End of the West (2019-22)
Phase 1-2
A time-based outdoor sculpture installation by Paul McLean, performed and documented in Astoria, Oregon.
1
Yesterday, Vince dropped by to introduce himself and let us know he would be removing the fir trees in our small backyard, at the behest of our landlord and the owner of the neighboring house. The trees had served as a buffer between the two properties. The sight-barrier they created blocked our neighbor’s views and, in the event of a major storm, might prove a risk for damaging either building, theirs and/or ours. Vince politely suggested I move anything on the path from the cut to the trailer on the street in which the cuttings would be placed and then hauled away. That meant the portion of The End of the West (EotW) I had installed out back was an impediment. Time to break the five-piece, backside, non-show show down. Phase One of EotW was finished. A second phase was about to commence.
The five pieces included: 1) an early Mac monitor, whose screen I had painted with luminescent paint and to which I had adhered a vinyl 01 sticker; 2) the crumpled vinyl print remnants of one of the Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown window treatments; 3) two tar-covered roofing buckets, one containing a tar-encrusted mop, gifted me by my friend John Keefe (RIP); 4) a wood sculpture assembled and gessoed at Goldleaf Framemakers of Santa Fe in 1995; 5) and a gaudily framed archery target wrapped on a styrofoam block. Four of the five pieces were mounted on lead-wrapped wood platforms, which had once been cooling flats for ceramics, I think, which I had picked up in Austin during a mid-00’s residency sequence, and which I have used in several installations since then.
These pieces, along with a similar number installed in the front yard of our Astoria home, each represented something dimensional in Western civilization or culture. Tech, design, oil and derivatives, architecture and manufacturing. On another level, the Digital or Virtual, Waste, Labor, Enframing... I could go on. Almost every day for the past several years, I have visited with these symbolic pieces, often several times each day and night, and witnessed their transformation due to exposure to the elements. The ornately framed and colorful target, with its terse graphic “Made in the USA,” had been enveloped by creeping undergrowth. All of them showed signs of weathering, some more than others, and also evidence of the yard care that flung cut grass and more at their surfaces, close to the ground. The metal parts have rusted. The wood has decayed. Their hues have shifted and faded. Underneath the bases, spiders, salamanders, worms and other bugs or “creepy-crawlies” had been flourishing. Some of the bases had become rooted in the earth.
To prevent them from damage from the tree-scaping business, really tree-demolishing, I migrated these EotW elements to the front yard, combining them with the others. Their arrangement now is denser. The echoes and reverberating features among them are more acute. They have less space, less autonomy, if you will. Deer frequently use both front and back yards to feed, relieve themselves and relax. Birds water at the buckets and boxes. Raccoons, possums, cats and other critters wind their ways through the decaying art obstacle course. One of the original vignettes didn’t last long. The wind repeatedly knocked over the Blue and Red tinted acrylic panels, with white vinyl adhesives titled “Vision Channel Device(s)”. They were the first to be relegated to the indoors. The VCDs were produced for the DDDD collective exhibit at the Parthenon Museum in Nashville (1999-2000), called “Inside>Outside”. They, too, had been recycled for use in subsequent displays and performances.
The “inverse” objects — those initially installed in the backyard — joined the set in the front: 1) a big, black NEXT monitor with an 01 sticker, that was first shown in “Heartless01” I think, in Nashville, in a sequence of multimedia and -disciplinary collective shows in 2001; a wooden ammunition crate containing a bucket-full of steel plugs, a lead toy gun, a mock .45 1911 pistol painted in luminescent yellow-green, and a charcoal drawing; two open white cubes with an iridescent mixed-media pour-lining interior; another architectural wooden construction from the Goldleaf series; and an assemblage of found objects (including a banjo, another simple wood construct, an African rhino fetish which was the second element to go back indoors) set in and on crimson-painted wood sandbox, now sprouting shoots of native grass. A Buddha head from somewhere had made its way over the past three years to a place in the middle of the front-back arrays, opposite our front door.
2
A dozen people over the course of EotW had inquired about the installation. Some were curious passersby. A few had actually climbed the steps and strolled to the front yard to take a closer look and shoot snaps. The landlord had been generally non-plussed, and at one point I had apologized for not asking his permission prior to installation, and then attempted a basic explanation of the project. He hadn’t seemed too interested. The exchange was a tad awkward. I didn’t offer to de-install the work.
