The Blindboy Podcast - Forgotten Pottage

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Art podcast. A 20th century history of Avant Garde Participatory art as a device of social change Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. You wet, upset, cardboard box full of terriers. Strewn on the side of the motorway. Adjacent to Texaco Station. Waiting for a good Samaritan to rescue you. I don't even know what I just said there because I'm messing around with the levels on this thing here, two seconds

okay, can you hear me? God bless God bless, God bless alright how are you getting on? hope you've been having a charming week a relaxing week, hope you haven't been putting too much pressure on yourself there's no need for

pressure, it's for pricks em I've been keeping very busy just a little update I mentioned last week that I'm currently in preparation for getting a live streaming situation together

we are getting closer to that goal, some equipment arrived last week, I had a couple of breakthroughs with the camera that I'm using, it's looking good, it's looking good, and I've been practising, I've been practising all week, particularly with, just to fill you in if you weren't listening last week, so what I'm planning on doing is a video live stream on a website called Twitch, which means I'll probably do it once or twice a week in my studio, and I got my camera sorted, I got some other equipment sorted,

and what I intend on doing, I'm going to be playing some video games, I will be doing some painting, hopefully. I'm trying to figure out how the fuck to get art supplies during this gorgeous quarantine. And what I think I'm most excited about at the moment is I want to write songs live.

I want to write, record and produce music live. Which... I'll tell you why that's exciting for me it's exciting because it's something within art that wasn't really possible before because the technology didn't exist all right so songwriting music production that type of creativity that's been around for a long time but the idea that you can do it live with a lot of people watching not only watching but having the ability to comment as it's happening or possibly even give input or suggestions why that excites me is because that's participatory art

right that's known as participatory socially engaged art and which has roots going back years and years to the fucking futurism to dadaism you know to the the russian revolution this democratization of art to take art away from the concept of just creating an object creating an object right that is the piece of art and then the audience just simply watches it and consumes it the goal of participatory art is to blur that line between how the fuck do i explain this with a piece of art with a song right an artist creates a song it's done and then the audience listens to it or an artist writes a play and the audience turns up and watches the play. Or an artist paints a painting and the audience comes to the gallery

and sees the painting, right? The goal of participatory art, which, like I said, they've been trying to do it for 100 years, has been to blur the line, to how can you include the audience in the creation of the artwork so that artist and audience and the entire creative process gets completely now blurred and shifted and the idea that i can live stream making a song

with input and participation that's really exciting to me because it's fucking new it's new as fuck so i'm looking forward to doing it i've been practicing it all week like there are i'm not the first person to fucking do it there are people on twitch who make songs live but in general what i see when i see certain performers doing it there's one fella called mark rebbele who's amazing when i see performers doing music live on live streams it's much more of it's performance based it's it's not full creative process what what i intend on doing is literally inviting you into the studio and being part of the production process so not just writing the song but like what synthesizers am i choosing how am i mixing the sounds and hopefully then as well an exchange of information whereby

if someone's watching it and they want to learn how do you make songs how do you learn to produce how do you learn to mix how do you learn to record that part of my creative process and the goal of making a song in 60 minutes is also sharing the creative process and being able to share with ye something i'm deeply passionate about and then the possibility of the viewer then learning uh from my experience so i'm it's just mad fucking it's mad exciting to think that i'm going to be able to do that so fingers crossed technology would allow me um So what I've been doing in preparation is. Like I said what I want to do is. I want to live stream.

And I want to. When I start the video stream. I want to say. We're giving ourselves 60 minutes. And within this 60 minutes. At the end of it. I'm going to fucking write write record and produce a song in 60 fucking minutes so I had to say to myself is that a realistic goal is it possible to write

a song in 60 minutes so all week I've been doing it every day this week I took a 60 minute chunk and I wrote a fucking song at the end of the 60 minutes I had a fucking song not necessarily good songs but that's not the goal it's making a 60 minute song is like um it's sketchbook it's sketchbook I'm not necessarily looking for something brilliant what I'm looking for is anything I'm looking for something it's confronting the fear of failure and just simply creating a piece of music and the critic in me that that is worried about whether something is good or bad truly silencing that voice in myself and just like I always say, like I'm a child playing with

Lego, except it sounds so I'm going to play you one of the songs I wrote during the week and I did this in 60 minutes flat I didn't, it's a song about Brussels sprouts I didn't sit down and go

I'm going to write about brussels sprouts i simply found some cards that i liked found a bass line that i liked and then allowed whatever words come out of my mouth that fit the melody that's what went down i didn't question them i didn't ask were they good or they bad i just fucking went with it and that's that's the goal that i'm going for so it's a silly stupid song about brussels sprouts afterwards i was reflecting why the fuck did i write a song about brussels sprouts and i kind of wrote it off going i don't know but then i realized earlier that day i hadn't eaten brussels. But what had happened.

