EXCREMENTAL ANTI-ART SPLASHFESTO CRYPTOLOGIES

March 19, 07
Countering fetishized actions of banality? Or current mysteries revealed?

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I found this bit at The Gothamist the other day (all quoted passages are in quotes, logically, and tildas, to make them more obviously quoted things. I think of tildas as little, ta-da!s):

 

~”Against Streetart: Tale of the Paint Splasher

Over the last few months, someone has been splashing paint over major streetart works all over the city. The “Splasher”, as he’s come to be known, has a taste for targeting major pieces by Swoon, Obey, Momo, and others. His trail of paint-dripped terror extends from Williamsburg, to Soho, and back again– and he’s already obliterated dozens of pieces.

Often, in the wake of his attacks, the Splasher also leaves wheat-pasted screeds, attacking the streetartists as tools of capital, calling their work a “fetishized action of banality” and “a representation of the most vulgar kind: an alienated commodity”.~

Whoever this splasher is, he warns that his wheat screeds, one of which is titled, ART: THE EXCREMENT OF ACTION, contain bits of glass and will harm whoever dares to remove them. The splasher is determined to get his message across and does not want it messed with or his sign will cut you. The article links to more pictures of the destruction at the flickr account of one FlowerfaceKillah but when you click on the link, the images have now been removed. For some reason FlowerfaceKillah felt the need to post and then remove his images of the destruction. Stay with me, it gets more interesting…

Then, the imnotsayin.blogspot.com people did some research and report their findings:

~”Here’s our best analysis: the Dadaists are an anti-art, anti-culture movement that originated in WWI Switzerland. That classic image of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and goattee penciled in? You guessed it: Dadaist. Their deal? They mock the status-quo and live in the moment.The Manifesto appears inspired by an essay penned by contemporary British novelist Jeannette Winterson. Her Product is the Excrement of Action rails against the societal infatuation with productivity – our modern compulsion to consider the physical output and tangible results/rewards of all our actions in life, rather than just “living our dreams”. She specifically references art and artists in the piece:

Artists suffer from this tendency most of all; for their vocation itself depends on making products out of the raw material of real-life experience.”~

and this post prompted the following comments:

~”At 5:22 PM, Flower Face Killah said…

It’s not “dadaists”, it one person doing all of this.

At 11:47 AM, mark said…

Go back to your own blog flower face. By the way do you think it would anger the anarcho-syndicalists to find out that I would be willing to pay maybe up to $20 to get one of their wheat-grass papers to fill up the empty space on one of my walls?”~

What does all this highly intellectual, crazy artspeak actually mean?

Well, in secret spy detective class we learned that the guy who lit the fire is almost always to be found among the spectators and the message left behind often contains clues, not only to his true identity, but to the real message he so desperately needs the world to discern. When a person resorts to such attention-demanding and hostile acts it means they really want to call attention away from what they perceive to be a commonly held and extremely erroneous public perception. Often they are angry because they see others getting attention for something they have done or wish they could do (at least this is what I hypothesized in my psychology textbook, which I only halfheartedly wrote in my imagination).

So I am posting the manifesto in its entirety here with my expert analysis from my secret spy decoder ring, font size randomizing decryptologizer software, and I while I have uncovered the true message of the manifesto, I will leave it to you to decide just who seems the most likely Raskolnikov here:

~”ART: THE EXCREMENT OF ACTION

A Dadaist once smashed a clock, dipped the pieces in ink, pressed the ink-soaked pieces against a sheet of paper and had it framed. His purpose was to criticize the modernist idealization of efficiency. Rather than inspiring the widespread smashing of clocks and the reevaluation of time in society, the piece of paper has become a sought-after commodity. The production of a representative organ(the ink-imprinted paper) for theaction (the smashing of the clock) guaranteed this outcome. Likean idealistic politician, the piece of paper, despite its creator’s intent, can only represent, and it is for this reason that it instantly became a fetishized object segregated from the action. Only in a culture obsessed with its own excrement are the by-products of action elevated above action itself.

Representation is the most elemental form of alienation. Art as representation is no exception. It is just another means by which our perceptions and desires are mediated. Art is the politician of our senses: it creates actors and an audience, agents and a mass. True creativityis the joyful destruction of this hierarchy; it is the unmediated actualization of desires. The passion for destruction is a creative passion. We are all capable of manifesting our desires directly, free of representation and commodification. We will continue manifesting ours by euthanizing your bourgeois fad.”~

Mystery revealed.