In which We Discuss Attempts of Twitter Spheres to maek works ov graet powah to own the libtards and restore the cultural science.
"We can do this, we can bring all these very interesting, very talented people together and put on a successful show."
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB6LUclgtVs]
You can just ignore me if you like and flip through this yourself, make your own judgements if you want. I link for that, and also because I think it's fair to judge people by what they're selling themselves as. First two words, 'Dissident Art'. That's what we're doing here. Allegedly. Aspirationally. etc.
https://the-exhibition.co.uk/
They really do most of the work for me. Just look at this page. Says more than I ever could at a glance.
But let's keep going anyway.
The video is broken into chapters, and at the start we have our 'Mission Statement' section. The exhibit ran for about a week and then closed around when this video was made, about a month ago. But in their own words, this was a "proof of concept", and there are to be "many more of these". Great. But before we get excited about dissident art's future let's look at what we have now.
Let's see this room that was, "as Jonathan Bowden might say, brimming with fire, with energy, with power."
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/18B6TZw/image.png]
Not too inspiring a look from the front door, but maybe everything just looks gay because of how we do buildings now. So far I see an indistinct white shape and some Dungeon Synth album covers. Let's keep going.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qdZ3QfJ/image.png]
"Now I'm no art critic, but so- but all of the art we have on display is incredible."
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/C8bX0Bw/image.png]
How do we top that tasteful Skyrim screenshot above (Just kidding, the guy didn't put his favourite skyrim screenshot on display in a gallery, that would've actually been interesting). How about a 3D Bronze of this guy's Bloodborne build? Oh and in the background we have Vallotton if she phone.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/YtFpK3w/image.png]Aren't you classy, whore of today? You're basically the subject of a late 19th century pop-art piece, you are the culture. This cool classy lady of the past who would keep it real but also FUCKED is just like you. She'd listen to all the coolest podcasts if she were alive today just like you do, she gets it, you do too. And a real man of the time could see that, just like one day a real man of today will step up and recognise you too. Well it's happened. The Exhibit hosts this monument to your greatness.
Have we started the fire Brother? Do you feel the pre-socratic fire welling within you looking at this imitation of an over 120 years old style and subject if she iphone?
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/rf28BqV/image.png]
Here's my favourite part of The Exhibit. I call it 'Wario Land 4 Dash Attack If He Real'. Its creator apparently calls it 'Prometheus'. Prometheus huh... I can think of another thing made this century already called Prometheus. I guess the two works have to fight it out for the title in my memory now. We'll see which one endures. A year from now one of you ask me if I like 'Prometheus' and we'll see what I think of.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/JzkGxVy/image.png]
I keep posting their faces as they're commenting rather than just the work itself mostly because I consider this guy important. I recommend watching at least a little bit so that you can see his face remain like this for the entire time as he comments on the "heroic energy" on display. As you can see he's saying things, but he doesn't seem to be feeling much.
"It champions strength and power, not minority concerns" says the one who seems to be trying harder to believe in this. He says that, but having looked briefly yourself, do you believe it? If nobody was saying this, if it wasn't plastered all over the thing top to bottom, is that the impression you would get? I think (or perhaps even hope) that he let his concerns slip here. He's saying what he wants it to be and telling us it's not what it obviously is. This Exhibit is a hothouse. It's a reservation. It's a protected space for minority concerns. It's a space where trad kitsch can receive support from externally motivated actors who will patronise them for the minority concerns which their work represents. Not the sheer overwhelming power they want to have. If this stuff was actually the bearer of the true fire they would not have to advertise themselves so explicitly as the painted word. They could just stand as they are and people would not resist. If human destiny is in the fire then we will seek it. In an age as dark as our own it will be radiant. Even if you aren't advertising people will find you (not to say you shouldn't advertise, as I said elsewhere leverage is nice to have).
