From 1990 until an undetermined point thereafter there will be an employment of the negation of all forms of work (and play). This will be called The Artists Strike (1990 – ?). Those participating will refuse to produce and / or consume artworks, creative acts,and political or philosophical activisms. We aim to undermine existing western philosophical notions and ultimately push for the radical transformation of society.
By the refusal of creativity for the years following 1990, there will be a collapse in the capitalist system. Art galleries will close. Museums and cultural institutions will suffer monetary loss. As the art world suffers everywhere, the inertia will collect on other elements of capitalism creating the desired push through, beyond the understood concepts of civilization.
Capitalism places an economic value on everything, including the mind. It makes a commodity of the conscious reasoning and understanding society has shaped and mutated to call its own, then calls it “art.” This exploitation is an integral part of the bourgeois capitalist formula for popularizing its banal ideologies.
Imagination, the tool of the acculturated mind, is no more authentic than its product. Only the mind that conceives can be designated authentic. Society has capitalized on the dull products of the imagination and through it has created the illusory reality. In order to destroy society as it exists, we must destroy the imagination. We can have no reform, for reform merely rearranges appearances. Nothing changes.
Society creates a split of the established modes of reality and then offers the alternative. The ameliorative can never be achieved since the entire affair exists in the imagination of a split mind. Moreover, the established modes of reality are created by capitalist ideologies and philosophies which are the primary agents of repression.
Fear of cultural death commits society to an unavoidable mass suicide. It limits primary processes (that distinguish the individual) to stratagems of unquestioned truth. The reality consensus governs circumstantial response and thinking towards a detestable redundancy, yet dissents to its own plagiarism. Individuality within society is a delusion. Truth repudiates society as society negates truth. Differentiation of the personality succeeds cultural death, the relation of cause and effect being inversely proportional.
Capitalist social relationships make desire the mechanism through which a nonexistent future prevails over the now. It denies the present and focuses on the future. Whatever one is, is incomplete and temporary, for only the future is significant. Society markets destiny as a pursuit-to-become something, a means of being; without destiny one doesn’t exist.
Acting on can mutate or create new data. Interacting with creates only the event of interaction. After the event, all is as it was. Noting changes.
TRUTH IS THE ILLUSORY TOOL OF THE SPECTACLE – NEGATE TRUTH.
ABOLISH PLEASURE – REFUSE CREATIVITY – SMASH THE IMAGINATION – DESIRE IN RUINS – THE PRESENT IS ABSOLUTE – EVERYTHING NOW!
(from OVO 3 1987).
