On the New York Art World, or Why I am Not An Artist

 17 Thermidor 220

FADING LIGHT, DEAD SNAKES

(A Short Piece on the New York Art World, Written From My Commune in the Desert)

            Prelude:  Time is running out in the fading light – there is only perhaps less than an hour of daylight left by which to write, and now I want to write outdoors/outside – there is no comfortable place here indoors /inside to write.  The crude minds here make things uncomfortable and ugly, and seem not to know this, but it’s a little bit better still when I’m outside.

            I keep looking for snakes here in the desert, and there are almost none.  I consider snakes my protectors, spiritually and symbolically.  My inference from the fact that there have not been any lately has been that there is nothing to fear.  Yet, the last snake I saw was dead in the road.  Are my protectors fighting for me and dying, in some sense?  This snake’s dead body was facing east, and I’m about to go to the East, but dreading it. 

            What could the snake have been protecting me from – trying to protect me from? I’m not sure how to interpret the decimation of my protections, but soon the fading light will force me inside, so let me try to set forth an idea before this happens.

           

            Back in New York I’m immersed in a world of artists it seems, and they somehow both are and are not my ilk.  I emerge from this immersion in the world of desperate artists feeling alienated again, because these artists are too ignorant of the political. 

            Like the artists though, I operate in the world of the outsider, because I have integrity.  It’s funny how at the present time, with reference to anything on the outside, people fling out the label “artist”.  I cringe at the question “Are you an artist?”, and I guess that’s because I know what it indicates.  One thing that it indicates is that what is outside, what is “different”, what has integrity, and whatever does not make life prosaic, is packaged for the consumption of the common, of the dullards, of the prosaicizers, as “artist”. 

            In the realm of politics this packaging for a media audience of slaves posing as persons is the label “activist”, which neutralizes real resistance to the rule of the dull-witted yet powerful, and further distances the possibility of one’s taking on the mantle of “revolutionary”.  Most all of the artists are unaware of this packaging of “artist” as “everything which is, though not directly threatening to it, is symbolic of the rejection of  business and markets, of the status quo, for the inside”. Art and the artist are themselves packaged as outside, but still consumable and thus comprehensible insofar as they are not threatening – to be an artist in the New York mode now is to be something like a vacation for the bourgeoisie, a wonder or marvel which they consume from a safe distance while remaining exploitative and abusive cowards.   I find New York artists quite unaware of this, as when they actually believe that art alone can effect political change, but I find them even less aware though of a concomitance to this reality, and that is the conflation of art and culture.

            The artists of New York seem less and less to really know aspects of culture other than pure art, aspects such as politics, linguistics, and philosophy, so it follows that everything that is “counterculture” is easily bundled together and politically neutralized for consumption by “the gray people”, as Sandra Good called them, in its appellation as “art” and “artist”, with artists neither making any objections to this nor acting from an awareness of the broader culture.  Since the consciousness necessary to understand this packaging and neutralization itself comes in part from other elements of culture that the New York artists do not seem to really know, elements of culture such as politics and philosophy, “art” as the production of works that are traditionally called art strictly speaking is aggrandized to cover over all of culture, as if art were culture itself.  This very phenomenon, however, is possible only when one lacks a real knowledge of the full spectrum of culture and of how politically neutralized artists really are.  Artists do not control interpretation, but rather must engage with other aspects of culture (e.g. political power) in order to affect taste, interpretation, and action. The monodimensionality of the New York artist and the absurd belief that pure art alone can change the political landscape is a guarantee of political neutralization, and this neutralization of artists has happened to such a degree that,  even the most aware artists, who are few in number, and who are politically engaged beyond their artwork as is necessary, are so engaged merely as “activists” (read: harmless to the powers that be) and not as “revolutionaries” (read:  dangerous and real menaces to the powers that be).

Considering this state of affairs, since I am a revolutionary, I must now say that I am not an artist.  