This Exhibit does not work. It is self conscious, awkward, cheap looking, and just not alive and burning in the way it aspires to be. "Cnaiur tried harder than any to be of the people, and so he would never be of the people." The Exhibit is trying very hard, I'll give it credit for that. It's trying hard, but they have not achieved a burn. They are not fire. This is not a burning font of energy which draws in fuel, consumes, and grows more powerful. What is power? What is fire? Well, for a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, why don't we look at what people do like? It should be obvious, I mentioned leverage above and will elaborate again, social factors can multiply and divide something's force of impact but they can't entirely obscure the truth of what's going on. Ben Shapiro pulls in bigger numbers than these guys, but he's also backed by a supporting network of media infrastructure that burns enough energy every year to send a rocket to the moon. With all of this leverage put towards multiplying his initial force he can do an okay job at getting some people to kind of half care about him, mostly zombies just kind of instinctively reacting to bad stuff around them and looking for a vaguely authoritative verbal droning to tell them their feelings are right. That's not fire. That's a shitty chinese electric heater that gives you carbon monoxide poisoning.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/sFQ0PS5/image.png]
The numbers are there, but this will never be real. He's not burning. It's a false heat.
What is power? What is fire? Well... what is the opposite of Ben Shapiro? What is something that is enduringly and inexplicably successful? What is something that seems to succeed despite the forces leveraged against it? What is something which burns and glows? An irresistable light shining in darkness? A mercilessly consuming and growing force that seems to be tapping into some kind of perennial element which will never die? The Futurists of 100 years ago this Exhibit is trying to copy were doing their best. And the fact they have cast a shadow so long that 100 years later people are anxiously trying to work within their footprints to be cool and current is testament to the real strength they had. But what that doesn't mean, is that the Futurists worked out the future. They did not, there is more to be done after them. The fire is eternal, the shape is not.
Reaching for the future is something between a process and a series of natural life cycles. The future is something which we are realising and living our way towards if we are not sterile faggots. The Futurists of 100 years ago created things which were powerful. The world was paying attention then, and people remember now. And history kept moving. People stopped looking at their work, people stopped making things like it. This isn't because people forgot or became corrupted. The Futurist vision is not sculptures of craggy man moving fast forever. It's about force and potential. Even a couple of decades after this stuff what do we need 'craggy man runs fast' for now that we have Warner Brothers. Some guy in California (a cool place at the time) draws his imagination to life and creates something so obviously bursting with life and potential that sculptures and static art as basically done as a subjects of organic public interest. Fellow observers have told me that I am not actually the first to see the Futurist's surpassed (or perhaps fulfilled, as this doesn't make them wrong) in the pop-art that followed. Allegedly Arthur Danto said that Tom & Jerry became a greater fulfillment of the aspirations of these sculptures of energy and power. Which I consider a respectable thought.
You can see there's something trashy and commercial about this, unheroic maybe. But what's undeniable is that American animation was power. The industry was an incredible thing, the energy of its works was irresistable. Images from the imagination rendered into motion and beamed across the entire world. To fast, too funny, and too new for everyone not to look. If one looks at the character of the captains of this industry, the general direction of their vision, and the fate of it all once they fell away and were not replaced, I believe that concerns of orientation or nature are put to rest. These were heroic times, these were powerful times, and they couldn't be one without the other. If they lacked some heroism that just means they weren't as powerful as they could have been. The moment their outlook and concerns became truly wrong the life bled right out of them despite all the infrastructure and inertia behind them. A phenomena which we've covered elsewhere on this site.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/561yrNC/image.png]
I didn't really answer my above question. What is alive?
American pop-animation I think is a good Post-WW2 example for what follows the Futurist exhibit and drawings culture these people are trying to reproduce, but it's not too good for us now. It's far further from us than it was from the Futurists. Far enough for us to have grown decrepit and disgusting and profoundly unfuturistic. They had some fire, then they lost it. But while they were alive and burning they were seen. And real fire catches and spreads.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/nsjKCMS/image.png]
If America was unmatched in power but maybe even in its prime lacked something of the heroic, the Japanese started out in an inverted spot and have been working to build both strengths rather admirably since. I don't remember if it was here, but I know I've posted before about Roy Lichtenstein's comic panel reproductions which he sold in galleries. Very cool idea to stick it to boring theory people in that way, and surely refreshing for gallerygoers driven insane by abstractions which only make sense in the context of bad theory. But I'll repeat myself on what I think is essential to take from the story. That Lichtenstein's work was nice because the comics were nice, and if being a galleryfag is about being cool and fearless in your taste, what's cooler and more fearless than foregoing the gallery entirely, telling the stupid middleman to get lost, and just reading your nice comics because they're more in touch with what you, as a living human being and disciple of fire, actually care about?
