EVOLV


Mark F. Cheney, closeted homosexual husband of the VP, presents the Ultimate Hit Song for September 2002...

The Revelation of Bedrock...from the end of Why I'm Not An Artist Issue 8

This was a post by Simon Apathy on Indymedia in June of 2003, which mentions some of the concepts I mention here.

"If there was no Benny Cemoli, we would have to create him"

12/10/03: Not many people know this but there was, in a sense, a historical "Robin Hood". One can find many 14th century court cases against Robin Hood. He developed quite an arrest record.

The thing about all these cases, however, was that they weren't all against the same person, by which I mean the same physical entity. It turns out that Robin Hood was a pseudonym that was used by the entire British underclass whenever one was to do an act of rebellion.

Nor was this an isolated historical anomaly. Four centuries later, during the industrial revolution, when anarchism first began to exist, there was a rash of grand sabotages, all claimed by one Ned Ludd. Again, this was a pseudonym used by many of the underclass of the period.

Philip K. Dick wrote a short story entitled "If There Was No Benny Cemoli" in which he illustrated this concept.

During the 1980s, there arose a movement called "Neoism", whose founder was Karen Elliot. Karen Elliot developed quite the portfolio very quickly, for someone without a Social Security number or an address, nor even a physical body. Even now the movement continues, and artists are encouraged to take either the pseudonyms Karen Elliot or Monty Cantsin and fear no repercussions.

9/03/02:'You cannot will spontaneity, but you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors'- William S. Burroughs.
Cut-Up techniques were developed from the modernist tradition of collage, the use of found material mixed with traditional elements of painting. But cut-up was used to advance the art of writing, simulating the white noise barrage that assails up daily. The cut-up technique, the history of which I will cover in a later entry, is an anti-rational attack on spectacle. When the rational lifelines are cut, the subsequent associations become blurred. In a free-trade capitalist culture where associations are weapons in the hands of the advertisers, the cut-up is our anti-personnel land mine. Such attacks burst the seams on the illusion of "control" over word and image smugly assumed by commercial artists and writers.

Take for example "The Ultimate Hit Song" listed above. Normally when P.Diddy inserts a comment into one of his songs, you can totally picture him, swaggering on or standing back with his arms crossed and sunglasses on, moving the song forward with his comments; but what are we to make of him commenting "Chill out my arms...Swine On..."? And notice that this makes no particular comment about P.Diddy as a person, but does affect our perception of the media entity that MTV and himself have constructed around him. This weapon destroys buildings, but leaves people standing...

In our current state, under the tyranny of the spectacle and the rule of "image over everything else" the cut-up may prove an artistic window through which true progress may be obtained...

8/28/02: This will be where I will place my experiments with computer-generated text, cut-ups and collage. I'm still gatherin material for this page, but I should have a suitable amount of material within the first week of next month...see ya then...

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