Is I had rejected Brussels sprouts. Which I found very interesting. So I was deciding. What am I going to have for dinner. So I opened my freezer. And staring at me were a bag of Brussels sprouts. And I thought about having some Brussels sprouts at my dinner. And then I said no fuck ye.

You're too Christmassy. And it's sunny outside and I was kind of harsh on the brussel sprouts in my head or something and because I rejected him and said not today buddy it's it's April and it's sunny outside and ye remind me of Christmas so fuck you Brussels sprouts because I'd done that they creeped back into my head when I was writing that song probably as some type of guilt because I was mean to Brussels sprouts I know that's ridiculous I'm aware that that's ridiculous I'm not saying the Brussels sprouts could fucking hear me rejecting them but it obviously had some type of emotional impact on me to the point that it

arrived into my head so in the moment i unconsciously wrote a song which praised and possibly sexualized brussels sprouts and that's the beauty of the creative process afterwards you have to go what the fuck was that about so i'll play it for you now the song is called round green buys and you know what i'm fucking happy with it um i'm happy with it if i'd have done this on a live stream i think i'd be happy there's elements of it that's the whole point of this thing when you're writing a demo like this you're not looking for a finished piece you're trying trying to see. What bits work. And what bits don't. And what bits can I take. And then start again with something new.

So here we go. Round green buys. I'm sorry to tell you. but your father's on Mars. Your mother's in prison for robbing my car. Your dog is on fire and they're not putting him out. So call to my house and we'll eat Brussels sprouts. Because they're round green pies, round green pies. They're such round green pies, round green pies. because the Your father's a mouse Your mother's in prison For robbing my car

Your dog is on fire And they're not putting him out So cut him a house And wheelie process boats Because they're round green boys Round green boys Oh, they're such round green boys Round green boys

Oh, they're such round green boys Round green boys, oh they're such brown green guys, brown green guys, oh they're such brown green guys, brown green guys. So there you go. So I was very happy with that. That was was my practice can i do a song in 60 minutes and i was very happy with that one because it it uh it passed what's called the old gray whistle test in that for the rest of my day that chorus of fucking round green boys was stuck in my head i was whistling it so i was like success i found the melody and i know it's ridiculous i know it's silly no one wants to listen to a song about fucking brussels sprouts but like i said it's a sketchbook it's a demo you know what would you do with that um fucking change it instead of

round green boys change it to brown green eyes and change the lyrics in the verse about fancying someone and then have it sung by a person with a conventionally

aesthetic voice and there you go you have a whack of the pop song so I'm really looking forward to being able to do that shit live on my stream when that's up and running very soon

so there you go so this week's podcast what is it about I think it's a bit of a hot take I think it's a hot take podcast it's in the bit of a hot take. I think it's a hot take podcast. It's in the territory of where hot takes exist. It's a hot take style musing.

Which I'd like you to join me on. What I want to begin talking about is. That thing I touched on earlier. When I was saying that. The reason the idea of creating a piece of music live with the people watching actually being involved, the reason why I find that so exciting is, as I mentioned, it's participatory art. It's art whereby there's participation from everybody in creating it it's not just one person and i want to talk about the history within art history of why that idea has always been considered really really radical in art okay but it's one of those ones that it's just it's a tough one to explain it's a difficult one to explain because in general as a society our perception of art and what art is and what art does is is really fucking flawed it's really flawed, the past week I really saw it because,

the Irish government, like during this corona crisis, the Irish government rolled out a plan to stimulate and look after the arts in Ireland, and I won't go into it in too much detail, but it's like they didn't consult with any fucking artists they didn't they don't seem to have any idea of what what the arts is that it's it's not just writers and painters and directors whatever it's the people who work within the arts to make it happen like just for a gig for example there's people who work sound people who work lights, there's people who work in theatre, it's not just about artists

and the Irish government put out this pretty shit plan to support artists who have all lost their fucking jobs like anyone who works in entertainment has an incredibly uncertain future now because mass gatherings are gone so, but when any artists complained about this

in the media the vitriol from the general public was horrendous people were just going why should we give a fuck about art why should we care about artists this view that art isn't a proper vocation or that art isn't important and people being completely unaware, they think that art is just some person off doing a painting or some person off writing a play and have no awareness whatsoever about how art and creativity affects and impacts all of our lives, you know, no awareness that, you know, going on to the fucking irish times going look at these fucking artists these stupid artists out complaining that the government isn't looking after them and then going off and looking at six hours of netflix