Lichtenstein lifted panels from American comics, I have to make a point of that because it's another now old medium. So old it grew corrupt and died as a vessel for fire. Many decades ago maybe you could get in touch with cool through comics, some life, something of some kind. But even by his time it was really a way of playing with plastic kitsch. A joke on the sensibilities of people who were laughably wrong. "Hey your gallery full of gay Jewish fake nerd crap is less fun than a panel I lifted from some stupid printed soap opera." If only he knew how right he was. If only he had the drive, the vital fire, to really believe in what he was doing to these people. If he did he would have started actually making comics and he would have become a true artist and vessel of fire.
What America was clearly waiting for in this cultural moment was for someone to embrace the power of mass media and what life there was in the plastic kitsch that was all Americans could collectively identify with anymore. And they got it a year after Lichtenstein produced his most famous panels in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/tQzXFN8/image.png]
Kenneth Anger was possibly the most shamelessly honest and clearsighted man in America. This film is him saying "This is what we are. This is what we love. Junk, kitsch, cheap excitement!" but he's not an essayist or journalist. He won't just write this. He's not a writer, but he was a curator. Not only is the stuff you see in a gallery tired and pointless by the 60s, the idea of a gallery as a vital cultural space was outdated. You want to share your soul with the world, you want to start the fire, you make a movie. I unfortunately can't just give you a youtube link anymore, but the film is well worth tracking down and watching in its entirety. It is the opposite of the painted words of its contemporary art exhibit cultural scenes and the unfortunate Exhibit of 2023. Kenneth Anger took kitsch and fuelled fire. Nothing that lives on in the heart of humanity bears the DNA of even the livelier subversives of the 60s galleries, but if you haven't heard of Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising, people you've heard of have.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/ykBJ5CM/image.png]
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/MDScssS/image.png]
Perhaps calling Scorpio Rising a film doesn't entirely capture its importance. Perhaps I could call it multimedia. But perhaps I'm also getting ahead of myself.
If America had an actually relevant cultural space in which to exercise power, in which it was possible to awe people into correctness, that space was the cinema. Not from Anger forwards, from its inception forwards. Anger just revitalised things by doing what could have been done decades earlier, were America not a gay country bent on sending people like him to jail. Perhaps calling Tom & Jerry a vital work of power is a bit much to accept, but how about Scorpio Rising? How about the works of the guys who watched Scorpio Rising? The culture which really impressed itself against people against the odds and stuck because it was good regardless of what the official voices said is almost entirely cinematic in the second half of the 20th century.
[Video: https://youtu.be/Olgn9sXNdl0]
Remember ARE SIDE'S based woman Amanda Milius? Wasn't her dad famous for something too?
[Video: https://youtu.be/6_HG-ho1-tA?t=72]
Film is an old medium. And it hurts to say but it's true, they're another medium which isn't just old, it has also grown decrepit. Like the novel I don't believe it can truly die due to the utilitarian simplicity of shooting things with a camera, but this tradition (or countertradition) of American cinema is over. No I will not watch The Northman. I will not eat the bugs. etc.
Cinema is old, but people still love Scarface. People post Conan. Its warmth lingers and provides some comfort for those who don't know where to go from there. Would you point them to The Exhibit?
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/YWQ9GyR/image.png]
Look, I think that's a motorbike on that one. Aren't you excited? Don't you want to devote your own time to this when nobody's paying attention? Maybe not. If so I can understand why.
[Video: https://youtu.be/9tBHsSD0GAk?t=111]
How about these bikes?
