Notes Toward a post-Artist Eschatology

• Nonconformity is being redefined as a mental illness.
• Apocalypse in the original sense meant a revelation (literally: an uncovering,) not a grand, destructive cataclysm. Armageddon is the cataclysm, apocalypse is the moment we know it is coming or possible.
• In the 1990s, the intellectual conversation over postmodernism was whether or not it was happening and whether it was possible to define “the now” without the benefit of historical distance. The term post-modernity better defines that time; it was the apocalypse of modernism, the moment we realized how deeply flawed modernism is and, thus, the Enlightenment and capitalism, and the realization that this era is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by something else, not the end of history itself.
• Our contemporaneity is the post-apocalypse. We are watching the era of the -isms and the -ologies pass. What will replace them?
• At the turn of the 21st century, reforms allowed Chinese artists to embrace the themes and representations of Western contemporary art. They began a period of experimentation, embracing their “fin de siécle,” often forming artists' collectives and communities on the outskirts of the major city centers. They became known for their innovative work and performances. Some were offered positions in the apparatus of State art institutions, by doing so, often making a choice that would pull them away from the experimental work which made them visible. Often those embracing the precarity of nonconformity instead of commodification were “disappeared” when their artistic representation threatened the mythologies of the Chinese State while Artists like Ai Wei Wei chose global recognition.
• Choosing nonconformity is a form of subalterity.
• The field of Artists using online technologies to create representation is wide and deep. BUT much of it interacts with or responds to social media platforms.
• Most of it seems activist OR performative OR critical commentary.
• Those that perform internet punnery in the form of memes or approach the sublime in the form of glitch or game or algorithmic complexity posit or reference a possible post-human dystopia that lies just beyond the event horizon – this Armageddon waits with nasty, long, pointed teeth – which seems honest, but often nihlistic.
• Activism among Artists grows, continuing to expand the field of art. Often this is “liberty-seeking,” experiments with technologies that attempt to escape the reach or control of Authority and give back control to local communities, the people, individuals. Why have so many Artists embraced online technologies as a solution to perceived social ills? Why (might work better without the word why)is there hope that commodification and surveillance aren't inherent in these systems?
• Choosing experimentation, expanding the field of art, has led Artists to a choice between institutional practices or experimentation, conformity or subalterity.
• Is it enough to be a critic, a cagey observer picking a neutral stance “reporting” on what is? Artists like Hitto Steryl charm the liberal elite (who ooze with pity for the noble subaltern) by performing their art in the form of TED-type talks for those who aren't in the place between. Is this really the space between Utopia and Dystopia?
• What is needed is a transcendent cynicism. For if the end comes soon, live it on your own terms, play the character you want to be. Even in the somber face of inevitable societal change, it is a valid hope that we have the agency to make things better than they are, better than they were, better than They want them to be. Even if the technological elite succeed in using the spoils of Empire to act out Lyotard's post-modern fable by escaping the gravity well as human consciousness in some form, the rest of us will be left here to find love in the ruins. Even the curmudgeon enjoys human touch.
• What replaces the Artists of this moment of contemporaneity? If commodity dissipates as modernism ends, as the field of art grows, as the moment becomes the next, do we simply become entertainers, gadflies, cultural critics or experimenters? Are we divinators, somber bell-wethers, sages or magicians?
• These are the questions of our time, of the way Artists choose to spend their days. And the way Artists will choose the time and place of their own death, for to perform as a subaltern is to learn to pass inside the interstices of the structure that Authority dictates. With that comes premature death due to increased stress, precarious housing, less accessible health care, etc., etc.
• Live as if experimentation and transversality are the norm, not the non-conform. Perform and pass, survive and flourish by finding hidden gaps in whatever didactism Authority dictates. The grand narrative is dead. Long live the new substrate.