PARASITE MAXIMUM
sucking truth for power
A contemporary artist is required to find a rhetorical anchor in the McLuhanian pleasuredome, under the Miserable Information Age. Drolly opportunistic and thirsty for the coy coattails of interest capita, what sharpens the praxial teeth yet to bite? The compression and speed of information shared without context, self-expression v counter-culture vomit fog and the rest pulsed through a febrile internet, harnessed to weaponise all who attempt to interlocute simultaneous historicisation and dissemination. Gone are the 1.0 halcyon days before all net dwellers were obsessed with branding themselves as a cult of personality content producer, innocence lost as progress meta-marches downward. Those wielding an armament of cottage-industry signcomms are thus qualified for their irony laced podcasting, slipping behind glossy screens, between demonic algorithmically tracking ads. Speculative criticism of a press release, an overboiled sci-fi fanfiction, a child rambling a freeform phantasy to its parent. But it situates your pre-emptive reception to the visual art in some critical locus, capitalism and lifestyle, you know the dril by now.
HOW TO HARNESS THIRSTY RANDOS TO POWER YOUR PLATFORM
Labour doesn’t denote worth, but are we not the worthwhile product of our own labour? Documenting our own wanderlust, parking overt privileges in shadow until maybe a bad instagram story presents the wretched meat of our vile classism to the furies with online poisoning. So smart, so aloof, no need to explain what the complexities are beyond asking questions that make it complex. Riding a wave of remote screengazing like a weasel clinging to a log going down a waterfall. Blockchain and art theory has only existed for as long as I discovered it, the ontological fire burns hotter and faster with trash in it. Whatever it is, it should accumulate… and multiplication of anything often turns it into art (citation needed). Non-linear ascent up a career ladder is a childlike dream, preferable to cumulative labour rising to a level of proficiency to farm out. Which way is up, western man? Art school contributes to this unwieldy bildungsroman, it is just one perspective that is hard to escape and grafted with willingness to the increasingly leisure-coated ponces carving out practice-plateaus and pointing out how everything is a despairing ruin of media-absorbed consumer fetish. What more can be done? Overcooked smug takes on social politics and technological infractions on western concepts of this/that. Art is an asset that trends as well as trades.
Damn bro. That’s a web strewn with droplets of irony toxin, because the most impressive facet of cultural capitalism is how it subsumes elements critical of it — the radical art is enabled by what it ideologically opposes *adam curtis voice* and it removes the tooth and nail. But ther is always the “democratic webspace” to fuckspose “data” as “natural resource” despite the fact that data isn’t oil or corn (but abstracted it totally is, henlooooo). To give examples would be to enter our names on even more shitlists because how dare we shit on art worms just trying to scran the marine snow in this precarious world. But the more unstable an industry becomes, esp the culture industry, the more it relies on sympathy from the ruling classes. They seem to like to hear about made up science like “expanded non-neuronal intelligence in technology and nature” which is a horrible fetid salad of words that only someone who has bashed themselves in the face with Adventures of the Dialectic. Tristan and Isolde, meet Athroposcenester and Brometheus. They can help you master the concrete poetry of the humblebrag.
When your choice of formally classed yet always potentially classless artist trajectory is positioned, the world unzips the trouser fly of its guilt sodden post-modernist narratives and reveals to you a hyper-engorged valve cluster of content. Cultural teats to suckle from. It feels vaguely relatable because it chips off some credibility from the oft-circulated sentiment that the post-boomer generation were sold a lie, as multiple economic and sovereign crises dispensed with optimism, replaced with insidious entrepreneurialism. A botulism of idpol, dried and added to whatever hunk of bread you’ll knead out with your arse cheeks for AQNB. But the bread can’t be too basic, like a screed on how art competition fees are bad. Everyone knows paying £10+ to be considered by some jury of metropolitan artworld crawlers and politically dodgy gallerist bourgeoise to be in some exhibition or publication nobody asked for, is bad. Whitechapel does it every year, despite being arts council funded, and people flock to it under the assumption that paying to be ‘considered’ by a jury is more pious than going to ladbrokes. These kind of fuckrat cabbage shits would be the first to pull the career ladder up after them, the abyssal void of a fake meritocracy, the free market. Which we know isn’t actually free except for those on the top of it, who get there by being rich.
But the illusion transcends truth! Everything you see is good, because the optimising hand of the market has picked it. You see nothing bad, because the market just ignores it. Nothing in an art prize can be bad, then, ideologically. It’s good content, because it has been judged by those in positions of authority within that system. They deserve to be there, as any hustle to reach positions above ‘scrambling peon’ or ‘hetty douglas’ is respectable. This is all fine, because zombie capitalism has forced it upon us and the only way out is to game the system. Then the almost Seinfeldian luxury of simultaneously occupying booths in art fairs funded by banks that launder money for pedophile billionaires AND having an esteemed position in cultural quarters as a politically charged radical voice. Billing yourself as a voice that ‘speaks truth to power’ but you’ll take the paycheque from the Brexit Festival to be on their advisory panel. The same Brexit Festival that has a £120m budget from public money, while art musuems and institutions make hundreds of staff redundant due to lack of govt support. The majority of those staff being especially vulnerable minorities. But when you act like an influencer in the artworld, progressive causes never quite link up. Responsible debate or sharing slides of outraged text against the machine, please. Whatever the patreon wants, it gets.