This film is 35 years old now, but do you feel it? Look at that thumbnail, one of the most imitated frames of animation of all time. This upload of this scene is only a year old and has a quarter of a million views. It's still beautiful to look at, the most expensive anime ever made when it premiered. You can feel the money. The amount of craft and vision directed towards the realisation of this two hour vision is still probably unmatched in animation. This film had the fire. 35 years later and you can still feel it watching it. It's something like five weeks since 'The Exhibit', who's ever going to look at that little colourful bike pictured above and feel anything comparable to this? Could they have when it was new, will anybody feel anything in 35 years? Will the future be anxiously looking back to this? It's not impossible for anybody to do. The world still anxiously looks back upon Akira.
And something I didn't plan, but a fun way to move forward. Look at this youtube user's pfp (at the time of writing). It's Lain!
Imagine trying to explain Lain to a time travelled Futurist from the 1920s. I think of all the art or media things we could show him created since his time, that might be the one to genuinely induce a future shock and kill him. After all, Lain is not about the past.
[Video: https://youtu.be/JlBLcLdTYr4]
PRESENT DAY, PRESENT TIME. And what a time. By all the way back in 1998 Culture and Technology had progressed to the point where it was possible for a Japanese concept artist to start with an image of a girl, and from that image create a quick and complete sprawl of multimedia. A tv anime that seems to draw comfortably from cool dangerous youth culture, experimental and arthouse film techniques and history, and the vibe of the internet, which it both accurately read, dramatised, and created by turns.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/M9jjwhF/image.png]
Yoshitoshi Abe was doing more than mercenary character design when he created Lain. He was doing more than drawing a lost and sad looking girl. He was tapping into some kind of force. He was discovered by professional culture industries as a trouble graffiti artist. There's something about his work. He belongs to a strange and I would even say miraculous (or demonic) kind of new wild human creativity. The mysterious fire aspired towards in images of Conan the Barbarian alive and working alongside the taste and sophistication of a modern Japanese man of high craft. This shaman-like to reach beyond and touch what we all feel is there is perhaps not supposed to reach such high levels of refinement. Abe was the original shaping hands, and then writers and producers and countless fine artists and craftsmen did their work and something truly new was born. The vision and instincts of a shaman privileged and aided by some of the most advanced culture and media infrastructure in the world. Granted multiple media bodies with which to begin driving towards its own future in its own strange and new ways without any regard for the world around it, A future which it is continuously creating as it blazes its mysterious course through The Wired.
Cool things have been made since 1998, but Lain is elevated by the fact that it is still going. Lain is not a tv show that came out in 1998. It was a force unleashed upon the world. A force which more than 20 years after its inception is capable of making world class intellects mutilate their bodies and worship her visage and the singularity. If nobody was putting up plaques and making podcasts telling you it was supposed to be so nobody would look at The Exhibit as a work of power. On the other hand, I challenge you to convince me that Lain is not a work of power. Lain is not in an exhibit. Not because it is not worthy. But because an exhibit could not contain it.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/yfRWXrp/image.png]
We live in an age of popular racing simulators in which you can break 1000km/h in your living room, violence simulators are the most popular media on earth, multimedia sagas of war heroes contemplating nietzschean perspectives on violence culminating in an interactive fascist action rock-opera affirming that war is indeed the hygiene of humanity. Children are empowered to build their own monoliths and even their own online war and crime simulators. The fire is not out yet. There are still good things out there which energise humanity and in turn are capable of drawing it back into themselves.
The great works of power, beauty, aesthetic strength and energising heroism all around us, but these poor fools running The Exhibit are too busy looking for works of power and heroism to ever notice. If you go beyond believing in what The Exhibit extols, if you've actually felt it before yourself, you will feel no positive desire to actually look at The Exhibit.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/856JLfk/image.png]
Don't strain yourself so hard looking for the future you miss it being born right in front of you.
"We can do this, we can bring all these very interesting, very talented people together and put on a successful show."
