"Additionally, this artwork of Jaar's is frought with colonial cliches. It is a fetishizing of Africans as victims, and the use of eyes is reminiscent of much Colonial writing. The eyes of the predator, bloodshot, out of control; the prose of Empire while in the colonies is rife with descriptions of the eyes of the natives. This is almost caricature. These eyes are not like any others because they have seen a special horror. Secondly, there is something deeply sentimentalizing about this. The woman, the mother, helpless, but now (!) assisted by a white artist. A man! Artist as white savoir, who also gets to wring his hands, brimming with white guilt."
The white voyeur. Observing Houston and the suffering from a distance. The acute suffering is that of the poor of course.
Jeff St Clair wrote..
"I tend to see Harvey as the latest aftershock of the political mentality that led to Deepwater Horizon. The Obama mentality, if you will. The pious mentality that signs the toothless Paris Accords, while authorizing deepwater drilling, fracking, coal liquidification, mountaintop removal mining, LNG terminals and offshore drilling."
The activists in the US desperately need education, and should be looking for it in the old left I am also criticizing. For they need to understand far more the nature of US imperialism, of the continuing plunder of the global south and the enormity of the suffering caused by US militarism. And finally, there is a huge danger now in the faux left. I am thinking of Chris Hedges remarkably reactionary article on antifa, and others such as the opportunistic Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin) and the endless stream of pretend left that clutter up The Guardian. These people are dangerous. They are serving the interests of what they purport to criticize. Controlled opposition.
Phil Rockstroh: Controlled, in many cases, by their compulsive careerism, a mode of mind and attendant Weltanschauung that is, by reflex, reductionist. The mindset dismisses not only art but psychoanalysis, or any process of character deepening -- not outright, as noted -- but by unconscious reflex, for the reason such endeavours do not bestow an immediate utility insofar as careerist gain. The careerist's hyper-professional path instils a crackbrained realism, and I believe the phenomenon also applies to your insight, John, as to why all too many leftists, who have internalised the very capitalist order that they believe they have rejected, evince an indifference -- if not philistine belligerence towards art. I'm not bandying value judgements here. I mean, how is it possible to avoid the internalisation of a phenomenon as psychically inundating as is the culture one is born into?
If you were born a Germanic pagan, the woodlands, glens, and meadows you navigate on a daily basis would be plangent with the resonances and admonitions of Wotan. Thus careerism, to those possessed by its careerist incantations and are inculcated with its cannons, seems to carry a numinous quality that degrades into a cultist mindset. In short, it is the only form of participation mystique available under late capitalist despotism. (To wit, we can glimpse why Hillary Clinton and the entire klavern of coastal, careerist elites are unable to grasp the mindset of flyover state "deplorables.") We are confronted with a kind of cultural and self-induced hypnosis. Thus their perceptions regarding art can only be viewed through a circumscribed lens of commodification...the dismal criteria that caused Robert Hughes to go muttering to his grave, and, I suspect, John, was at the root of your disenchantment with Hollywood.
Frequently, I'm asked why I'm not on Twitter.
The landscape of language is being fracked; its eco-system destroyed by a truncating of the complexity of lexicon, both written and spoken. There is the banality of evil and then there is the evil of banality. The banal mind of the crackbrained careerist must reduce earth, sky, language, and psyche to controllable (dreamless and dead) bits. All is fodder for commodification.
"I attack all those persons/ who know nothing of the other half,/ the half who cannot be saved,/ who raise their cement mountains/ in which the hearts of the small/ animals no ones thinks of are beating." -- Federico Garca Lorca, excerpt: New York (Office and Attack)
All as the manic media culture churns in a proliferation of fervid imagery that is freighted with a nightmare quality, as concurrently, nightmare storms and wildfires, so huge in scope that they seem culled from the dreaming mind of one in the midst of a breakdown, descend upon us.
"In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the
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