PAINTING FAUSTIAN TRADE-OFFS

Art not meant to sell or soothe, but piss on normalcy.

My two or three followers (a wildly optimistic guess) would be very surprised to hear I in fact also paint. Of course by surprised I mean bored.

But I do. I don’t sell my painting because contemporary art is a farce. I once grazed by the art world and it turned me down, which caused me great sadness. Only later with my political enlightenment I realised the art world, like other worlds, did me a great favor by turning me down. I am poor, but I am not part of that dystopian bunch that took human creativity and distorted it to the point of no return in the service of finance. Alas, everything is in the service of finance nowadays. Even sunshine.

I don’t call this dark: confronting reality isn’t dark, it has the clarity of fresh air, and problem-solving.

The colour scheme of liver disease, and putrid plants. Grotesque and queasy, not meant to be liked.

Art not meant to sell or soothe, but to piss on normalcy.

A story of the abyss of bourgeois morality opened by a failed relationship; to give into that, is the actual SIN.

Temptation in art and religion is usually felt by the man, and the woman IS the temptation. Temptation is usually also sex. Or anything pleasurable. But mostly sex. We as animals are programmed to feel remorse at having too much pleasure.

I view domestication as the real temptation. Domestication is the sin.

Settling down and becoming part of the respectable middle class is a great big sin. Its “propriety” is praised on TV. But it is intellectual compromise and ideological murder.

You have to look at it through the prism of political systems. What allows people of the middle class their little comforts in their corseted existence with strict behavioural rules & rituals is an economic system. They work for this system, and they beget some comforts. It’s a beaten path accepted by most, who strive for it, unquestioning. Because it’s the one held up for the masses to aspire to, especially with the hypnotising sheen of media, film and pop culture that makes it so glamorous to own things, cars and lifestyles. Pop music doesn't even hide its consumerist intent anymore, so many songs are about designer items, fancy cars and splashing cash.. so many songs are about “work”.

The aspiration is to fit in economically. You work in a corporation, you are a good bee, you are rewarded. You keep your eyes on the rewards, not the constrictions. The fact there are constrictions is erased from view, as you are distracted with the consumerist jollies. But as an outsider — you have the privilege of a helicopter’s view over the real trades involved.

You do trade work, but most of all, you trade obedience. And the capacity to question things. If you start to question things, job offers start to dwindle, and the new tech world has many subtle means of pariahing you for the wrong thing you said.

Not just once was I excluded from groups for saying unpopular things. Had I been in conventional work, this would have affected my finances. In my niche, I am lucky not to have paid a high price for my opinions. Not many people are. So they instinctively learn to not say the wrong thing.

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds” — is the obedience-instilling idiom for that sinister trade off of dignity vs. comfort.

The trade off was apparent to me early on, and I was willing to bear the cost of refuting it. But sometimes natural hormones and instincts make you seek company and if the company is not on the same page as you, they may eventually use your pariah status against you and try to shame you for not being “one of them”. Not having a job. Not trading your dignity too, for comforts. And fitting in. For me this would be a faustian pact. And I never signed it. It was temptation in the most perverse way, i.e. the most subtle way. When nature plays your deep emotions against you and you’re inclined to seek the socially sanctioned company of people despite being fully aware the limitations they’ve got.

The otherwise idyllic landscape of settled life, a picket fence, prosperity, and the natural abundance symbolised in round womanly breasts.. the nesting spirit that places you as a drone alongside others in the matrix… those appeared as THE TEMPTATION to me. With almost biblical connotations. As they are painted in my tableau.

Temptation isn’t sex, or gambling, or drugs. Temptation is the neoliberal pact of going to work, having kids and buying for pleasure — thus picking safety of opinions and comfort/glamour of the nest over intellectual integrity.

Because if you have intellectual integrity, and see what this economic system is doing to the world, other nations, and the poor in your town, you simply cannot just bow your head in your cubicle and go home to a wife and kids in a flashy car. You have to connect the two acts: nesting/work and the destruction of the world. And see how your work and ambitions of a nice respectable life are harvested into an effort of destruction and war. And you have to resist it. And accept, either solitude, poverty, or outcasting.

Can you? Can you take your activist ideals and good will to their right end conclusions and stop partaking? Stop doing your bit at work and censoring your dissatisfaction? Can you stop buying, and nesting, and marrying for status, and having status symbol kids?

If you don’t, your Facebook posts about the ills of austerity and the ecological destruction of the Amazon forests have no value. Because every day you go to work you vote for them. With the most important things you have: your time and your intellectual labour.

Think, what is the real temptation? Because it sure isn’t what it was anymore. The respectable is the new sin. The real sin is domestication.