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB6LUclgtVs]
You can just ignore me if you like and flip through this yourself, make your own judgements if you want. I link for that, and also because I think it's fair to judge people by what they're selling themselves as. First two words, 'Dissident Art'. That's what we're doing here. Allegedly. Aspirationally. etc.
https://the-exhibition.co.uk/
They really do most of the work for me. Just look at this page. Says more than I ever could at a glance.
Quote:We come together because we are hungry for true beauty, aesthetic strength and vital expressions. Because we want to see culture that energises. Because we have been standing on the sidelines watching how the flame of true creation has been smothered by petty ideology.
This is a momentous occasion: like-minded artists from across Europe joining forces to make a cultural shift. We believe this is a pivotal moment in its nascent stage.
Inspired by the collectives that have formed before us, we stand unapologetically to carve out another route in this time of artistic stagnation.
If we don’t rekindle the fire, who will?
But let's keep going anyway.
The video is broken into chapters, and at the start we have our 'Mission Statement' section. The exhibit ran for about a week and then closed around when this video was made, about a month ago. But in their own words, this was a "proof of concept", and there are to be "many more of these". Great. But before we get excited about dissident art's future let's look at what we have now.
Let's see this room that was, "as Jonathan Bowden might say, brimming with fire, with energy, with power."
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/18B6TZw/image.png]
Not too inspiring a look from the front door, but maybe everything just looks gay because of how we do buildings now. So far I see an indistinct white shape and some Dungeon Synth album covers. Let's keep going.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/qdZ3QfJ/image.png]
"Now I'm no art critic, but so- but all of the art we have on display is incredible."
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/C8bX0Bw/image.png]
How do we top that tasteful Skyrim screenshot above (Just kidding, the guy didn't put his favourite skyrim screenshot on display in a gallery, that would've actually been interesting). How about a 3D Bronze of this guy's Bloodborne build? Oh and in the background we have Vallotton if she phone.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/YtFpK3w/image.png]Aren't you classy, whore of today? You're basically the subject of a late 19th century pop-art piece, you are the culture. This cool classy lady of the past who would keep it real but also FUCKED is just like you. She'd listen to all the coolest podcasts if she were alive today just like you do, she gets it, you do too. And a real man of the time could see that, just like one day a real man of today will step up and recognise you too. Well it's happened. The Exhibit hosts this monument to your greatness.
Have we started the fire Brother? Do you feel the pre-socratic fire welling within you looking at this imitation of an over 120 years old style and subject if she iphone?
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/rf28BqV/image.png]
Here's my favourite part of The Exhibit. I call it 'Wario Land 4 Dash Attack If He Real'. Its creator apparently calls it 'Prometheus'. Prometheus huh... I can think of another thing made this century already called Prometheus. I guess the two works have to fight it out for the title in my memory now. We'll see which one endures. A year from now one of you ask me if I like 'Prometheus' and we'll see what I think of.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/JzkGxVy/image.png]
I keep posting their faces as they're commenting rather than just the work itself mostly because I consider this guy important. I recommend watching at least a little bit so that you can see his face remain like this for the entire time as he comments on the "heroic energy" on display. As you can see he's saying things, but he doesn't seem to be feeling much.
"It champions strength and power, not minority concerns" says the one who seems to be trying harder to believe in this. He says that, but having looked briefly yourself, do you believe it? If nobody was saying this, if it wasn't plastered all over the thing top to bottom, is that the impression you would get? I think (or perhaps even hope) that he let his concerns slip here. He's saying what he wants it to be and telling us it's not what it obviously is. This Exhibit is a hothouse. It's a reservation. It's a protected space for minority concerns. It's a space where trad kitsch can receive support from externally motivated actors who will patronise them for the minority concerns which their work represents. Not the sheer overwhelming power they want to have. If this stuff was actually the bearer of the true fire they would not have to advertise themselves so explicitly as the painted word. They could just stand as they are and people would not resist. If human destiny is in the fire then we will seek it. In an age as dark as our own it will be radiant. Even if you aren't advertising people will find you (not to say you shouldn't advertise, as I said elsewhere leverage is nice to have).