The Eroticization of Getting Fucked Over

(submitted to me by Trashi Lovequest, an incorrigible lover of boys)

I have drawn so much sustenance and inspiration from Janis Joplin(1), and particularly from her words of wisdom about love.  She said that if one has love for only one day, for only one night, for only one afternoon or one hour, one has still really had love.  She advised to believe in this love, fleeting as it is.
This love, this fleeting love of an afternoon, sometimes run through with sex, is/was real, and this was your love.  This means something to, and is valuable to those of us whose love lives consist only in these fleeting moments, minutes, hours, afternoons, mornings, and nights of loves which, after the fact, leave us questioning their reality or legitimacy because they were so fleeting, so brief - because this person payed attention to us for a few hours, of a midnight.
"This was real, man," she said. (Janis 3:16)
And her word is now The Word.

She took my consciousness one stage further.  An earlier stage in this consciousness was to recognize that this is what my love life consisted of - of encounters with boys who may or may not have cared, boys whom I loved and pined for after that afternoon we spent in bed, or biking in the country after a happenstance meeting.  The stringing together of these moments had been a personal and ontic narrative for me, but I had not had the level of consciousness necessary to really call this my love, my love life until, in a moment, listening to the wisdom of Janis, I gained the courage to move to this next stage of love consciousness. 

Even this level of consciousness, or this field of consciousness which is centered on the constitution of love is, I think, something inaccessible to heterosexuals, but something that gay and lesbian minds and hearts have a predisposition to find or invent, especially those of us who escape again and again from the traps of 'family values' and the pathology of family and its templates.

But then lately, even in my hearkening again and again to the sage's words about the validity of an afternoon encounter, of a midnight's debauchery, and my further realization that, not only were these encounters love affairs, but that their connection together in a string of experiences was my love life, really; even with her words of inspiration and wisdom in my mind, I began to want more, and began to have a new desire - a desire which seemed to run up against heteronormative ideas of love,  and one which had to be extracted from them.  (And isn't this all we have been relegated to as gay and lesbian persons - to an extraction of reality and of our true desire from their pathologies, their masturbation, their desperate frauds?).

This new desire was a desire begotten, yes, by wanting more, even in conditions which preclude the possibility of my getting more.  This new desire is a desire to be fucked over by guys - to understand, to see, to convert this being fucked over into love.  Hurt me.  Use me. Step on me. Reject me.  Walk all over me. Say that it was just sex. "Fuck me over." (I found myself saying this openly and out loud to one of my 'lovers' as I, lying on the floor, asked him to step on my head, and recently again I said it to my nineteen year old lover - my cries of  "fuck me" became, in bed and out, cries of "fuck me over!" [later, in a more rational, calm mode I explained to him that he had already fucked me over, was fucking me over, and would fuck me over in the future]). 

This, then, this being fucked over, used, taken advantage of, when there is nothing or little else, is love, and acquires a validity even despite its pathologized origins. There was love there, in these encounters, and their being taken together is my love life, a type of love life which is genuinely and thoroughly gay in that this type of love and this type of love life in the world of gay desire is validated, pursued, valued, and not denigrated and pathologized, as it is in heteronormative life.

This is love in the time before the Revolution - before the gay/lesbian/queer revolution, the time when it was/is still difficult to extract love from their self-deceptions, from their deceits, from their pathologies and social malignancies.  

Do you understand?

Do you understand that "love will find a way,"(2), even in a false world of imposed interpretations?

Love is the foundation of the Revolution, but love cannot wait for the Revolution, for the epuration. 


And I trust that you'll pardon my French.



T.L.


(1)  "Writing begins with a dead woman" - Helene Cixous, in 'Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing'.
(2)  "Love will find a way" - Modern Rocketry, in "Homosexuality".

Part 1 Gay and Lesbian People and the Organized Left

The core problem with the left for a gay and lesbian movement is the left's belief that, since property relations are the original source of actual social relations, these must be addressed directly and primarily and that addressing the outgrowths of property relations, such as misogyny and the oppression of gay and lesbian people, is secondary.  The ultimate manifestation of this is a refusal to put gay and lesbian justice first and to make it primary and central in leftist programs.  This mistaken focus on the origins of property relations is a result of absolutism, which always creates incorrect thinking.  This particular absolutism on the part of the left  is revisionist, and even counterrevolutionary in that it favors syllogistic logic, a mainstay of reactionaries, over inductive and dialectical logic, the correct logical templates for revolutionary justice.