This is I believe my first attempt to address EotW. I have devoted a prodigious amount of thought to it. Maybe I will give a lecture on the topic down the line. For now, I will share a few of the main concepts. The End of the West is first off highly site specific in its current form, but it is meant to be transitioned to a “white cube” exhibition space. I have pictured each object presented in a variety of ways. Some of these include: encased in plexiglass boxes; on pedestals caked in range of sculptural materials, such as clay, goopy paint, with or without net wrapping; in clear or tinted containers, submerged in liquids (like water) or numerous other types of medium, solid or wet. I have envisioned them going through mold-processes, and then up-sized in many materials, from concrete to bronze, also plastics of many types and colors. I have conceived of lots of movies and photo series for which these things would play a starring or central role. EotW has inspired many poetic flights of fancy, dark philosophical rumination, deep and calamitous political screeds, social commentaries and innumerable stories. I have imagined them to be a map for an epic tale, each object representing a city-state, Game of Thrones intro style. I have given each one of these pieces a host of names, none of which I can recall.
The End of the West has been installed in hundreds of galleries and museums across the globe, in my mind’s eye. I have participated in many an imaginary panel discussion on the meaning of EotW, with celebrated artsy VIPs, but also with stranger “cultural” or public intellectual and pundit panelists, before a multitude of colorful congregants in attendance. I have enjoyed so many delightfully enlightening and clever conversations with the industrial smartsy set, chattering about the aesthetics of EotW, about its obvious connection to Arte Povera, its inherent lessons on permanence and impermanence, its function in and beyond the marketplace or academy, the potential to re-package the project as an NFT, plus more and more. The End of the West has provided me hours of dreamy, solitary diversion. I should note that deriving such pleasures from a collection of objects would never happen, had I no basis for the fancy. I have a lot of experience in the art circuits for oral transmissions. It’s a mixed bag, but I always did get a kick out of that ring of the circus. The art world, it turns out is really fun in its not-real not-manifestation, too. I doubt that statement would hold, if the idea of EotW were less meaty. EotW, after all, is a confrontation with a bittersweet speculative reality, consisting of transitional material and immateriality-as-matrix. The themes and narratives interwoven into these humble and weird things are troubling at the outset, and go downhill from there. The End. Think of Jim Morrison. The West. How is it even measured or defined in 2022? The notion of “the West” is frail and fraught, and until very recently, according to its self-generating history, the West was humanity’s apex. That notion is in a shambles, in so many of its aspects. It is difficult enough to talk about endings, much less embrace them, especially when Death is the kind of end we mean, or mean to avoid, to dance around. To converse on the West is no simpler. What is THE WEST?
“Endings End by force of Will, surrender or concession, and as inevitability.”
POIESTHETIC
The End of the West was conceived as an artistic, conceptual volley across the sails of mortality, writ Big and small, a riff on the mythologies of Western-ness, both American and Euro-centric. As such, the central element being art, the inherent cheekiness is located in Outsider-ism. The sense of being shunned, of banishment, of a seed growing without necessary light. Alternatives have to be discovered in the ebbs of flow. EotW is a poiesthetic exercise, and therefore unhinged from speech, in its common sense. Even pre-speech, in its utilization of Nature as a collaborator, as opposed to anything networked or digital, excepting our periodic and incidental documentation with social media dispersion. The work itself is bereft of electricity, although the presence of energy is requisite. The monitors are decidedly not plugged in. The wiring is disconnected. The lighting is ambient, mostly non-artificial. No keyboards permitted and none present, except for the old, broken iMac keyboard stashed in a refuse pail on the porch, an empty 5-gallon paint container. The noisiness or lossy-ness of tech-separatist artistry in the configuration, most pronounced in the few graphic vinyl images sprinkled about the array, is referential to systems, to code. Design is signaled, along with numbers, as one of our ubiquitous global contrivances, carrying on through the post-contemporary period, to which EotW emphatically belongs. But the tendrils of Wilderness, and entangling objective modernity with their insistent aversion to historicity, intrude on the staging of the scenario. The clearing must be maintained, to prevent its reclamation by the forest. The age-old tension between civilization and Nature. Not far from here is the Dismal Niche, the mighty Columbia River, the even-mightier Pacific Ocean, crashing against the Northwest Coast. The very Edge of the American continent, the American Dream of Manifest Destiny. Asia and Hawaii and Alaska just over the horizon. Think of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. The primitive world contains this place, permeates it, resists any idea of distance and divergence. One gets the sense that it is only a matter of time and circumstance, until the balance of power is reversed or inverted.