This Exhibit does not work. It is self conscious, awkward, cheap looking, and just not alive and burning in the way it aspires to be. "Cnaiur tried harder than any to be of the people, and so he would never be of the people." The Exhibit is trying very hard, I'll give it credit for that. It's trying hard, but they have not achieved a burn. They are not fire. This is not a burning font of energy which draws in fuel, consumes, and grows more powerful. What is power? What is fire? Well, for a potentially fruitful line of inquiry, why don't we look at what people do like? It should be obvious, I mentioned leverage above and will elaborate again, social factors can multiply and divide something's force of impact but they can't entirely obscure the truth of what's going on. Ben Shapiro pulls in bigger numbers than these guys, but he's also backed by a supporting network of media infrastructure that burns enough energy every year to send a rocket to the moon. With all of this leverage put towards multiplying his initial force he can do an okay job at getting some people to kind of half care about him, mostly zombies just kind of instinctively reacting to bad stuff around them and looking for a vaguely authoritative verbal droning to tell them their feelings are right. That's not fire. That's a shitty chinese electric heater that gives you carbon monoxide poisoning.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/sFQ0PS5/image.png]
The numbers are there, but this will never be real. He's not burning. It's a false heat.
What is power? What is fire? Well... what is the opposite of Ben Shapiro? What is something that is enduringly and inexplicably successful? What is something that seems to succeed despite the forces leveraged against it? What is something which burns and glows? An irresistable light shining in darkness? A mercilessly consuming and growing force that seems to be tapping into some kind of perennial element which will never die? The Futurists of 100 years ago this Exhibit is trying to copy were doing their best. And the fact they have cast a shadow so long that 100 years later people are anxiously trying to work within their footprints to be cool and current is testament to the real strength they had. But what that doesn't mean, is that the Futurists worked out the future. They did not, there is more to be done after them. The fire is eternal, the shape is not.
Reaching for the future is something between a process and a series of natural life cycles. The future is something which we are realising and living our way towards if we are not sterile faggots. The Futurists of 100 years ago created things which were powerful. The world was paying attention then, and people remember now. And history kept moving. People stopped looking at their work, people stopped making things like it. This isn't because people forgot or became corrupted. The Futurist vision is not sculptures of craggy man moving fast forever. It's about force and potential. Even a couple of decades after this stuff what do we need 'craggy man runs fast' for now that we have Warner Brothers. Some guy in California (a cool place at the time) draws his imagination to life and creates something so obviously bursting with life and potential that sculptures and static art as basically done as a subjects of organic public interest. Fellow observers have told me that I am not actually the first to see the Futurist's surpassed (or perhaps fulfilled, as this doesn't make them wrong) in the pop-art that followed. Allegedly Arthur Danto said that Tom & Jerry became a greater fulfillment of the aspirations of these sculptures of energy and power. Which I consider a respectable thought.
You can see there's something trashy and commercial about this, unheroic maybe. But what's undeniable is that American animation was power. The industry was an incredible thing, the energy of its works was irresistable. Images from the imagination rendered into motion and beamed across the entire world. To fast, too funny, and too new for everyone not to look. If one looks at the character of the captains of this industry, the general direction of their vision, and the fate of it all once they fell away and were not replaced, I believe that concerns of orientation or nature are put to rest. These were heroic times, these were powerful times, and they couldn't be one without the other. If they lacked some heroism that just means they weren't as powerful as they could have been. The moment their outlook and concerns became truly wrong the life bled right out of them despite all the infrastructure and inertia behind them. A phenomena which we've covered elsewhere on this site.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/561yrNC/image.png]
I didn't really answer my above question. What is alive?