SMASH MY BODY INTO PIECES AND BURY ME WITH THE WHITE WINE GLASSES IN VICTORIA MIRO’S GARDEN
It’s a peculiar inversion of the vanguard, culture allowing itself to be lead by trailblazers of tech startup industries, the detritus of innovation hoovered up for substance — which is in turn reconstituted into artwork of a ‘socially conscious’ nature We seem to need artists in particular to tell us how weird excessive biopolitics are by refiguring a lexicon of jargon. Everything works in the favour of artistic formation, the more insidiously positronic the better. Unconscious mores of marketability within the role of the artist are slingshotted back via that jargon buffer system and you’re given a solid “intellectual” thrust, often co-opted into the beast it itself critiques. Creative survival is obviously paramount, but garnering seductive attaches isn’t considered mutually exclusive with rampant commercialism. It’s admirable to profit from the very thing you might ideologically oppose, like the horny-for-brexit garbage academics who infest vaguely legitimate art conferences funded by educational bodies. The “resistant witness” of Russian nonconformist art, once a satirical branch of Soviet era painting with the aim to covertly undermine the carnivalesque of the state by painterly refraction, this old art modus operandi has gone on a Dantean journey. Praxial tropes (not just visual tropes) don’t burn out from overuse in the visual arts, they transition through various stages of hell until the abyss inverts into paradise, tropes becoming symbol. A trend/gimmick discarded by the self-professed precarious contemporariat just ends up in any fashion/branding wank kettle for “creative, vibrant nowness” despite the avant-garde yawns echoing through the dispensary. Funnily enough, those visual cultures then end up being the content of which these artists, enamoured with the urbane logo drenched gloam, chew and digest — the meta-product being formerly discarded subjectivities. Examples of these are often thrown up in the chattering social media patches of curators and art workers, signals of tongue-in-cheek bad taste acumen — the gallery potted plant, the gradient dye, the domestic object alienated, aspirational lifestyle codes from the media… enjoy your own list forming, reductive salience ball booster. We’re all guilty of it! Dismissal is gr8.
The tick, the bloodsucking parasite, is a noble creature and its raison d’etre of host consumption is actually a pan-philosophical dictum that parallels to survival in our gentrifying, urban lives. Fuck, who would have thought!? But don’t try to convince the workaday folk with that rhetoric, it only tracks with the directors of doublename galleries. Drain minuscule amounts of elixir to keep the primary organism alive, but do not extract so much that the host dies or notices. It’s a valid laissez-faire capitalist work ethic, while disenchanting in a glib manner because there is no romance or heroism in being a tick. Maybe that’s relative and perhaps even obsolete, right? Get ready to travel with this bullshit!
If the host willingly gives nourishment, the definition of the parasite falls apart. Not a fully graduated symbiote, caveats of this arrangement are distributed obscurely enough that risk goes unnoticed — suddenly the parasite no longer trespasses the authority of the host. The terms of blood sucking are re-written against the tick with its own consent, almost. What if the parasite is persuaded to generate something — it discovered it might have wanted to do that all along. Of course this is a very daft metaphor to acknowledge a paradigm in art making as well as the anthropomorphic projection that a tick might be conscious of death/career termination, philosophically speaking. Developments yonder in the millennial silicon VR crèche twinned with
austerity measures prod a sleeping nostalgia combinant in that paradigm. Art is a mirror to culture, but the hand holding the mirror has been swapped for the pseudo-iconoclast holding the iPhone camera, the mentality of a backseat Guardian website piecemeal commenter, the syrupy hedonist swaddling the creator myth in glitchy stock irony. The smugness trickles down to the fingertips after those typical macho-intellectual statements, the think piece commerce traders rutting in many vestibules. The tick could move up to a prime vein if a compliant measure is enacted. Or another tick might join onto the host, tumescent enough to nourish another little sucker. Does that 2nd tick feel any relations to the other, envy of feed point or desirous of tickly usurpation? Though ticks might cluster, hematophagy is too precarious an extraction method to perform en masse. Vital essence is limitless in theory, but bodies and good circumstance are not. Parasitiformes don’t need worry with choice, another problem of this daft metaphor. Maybe time for another.