Memories, ghosts, shades of memory. The synthesis of centuries beyond recognition fuses with the heaviness of darkness and the over-abundance of water. While drought consumes vast portions east of us, we move through liquid as profusion, our feet caked in mud, erosion prevailing. The precarious mansions on the hillsides huddle against gravity, the threat of landslide, with the odors of wildfire drifting toward our distant reaches. The nightmares of modernity, and their distortions, shuffle or seep through the ideological cracks. The Homeless Problem does not go away - it recedes and returns, like the tides. The airwaves are infected with polarities and binaries, which have no foundations among what remains of the westward visionary thrust. The howls of iconoclasts blend with those of wolves, coyotes and hunting hounds. The sea lions bark incessantly. Geese honk overhead. Eagles and vultures circle below the swirling storm clouds and above the dirt. Cemeteries become indistinguishable as such, and with them go the optimistic travelogues of the Dead, who were pioneers, driven by dreams of conquest, of riches, of freedom, of a future far from the keeps of monarchs and cathedrals of the men of God and sword. One cannot help but breathe the profundity of the conjunction of humor and tragedy, which is folly in two acts, as one stands at the Pacific Northwest shoreline, gazing backward at the topology once ruled by majestic trees, as enormous as the skyscrapers of their day. The webs of spiders arrive with fall. The bees were by my estimation uncommonly scarce this year. Most everyone is anxious, and no one trusts anyone else. I don’t recognize this post-COVID version of my native countrymen. People tend to keep to themselves, and are easier prey to the negative messaging system with which they occupy themselves under the blanket of politico-economic fear and trepidation. What evil may appear out of the haze and mists? Another plague? A mushroom cloud and a slavering commie horde? Will it be the anarchists or the cops, smashing through the front door? Money, gas and food gone up or just gone, leaving the poor with nothing to buy, nowhere to go, nothing to eat? The orgy over, except in the endless depths of pornography for the compartmentalized masses. The collapse of the grid is a taboo subject, because everyone knows if the Internet and media break down, the Purge will actually happen IRL. The only pipeline for social stability being Amazon, and even its juice will eventually evaporate, gone to Space, we worry, in Jeff’s rocket ship. All we have left will be madness and horror, alone with ourselves. I wish David Foster Wallace were still around to dramatize the status quo, but Infinite Jest remains a poignant subtext.
3
Of course, says the optimist, it could all turn around. We’ve been through worse. Will it, though? Have we? Is a MAGA-type revival for the West in the cards? The anagram would be clunkier, but… Nostalgia is a contradiction of the Real. The absence of existence infuses the past with falsity, and the future with the burden of becoming some version of the past that never was. On the other hand, a cliche of messianic modernity is the contention that one moment and one person can change the whole of creation. We believed this loopy notion, even though it lacked any certainty of knowing. Today, the remnants of the modern are just a god-awful mess. In the post-contemporary, though, it is hard to be sure whether a witness or a shiny new invention is more necessary, for the wind to shift its direction, for the day to be saved. Change, we presume, is but a click away. The question of morality is something else entirely again, the foe of necessity, of immediacy. The moral taps our shoulder, as we peer at the screen. The fabric of the Fate of the West is spun, Its demise just another bottoming out in the down-scrolling of billions of feeds.
“Verbosity is only Anathema by another name, in the End.”
EotW is opposed to the art of short-term gratification, a la Jeff Koons, and so much of the contemporary’s dumb and shiny, exploitative anti-aesthetic. The bedevilment of being overwhelmed is the post-contemporary malaise, not entropy, not ennui, and certainly not wanton consumption and excess. The West is dying a “death of despair”. Meanwhile, the “greed is good” (a la Gordon Gecko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street) motto, absorbed into the fumy smoke and carnival mirrors of the Market, is simultaneously strangling the West one closing bell at a time. Glibly re-branded as Animal Spirits, the West’s Death Drive is embodied in the hedging and next-gen private equity classes, awash in anti-collective libertarian elitism, a cohort which in its leisure moments embraces the glossy experiential life beyond the grasp of Instagram and its flashiest influencers. The crooks own City, and we don’t have a Super Hero outside the cineplex, no Batman, certainly no Bruce Wayne. The ludicrous fiction of the public-minded American super-rich is stuffed into a box in the Cayman Islands, shoehorned into the bland generic title of a dirty shell company. There is no longer a need to cover up the smell of corruption. The blatant theft of “anything not bolted down” - and that, too, at the End - by the predatory percents and their enablers is the existential stench that engulfs the West, even as we realize the stink is atmospheric, global. The odor of Davos is the worst. This isn’t “in our minds”, just another populist trope or conspiracy theory. It is a mindless cataclysm paid in plastic, a trickle-up reality, astutely scrubbed from network programming or the mass media, where the Mind goes to be terribly wasted (remember that sad PSA?). Anyway: The financial elite dismisses the mind of Man as uninteresting, validated by the shockingly bland, sad and creepy inner world Google made knowable, and then put up for sale. Financial pros only care about the returns on Alphabet (GOOGL) and the rest of the FAANG stock block.
