture an actual horse? And there is the very ancient pleasure (or lust, if you like) in knowing what is beautiful, which always stems from the mastery of the dissimilar, from the reduction of the heterogenous; it is the intelligence of nature, at its core a pleasure, which later came to be confused with "experience" (or in the case of Marxist-Leninist and other fuddy-duddies, of "correct ideology").




Emma Goldman never actually said, precisely: "If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution". Nor did Joe Hill say, exactly: "Don't Mourn - Organize!". But what they did say was close enough to those sentiments. And they likely wouldn't begrude latter-day anarcho-syndicalists and other radical liberationists, abolitionists and revolutionary proletarians from making their words sound slightly more poetical.

Joe Hill actually signed off his final letter to Big Bill Haywood, just before being executed, with the words: "Good Luck to All of you". Not quite as rabble-rousing as "Don't Mourn - Organize!". But a nice solid expression of solidarity nonetheless. All of us could use a bit of luck.

Emma and Joe were two early-20th-century North American anarchists. There used to be a club/cafe in Austin, Texas called "Emmajoe's" in their memory. I don't know if it's still there. That's where I first heard Townes Van Zandt, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Gilmore.


Is there beauty in dancing with myself? Or is it like a single shoe? Which is to say, is one shoe by itself still a member of the group "a pair of shoes"? And for that matter, is a pair of shoes an individual member of the set "shoes"? Or does it have some quality, with respect to the intelligence of nature, in and of itself (themselves?)? And how do I feel about that?

This dancer in this (free and open stencil of a probably-many-times repeated) painting clearly opens to the "post-modern" truth of being-a-product, yes, but that in turns opens us too to its unveiled-unveiling presence, of letting itself be traversed for its own "standalone" beauty but also as a political ikon in remembrance of all those peoples' saints since Mother Jones and Eugene Debs and so many others who've danced in the face of state-sanctioned imprisonment and execution for political "crimes" - or for the "crime" of simply Being.

A lace through the eyelet of single shoe, like each ephemeral flutter of our red-and-black flags, is a step traversing towards truth. And even when there is error, or a crossed step, or difficulty in attribution, the margin of aberration tends to be small in such presence. The truth of the dancer carries its own weight; there is little for the picture police to haul in.





Many years ago, the original incarnation of RevCom member Eskimo Moltke proposed an experiment in alternative e-economics: the creation of a market and a currency that would intersect with the "real" market and the "real" currencies of eRepbulik, but offer some increased room for exchange, solidarity and collaboration. That was long before bitcoin.

The experiment had a brief lifespan. The currency used were called, informally, "sickles". Formally, they were "Socialist Freedom Reserve Notes". As a further exploration in widening percpetions, the virtual "notes" were designed to be viewed vertically rather than in the real-world-standard horizontal configuration. No one knows why.


An idea can be - and many have been - criticized as being too big for the canvas. Colossal qualifies a presentation -- a putting-onto-the-stage, a catching-sight-of -- as more of a concept than a thing. The presentation of the concept is imputed to be unpresentable. Well, not simply unpresentable, but (worse) almost unpresentable. It is "almost too large". The concept is announced but eludes presentation on the stage.

How is the category of "almost too" arrested by the picture police? A pure and simple "too" would bring the colossal down. It would render presentation impossible. "Enough" and "not too" have a similar limiting effect. How then are we to think in the presence of a presentation that "almost goes too far"? But especially if it "almost" does so, if it presents an excess that pushes (maybe even beyond) the limits of (re)presentation?

The almost too forms the singular originality of the colossal. There is nothing of the empirical approximation in it. It escapes enclosure.







The iconic artwork of Emory Douglas "speaks" much like Dr. Fate did to the startled player, with an honest and straigtforward beauty that is difficult to monetize or spectacularize.

Though Comrade Douglas, former Minister of Culture of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, has had his work exhibited at the Tate and has a popular coffee-table book of his work you can buy on Amazon, he's also continued to collaborate with people rising up -- notably in the 2009-2014 Zapantera Negra collaboration with Caleb Duarte and Mia Eve Rollow, which brought together the aesthetic sensibilities of the Black Panthers and the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army), based in Chiapas, Mexico.


But let's not play a game of utility and function. All the traits of detachment over which we've passed during this tour, those which mark the contour of a single unlaced shoe, of a lone dancer, of an imaginably HUGE modification to the game world that is in excess, those reserves of judgement which delimit the picture itself, are effaced in the belonging of this mother's truth, in this wedding with the intelligence of the earth. The pictoral instance almost seems to be omitted - something that is reinforced by Douglas' straightforward lines and pastel colors. One forgets about painting in the aesthetic-cop sense.


Even the (intellectually) fascinating progression from re-presentation back to presentation is effaced in the obstinate specificity of the text and the pictural reminder.












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Thanks for checking out this edition of "Radio Free Dixie"! Please provide feedback and art criticisms of your own.

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