American pop-animation I think is a good Post-WW2 example for what follows the Futurist exhibit and drawings culture these people are trying to reproduce, but it's not too good for us now. It's far further from us than it was from the Futurists. Far enough for us to have grown decrepit and disgusting and profoundly unfuturistic. They had some fire, then they lost it. But while they were alive and burning they were seen. And real fire catches and spreads.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/nsjKCMS/image.png]
If America was unmatched in power but maybe even in its prime lacked something of the heroic, the Japanese started out in an inverted spot and have been working to build both strengths rather admirably since. I don't remember if it was here, but I know I've posted before about Roy Lichtenstein's comic panel reproductions which he sold in galleries. Very cool idea to stick it to boring theory people in that way, and surely refreshing for gallerygoers driven insane by abstractions which only make sense in the context of bad theory. But I'll repeat myself on what I think is essential to take from the story. That Lichtenstein's work was nice because the comics were nice, and if being a galleryfag is about being cool and fearless in your taste, what's cooler and more fearless than foregoing the gallery entirely, telling the stupid middleman to get lost, and just reading your nice comics because they're more in touch with what you, as a living human being and disciple of fire, actually care about?
Lichtenstein lifted panels from American comics, I have to make a point of that because it's another now old medium. So old it grew corrupt and died as a vessel for fire. Many decades ago maybe you could get in touch with cool through comics, some life, something of some kind. But even by his time it was really a way of playing with plastic kitsch. A joke on the sensibilities of people who were laughably wrong. "Hey your gallery full of gay Jewish fake nerd crap is less fun than a panel I lifted from some stupid printed soap opera." If only he knew how right he was. If only he had the drive, the vital fire, to really believe in what he was doing to these people. If he did he would have started actually making comics and he would have become a true artist and vessel of fire.
What America was clearly waiting for in this cultural moment was for someone to embrace the power of mass media and what life there was in the plastic kitsch that was all Americans could collectively identify with anymore. And they got it a year after Lichtenstein produced his most famous panels in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/tQzXFN8/image.png]
Kenneth Anger was possibly the most shamelessly honest and clearsighted man in America. This film is him saying "This is what we are. This is what we love. Junk, kitsch, cheap excitement!" but he's not an essayist or journalist. He won't just write this. He's not a writer, but he was a curator. Not only is the stuff you see in a gallery tired and pointless by the 60s, the idea of a gallery as a vital cultural space was outdated. You want to share your soul with the world, you want to start the fire, you make a movie. I unfortunately can't just give you a youtube link anymore, but the film is well worth tracking down and watching in its entirety. It is the opposite of the painted words of its contemporary art exhibit cultural scenes and the unfortunate Exhibit of 2023. Kenneth Anger took kitsch and fuelled fire. Nothing that lives on in the heart of humanity bears the DNA of even the livelier subversives of the 60s galleries, but if you haven't heard of Kenneth Anger and Scorpio Rising, people you've heard of have.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/ykBJ5CM/image.png]
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/MDScssS/image.png]
Perhaps calling Scorpio Rising a film doesn't entirely capture its importance. Perhaps I could call it multimedia. But perhaps I'm also getting ahead of myself.
If America had an actually relevant cultural space in which to exercise power, in which it was possible to awe people into correctness, that space was the cinema. Not from Anger forwards, from its inception forwards. Anger just revitalised things by doing what could have been done decades earlier, were America not a gay country bent on sending people like him to jail. Perhaps calling Tom & Jerry a vital work of power is a bit much to accept, but how about Scorpio Rising? How about the works of the guys who watched Scorpio Rising? The culture which really impressed itself against people against the odds and stuck because it was good regardless of what the official voices said is almost entirely cinematic in the second half of the 20th century.
[Video: https://youtu.be/Olgn9sXNdl0]
Remember ARE SIDE'S based woman Amanda Milius? Wasn't her dad famous for something too?
[Video: https://youtu.be/6_HG-ho1-tA?t=72]
Film is an old medium. And it hurts to say but it's true, they're another medium which isn't just old, it has also grown decrepit. Like the novel I don't believe it can truly die due to the utilitarian simplicity of shooting things with a camera, but this tradition (or countertradition) of American cinema is over. No I will not watch The Northman. I will not eat the bugs. etc.
Cinema is old, but people still love Scarface. People post Conan. Its warmth lingers and provides some comfort for those who don't know where to go from there. Would you point them to The Exhibit?
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/YWQ9GyR/image.png]
Look, I think that's a motorbike on that one. Aren't you excited? Don't you want to devote your own time to this when nobody's paying attention? Maybe not. If so I can understand why.
