Kultcha
As I witness a rainbow lightshow of exploding wires and popping valves….. turns into the hissing snow of a blank tv screen…..as I crawl across the carpet, sweet taste of post apocalyptic adrenalin on my tongue….havoc, disarray, an affliction on all levels, cultural oppression and hijack in the kali yuga. So it would appear that in the final sum no one is going to come down from the sky and make it better…..make it nice, white and polite with one sugar please. The age of polite seduction and cultural appeasement is over. This is the real thing, this is war, Godzilla has arrived on a tank from Iraq, straight from the united states of nothing.
Excerpts from Ron Curran's collected commentaries and statements
Excerpts from 'INSPIRATION RULEZ' ' It's not necessarily rational at all, It's a kind of anti-logic , asymmetrical, rhombic, ambiguous, tetramorphic or tilted…intuition plays such a huge part in breaking the trance because we live in such a commodified culture it's really hard to break that mould because years and years of pressure, of being fed the same old pap, this one perspective version of the world… of history, what is successful or respectable etc.. So easy to lose sense of identity under an avalanche of Kulture, of media and visual opportunism, to feel insecure, to feel different, our culture makes claims about being tolerant but in reality that is not the case, increasingly we live in a coercive culture, in an increasingly homogenised and colonising culture, in a culture of supervision and surveillance where to deviate or wander is seen as suspicious or in some way criminal. It is a hard edged and fthe over-rulers and is coded and literally genetically engineered like any other product in our school system or sitting gleaming on the shelf.
Excerpts from ‘TERROR SHAME & FEAR…INSPIRATION PROSECUTES THE DEVIL.’
‘To move beyond the clamouring… to a more natural cosmogony…to find resolution within the open order of things…within its legato…its cadences and abundance…inspiration is synaptic and works within a vivid geometry…and through it, you remember what you were given…something that is way beyond simply the visual…that has its own remarkable nature…and at its heart a pure and perfect machinery, a reconstituted reality, in very intimate and necessary terms…at the centre of all great art ..an incredible state of recognition of real self, of real you. The rejection of illusory text for a more revealed essence, returning experience back to its original and rightful owner.’
Excepts from ‘THIS IS NOT A PROPER DRAWING CLASS’
‘drawing has been primarily presented to most people in our culture – for example: the school system, traditional or academic art societies, clubs, competitions, our parents and most of our friends, newsagents, bookshops… “how to draw” books… by the deputy principal, as a skills- or craft-based activity, a rewards-based activity, a step-by-step codebook of “how to” draw like the masters or paint like michelangelo…as tidy-towns a go-go, or how to do watercolours as good as sheena the warrior…etc etc…THE TROUBLE IS NO ONE EVER CALLED IT ILLUSTRATION!! ... OR AT ITS MOST CRASS AND PLAGIARISED…FORMULA 44…as a culture we have been fed this virtually since we learned to walk…so our minds have been pretty much cleverly inculcated and programmed into believing that this is what drawing is all about…that it is a terrifying skilful activity that only the select few ever really achieve, or those who are lucky enough to have been born talented…that is, it is presented as a heavily technique-laden or perfectionist activity….that drawing is only about getting a ‘good likeness’ of the subject or employing the tried and true golden rules of perspective, of light and shade, and with perhaps an equally terrifying and detailed understanding of the human form etc etc…AGAIN, THIS IS PART OF THE GREAT CULTURAL HOAX and has actually very little to do with what drawing is, or fully entails. ‘
Excerpts from ‘RITUALS OF THE HIGH MASS & NEW FLOWERINGS.’
‘in New York Amerka, the high master of cultural emergency…Basquiat writes graffiti onto the skin of mainstream Amerika, spills language from a coffee cup onto the shirtsleeve of corporate rule..gives back Amerika the burger with the lot…holds up the Bank of Americo with voodoo, Joes’s takeaway and an exclamation mark…language is reclaimed by Jean Michel with half a smile and a can of white paint….informs Ameriqua of its mental illness status…records all the double speak…recovers the voice of original tongue/Washington freaks…Jean Michel is hip …resets all the clocks.’ ‘in Canberra, Wilcannia, Redfern, Tabulum (all the same).. the dialectics of alienation.. the song is remote, angelic and melancholy youths carrying butane lighters look dangerous like pagans, sniff petrol and hang around the mall, shoot bottles off a wall, OD or sleep under a bridge.. ‘electric lights popping, going round and round like hot chickens at the victim hut…poverty and the discourse of extreme exclusion.. breeds hybrids like farmer John’s chooks.. which suddenly grew breasts like mutants.. safe enough to drink, says the mayor.’ R.I.P. Bruz.