The subject of the Mind has for ages aroused Man’s curiosity, as far we know, because self-reflection reveals its (the Mind’s) unique oddity. Fast-forward to Now: In the diversification of mind, inhabiting “real” and “virtual” space-time, we stare into a screen that facilitates the co-existence of ourselves as Other, an Other we can tweak to our fantastical preferences. Sorry Jaron, we have become via avatar and profile our own symbiot, our own gadget, a mind-widget with virtual physicality. Still us, a mind extension of our conception of Self, and both Baudrillard and McCluhan are proved right and wrong by technology of Mind, because the medium is simulacrum. That Mind-product - we don’t have a common name for it yet - is the prime resource the neo-Conquistadore hunts like the Spaniard iteration hunted the gold of El Dorado. Picture Klaus Kinski in Wim Wenders masterpiece Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Coming for you through your METAverse goggles. Only to those who would mine the Mind for its promise of yet-unimaginable and unmanageable abundance, redolent in our fantasy-manifesting pixilated, pixelated Selves, is the Speculator’s woozy and unfathomable dream of cornering the NEW market on our til-now Secret Othering Mind, and converting it into Bitcoin or like cyber-currency and stuffing them into swappable bundles of derivatives. Right, Marc Andreessen? Mine our brain functions the way the great mountain in Peru, Cerro Rico has been mined, by the Spaniards in 1545 through the present day, by a consortium of international corporations. Is Potosi the West? Is the Mind the new Potosi? If the project requires the sacrifice of tens of millions of human lives to acquire future plunder, and the erecting of a memorial and monument to the pestilence of colonialism nearly as tall as the original, so be it. At the End of the West, anything goes. New colonialism, same as the old one. Plus an upgrade! Check out the new improved “Skin”… We do have a brand new meaning for Precious (golem, golem). A hint: Its base element is not bright, pretty metal, but it is carbon-based. Give up? Let’s call it Human Capital. And your are IT! Call your broker to invest — in YOU! What an elevator pitch to an “Angel” for a Start-Up! Too bad, that elevator’s going down, down, down!
∞
We can’t rely on antiquity to get out of the jam this time. No Deus ex machina will be forthcoming. The Classical is a whisper just out of hearing in the post-contemporary period. Once all of worldly value has been transitioned to the Blockchain, or whatever mechanism ensures total deprivation for all but a Darwinian international elite, they (the elite) will most assuredly read Plato with wonder, or listen to the audio file, while their trusted minions devote the remainder of their AR-assisted, 3D-printed eternity counting Doubloons in their ultra-posh and cozy bunkers beneath the planet’s crust, where it is yet warm, LoL. Or something like that. Cast into a mean projection that never in a thousand millennia will come to pass, IRL. The End of the West is tossed in gumbo dish of endings, with the end of the world, of culture, etc., along with a multitude of compounding, grim predictions that refuse to manifest, as if of their own commingling, accordant discord. As if rampant speculation were a rude gesture signifying the rejection of sentience, the possession of one’s faculties has turned out to be a social liability. Checking you out, Joe Rogan, you self-proclaimed moron. And in this milieu art will become so like pollution or trash, you could no longer tell one from the other. We are already there. Witness: Throwing soup at van Gogh sunflowers is an act of protest, radical, an activist direct action. Nothing has to be plausible, and nothing implausible gets made unless it can sell seats in a theater no one attends post-pandemic. Question: Why did Michael Crichton re-animate dinosaurs in his Jurassic Park novel, and Spielberg, in the movie adaptation? Why didn’t they fictionalize the rebirth of Socrates, Aristotle, Schopenhauer, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault, et al., in a fiction titled, Philosopher Park? It’s a rhetorical question, but one Germaine to EotW. The correct answer wins no prizes. Answer: ø.
DRIFT: The New Post-Contemporary Literary [Dedicated to Elon, the self-titled “Twit in Chief”]; or “Why is Twitter Worth $44 Billion to One of the Planet’s Wealthiest Techno-Industrialists?”
