question of the day: what's my job?

and, finally coming out of strange european funk, mixed with nostalgia for native canada, and realizing have turned into lazy artist bastard, as unexpectedly as that may seem! what is the work of an artist exactly? for those of you not in the know, contemporary artists belong to a select group of people who have no exact project nor proposition, but who make a living (or try to) constructing things that nobody really knows anything about...whether it be performance, sculpture, literal, or fourth degeree, abstract, conceptual, land, photography, installation, dispositive, a maze, an apple, a pile of socks, a projection of someone talking with their eyes closed or god knows what else...people do these things, then other people talk about them, and somehow, money is exchanged...but that's rare enough. In the middle ages, they at least had the decency to execute people who pretended to be witches, "Hi, wanna watch me change lead into gold?....Eat flames flunkie!!!"

contemporary art is for losers...so call me by my first name.

at the same, being the one guilty in first degree, I would like to take this time to implicate others...people who scare me a hell of a lot more are people who are willing, in their less then fortieth year, to stand by and make the same kind of drivel that we now know to be a kind of advertising...I speak about a certain kind of photography, by virtue of employing an aesthetic that is already established (cold distant long lens, clean view, good exposure, good composition), that in fact has a content or a message that verges on someone telling me the time of day and that we see regularly being used to sell to young richies to put besides their one-step over Ikea furniture...I speak about a school of cinema that proposes to make this same kind of image, but in film, and sell the importance of culture as being the only acceptable voice of truth in our depressing artless society, long cuts, actors who anti-act, meaningful metaphors jumbled in with oh so tangible ennui...I also speak about tricky installations, where a gadget, a device, is employed, oh, you wave your hand in this space and the movement of your arm triggers a sound, your body is a breathing instrument...something that references the history of contemporary art, well, shoot me shooting me in my video of myself as a 50s icon why don't you...wow, I could go on and on...and you all wonder why I stopped buying Artforum, Art in America, Artpress...blah blah blah...I don't need to be indoctrinated into the history and culture of contemporary art anymore...if that's what I need to do to be an artist SCREW THAT!

What is the job of an artist? I have no idea...except that it exists. Somewhere, my job is to make my job, or at least to figure out what I think I can do, and try to find some sucker to pay me for it. People, like my old self, used to joke and say, well, at least we're the only free people in society because we get to do exactly what we want to do, and people will pay us for it. But, HELLO, might as well be incarnated as a lap cat.

for those not self-motivated, or passionate enough, being a contemporary artist is a pure excuse for wasting time while figuring out what to do with one's life exactly. Have had hair-brained schemes of floating madonnas, melting ice madonnas, battlestar magneticron, an image of reflection that reflects endlessly and finally mom and dad potato clocks. What that fuck is that whole mess about already? i built a telephone that's permanently broken (figuratively...literally), I wrote a screenplay about dysfunctional brothers head-fucking pigs up the bum...shit...crap...

(caveat: I like what I do...surprisingly enough...hey, laugh it up funboy, I get to play with my sangliers.)

Ok, my role as an artist was largely a vehicule to promote my own sense of importance, my 'unique' voice. But, funnily enough, everybody out there seems to have the same idea. That contemporary art is rife full of egotistical infighting, mud-slinging, and slander, among the generally mediocre self-promoters, is a fact that never ceases to depress me. the idea that people make things that they believe are original, that originality is a virtue needless to say a birthright only the stupid and blockheaded have lost, that somehow everybody has something important to say, but that nobody says anything, that the world is sentimental and people still cry when watching Titanic (wheeee!!! I'm the king of the world!!!)...what the world needs now is more artists who have the courage to laugh screamingly and pointedly at the ludicrous tragic predicament we call life, doomed as it may be. Whoever these dorks are, I'd like a rollcall someday...

I mean, if we've stopped being animals a long time ago, why is it that the fundamentals of our society is based on the animalistic law of competititon? What's the point of pretending things are getting better, or that people are supposed to be better. The result of this idiotic premise is that our athletes take more and more drugs to break records, our corporations get larger and larger, and people ressemble more and more ken and barbie, every day. As much as I always hated the crude romanticism of D.H. Lawrence, I always held on to the idea that if people were to work with purpose and dignity, with a sense that they were not building a shelter away from the world, but finding a way to include the world in every aspect of their life, (and I'm not talking about consumer choice as a way of battling corporate culture [Naomi Klein is GROSS]) blah blah blah blah...would be able to have straight not crooked necks, and not look and feel like Jabba the Hut when old....is that what we're looking for?

I don't have any answers really...

~ring
What's my job?