NewWorLdLog: New¬Post

Saturday, 18 September 2010

New¬Post

Das neue Anti Design Festival in London (18. bis 26. September) kommt ganz wild, böse und natürlich “Anti” daher – und ein radikales Manifest gibt’s auch schon: “We are living in an age where millions of colours became 256. Difference is the enemy. Generic culture hypnotises us all into generic patterns, where control is visibly invisible. Danger is replaced by fear. New means upgrade. Risk is obsolete. Art made money stupid, and money made us fools. We welcome no_use, no_function and no_fear. Anarchy, crash and burn, the new awaits. From Learning to Earning, and now to Yearning, we have forgotten why we are here. We have lost touch with what made us tick, the fire of creative possibility that once consumed us from within. Revolutionary thought is but a distant memory.

I grew up as part of a generation that thought it could help improve society; that our sole function was to be conscious and to spread that consciousness through creative awareness, exploration, observation and questioning. This generation was replaced by the Thatcher/Reagan paradigm of Culture=Money. Thinkers became earners, Creatives became entertainers, and a whole dumbed-down generation now feels entitled to success and profit without having to work or think too much. We are now left with a spiritual hollowness. The belief systems of consumption and commodity have been exposed as empty. Revolution is a distant echo lost in the white noise, and religion has been largely subsumed by globalisation. Virtual experiences have replaced human touch. Analogue culture is now the exotic. We have managed to create for our children, perhaps for the first time in history, a future which is less hopeful than the one we live in today.
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Mankind has the opportunity now to reclaim the cultural high-ground and risk something new, a creative breach in the barrier of exclusion that can allow some real growth and evolution, like a bright light shining through the cracks of a crumbling wall.

http://www.rebelart.net/diary/london-anti-design-festival-2010/006640/

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CEP Proposal

Deleuze & Guattari once wrote that “New York is virtually a city without a language...” [from Postulates of Linguistics in A Thousand Plateaus, 1923, pp. 103]. How provocative a statement to make about a city brimming with so many languages, dialects, slang etc. I thought. New York for me has always been, as for so many before me, a city of such artistic prestige and accomplishment, vitality and possibility. It has drawn young artists to its bright lights and wide streets for decades now, and it will continue to. Surely New York is a city without any ‘without’: a city of infinite possibility and opportunity, offering itself to all whom arrive, making them never want to leave, offering everything they need.

But I was too hasty; my argumentative cry against with their provocations would have been quickly silenced, had I read a little further on: “There is no language that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities...” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1923, pp103). But my silence was brought with a smile, with a sense of relief, of assurance. Just as I believe[d], and have argued, New York is a city without a language- without a set, solid and all-conforming ‘language’, but rather a multiplicity of tongue, of variations of the tongue, the lingua franca, of English. New York for me is a prime example of how all languages, exchanged by so many different people from such different places is continually being shaped, changed and modified, mutating every day through common shared discourse and people trying to make sense to each other.

Having been born in one country but then being raised between two countries has brought difficulty when pledging allegiance to either. I have felt neither here nor there, not this nor that. What happens to those who don't feel a part, or feel apart, from their surroundings? They start something new; they seek out new places to live and to start again, afresh. The historical implication of New York City having been built ex nihilo by such a wide group of people(s) having travelled from their Old World in search of the New, ready to build themselves a New life in new contexts has always inspired me to travel and work there, to also become a part of the engagement with the 'new' moving away from the old, the traditional, the conventional, the usual, the obvious. I can see a direct link between this state of mind, towards progression through experimentation, in my journey to art and performance College and my future journey to New York and the USA, to frame my questions around the 'New' within city whose very name and ethos is just that.