Not The Art Strike by Feral Faun (in AntiClockWise #15)

In a letter to the Museum of Modern Alienation, Feral Faun gives his/her views on the coverage of the Art Strike and other art issues in earlier issues of AntiClockWise

“Thank you much for writing and sending all the ACWs. I’m quite impressed with them, a very worthy effort. I especially like the fact that you can do a zine that has some intelligent theoretical content, but that also seems to be fun for you to do. Being that sort of asshole I am though, I have to share four criticisms I have:

1) You give Stewart Home a bit too much credit. My impression from what I’ve read (2 issues of his SMILE; Art Strike literature; plagiarism literature; “The Assault on Culture”) is that he is arrogant and shallow. A friend of mine of mine who knows him agrees with that assessment. Most of what he deals with has been dealt with better by others already. If he’s trying to satirise, he fails because he is satirising things already so absurd that he seems no different. He is especially shallow (verging on being downright stupid) in his condemnation of the surrealists and his uncritical praise of mail art. The former, he either knows little about or intentionally distorts to allow for his formulae (I suspect the latter). The latter he blows out of all proportion. In fact his entire “The Assault of Culture” impressed me as an experiment in distorted proportions, portraying amoebas as hippopotami and elephants as paramecium.

2) Following Home, you try to portray the surrealists (in an otherwise excellent article on Dadaism) as devious politicians. In fact, what kept the surrealists from making any real mark beyond a few paintings and obscure books (and of course being the parent or grandparent, direct connections exist, of COBRA, a group of surrealists who broke with Breton, the Lettrists, the S.I. and all offshoots of any of these groups) was their inability to play the game of politicking. They were constantly trying to make connections with other ‘radical’ groups, only to find themselves being manipulated into things they didn’t want to do. A lot of critiques have been made of the surrealists, most of them with a lot more depth and intelligence than Home’s shallow condemnation.

The situationists made a good summary critique of the Dadaists and surrealists: “The Dadaists sought to suppress art without realising it; the surrealists tried to realise it without suppressing it”. In other words, neither fully understood how to get beyond art – and so both are now looked upon as art movements (Duchamp’s urinal is now displayed in an art museum!) just as some folk already recognise Home’s Art Strike as nothing but a piece of performance art. There is a lot to be learned from a critical study of early surrealist writings. To merely write them off is not wise, it is prejudiced. Their project was not to suppress Dadaism (whose utter negation had pretty much petered out by the time surrealism began) but to realise its positive side. Surrealism failed in this, and I feel that failure was inherent in the method and organisation of the surrealist movement – but Home does not deal with this in an intelligent and useful way, and nor does your article. Finally, it is Artaud, not the mercenary Dali, whose defection from surrealism most clearly manifest its inability to give the liberation it offered. A person who sells themselves to the highest bidder (the real reason behind Dali’s ‘conversion’ to Catholicism and fascism) can hardly be considered to be “doing their own thing” or to be an anarchist. A more appropriate term for such a person is “snivelling shit”. Artaud is the only one whose refusal to conform led him not only to break with surrealism, but ultimately to spend years locked away inside an asylum – not in a huge mansion bought with the money earned by painting pseudo-mystical religious crap and singing paeans of praise to a fascist dictator and the Church.

3) Mail art does not destroy the spectacular nature of art, it merely (very much in line with the post industrial age of cybernetic control) decentralises it. But the very fact that three is a definable mail art network shows that it has not escaped the category of art or its spectacular nature. This is a further evidenced by the fact that small galleries and exhibition spaces do mail art shows. Even if money is not exchanged, a form of exchange manifests in this activity, the exchange in the recognition of the mail artist. Since the nature of control in the cybernetics age is mostly decentralised, its ‘natural’ form of art would have to be mail art. All other forms of art become anachronistic, reflecting earlier forms of domination and alienation.

4) The critiques of technology that have been developed in the past 20 or so years have not all been from greens or eco-freaks. There is a tendency among certain post-situationist currents that has developed a critique of technology as a method of domination. This critique says that technology cannot be considered neutral because it has not developed in a natural setting, but has developed within a system of domination as an integral part of that system. In particular, industrial and post-industrial cybernetics technologies were developed quite systematically as systems for controlling people. Further, this critique shows that technology cannot simply be dealt with piecemeal but must be recognised as a system of relating to the world that is an integral part of the social system based on work and exchange. Such a critique is free of the self-sacrificial moralism of the greens and recognises the possibility of using this system against itself (e.g. creating computer viruses that wipe out vast banks of corporate data), but which recognises that the end of domination and alienation means the end of the technological system was we know it.”