'Necrophiliac, psycho-racist & hypochondriac'. Performance at LOGEMENT, Antwerp (above) & BUREAU DU PORT, Brussels, Belgium. July 2009. Group
performance text
Today’s art-scene is necrophiliac, psycho-racist and hypochondriac. This art-scene is an elitist movement unknown to most. At the same time this art-scene wants to be worshiped by the masses and is afraid of their power.
Only works of art that meet museum standards ("museum quality") are purchased, since; “There is no purpose to build up a mediocre collection”. (Quote from the book ‘Collection of Flemish community acquisitions 2002-06’)
The museum quality, art movement works like a sect. It displays itself and behaves as if a God. It is totally absorbed into being PURE, LIGHT, CLEAN, CONSISTENT and without paradoxes. Every step is carefully calculated. The snobbism is incredible. The hypocrisy is total. Nothing can be said about anything outside the fixed borders. The rules are strict and narrow. Much is classified as impure. 'Understood' as not allowed. And if anything not allowed shows up it must be exterminated. How does extermination work today? By SILENCING.
Those who dictate the art-scene like despots, buy and sell art that must decorate their empty world. The art they show interest must also BE as empty as possible. Little entertainments or decorations, and forget-this-world-I'm-always-going-to-be-ok-anyway's. To quote artist Gustav Metzger “Growth leads towards self-destruction and towards machinery made to break down, so that you can replace it, go on borrowing money, spending it, and accumulating. That is what we know as the capitalist system. This system is inherently cynical, inherently throwaway — and damaging in all conceivable directions. And artists go along with it, reflect it and that means they then support it.”
Through psycho-racism INDIVIDUALS are now attacked because of their INNER deviations. Your art is not art if it is not part of the money-machine. And it's not even worth looking at if it does not make you laugh or suggest salvation, which in our post-colonial time is called nirvana (the state of being free from suffering). The perfect, the pure with no desire for anything, is the end. You are dead if you are there; in perfection, in nirvana. YOU ARE DEAD. So, I come back to the beginning. The present art-scene is necrophiliac, psycho-racist and hypochondriac.
Some artists try to portray reality by being “REAL” in their works of art. But as Lenin is supposed to have said “you can never compete with the radicality of the real”.
Absurdities are popular because they feel eccentric. But only if they are superficial, non-threatening. A real absurdity would be unbearable for just about all. I see how quickly and easily people get annoyed. Those same people who claim, or behave as if they are the most tolerant. They are false and many don't even know it because they are too occupied with their hypochondriac selves. Yet, they have killed their own souls, and TRY TO KILL OTHERS IN SILENCE. These hypochondriacs (artists, collectors, gallerists, etc…) who are so vein and unresisting to pain! Always complaining about their situation, always feeling sick, begging for compassion, that their art or collection is not good enough, that they don’t have enough success. Always pretending their situation is worse than anyone else’s, even if they are drinking champagne.
All of this can only lead to mediocrity... But as another despot once said: “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it”. (Hitler).
And to end this I would like to quote Hanna Arendt: “Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.“
SOME OF THE OTHER PARTICIPANTS AT LOGEMENT
Could only find a few sites to link: Ludo Mich, Harry Heirmans, Guy Rombout, Rufus, Chris Gillis, Phil Bloom