[In the manner of a sequence or string of Tweets — PJM]
The Prophet is made redundant by the End. As is the politician, whose job description in our broken Western democracy implies a commitment to progress, as message, not deliverable. Outside the pay-for-play scheme, post-Citizens United. Improvement does not outlast the End. The question “Why?” is insufferable beyond the finish line, the End. The End does not brook a whiner, unless the aggrieved can afford to purchase Twitter, or is buddies with someone who can. Even survivors of great calamity lose their taste for explication, because Reason is not a Time Machine. Direction (imagine a gorgeous, driven orchestra conductor, a la Cate Blanchette in Tár) ceases to be an issue of record, because the Music’s over, and vinyl is outdated, or a fetish. What?! Emoji. Correction loses its cause and causality, unless we are referring to the Penal Industrial Complex. Hehheh. He said “penal”. No fix to figure out, no redemption, just productive churn and slavery repackaged in a sharp fitted fluorescent onesie. Ownership of the End is a moot point, an uncultivated plot, a desert. Truth is unaffected by the End of Things, which is why there forever will be a place for Art, and a reason for Philosophy, as long as “The People” means anything at all. (Popular) Science is deprived of its rigor and aspirational motivations at the end. Because Fauci. Science never distinguished West from East anyway. Science is whorish that way, but also spot on. Poetry, in distinction, makes relatives with culmination, which only waits for the next poet and poem, and will never cease to do so, under any circumstance, in any scenario. Poetry is the Truth of Art, and as speech indistinguishable from Love. Love would not be love without the End. The End is the unforgettable lover of Love. They are infinitely intertwined in the Creative, Its brutal destruction and Its inevitable emancipation. Endless Love is not a myth, but the measure of Myth.
In such Twitterish pronouncements, a vaguely sequential series of Pop Realizations replete with perverse wisdom, solace has no footing. Trans-Everything, stumbling over post-Everything, into a World of Things that could never exist in Real Life. Like a Classically-educated drunk or madman reciting Shakespearean verse automatically, because of a glitch, something mechanical, not organic. Aimlessness is unnatural, but that is precisely the difference between wandering and being lost. The wounded and ill animal will wander til death is close, then collapse or lie down and wait for the Last. Refugees of war and famine trudge on with no objective. Their ideas of Home, and with it their objective surety, have been smashed to bits behind them. The West was and is lost, not ending, because Its edge marks the end of the objective, and therefore, the Object, the Thing, a means by which concurrence can be achieved on the meaning of exploration. Is Home a Thing for us? It is in the post-contemporary, but one more type of commodity, an asset, a target of the Street’s gamblers, another color of chip in the Big Casino. Even after the 2007-8 Crash.
We of the West never had a clear, big picture. History fades, and with it the point of the enterprise. We confuse it with a spaceship, with Shattner, AKA Captain Kirk. The nice old fella Bezos squeezed into his phallic rocket toy for good PR, while his gross divorce finalized. Are you still wondering why heroic NASA is underfunded, getting squeezed, privatized, as they say? No career-minded Hollywood critic would dare cheer for Richard Linklater’s fabulous animation Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Childhood, for fear of offending Jeff, Musk and the Virgin guy. Are being hyperbolic? Sure, we had representation, once. The subject of which was converted into Manifest Destiny, here in America, but that was a long time ago. The paintings of that era have not aged particularly well, and neither was the concept. Too many bones litter the Westward Trails, and the bones of pioneers and natives are difficult to differentiate at a glance. A catalog of atrocities undermines all the claims attached to the intervening territories, both the tangible ones and the imaginary. Any Westbound teleological answer could be simplified, if the questions raised by the obsolete idea of Progress were less complicated. The West was never not a dimensional phenomenon, because Western Civilization has staunchly insisted on its solidity, its core Unity, while simultaneously persisting in expanding its parameters, its borders, its power and inevitability. The American West failed to defect from a European definition of Westernization, and all the ideological baggage that accompanies that odious term. Westernization as a project is no less a failure, not of- and by force, but of Vision, Being and Becoming. Europe imagines the West to be imminent, America intuits its immanence. In 2023 we have Manifest Disney. Are you still following me?
“The End is a melodrama whose Nemesis never makes an appearance.”