Excerpts from ‘RITUALS OF DISEMPOWERMENT’.
‘Sooner or later, and I think this is inevitable, you realize that there is not just one way of drawing… it is fantastic in it’s dimension and possibility… a kind of ever-expanding visual fractal.. it does not mean simply locking up in a form or just reproducing or rehashing an external image…no matter how cleverly you may believe you have done it, and with whatever dazzling skills or impressive technique, it will still be illustrative… and it essentially goes nowhere and says nothing. It’s a pot boiler. If you have not put your energies into it or put your name to it in some way, then you are simply jumping through hoops. You have chopped off your true creative self and you are running a horse race on a chocolate box.. sweetly timid, sugar coated but it does not have the clang and the bang of strong, poetic or connected work. Shy and illustrative work melts like candy floss in the face of inspired or bold work. It does not sustain, stand the test of time or nourish the spirit. You can start a spoon collection but if you haven’t gone outside and opened up the gate, then you’re still setting up doilies or decorating cakes. Drawing means experimentation and going forward – setting yourself free, not setting yourself up.’
Excerpts from “SHAPE SHIFTING/MODERN MIND GAMES”
‘The fairytale has turned nasty.the label is dominant…with language like virus on every channel…language is loaded and made in Los Angeles, Tokyo & Islamabad and carried in the red, white and blue striped bag of social poverty and cultural disenfranchisement…the pop culture of the rubbish tip..on the web-sites of doublespeak, spoken in Washington, Canberra, Roxy and Nike… Hypnosis and narcolepsy. .no luxury… the death of Christ and Buddha.. in Omaha or Meekatharra a dark sun still shines on the wheatfields.’ ‘How can I draw when to draw means to waver, to wander from conventional/ fixed reality. How can I draw when to draw means to break the law. How can I draw when I can’t move coz I’m pinned under fifty tonnes of manufactured culture, forty skyloads of religion, eighteen truckloads of pay TV, sixteen meet the candidates meetings of political agenda, a never ending traffic jam of talking faces, fifteen loud armies of TV advertising and my mind feels like it’s set on permanent replay and (we’re ripping the heart out of ecology).’
Excerpts from "HEY MUMBO JUMBO"
‘Straight jackets, car alarms and cosmetic fruit…the genetically modified drawing reality test.. hair gel and high art, smart money and smart missiles. In our modern high capitalist culture language has become anti-language… it has become a commodity like any other exploitable resource.. at all levels of culture.. eg. Mutually assured destruction (MAD) whitehouse double speak, murder and assasinate, 24 hour fast food advertising rapidspeak, to political glib, from radio slick to homeboy and rap, to doof-doof & trance monologue…to face cream honey pavlova..to legal threat, confuse (hocus pocus) and intimidate..to government kafka-esque, to graffiti sub-lingual…a multi-babble of fracture and distraction. And equally in the mainstream with high art pretentious with its whispers and gossip, its colonial acquisitions, its café latte and chitter-chatter, its mirrors, its hairdo’s and its bouffe, with its assumptions of ownership and its colonizing of reality.’ So what is classical? ‘The institution of the mainstream (high art) which is a sometime collector’s book of antique clocks, famous racehorses and neurotic addictions would have us believe that art is about obsessive attention to detail or the near perfect rendition of the illusion of reality or a superhuman and subjugated addiction to technique, or the obsessive crafting of a convincing likeness, or the use of sentimental and familiar subject matter and that after a long and gruelling slog one finally reaches the hallowed heights of accomplished artist and gets the stamp of approval from on high and gets to kiss the feet of the great master, but strange, Everyone’s done the same picture. Excepts from ‘GOING THRU THE LAYERS.’