[Video: https://youtu.be/9tBHsSD0GAk?t=111]
How about these bikes?
This film is 35 years old now, but do you feel it? Look at that thumbnail, one of the most imitated frames of animation of all time. This upload of this scene is only a year old and has a quarter of a million views. It's still beautiful to look at, the most expensive anime ever made when it premiered. You can feel the money. The amount of craft and vision directed towards the realisation of this two hour vision is still probably unmatched in animation. This film had the fire. 35 years later and you can still feel it watching it. It's something like five weeks since 'The Exhibit', who's ever going to look at that little colourful bike pictured above and feel anything comparable to this? Could they have when it was new, will anybody feel anything in 35 years? Will the future be anxiously looking back to this? It's not impossible for anybody to do. The world still anxiously looks back upon Akira.
And something I didn't plan, but a fun way to move forward. Look at this youtube user's pfp (at the time of writing). It's Lain!
Imagine trying to explain Lain to a time travelled Futurist from the 1920s. I think of all the art or media things we could show him created since his time, that might be the one to genuinely induce a future shock and kill him. After all, Lain is not about the past.
[Video: https://youtu.be/JlBLcLdTYr4]
PRESENT DAY, PRESENT TIME. And what a time. By all the way back in 1998 Culture and Technology had progressed to the point where it was possible for a Japanese concept artist to start with an image of a girl, and from that image create a quick and complete sprawl of multimedia. A tv anime that seems to draw comfortably from cool dangerous youth culture, experimental and arthouse film techniques and history, and the vibe of the internet, which it both accurately read, dramatised, and created by turns.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/M9jjwhF/image.png]
Yoshitoshi Abe was doing more than mercenary character design when he created Lain. He was doing more than drawing a lost and sad looking girl. He was tapping into some kind of force. He was discovered by professional culture industries as a trouble graffiti artist. There's something about his work. He belongs to a strange and I would even say miraculous (or demonic) kind of new wild human creativity. The mysterious fire aspired towards in images of Conan the Barbarian alive and working alongside the taste and sophistication of a modern Japanese man of high craft. This shaman-like to reach beyond and touch what we all feel is there is perhaps not supposed to reach such high levels of refinement. Abe was the original shaping hands, and then writers and producers and countless fine artists and craftsmen did their work and something truly new was born. The vision and instincts of a shaman privileged and aided by some of the most advanced culture and media infrastructure in the world. Granted multiple media bodies with which to begin driving towards its own future in its own strange and new ways without any regard for the world around it, A future which it is continuously creating as it blazes its mysterious course through The Wired.
Cool things have been made since 1998, but Lain is elevated by the fact that it is still going. Lain is not a tv show that came out in 1998. It was a force unleashed upon the world. A force which more than 20 years after its inception is capable of making world class intellects mutilate their bodies and worship her visage and the singularity. If nobody was putting up plaques and making podcasts telling you it was supposed to be so nobody would look at The Exhibit as a work of power. On the other hand, I challenge you to convince me that Lain is not a work of power. Lain is not in an exhibit. Not because it is not worthy. But because an exhibit could not contain it.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/yfRWXrp/image.png]
We live in an age of popular racing simulators in which you can break 1000km/h in your living room, violence simulators are the most popular media on earth, multimedia sagas of war heroes contemplating nietzschean perspectives on violence culminating in an interactive fascist action rock-opera affirming that war is indeed the hygiene of humanity. Children are empowered to build their own monoliths and even their own online war and crime simulators. The fire is not out yet. There are still good things out there which energise humanity and in turn are capable of drawing it back into themselves.
The great works of power, beauty, aesthetic strength and energising heroism all around us, but these poor fools running The Exhibit are too busy looking for works of power and heroism to ever notice. If you go beyond believing in what The Exhibit extols, if you've actually felt it before yourself, you will feel no positive desire to actually look at The Exhibit.
[Image: https://i.ibb.co/856JLfk/image.png]
Don't strain yourself so hard looking for the future you miss it being born right in front of you.