The End of the West, begins as a despairing cry, and diminishes into nothingness, devoid of sound and speech. What sound remains is that of the wind blowing over the land, absent Man, unheard, unfelt, breath unfettered by bodily presence. The wind will persist should growing things cease. Why pretend otherwise? This is the physical future, the future of Mind, of Self, of Desire. The origin of wind is still unexplained by Science, which with the aid of technology and engineers, can harness wind, create it mechanically, measure it, theorize it, estimate and almost predict it. Science cannot tell us What Wind Is. It shares turbulence with water. It has its effects, on fire for instance. It is a physical vehicle for the expression of time, and so on. In short, wind has its qualities, can be to an extent quantified, has its names and anthropomorphic assignments. Yet the wind is really an Unknown. Is the West any less indefinable? The End is another matter, one as impalpable as a Thing. The division between End and Beginning is as mysterious as that which separates Thing from Not-thing. Except that the End disembodies Thing-ness. The End is the expression of Nothing, Void as Not-Thing, but in the Mind, a phenomenon, an Event, the event of negation and the final expression of negation. As such, the Mind is incapable of conceiving of the End in the way the Mind can conceive of Truth in the creation of meaning. The End is negation as totality, the opposite of Infinity, wherein all finite things are unified by Time. The End is time’s end, the marking the whole end of things, the finest expression of finitude, in which scarcity achieves its objective, in annihilation. The Game is over. No one is winning in the End.
At the last gasp of existence before the End, comes the realizations of what opportunity was lost, dreams unrealized or abandoned, what if any prospective adjustments could have been made, but were not made for whatever reasons, which might have prevented the End, but did not. If regrettable, the narrative of regret speeds by, the last act of love in honor of love. A gratifying montage of incidents, mingling with foregone conclusions. Although cinematic, this pre-experience of the End is not absurd as a technique, because the End is not a movie. Hollywood reformed the End, into a brand, banal as it is empty. The Happy Ending, which is now a euphemism for a mechanical sexual act performed under the rubric of healing touch, the obscenity of which is grossly misunderstood. The End of the West, unlike many of the B-movie “Wild West” revisions, is joyless in its finality. Neither is EotW therapeutic. The premise is thoroughly serious, the anti-matter of fluffy entertainment. In the End the West consumes itself, without proving Marx right. Capitalism was ever the West’s existential excuse, and the sentiment was reciprocal. As a brand, the West could not sustainably satisfy its market, which is the desire to desire, which is insatiable, never to be fulfilled by Enough of anything. Disneyland propped up the West’s animal spirits for a few decades, until media and Disney merged. Eventually, galaxies long ago and far away could not escape the appetite for fantasy. “The happiest place in space” replaced the initially conventional dreams of perpetual childhood, as the darkness of the universe outmatched the twinkling stars, due to our cognitive-perceptual misapprehension of distance and point of view. In the end, drugs and unconventional sexuality did more to subvert Disney’s myth of a happy Western destination, as anything, with the exception of race awareness perhaps. Q: What does Mickey Mouse on Oxy look like? A. Kaws. So it goes in the post-contemporary West.
4
If there is a conclusion to be made about the proposition, “The End of the West,” I fail to see what that could be, honestly. Plainly stated, the West is so Big, and means so many different things to different people at different times, there seems little point to concerning oneself with Its (the West’s) ending. Which is exactly why the subject makes for an excellent conversation among a diversity of conversationalists. A thought came to mind during the composition of this short essay, a familiar thought: What does the West mean, now that we have learned: A) the Earth is not flat; B) it spins (wobbles) on an axis; C) and moves at tremendous speed in, as far as our telescopes reveal, an all-directional universe. The term “West” has by astronomy been made redundant, and for quite a while. What does that say about us, and the tenacity of our disbelief, or rather, willingness to suspend disbelief, despite contrary facts? Our compasses need an upgrade, as do our geo-politics, but the urge to embrace fraud is overriding our better sense. Only last week Francis Fukuyama published in the Atlantic an accidentally funny article entitled, “More Proof That This Really Is the End of History.” By “accidentally funny,” I mean funny the way a revival tour of a Classic rock’n’roll band is (e.g., The Who, on tour now) funny. This is the .accidental problem with Endings that never actually arrive. They turn the Prophet into a Clown.
