Dennis Hollingsworth

Friendly Fire

Here's the paragraph that popped out to me in Ben Davis' recent articleThere Has to Be a Better Way to Argue About the Climate-Activist Attacks on Art:

In a book I put out earlier this year, I have a chapter titled "Art and Ecotopia," about the weaknesses of the "awareness-raising" strand of eco-art, and the need of centering a realistic, positive vision of the future if artists are going to put their energies to good use. But I also end by saying, "without a positive shared narrative or image of the future to hold on to, the psychic consequences will be both predictable and horrible. Then, the mental weight of the end-times narrative can only be expressed via metastasizing death cults and sociopathic nihilism, as the lack of a positive future renders the present meaningless.

A few notes:

- Ben Davis is my favorite art world egg head. Of course, I don't map 100% on his worldview... who ever does per anyone? But he is one of the few art world thinkers out there that instantly captures my interest. I always want to know what he's thinking.

- The bolded emphasis I highlighted in the quote above points to our (our, meaning us, the members of the the contemporary art world) naturally inherent weakness: we tend to feel first and think later. (Strength is intimately connected to weakness, after all.) Therefore in pursuit of what would otherwise be a noble cause, we extravagantly color outside the lines.

We allowed our emotions to become dis-regulated.
We veered into screaming.
We forgot that one should remain vulnerable to persuasion if you want to persuade.

[Wait a sec. Are the protestors artists too? ... *shrug* ... Well hell, why not? Everybody wants to be.]

The upshot of his point is an argument that will enrage most of my peers, but it has to be said and I'll say it three ways:

1) Currently, the Climate Change narrative is a threat to the ecological agenda.
2) If you care about the environment, if you really care, you'll be inclined to dismantle the Climate Change movement and remake it into something reasonable.
3) The Climate Change mindset is counter productive at suicidal dimensions.

Unpacking this idea requires a Substack account, but I can sketch out a vignette before the mike drop: we are currently loading landfills with the debris of iteratively prototyped, premature tech at global scale... visualize the buried mountains of batteries and carbon fiber husks of windmills now and soon to come and grow.

No, if you care about the environment, you wouldn't use lurid colors to illustrate your argument. Bully tactics don't make a better world.

- When I first saw the image of the tomato soup > Van Gogh Direct Action event, the thought flashed in my mind that it appeared to be an aggressive turning of Pop on Modernism, the use of Warhol's famous tomato soup cans' contents occluding the signal painter from whom sprung Modern-cum-Abstract Painting (VV). This, the angry cousin of the time that Rauschenberg famously erased the DeKooning drawing.

What happened in 1953 was Postmodernism's declaration of independence from the legacy of Modernism. Whereas before art tried to touch G-d via material means, afterwards art pointed towards everyday life via conceptual means.

Script, flipped.

What happened in 2022 was an attempt to erase civilization. Yes, the painting had a protective glass. Yes, it could be cleaned. But somewhere in this moment, there's an activist considering how to raise the stakes.

Script, burned.

Friendly Fire, in other words.