“They said in the Eighties that painting was dead, well, painting hadn’t even started. It was such a narrow minded period of time, the conceptualists really tried to get rid of painting completely.
The area of imagination, the playing field for art, is so gigantic that no-one’s really explored it. That would be the legacy that I would want to leave, the exploration of what imagination can lead to, how it would compound itself to become expladential.
In other words what my generation does I would like to see another younger generation come and step on that and make that one step further into wild abstraction, to compound the poetry, make it lyrically remarkable.”
RADIANT
Creative logic, positive imaginings, brain food, associative machines, dynamic potentials, positive humanism, sexual politics, human rights
Theorie der Halbbildung
“At its highest, the philosophical idea of culture [Bildungsidee] sought to form and to preserve natural existence. It meant both the repression of the animalistic in humanity through their adaptation to one another, and the salvage of the natural in opposition to the pressure of the decrepit, man-made order over and against them. The philosophy of Schiller – that Kantian and critic of Kant – was the most pregnant expression of the tension between these moments, while in Hegel’s theory of culture – under the name of externalization [Entäußerung] – just as in late Goethe, it is the desideratum of adaptation, in the midst of their humanism, that triumphs. Where such tension dissolves, adaptation becomes all-triumphant, and its measure becomes the merely existent. It prohibits the positive from erecting itself over and against the given. By the power of the pressure that it exerts on people, adaptation perpetuates the amorphous which it was intended to form – aggression. Just this, according to Freud’s insight, is the source of civilization’s discontents.”
“Did you vote Tory at the last election?”
““Low-income holidaymakers” are the perfect art audience. There’s something very evocative about the British seaside experience. This show is modelled on the failed winter wonderlands they build every December that get shut down by trading standards – where they charge £20 to look at some alsatians with antlers taped to their heads towing a sleigh made from a skip. Essentially this is a theme park that Lawrence Llewelyn Bowen would endorse. The advantage of putting art in a small seaside town is you’re only competing with donkeys.I think a museum is a bad place to look at art; the worst context for art is other art.“
“Get stuck in and change it”
“If you think academies are a red herring, a partial and inconsistent solution to a problem that has been wrongly framed, then you need to somehow respond to this; choose a school that is still local authority-controlled, and support it to stay that way. Or become a governor of an academy, to uphold the values that you loved in community schools: that they serve the whole community.”
“Artists shouldn’t be making art on the side, it should be their job”
“We need to re-train audiences who’ve grown used to the free YouTube model that shorts are worth paying for. I keep telling my animator friends, “Please sell your work. Even if you put it online and just charge 50 cents, sell it.” “Everything is free” has been doing genuine damage to young artists.” (animation)
28 February 1995
“Do very hard things, just for the sake of it.
(A way of doing something original is by trying something so painstaking that nobody else has ever bothered with it. […] Then the question arises in the mind: ‘Why are they going to all this trouble?’ I like this question. I like any question that makes you start thinking about the ‘outside’ of the experience – because it makes the experience bigger.)”
nature and techno
The banks: how am I here again?
The Age of Happiness
“The truth of the concept of immiseration has been demonstrated today not, as Marx expected, in the field of goods necessary for survival, since these, far from becoming scarce, have become more and more abundant; but rather in relation to survival itself, which is always the enemy of real life.
Affluence had seemed to promise to all men the Dolce Vita previously lived by the feudal aristocracy. But in the event affluence and its comforts are only the children of capitalist productivity, children doomed to age prematurely as soon as the marketing system has transformed them into mere objects of passive consumption. Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume, the hellish cycle is complete. In the realm of economism, survival is both necessary and sufficient. This is the fundamental truth of bourgeois society. But it is also true that a historical period based on such an antihuman truth can only be a period of transition, an intermediate stage between the unenlightened life that was lived by the feudal masters and the life that will be constructed rationally and passionately by the masters without slaves. Only thirty years are left if we want to end the transitional period of slaves without masters before it has lasted two centuries.”
Paul Greer 