“Too much death,” he says. And so there is. Too much of endings, of collapsing supports, of anguish and crying. Open lament, in the world, and deep sorrows hidden away in our bedrooms. Our pillows are soaked with tears. In faraway hospitals they mop up blood, and spread disinfectant on piles of bodies which are made too fast to be buried. Feelings of bereavement are generalized.
As well as the most violent public massacre we have seen in the West in many a lifetime, there is all over the world now the smell of impendinig disaster. Will it be war or revolution? The most powerful government in the world is being devoured by fat happy worms, nihilists in charge. And the very structures that exist to sustain it are at this moment powerless to protect it.
The nightmare is like the customers held hostage in a diner by a maniac with a grenade. “You try something, I pull the pin and we all die.”
“Resist to exist”
The strategies of resistance which marginalized people have used in democracies for all my lifetime don’t work if the democracies themselves are failing. When the people are gone from the streets and only wolves remain, carnivals are not possible.
You can caper and rant and sing as much as you like, but they don’t want to watch. They don’t want only a bone. They want to rip your flesh, cause you pain, and watch you die in prison or, why not?, right here in front of your house.
That’s what we’re feeling like. “We” meaning me. Speaking to you. As if you could do anything about it. As if you could come back inside the house, lock the door, close the windows, and make breakfast.
More Sleepless Nights
What you, me, we, can do is “art” about it. It’s what we’ve been up to all these many years, 45 in all, since the founding of ABC No Rio. There has never been, will never be a better moment to do that than now.
In what feels like the twilight of liberal democracy in the USA, in a city where the light shone most brightly, down the corridors of the long streets of Midtown, as the sun’s final fading bit of warmth falls upon us… We shall face the past, and shape it like an arrow to go forward.
Easy to say. But when the #ABCNoRio45Years project of representing and reconstructing creative positivity is riven with abstentions and conflicts, when begging folks from afar isn’t working, and things for too many people only seem to get worse –
”You've got to ac-cent-tchu-ate the positive
E-lim-i-nate the negative
Latch on to the affirmative
Don't mess with Mr. In-Between
You've got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith, or pandemonium
Liable to walk upon the scene”
-- lyrics by Johnny Mercer, 1945, when the USA was killing fascists, not electing them
Exiting the Quandary
For the #ABCNoRio45Years project, it’s a more direct question. How can we… face up to the past and make it medicine for the future?
What seemed to bother many ABC people within ABC today was the totality of the concept – the timeline, all the years crowding together in one room, putting one event against another unrelated, each artwork in competition with the another on the wall nearby. So, well, it’s 45 years, how else you gonna do it?
The key to that problem (IMHO) is to be aware of the arbitrary nature of event time as it is expressed in western institutions, and how that works against subaltern culture.
It’s hard for me to forget the timeline of Rammellzee’s career at a 2018 exhibition with its year-long holes, which in the context became aporias. Was he drugged out during those years?, or what? No, Ramm was just out of the running in the market during the years when “graffiti art” was no longer fashionable and the market for it tanked. The art institution recapitulates the art market, just as (Whig) history recapitulates (mainstream) journalism.
Decolonize Me, Before I Kill Again
At this point in our thinking, we sure could use a little dose of Decolonize Colonic – which I take from this rich text by a young artist and scholar, Youssoupha Féhé Sarr. He contrasts the immobilization and freezing imperatives of western institutional archives, museums and schools as against a conception of time within orality which “is inscribed in its movement… and thereby fulfils its circularity and inclusiveness.”
Meeting in Dakar. photo by Anna Karima Wane
It’s death we fear, and death we try to deal with by remembering, monumentalizing, archiving, institutionalizing. In the west. In the “former west”. And death has been happening to our crew since we have set out on this travel.
We and all our works are seeds, and we will pass, but we will also be coming back and in many forms.
This archival display project, this #ABC45Years is as it must be, a way forward. A way, in Sarr’s words, to be “cunning” with our “archival apparatuses”, to endow them with “a flexibility and fluidity that allows one to remain in motion. One does not fight against oblivion…. But above all, it is accepted; for it is indeed oblivion itself that makes it possible to have, individually and collectively, sufficient space to welcome irreversible renewal.”
Adelante juntos, semillas inolvidables.
LINKS
"too much death
Colin Moynihan, "Steven Englander, Leader of an Outsider Art Outpost, Dies at 63", Dec. 23, 2024
As director of the fiercely independent cultural center ABC No Rio, he led the battle to halt its eviction and later raised money to build a new home for the organization.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/23/nyregion/steven-englander-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.qk4.wzmd.0AkDXK9ARUZq&smid=url-share
Deborah Solomon, "Walter Robinson, Exuberant Art-World Participant and Observer, Dies at 74", Feb. 14, 2025
A painter who took his subjects from pop culture, he was also the founding editor of Artnet.com and chronicled the rise of the SoHo art scene in the 1970s. [And a member of Colab, who showed and played often at ABC No Rio.]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/14/arts/walter-robinson-dead.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xU4.ooMC.qMu9TAc97Ds0&smid=url-share
Resist to Exist 2023! Germany Biggest DIY Festival in Punk, Ska, Hardcore, Rap
“Positivity”
Catholics "not like Vance” – next to go, at 88 y.o., a text on Pope Francis
“Building Universal Fraternity: A Utopian Chimera”
https://fsspx.news/en/news/building-universal-fraternity-utopian-chimera-47996
“Positivity 2” – Technical, Oh-So-Learned Career Positivity
(You can still do this in the EU, at least until the grant runs out)
Antje Daniel & Dieter Neubert, “Development as Utopia? Road to a Better Future Between Fiction and Lived Utopian Practice”
Pages 189-209 | Published online: 19 Feb 2024
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2024.2314279#abstract
LM Petersen, “Redistributive Solidarity? Exploring the Utopian Potential of …” yadda yadda
Sage Journals https://journals.sagepub.com › abs
de · 2023 · Citado por 3 — “We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution may be a means of furthering the recognition…” Sure.
“Positivity 3” – Living in the Clouds (not the Metaverse)
Charming Utopian AI "slop" at
https://bsahely.com/2024/12/21/the-garden-of-becoming-cultivating-a-life-centric-future-of-unity-flourishing-and-transformation-chatgpt-o1/
And some more of this beeswax
TOWARDS LIFE-KNOWLEDGE
"Knowledge always win in the end, but not unless and until it is known." – Professor John McMurtry https://bsahely.com/2024/12/21/the-garden-of-becoming-cultivating-a-life-centric-future-of-unity-flourishing-and-transformation-chatgpt-o1/
which is not to say that it is, at its root, undeniably true, correct and devoutly-to-be-wished-for. But the recent coining of the word “scholasticide” shows the outlook is not promising.
The Work of Rammellzee
On the occasion of a career-spanning exhibition at Red Bull Arts New York....
https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/05/jeff-mao-on-rammellzee
FORMER WEST (2008–2016)
This online platform makes publicly accessible the FORMER WEST research trajectory (2008–2016) archive, including an extensive video-archive of lectures, interviews, research gatherings, seminars, and exhibitions. https://formerwest.org/Front
search term = “facing the past fear of archives”
hits
Youssoupha Féhé Sarr (translated from the French Senegal by Adeena Mey), “The Archive and Time. Leaving the Fear of Oblivion”
https://www.afterall.org/articles/the-archive-and-time-leaving-the-fear-of-oblivion/
/////////////////////
