(rebel
army’s ht laid the bit post-yap...lo-fi)
I at the
beginning all respect, big respect due to anyone who’s ever spoken, who’s
written, painted, sculpted, given stones and woods paint and – as long as they
were doing that from the depths of their bowels and the absolute and total
contempt for any third generation clone of a retarded monkey that’s ever fitted
a role that was constructed for them. They’re supposed to be angry, someone
creates that for you and you enter that space and you act angry, you are
supposed to be happy and you do that - I’m just bouncing off what Thembinkosi
has said. It’s a designated role that gets given to people and they step in
there and they play it and speak in the name of art.Um.. I have absolutely no
love for those fartists who speak in the name of beings where Frankenstein’s
never been. Anyway I believe that you can get as surreal as you want, you can
be abstract, vessel of the gods, locking yourself up in a cube, all conceptual,
running structural up against a future mural, you can be a post-dated
futuristrick, you can mix up your colours with metaphysics - but time always
sticks and the putridity of your art history oozes out of the pores, slides
under the gallery doors.
And so we
are here in a session that might as well have been called, ‘bring on the
freaks’. It’s supposed to be those guys that – they don’t engage in high farty
talk, they’re just low level intellectual creatures, you know. They say it was
originally called ‘Messy States of the Art’ you know. You’ve got some guy who
is throwing a little stone somewhere, you’ve got someone who is throwing faeces
against the wall, we’ve got someone who takes of their clothes and poses at the
slightest provocation and stuff like that and you put them up there and you
say, this is ‘Messy States of the Art, Art and Activism’ you know. I don’t know
about that. [ action] Yeah, yeah, yeah, Tracey, okay, I want – she’s kicking me
under the table for some reason or other, perhaps to give me some inspiration,
whatever.
I suppose, I
have to start out by echoing what has been said. Some time ago there was a time
indeed when artistic expression knew no demarcation and specialisation was well
vain, but then limitations became standards, when people realised that they’re
locked in this box, so they want other people to also not be able to get out of
that box, so their limitations become standards for the rest of us. And so now
the artists – I was asked at some point why I’m a poet, I’ve never called
myself a poet except when it was meant to piss someone off, if someone said I’m
not a poet I’ll jump up and define myself as that fucking poet, but – sorry, I
didn’t mean to say that. But anyway, now because of that, the artists have
fallen so much in love with their chains that they paint and polish them with
their brains and stand in defence of false borders imperialist by definition
and call it ‘discipline’. You know whips and leather, lips of foul weather,
bring these ropes to string up art hopes. I mean, it’s said we constantly looked
counter the flow, you know, to be locked in the perennial NO. We all know it’s
hard to take a stand in quicksand. Now the art-activist is a Sandton Mall
guerrilla engaged in marshmallow war, the little warrior’s fate is dictated at
Gallagher Estates. And this renaissance-time talk, this art boom-slime has
Fikile cartoon figured out, he is an Afro Speedy Gonzales emasculated, an
Internet called Castrato, dressed up in digi-arty-face. Now the cyber-warriors
get called up & out of the brainstream like ‘mess with me. I’ll hack an
artwork on your curator’s winter face’, we’re lime-wired to the future, now
globalisation means bringing Lefifi Tladi out of the dark of black
consciousness to coffee-creamer commercials. So now we have Africa at the opera drowning in
faecal perfume. Where question is killed with a sound bite to the jugular vein.
So with no tools for any formal dissection we’ve fallen into a thematic void,
to emerge with broken-winded fart theories talking ecstatic but forced to walk
it synthetic, propped up against the fool’s lie of artistic freedom. Now
spin-doctors got your bleeding hearts sutured shut, now you liberal
haemorrhage. Again, I repeat, we do not have a culture of criticism just a
tradition of bitching. So onward, onward eager children you know, there was a
smile, there was a minute when a smile was subversive when some would say
skinning teeth was obscene before the art scene became all giggle and green,
you know, and we received remuneration to join the revolution. So now our art comes
blown in transatlantic slave-trade winds pretending to be master of its
pre-ordained destiny you know, case in point check, check the open mic session
for the tongues that self debase as they anoint, you know, and the agents and
consultants come with talk dressed in the crimps of pimps because the artist of
social conscience is a street prostitute, pedalling rotten meat. So we make an
enema of cinema, you know, blackwash becomes a blushing / ablution, becomes a
cleansing solution. Antiquity had the art role as one that was meditative (?),
now you know, now our posterity is on the posterior or to be specific
there...rectal attack. Art becomes vomit, faeces dropping as pieces of
performance. Now bum-rush means painting the human canvas with a cum-brush, you
know. Prostration is the great event, the institution, I repeat, in respect
(?), the institution serves as the experience’s orifice, that’s what the
gallery seeks. The media hype fraud gets the tribe award... when ‘life-arting’
itself towards affirmation becomes entertainment, that’s what is called
‘containment’. Again you get these freaks, I count myself as one, we all sit
here as freaks. We get these freaks to come in here and throw stones and burn
fires, you know, when you give them a bottle of petrol and a stick of matches
and say, yeah go burn there and then you stand and applaud, that’s
neutralisation. That’s what it is you know. Now we conspire to put the future
in a museum, time slipping, slime warping, we stand opposite origins. History
obliterated then recreated under Holywooden direction. Have I spoken out of my
ten minutes already or do I still have time, I’ve got a bit to say. That’s sad,
that’s it. Okay we’ve moved from romanticising poverty to glorifying access,
but then again self-preservation is no disease, you know, so the practise is to
paint the consumptive redemptive, cause it’s a hit to be elite. The human is
just so much meat for the grave that’s where you get the ultimate lower class
in the grave. As naai as you can get off the art drug. Where dick, mic and
Afro-chic together make pretty poetry. We’re stuck in a jam factory. It’s, S
& M time. We’re paid to kick a rhyme up the President’s rectum. The
government created revolutionaries, you know, Nestum and Purity babies, fashion
models and dreadlocked puppies, yelping in the space between intersexuality and
code-bitching. Barking at the high farty with low-level intellect as I said.
Sitting at the feet of Jan van Riebeeck and as I said this is the extent of
neutralisation we used to piss on that shit you know urine that was acidic. Now
poetry is a fashion accessory, very visual, art dressed up photogenic, in lines
of graphic-design that run from rainbow birds to broad based infanticides
stamped ‘Proudly South African’ gingoistic, where the poem is uniform and art
with an utilitarian purpose gets dildoed to irrelevance coming off the
conveyor-belt, dry. I think art plays a part about as smart as a fart. Art
practice becomes nation creation, religious, celebration of putrid nationalism
in the time of sub-zero degree politics. Should I leave it there? No hold on
just a minute. Ag, forget it, okay sure. It’s fine. No, no, no.
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