The West and History are equally abstract. Artists and Philosophers tend to abstraction, while simultaneously celebrating realism. It is a baffling contradiction. Endings synthesize coupled abstractions, especially when wielded discursively by Thinkers of the highest grade. Sometimes in synthetic theory, which is dimensional, one or the other of coupled abstractions will take a hit, as art did in Plato’s Republic, in that instance due to the persistent conundrum of mimesis, which the great Thinker consigned to the artistic foible of illusionism, slipping into the delusion of demarcating True perception. Again, though, Time can be relied upon to sufficiently diffuse assertions that falsely limit or negate a thing’s synthetic life. There are levels in reality, and the artist envisions then objectifies these levels, in which the portions of the Real and Abstract or Reflective or Distorted or Echoed are blurred and discomfited. The synthetic formulation of mimetic art yields patterns and symmetry which possess a beauty both natural and artificial. The synthetic qualities of patterns, demonstrated in symmetry, connote a Unity, an Infinite, which we find immersive, attractive. The induction of perception in those higher levels of artistic representation can cause in the viewer a dreamy sensation, associated in many cultures, from the prehistoric to the post-contemporary, with the sublime or divine, and the infinite. The Within-which-there-is-no-End. Where Being and Becoming merge in the finite experience of what could be construed as another level in Reality. Historically, the “heightened” sensation of Presence has garnered secular opposition. The scare quotes indicate terminology that is imperfectly associated with the content. Height here, ontologically speaking, is about as relevant as “West,” astronomically speaking. Our language is frustratingly lame when it come to “transcendent” experience, even hackneyed, maybe due to general overuse of what little we are provisioned. Or maybe the shortcoming is in the author’s mirror. For our purposes, does it matter? No one is left to convert anyone in the End.
Abstractions, as Pollock, best among others, proved, can absolutely be Things, even synthetic Things. Others, best among still others, proved with abstract diptychs, that coupled, the abstractions were still one Thing, although each framed component could be considered separately. And eventually, through the work of many others, best among them Donald Judd, Art showed that many components could combine as a single Thing, while maintaining a specific autonomy. Bacon was also a genius in this aspect of his practice. These objective (dimensional) breakthroughs sparked philosophical debate among Thinkers like Danto, Derrida and Adorno, among many others. Heidegger weighed in. The art critics (e.g., Greenberg and Rosenberg, etc., and then the October magazine crowd) carved out territories and rubrics, sometimes even discussing their ideas about art with the artists themselves. Every so often a non-philosopher might point out the Unspeakable-ness of Art. We can conjecture on the order of discovery, but there is no proof that language precedes art in the long arc of human expressive evolution. We can surmise that all written language must by definition be graphic, but speech or vocality is another matter altogether. Sound and Vision are coupled in the Mind today, but there are natural distinctions. The human body on its own accord produces noise, to the levels of intentionality, technical proficiency and virtuosity. The pathway to expression for visuality requires more, and the “more” is external to the human body, even if the medium is blood, piss or shit. Hat’s off to Andy Warhol (RIP) and those IRA hunger strikers. Does the technical distinction (defining or dictating the means of Sound and Vision) mean anything, beyond our limited and limiting conceptions of the practical? To put it succinctly, provocatively and metaphorically: A drug is (not) a drug is (not) a drug - a staple of rehab theory; or, to reframe Thatcher on the subject of the IRA - a terrorist is (not) a terrorist is (not) a terrorist. And this is not a pipe. By ignoring the synthetic processing of a Thing, one cannot negate its antithesis via a simple linguistic construct denying a Thing its proven capacity for complexity and scale, beyond the recursive power of definition. Art is (not) art is (not) art… Especially because the arts as we define them in the post-contemporary exhibit a Germanic additive underpinning. The Multi-ness of contemporary art has morphed into a Trans-ness, reflecting a specific facet of cultural association. These abstractions today are constructive, not creative. The structural, the formal limits of art are expressing a definite dissolution, the intentional dissolving of borders or limits, a function of global awareness combining with Virtuality. A by-product of this movement is the abandonment of the Object, its objectives, and the swapping of the Thing for the Subject, and its subjectivity. The lossy effect is centered in compounded disappearance or a dislocation of expression, from its origins. Provenance/Blockchain will not fix this banana-shaped bug.
