The predictable trendy backlash to everyone burying their face in the ever-devilish facebook and other screen prisons for the last generation is the rise of the “experience” economy and the pre-pandemic fad of “experiences” in art. Among all sentient beings and creatures, only homo sapiens need be reminded that we are incarnated to “experience” things and not stare hollow-eyed at virtual chimera.
As anyone with a dog or cat knows, they watch us with expression verging on pity and shame when we drop into the abyss of laptop or television on a sunny day.
No, visual artists are not required to provide us “experience,” as there is beyond abundance of experience everywhere. Seen a sunrise lately? Taken a vehicle to an unknown land, or simply played an instrument with a friend? What we ask of artists is to help us to see those experiences in newly intelligent and illuminated ways.
This is the Promethean fire that the impressionists gave us, the cubists, and even on occasion pop art. At the same time, other “movements” were basically attention-getting scams to create buzz and monetize. The CIA noted how susceptible the public is to this sort of herd manipulation and famously funded modern art, especially the gobbledy-gook of abstract expressionism as a means to distract curious eyes from the heart-rending, socially-potent images of working-class realists like Diego Rivera. They funded journals and stoked critics with money and public relations and voila–suddenly fools were cooing over kindergarten-vintage Rorschach lines and blots instead of the rich, humanizing dignity of a peasant farmer at harvest.
Guy Debord called it all long ago in The Society Of Spectacle, and the hedonistic, entertainment-crazed fads of today might as well be CIA-funded for they perform the same function. Might be a good venture capital plan for those now tanking in the No Experience economy.
So rather than line up to attend the Museum Of Cucumbers or Pickleworld, exiting into the gift shop, I continue to seek those creators who render essential subliminal realities of our world and the keys to survive in it.
Of all those alive and working today, the greatest is Ralph Steadman.
Ralph’s impressionistic and gonzo vision is highly literary, social, and ever-political, with an unshakable passion for civil liberties and the universal declaration of human rights. He is that rare, true artist for whom one glace at a creation and it is unmistakably his. As a master stylist not only unafraid of risk but drawn to it, he is at once whimsical and grotesque as he helps us to laugh amid the cruel descent in late capitalism industrial madness. On a most basic level he makes cartoons but at the same time he makes visible what is really happening with the implications and hypocrisies extant in what people present to us in an image-fevered and hyper-narcissistic society hell-bent on hijacking our eyes as a ruse to exhume our wallets.
I met Ralph in Los Angeles and he was just as warm, ebullient, charming, and playful as you could possibly hope. Not a trace of the absurd airs that often accompany a successful let alone famous creator that are so redolent of a subway urinal. He signed a selection of works, which are far more numerous and wide-ranging than those familiar with him in his most notorious dimension might presume, and we enjoyed some riotous banter as I’d also known his infamous former collaborator.
This November, Chronicle is publishing Ralph Steadman: A Life In Ink retrospective, which along with the For No Good Reason documentary from a few years ago will firmly cement his place as the most wild, free, evocative, hysterical and downright honest chronicler of these strange, dangerous and seemingly end times.
Ralph recently sent me this signed print, which I cherish as a talisman of the age, a kind of magical X-Ray or microdose of a truth, which–like all truths a true artist depicts–we must accept in full, set aside contrived “experiences” and vapid social media addictions, and confront forthwith or face the consequences.
Let the entertainers wallow in Sodom and Samsara. Let the warriors keep your eyes open, don’t be fooled by the sideshow, and make your moves to liberty.
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