This Deep Dive Perspective examines the role of art in resistance to tyranny and destruction.
During the last few years, Eddie, Alex and I, with others from time to time, met weekly for a period, spending the day together talking, screen printing and having lunch at the London School of Mosaic where Eddie has his silk screen printing studio. The project is documented at https://invisibleuniverse.org/
Structural Utterances by Eddie Farrell Abstract Over the past 40 years a strange and worrying behavioural split has taken place concerning the arts and governing powers. For me The 1975 Trilateral Commission Report, “The Crisis in Democracy”, (Trilateral Commission, 1975) represents a triggering point when the arts in western society started to become more uncomfortable, maybe even fearful of presenting an effective, inventive and critical voice on the side of the public in relation to governing forces.
An artist’s understanding of an ever expanding picture plane continued and possibly even accelerated well into the 20th century. By the early 1970s however, time had long caught up with the go-to space for presenting these changes, the gallery context; the location associated with much innovation throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. Today the gallery and art institution pulse more as a brotherly echo of the Too-Big-To-Fail-Banks, systemically flawed; underwriting any ideas-with- legs, in order to cripple them. This is further complicated by artists not seeing or choosing not to see this; so in the same way that banks and corporations exercise huge power over how society is structured, contemporary galleries and art institutions have unwittingly or not, become the authoritarian interphase or gatekeeper between visual ideas and the public.
The curious split however, is in the contrast we see between the arts, increasingly retreating behind a showy but compromised, context and how the powers that be (or shouldn’t be) have emerged out of that mid 1970s triggering point. The governing powers appear to have shown themselves to be the true descendent of the spirit of Dada and Duchamp; far more ready to diversify, infiltrate and step out of their comfort zone. Represented through the inventive zeal, excessive chance taking, increased double speak, contradictions, flip flopping, lies, fakery, spying, spinning, torture and complex layering employed in their work.
Unlike the pioneering work of the artists mentioned throughout this text, whose central concerns were less to do with power and more to encourage the liberation and freedom of their fellow man, this contemporary trickery of governing powers, manifests as a shocking form of repressive control. What’s more they don’t seek to promote the artistry of their work and although many from all walks of life, highly suspect something fishy is going on, the powerful chose to keep their ever evolving work well hidden.
“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the government is actually doing is worse than you imagine.” (Blum, William, 2000: Rogue State)
This text is a call to the artist within us all to connect from ground up with the important visual heritage that questions and invents in the service of humanity. To chose a life where individuals can act as themselves not one where every action is taken in relation to how it will be interpreted, praised or condemned by a more powerful party.
My ears slowly open up to a summer dawn chorus, my eyes look towards the window, left side of my face on a stack of pillows. Beyond the six portrait rectangles of the lower sash window is the familiar shape of next door’s conifer. The peak gently rocks in a mild breeze but its tussled green apex holds together more or less complete within the upper left window section. My awakening aesthetic is irked by a few straggly green spikes extending beyond the vertical astragal to the right, into the adjoining section of window. I’ve no problem with with the widening part of the tree spilling downwards through the lower panes of glass but I’m determined to position the apex of the tree within the upper left frame. To this end I manoeuvre myself further up the mattress and use some deft toe pushes to help fne tune the position of my head on the pillow. Cramped, contorted and twisted from toe to closed left eye I now have the composition lined up to experience a instance of satisfaction. The moment I let go the composition is gone.
Eddie often says that thinking and making takes conversations into interesting places. In our work, it was less about the finished prints than the process of producing them.