This being said, it should be asserted that the left has a more correct hypothesis regarding the origins of sociopathologies than perhaps any other organized tendency, movement, or conceptual framework.  And yet, at its center is the fundamental error of believing that the effect must not be addressed, but rather only the cause, even when that cause is highly transmogrified and fully removed from its inceptual context.  The basic theory of the left, with regard to gay and lesbian justice, which it does not address directly or adequately, to say the least, is that private property produces relations of domination and oppression, including the idea that women are property. Women then as such are an oppressed class, since anyone who is the property of another is not free.  Women were and are the owned, not the owners, and marriage is the guarantee of ownership, the continued truth of which is still manifest in the fact that women stay in marriages out of financial necessity only ("for the sake of the children").

The male persona took on the role of oppressor and property master because some inadequate and unsure males forced this template onto maleness and sealed its reality by going to war over property.   Property as a usurpation and property relations produced ideas of dominance and control, which these inadequate males then pushed onto the idea and persona of maleness, as a cover for feelings of weakness and inadequacy. Maleness then came to exist for many as domination, complete with its attendant psychopathologies, such as competition and physical and emotional abuse.  Women did not gain property except insofar as they were property, and also had the related and negative psychopathological, manufactured characteristics imputed to them and then made manifest through enforcement. 

As more and more elements of life became pathologized by property relations and male feelings of inadequacy engendered thereby (the nature of property acquisition is to continually beget desire for more property acquisition), sexuality and sex itself became more and more thoroughly pathologized, becoming sadomasochistic.  The male feelings of domination/inadequacy begotten by property relations then naturally created self-aggrandizement through the denigration of the female  or the non-dominant male (the eunuch, the transgendered person, the considerate male, et cetera).  Sadomasochism as a form of property-based identity was then the understanding that one person's gain was another's loss, or that one person's power meant another person's powerlessness.

In society, gay and lesbian persons are all women, and stand as women, and can indeed stand no other way.  The fusion of a society of property and the concept of sexuality, which latter emerged from the fusion of Judaic ethics and science, produced the concept of heterosexuality in contemporary times.  Heterosexuality then, became a core of property based sadism - a sexual fantasy world of dominator and dominated.  It was in this context which modern gay and lesbian identity arose.

_________

A number of questions emerge from the basis for gay and lesbian oppression as understood by the left.  One is the question of the origin of the desire for private property.  Whence this desire, if it is not natural?  The question goes back to Rousseau, who, in his conjectural anthropology, deigned not to answer it.  The answer to this question from the perspective of the left now is that the historical circumstances of prehistory would have determined the development of this desire, but that those circumstances are more or less unknown to us.  This hypothesis is reasonable enough, is consistent with the view of historical, societal, and  dialectical determination of human behavior, and in any case is antecedent to the question of gay and lesbian justice and the left. 

A second question is why gay men came to be identified with women.  This has to do with the understanding of what a woman is through the eyes of the corrupted and ruined male.  In the eyes of this kind of male persona, women do not exist per se, but only as "walking embodiments of men's projected needs" (MacKinnon).  These needs of the corrupted male with a false persona are then also false needs, but real ones as well insofar as they determine an oppressive actuality.  The sadist male as he has developed then must find others to dominate,  and since sadism from property relations involves fundamental insecurity, the sadistic male also must seek constant reassurance for and reinforcement of himself.  When he sees the falsity of his persona in the refusal of the gay male to be interested in the domination of women, he is enraged because this immediately removes the cornerstone of his false identity, revealing it for what it is, and showing that maleness has nothing inherently to do with domination and that he is rather a ridiculous fraud.

End Part I

MacKinnon, Catherine. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U. Press, 1989, p. 119