The 20th Century saw the emergence of “art scenes”, an “art world” and the commercialization of both, which simulates discursive synthesis. Between then and the post-contemporary Now, Web 2.0 synthesized everything, leaving art and philosophy behind. The markets are the hyper-synthetic medium within which Everything, including Web 2.0 and its ostensible upgrade, Web 3.0, must exist to exist. EotW is a refutation of this doubled and re-doubling status quo. Our premise is “Everything-ness, Everybody-ness, Everywhere-ness Must Stop [in the End of the West].” EotW, to put it bluntly, is a folly, but no more a folly than the Virtual Rush of the early 21st Century, a folly minus folly-ness. To get the joke, one must revisit and drill through the Hollywood version of finality, the Happy Ending. For us, an End is a performance, an act, a secular version of ritual attending the passage from one Reality or phase of it and the entering of the Next. At its roots it is spectacular, and deeply human. Legend contains the stories of fantastic funerals. Rulers and rich men of all descriptions throughout history and beyond it have pumped incredible resources into erecting memorials to their mortality, sometimes in dubious relation to the lives these powerful people in fact lived. The employment of and output by artists and artisans to beautify and attach visible profundity to these projects is the stuff of many an art history course. Perhaps in the phenomenon we can identify one point of conflation of fine art and craft, as they both were applicable in service to the material consecration of Power in objects, architecture, and all that can be uncovered in the tomb of the potentate. But this bias in class ignores the many archaeological discoveries of humble burials, or collective projects for ritualizing mortality, which do not show evidence of Empire nor any aggrandisement of Civilization, in the person of an Emperor in the conduct of a civilized (wealthy) demise. In the post-contemporary we have the means to situate all these disparate instances, styles and approaches in a spectrum, for the purposes of research or analysis. However, it is a fallacy that such subjective analytic “exploration” is an equivalence or replacement for Art in its secular station. Art survives Death and that is one of its key measures. The temptation is to exclusively link art to the vernacular of death, within the context of power or its lack. This truly is illusion and superimposition. Think Hirst’s weird diamond-encrusted skull, and beast cadavers, etc. The sustenance of power’s narratives is the objective of the powerful, and artistic freedom is always liberated from that project, although the boot on the artist’s neck periodically attests otherwise.
“Art is unafraid at the End.”
We find ourselves in just such an historical moment, with the thugs among us ascending. Relax. Art will outlive “The West” and its definitions of art, and lack thereof. It helps that artists are superficially indistinguishable from their non-artist fellows and fellow citizens, with some obvious exceptions. Our categorization as “non-essential” during the pandemic may or may not be only a revelation of our real status or lack thereof. The romanticization of art, its valorization as change-agent, its association with genius and heroism, correlation with madness and passion, may undergo reassessment within the social hierarchies that determine occupational value or risk under new management. Hopefully, we won’t be lynched or encamped and butchered. Which is more historically common than we would rather like or remember. Happening today this minute, as a matter of fact. As the West drifts through its nadir, artists will seek to adapt to the emergent relational topologies and find a course by which art is realized. Art is sure of itself, as consistent as Death and taxes. What is not clear is for whom the post-contemporary art will be made, and why. An issue for clarification revolves around the subtle demarcations between witness and observer, which have traditionally eased the task of viewer. The blurring of the viewer’s role in art due to virtuality will have to be delineated, which requires the distinguishing of creativity in its generality, and art in its specificity. Today, viewing, like all else, can be legitimized as its own art form, if only fallaciously. To view is the first order by which art is comprehended, a precursor to any interpretation. Technological trends have necessitated a compression of action and interaction, resulting in the confusion of their separate but linked dynamic. A post-contemporary viewer may wish to be the maker of the Thing which moves one. From this possessive wish, a rejiggering of envy compounded by any number of complicating urges, the art-thing is diluted within the non-medium of immateriality. The condition is mysterious to most actual artists, who have discovered through hard lessons the unromantic side of art life.
The same holds mostly true for the West, and also for endings, which rarely contain unqualified happiness. The West and its End do not evoke visions of heavenly bliss, nor could one reasonably expect them to do so. Cormac McCarthy is America’s most eloquent writer on this topic. Voltaire is a European correlate, although the case could be made for David Jones or Wilfred Owens. It is in the trenches where hope dies and is buried under the squalid layers of mud and offal. At some point maybe Western Man will confront the making of the world into a charnel house, where Conrad’s “Horror” is the final enunciation. For now the West is but a vestige of Its former Self, and Its (the West’s) End a performance of willful forgetting and wishful thinking, by and for artificial persons. “The End of the West” sounds more like an advertising campaign than anything meaningfully historical. The hook in an imaginary EotW ad could be: “FIRE SALE… EVERYTHING MUST GO!” If the spot needed a Shakespearean twist, we might suggest Richard III, crying out, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!” …Jim Morrison and the Doors providing the soundtrack. “The West is the Best. The West is the Best. Get here, we’ll do the rest.” A giant KAWS Dead-Mickey dummy re-enacting the final scene in Jordan Peele’s brilliant NOPE (standing in for the big goofy inflatable cowboy). …In closing, shall we agree that nothing envisioned by Dali - or DALL-E, for what it’s worth - can surpass the unbridled strangeness of America’s imaginary West? Or that the Western Mind eventually ultimately devised and realized both Auschwitz and the Atomic Bomb as projects, in the span of a few years? If those events did not demand an End to everything Western, what will? The answer to that question may yet reveal itself to us, speaking for any who intend to survive whatever nightmares arise from Man’s hubris and hatred, for the love of Art and vice versa. Til then, all is quiet on the Western Front, again.
