WHAT THE MANIFESTO?

Having found the market driven critical discourse of contemporary art to be at times both distorting and arbitrary (though at times it does seem to provide a certain symmetry: with openings feeling something like an illegal dog fight: bloody lino and hand licking.) and having seen the opportunities that art may provide for paradigmatic transcendence confounded at the point of its proliferation; I must now attempt an autonomous dissemination of my own work.


As the amount of information increases beyond the capacity of individuals to comprehend it, any single part of the data available can be accessed and analyzed instantly; the problem we now face is that we have reached such a saturation of information that specific information is subject to so many possible relations within the data stream that it immediately losses any autonomy of meaning (google etc) and so we find ourselves forced to integrate artificial or spurious peripheral relationships when considering any single area of data. Rather than triggering a reductive process whereby we mine the pool of data for comprehensible specifics whole areas are taken together and summarized by engines powerful enough to link these abstract families of disparate information. Any specialization losses the possibility of a dialectical opposite as huge tracts of knowledge are integrated into larger and larger webs of information, the mechanisms whereby these fields might be made useful move further away from the skill set of the human mind. As the amount of accessible data grows we approach a state of binary dependence, but one in which the code is lost, we may comprehend the referent but we can no longer conceive of that which it signifies. Knowledge must be made palatable for an increasingly plural and superficial cultural paradigm.

Ideas lose currency in a society obsessed with production. The longevity of concepts is inextricably linked to the time given to their consideration, not to their production. It is the duty of the artist to create the idea; it is the duty of the society to preserve it. Galleries should act as repositories for artistic truth. The market should function as a tax system levied on the willing for the maintenance of a shared cultural legacy. The artists’ only consideration should be the proliferation of their truth. It is the artists’ position in society that provides the paradigmatic base for the work: at times detested, adored, but always at odds with the governing ethos of wider society. The critical establishment should exist to catch the windfall of those who create.