Pp3. ‘(drawing) as a kind of irregular but fluid (grid) system of marks that sets up territory in which that person’s mythology/expression can operate, where they can move about and talk about their feelings (crucial!) throughout the history of art there have been numerous examples of this ‘matrix’ of these thematic tendencies (obsession?)…..e.g. goya’s witches, picasso’s minotaurs, pollock’s totems, matisse’s odalisques, van gogh’s self-portraits, rembrandt’s christs, de kooning’s women, tucker’s images of good and evil, nolan’s kelly series, blackman’s chaplin figures, whiteley’s nudes, bacon’s popes, lautrec’s dancers, dubuffet’s art brut figures, etc. etc……that is, which all grew more or less directly from their own energetic base, from their rhythm and language…..in the style of…..that is, they were as such archetypal and in the style of that which was consistent with their SIGNATURE STYLE…..i.e, the subjectivity didn’t just come off the shelf or was dug out of or found in a box at the back of the garage, or copied or just randomly invented…..it was derived more or less directly (thru a prolonged process of self-interview and examination) from the ENERGETIC PRE-DISPOSITION OR MAKE-UP OF THOSE INDIVIDUALS…..it was invited…..IT WAS HOME-DELIVERED…..IT WAS PIZZA OF CHOICE…(FROM WHICH THEIR ARCHETYPES EMERGED). ‘Really original work often emerges as something savage and unexpected……as something UNCOMPROMISING AND SEEMINGLY ABSURD OR SCARY….and yet it is by the same measure TENDER IN ITS ADMISSION OF OUTRAGEOUS REALITY…….IN ITS NATURAL POISE AND ORIGINAL DELIVERANCE……no matter how much it challenges our sensibilities, if there is integrity in the work then the TRUTH WILL OUT……it will VISUALLY REJOIN THE GREAT VISUAL MATRIX IN THE SKY AND REHIT INTO THE MASS PSYCHE AND SHAKE THE CABLES OF ALL OUR SHARED REALITY.’
ART & DESTRUCTION IN MEXICO
Has Byron Bay become the wash up point, the high tide line in a tidal surge of all night parties and trashed holiday flats and margarita sunsets where a whole procession of blissed out devas in painted kombis drive up into the sky and tie-dyed goddesses run fire sales of rubber dolphins, tribal Indians and glow in the dark gurus; in a glass bead game of reality and fantasy. Has Byron become a dumping ground of syringes, petty criminals, beggars and hungry ghosts? A squashed cake of sweetly sick glitter, fairies and fashion junkies, their collective relationships and lives left like clothes next to a skip bin in the rain, like a stain all along johnson street at dawn mixed with the smell of incense and vomit, (like a box of rotten fruit falling off the back of a truck, houses fall into the sea at belongil.) Has our originality, our original aesthetic been dumped on, and our claims to consciousness become a joke?
I mean culturally, where are we at? I mean just how many goddesses can you fit into the back of a mini? I mean just exactly where is Dream World? And who are the tourists? And just how much further can you push the esoteric bandwagon before it goes right off the tracks and into free-fall? So who runs this culture machine of the 'pseudo cool but extremely mundane'? Is this the 'smart money' or is it really dumb?
Before we all finally o.d. on this rollercoaster of upwardly mobile, pseudo spiritual chunder and bad-taste crappe would someone please pull the plug before we all become simply shit-faced. "desperate stakes in the hula bar." got caught in this bad dream….wurlitzer organ playing….I am sprawled, struggling on the lounge, next to the fish tank at the bar barista, trapped in the Harvey Norman ad playing over and over again when all of a sudden giant iguanas ridden by male-order brides come charging out of my tv screen howling like banshee and mind goes fizz-bang!
The age of extreme desensitisation is upon us, of cultural and colonial rape, of ten thousand videos, of techno soma, of the guru in the package, of crack, ecstasy and laser and the spiritual mafia. And so, what now? When do we wake from the dream? When do we come home? And who are you and where are you going? And how much of you is really yours? And what's your destination louise? What is it with this "art thing"? Isn't it a little bit more than playing dress-ups? A bit more than doing pretty pictures, making slick images, joining up the dots or serving up formula 44. Or the Dog Moron prize for portraiture/for how boring and straight you are. What is at the radical centre of culture and does it rot, of your culture, any culture?
What is at the centre of who you are and can you stop from falling? Where no amount of drugs, money or in-flight guru can help you in the stone-cold sober and inevitable moment of naked reality. Our mobility, openly moving, golden and carnivorous, without corruption, coercion or assumption; the thing sublime. Is it savage? Is it confronting or terrifying? Is it unsettling, fractured or divided, entrancing, luxurious or illusive? Is it just one of you? Or are there fifteen? Is it a troupe or a magic lantern show? What and who are you inhabited by?And when we finally recover our senses and regain our equilibrium will we ask ourselves what is this obsessive ideology?