The deep-sea anglerfish has a pragmatic mode of sexual congress: the tiny males are pheromone-charged seekers who graft themselves onto the females, those iconic death orbs with siqqq teeth and that bioluminescent lure. Copulation isn’t temporary for the male angler fish, as he actually begins to fuse to the female until naught but a flailing remnant is left attached, like some protrusion of mis-assembled Ikea furniture. Objectively this makes a lot of sense to fish inhabiting a cold, sunless void. The role of the male as parent is reduced to the functionality of USB-C to HDMI adapter, something you need to buy separately but is absolutely necessary. Consumer capital doth provide such analogues! All the male angler craves is functional absolution and it is getting a pretty sweet deal out of the arrangement too. Once the blood vessels merge, the male’s eyes and fins atrophy until he is nothing less than brain and testicles. Labour, time and currency mean nothing when you’re a little brain testicle supported by the ultra-state of female angler fish. That’s not far off the paradise promised to us by capital: exert labour for money which can extract pleasure and retain membership to lifestyle, enough money can also nullify the requirement for labour, the absence of which also qualifies for pleasure. We’re all striving for that big angler fish to retire into. A hermetic space of our own concerns, refusal impossible, leisure (the zero-labour kind) endless.
The angler fish do not have systems of prestige and males simply need follow their olfactory hunt and the chaos of nature plays a hand of death or actualisation, nothing in between. The females needn’t be picky as a shunned male simply dies rather than DMing you weird shit at 2am for months on end. Beating nature with big brains is our species’ survival gambit, as opposed to sexual parasitism or lovecraftian mandibles. An ecosystem deprived of photosynthesis must find an energy substitute and in abundance. What the aphotic depths of the watery abyss isn’t without of: marine snow, not a twee anaemic guitar band of reformed Tory flesh from rural England but a constant downward drift of organic material in ultra-miniscule fragments. Maybe the only trickle-down economy that actually works. Particles of sinking biological matter shaved from the azure plane above provide nourishment for tiny fleets of plankton and krill — miniature scavengers whom in ever increasing mass populate the exclusively carnivorous food chain. In a realm where the primary generative source of life is outsourced to the discarded machinations of another, evolutionary methods to circumvent precarity become particularly radical, obviously this relationship works out for the fanged hunter/baiting trapper angler fish.
The artist is not dissimilar. Independent ecosystems of artists and studios are under threat from themselves in a self-cannibalising gentrification process. Well, some are, the ones with family wealth behind them just relocate - the others perish. With the perceptive disruption of social media, surveillance states et cetera et cetera it can hardly be a blameful submission to give up being quasi-antagonistic and just simp for Hannah Barry Gallery projects instead. Survival is better when you can regurgitate capitalism’s own culture back at it, narcissus in a lambent frappe. Daddy pours a bowl of Kellogg’s Detritus for hungry, fledgeling mouths. When the material is digested, the carrion birds of advertising/marketing can snaffle the carcass and even that behaviour can become a nice glib angle some hip artist crew can “address” with some fabrication or other. Those clamouring on the floor for loose particles of Kellogg’s Detritus belong there, in their own nethersystem. No reform, just game. Until a deus ex patreon drops in like a last minute Mario Kart blue shell, but as nice as that can be, why slide into a rubberbanding artificial economy? The strange philosophical breach occurring in scholarly certainties after the far right ascension and the left fragmentation, or post-brexit/trump might render this diatribe obsolete. The currents of funding within the UK arts network are put in ever more precarious tinged jeopardy, though that isn’t anything new so sound a fart trumpet in your head. Private philanthropy as saviour isn’t a certainty either, it’s individualistic and also a pipeline to property development grifts.
Mediations on class, culture and the modern condition, which used to mostly involve kinda being weirded out by New Labour and post 9/11 rolling news, constant war atrocities broadcast from elsewhere, yeah yeah, mediations now are fulcrums of value operations. What I mean by that is, I don’t have to explain it really, it’s in the press release. The ‘art world’ is what we look to as space for renaissance even when the immolated dregs of aspartame fascist toryism fall around, self-determination is suddenly one of those weird myths that go alongside ‘surviving in an art career without going to a posh school’ yet it is all that is left now many support structurs have vanished.
This is a state where inequalities are painful, but the tangible stymieing of new generations of artists is a bit occluded. They’re nice people trying to make art, and art is great for people to look at and can make some money sometimes, or at least sheet cred? Support emerging artists: a term with the radioactive half-life of a thousand years. And if your gallery has to close down you don’t even have to tell all the represented artists until they corner you by the drinks table at the Turner Prize party, lolol.
The forever boom has nestled comfortably into the logic of the standard art market, prestige trading, vapid fuel for culture dispatches. Upwards or downwards, always forwards. A DIY periphary subculture going mainstreadm and turning a profit within the lifetime of an average garden bird.
Regardless of what anybody really thinks, the audience is like a prop for install shots or some light jazz music for background ambient presentations of the best shit-eating grin faux humbled class apologisms. Look instead to a panel featuring a credibility desperate charlatan who likes excl dinners, someone who runs a website you’ve never heard of, a writer for overdesigned and behind-the-times magazine. We all know this, nobody needs a meretricious diatribe by Jerry Saltz et al. to admonish swathes of the sector. Pleads for reform come within the vessels of the old hierarchs, darlings of the new friendlier faces of white supremacy. Fraiser Crane with the 1000 eyes, by your deathbed, watching the phantom twitch of your thumbs . A disaster must occur before any reform, which is the boringly defeatist ultimatum most applicable to any end.