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I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how I might start an art movement. In general, people seemed to feel starting a new art movement was not possible, if they thought about it at all. It was something that occurred in the past, during the twentieth century and before, and was now no longer viable. When I can’t figure out how to do something in real life, the next best thing is to write a novel about it. But I don’t just want it to be a novel, I also want it to be a fable.
Many art movements I’ve read about over the years followed a fairly specific pattern that greatly interests me. There is an extended period in which a group of artists – friends living or hanging out in the same neighborhood with cheap rent – work in relative obscurity, often spending a great deal of time together drinking to excess. During this time they debate artistic questions, share influences and resources, while each individually continuing to make work and develop their practice. Through such debate certain commonalities emerge, alongside many differences. Often, somewhere in the mix, there is a manifesto or a few. At some point there is a breakthrough moment when one or two of the artists achieves sudden success, the unexpected yet hoped for fruits of this longer period of hidden, communal development. During this breakthrough the movement is given a name, often by a critic or hanger on, and the name sticks, a name most of the artists involved don’t particularly like. Many of the artists quickly go from struggling and having little money to being known and having more money than they know what to do with. The drinking becomes more extreme. A few of the artists are singled out as being the most important avatars of the movement and many of the others are relegated to the status of minor players. Imitators and posers quickly flood the scene. There is instant nostalgia for the tight knit sense of community they had not so long ago experienced. Often at least one of the artists dies, unable to handle the sudden rush of celebrity or through drinking. In general, all this takes place over the course of about five years. Much later, after everyone is dead or old, the movement becomes even more glamourous in retrospect and a great deal of fluff is written about it. I would like the art movement I help found to echo some aspects of this trajectory while jettisoning others.
So first I had to find the people, then we had to bond over the course of a substantial interval of relative obscurity. I was hoping for less alcohol than previous art movements, but we’d have to see which stimulants were the drugs of choice. I imagined it a little bit like putting together a boy band, though definitely not all boys, those days were long gone, no more boys’ clubs and no more centring whiteness. And it had to be about something substantial, something political, something worth doing.
Meanwhile, there was much going on in the world. There was war, there was genocide, there was fascism, there was an enormous amount of protest against war, genocide and fascism. I would join a protest practically every week. It seemed likely to me that the other artists I was looking for were also part of these protests. And therefore, as we marched, I should talk to as many strangers as possible Often this did not go as well as planned.
Did art movements of the past emerge organically or did the artists involved actively work to make them happen? Some mix of both? Always an aspect of zeitgeist involved, some generational shift. (Art movements often started by the very young, which I am not.) There’s of course a shift occurring now, with U.S. hegemony in the process of coming apart as the seams. Is this the kind of shift you can build an art movement on? Usually, art movements are built from shifts that are more forward looking, optimistic: this is the new thing that will forever improve art as society improves alongside it, these possibilities based squarely within the idea of progress, and since progress is a lie, we’ll need to find another basis. Things don’t progress, they go in circles like the seasons.
This book will be my contribution to an art movement that doesn’t yet exist, a kind of history in advance.
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