This pseudo-spiritual fantasy land we have so ornately crafted, this parallel universe of borrowed images, this fairytale menagerie of imported images run by order of hip-capitalist providers. When do we return to our core reality? When do we jump, light the wick and sink the ship? When do we end the slave trade? When do we ask ourselves how are we actually written and what is that language? And when does the word intimacy take on its full political meaning and potency? When do we become less co-dependant? When do we bust the kind of anxiety that comes of endless and desperate compromise and the desire for acceptance so that we don't get so easily bought out or run by popular culture. That is, I would swap say, five goddesses, three dolphins, ten tribal Indians, six formula seascapes and say two candy floss abstracts anytime for just one kid's painting. I would swap one doodle on my notebook by the phone for say, five brett whiteley imitations, two mythological forests, four dealers, three Cherokee chiefs (with headdress), and a whole folio of designer nudes. I would toss out six boutique abstracts, five charm-school scenes, three cases of chardonnay, two opening night parties, six swimming pools (with lightshow), a trailer load of imitation neo-grecian statues, fifteen enchanted forests, five unicorns, two celtic princesses...a partridge and a pear tree, for even just one good (but honest) drawing done badly. I would rather look at the graffiti on the wall down at the railway station than mix it with any limp wristed 'genius' or his gold-bound set of mail order muses, with or without the keatsian garden setting thrown in.
So the spiritual supermarket becomes the spiritual fashion parade at the art deco paradiso café. It becomes the spiritual art collection run by the spiritual mafia importing crystals and objets d' art (along with the ecstasy and the cocaine) from the 3rd world, dug up and/or produced by 'paysannes' working for next to shit wages to pay for the seaside views, luxury cars, and italian leather shoes of the byron medici. But that doesn't matter so long as all those nasties (and other unwelcome and disproportionate realities) are kept well beyond the borders of our 'beautiful' shire. Away from our balinese balconies, our white boat shoes and our impeccable houses, as we continue to furnish our lives and our minds with an ever increasing amount of pseudo primitive appropriations and other assorted dubious crap; what could only be called 'kosmic kitsch. Indeed, have we fallen into the same predictable and tasteless trap as those 'unenlightened' straights that we are so ready to condemn? A 'sugarine' mythology which we don't even bother to question the credentials of or its iconography or the illustrative hegemony it sets-up.
How many more 'primitive' cultures are we gonna' poach, romanticise or simply rob and put their leaders faces on t-shirts cos we can't come to terms with, cope with or face our own realities, read our own experience. Isn't this a serious cop out of some dimension? Isn't it actually really dumb? Isn't this a huge failure of language in the same way that we endlessly apologise, give thanks or praise to the 'elders', not because we particularly care but more because it is seen to be cool to, or politically correct to do so? Part of the obligatory rave of 'honouring the ancestors' (if we were really 'honouring the ancestors' we wouldn't still continue to rip-off their land or sell off their culture) -'healing the planet', 'sharing your heart' or whatever fashionable cliché is in vogue at the moment.
This is not to say that there is not great value and huge historical importance in all of these cultures that we draw upon, they are fundamentally relevant in how they have influenced our present culture and our psyche and the sometimes startlingly relevant wisdom they contain, however, it is fundamentally important that we do not escape from or avoid dealing with the immediate realities of the culture we live in, in terms of how we personally acknowledge or face those realities. When do we separate the garment of ceremony from the skin of reality? Ask any taxi driver how 'beautiful' or even safe johnson street is on a saturday night. I think we need to start to get a little more real and to start to see thru the layers of the culture we live in. Are we going to just keep playing 'dress-ups' or put more spak filla on the wall? Is it art or is it demographics? Is it language or is it décor? Is it indisputably lucid, uncompromising, startling, powerful, poetic, fluid or raw, or is it more hedonistic self-indulgent, fantasy or pap? Does it feed your soul or have you been given take-away? Are you being set free or are you being set-up? Is it about the colour of the furniture or is it about the nature of the firmament? Is the goddess really dancing or is she asleep, floating in her café latte? When do we stop calling souvenir shops galleries and décor shops studios?
It seems a massive shame and a huge irony that in a place that prides itself on being at the forefront of culture in this country that we continue to buy into and tolerate such tragically shallow schlock. We deny ourselves our best possibilities, we exclude ourselves from a wonderful and undreamed of dimension. We do not even begin to feed or touch upon our most intimate needs.
Ron Curran © 2005