It’s weird

It’s weird because I remember being a teenager in the ’90s and romantically feeling as though art wasn’t as potent as in the ’60s because nothing was at stake. Or I’d read about feats of high thought in the ’40s, of humans doing extraordinary things because there was great adversity. Like they’d write great works of literature, flee into hiding in a sewage drain, then kill themselves. Now we are in a time where a lot is at stake, and there is a lot of adversity, and yet there seems to be a general wash of befuddlement in the USA. The time has come, but we’ve forgotten our train of thought. For this there are reasons which deserve real analysis elsewhere, but with that in mind: maybe we need to use our forgetting. Of course, there are people living exceptionally due to excruciating circumstances, but for many of us in this “Downtown” we are here to “Critique,” it hasn’t hit everyone just yet. And it should; we’re going down. There’s still a formal, maybe market-driven or trend-driven regurgitation that could use a little extension of the amnesia of our time — like our amnesia maybe needs to go all the way, only formally. I’m reading a book now about “Poetic Forgetting,” and it seems useful. It’s a very 20th-century concept, maybe, but also it’s about how forgetting allows an opening into new configurations of language and form. Then I was reading an interview with Pope.L, and he talks about reading a Handbook of Ignorance Studies. And Pope.L talks about what he is getting from the book, and it’s an understanding of how ignorance can be a resource, and that with all new knowledge comes new ignorance. I feel like decay and undoing are what we need to lean into in art, or in life, right now, to understand how to use this moment of torture and flummox into a state of rewiring. Of course, this is a time for absurdity, and court jesters, and grave motorized feeling to activate a sense that there is very little left to lose, and so we have to lose our shit. The senses connect us to our humanity; we can build with both historic awareness and a forgetting of what we know habitually because we just don’t, we have been wrong. We must lick the dirty floor now and taste it, and let that remind us of what we must live for. All people perceive, and all art is about perception, and we must use art to change a putrid perception that truth is found in fascist self-interest, art unwittingly performing this perception through a regurgitation of acceptable gestures enacted in fear or marketable self-interest. Art should work to erase the perceiver’s false logic by first erasing the artist’s own. Art needs to delegitimize, confuse, satirize, and connect with the gut and connect with urgency. For that, you need courage, and for courage, you need to forget about everything but what you know atomically. Let that drive the artist and those who witness to lose all constraints and shame and activate their person, and all the living bacteria and fungi living in their person, to take on the task of collective liberation.