while they're in quarantine being unaware that every single person who made the netflix program that you're consuming is working in the arts in some description or they went to the fucking they listened to a radio or they read the read a book people seem to be the general public seems to be completely unaware of what art and creativity is and how much of it we actually consume in our day and how hugely important it is for our collective mental health and not just mental health but our sense of meaning and purpose and how we relax how we enjoy ourselves there's you go to work and then when you're finished work you're either consuming sport or art or just socializing but art is huge and art's important and and that's just art as entertainment art as entertainment is just one possible function of what art can do art doesn't have to be entertaining

some art can make you really angry some art is looking for a reaction some art is ugly some art is designed to enrage to challenge you and that's the purpose of it art is not just entertainment but it's a way to challenge power it's a way to challenge politics it's a way to have discussions that transcends simple debate and words it's a way to to ask questions about society and about ourselves not just using words but using like fucking music, like music is vibration, symmetrical vibrations of air that make us feel emotions

painting fucking visuals art is it's a way to have conversations that are far more complex than just words can do and real radical art and radical artists

have always been concerned about how can this art be used to somehow better and improve society and challenge power so this week I'm going to do an arty farty podcast and I'm going to do an arty farty podcast and I'm going to give myself the task of yeah trying to address

trying to democratise trying to put into simple language a really a really fucking complex thing about art which I think it's participatory art also known as socially engaged art i've definitely mentioned it on previous podcasts this is what i did my master's degree in i did my master's degree in participatory art what i did is I I did it on internet memes I I it was about 2015 and a huge part of my thesis was looking at internet memes and framing them as participatory art as an act of create a creativity

which had no had no authorship like when you see an internet meme, you don't know who made it. You don't sign off on an internet meme and it's like, here's the artist who made this internet meme. But yet they exist as these creative artifacts. An internet meme is creative. People use creativity to create a meme. They're shared everywhere.

We add to them at all times. Anyone can add to them. And internet memes are, in my opinion, true participatory art. Participatory means it's not just about one author. It's not just one artist creates this piece of art for an audience participatory art is whereby the artist is taken out of the equation and there's now a complete blurring of boundaries between audience and artist and the audience and the artist are one and everyone participates together as a community to create a piece of art.

And that's what internet memes are, in my opinion. That's what I did my thesis on for my master's degree. So I want to talk about participatory art and its roots in the historical avant-garde of artists of the 20th century and why it is considered radical and why it's important and it's going to be a tough one to talk

about because even though I did my fucking masters on this shit it's just one of those it's difficult, it's difficult to get across but i'm going to try my best so i'm going to mention certain artistic movements that i've definitely covered before in the podcast futurism dadaism maybe surrealism and possibly situationism, okay? The first three are early 20th century art movements. The first one would be Futurism,

which would have started around 1911 or 1912 in Italy. I've done a podcast on Futurism and music. I did a podcast on on futurism in music. I did a podcast on futurism in music. I also did a podcast before on performance art called Jolly Fanta Rye, but that was more late 20th century. But I don't want to focus too much on the movements. What I want to focus on is why they considered participatory art to be so radical, to be the most radical form of art making. you have to try and think of what was society and culture like circa 1910 in Europe

because these are mainly European movements, right? What you have is the end of the Industrial Revolution, right? About 1910, that's the end of the industrial revolution right about 1910 that's the end of the industrial revolution age but it's also it's a real important time for technology you've seen in you know the car became a thing people are able to fucking fly by 1910 but in terms of the structure of society and the place that art had in society, art would have been viewed by the radical artists.

The art world at the time would have been viewed by radical artists as something which was just used to prop up pre-existing systems of power, right, if you think of, like paintings, so paintings as one form of art, paintings were, you didn't have fucking, there was no television, right? There was no fucking internet. There was no colour images, right? People weren't really, the average person wasn't experiencing a lot of visual stimulation when it came to images. So a beautiful painting had about 100 times more power back then as it would now. If you see a painting now it's probably not going to impress you that much because we've got screens on our phones that are bombarding us with

visual information all day but you go back to 1910 a really good fucking painting is gonna have a lot of power and it might be the only breathtaking piece of human creation that you see all year if you're a poor person in Europe in the early 20th century. So paintings were, they were in galleries, they were in churches, they were in the homes of landlords, churches they were in the homes of landlords right and i'm just using painting as one example the church uh traditionally all throughout the fucking renaissance all throughout the industrial revolution the church had an intimate relationship with artists with sculptors and painters right in order for a sculptor and painter in the renaissance and beyond to exist and earn money they required the usually the church to be their patrons the church would provide the artist with

money to earn a living and in return then the artist had to paint paintings or make sculptures which usually glorified religion in some way okay this was done for two reasons the bishop or whatever who wanted to commission the work they wanted themselves to look more holy because they're they're commissioning this wonderful magical piece of art which is a gift from god they would have viewed artists as having a gift from god but most importantly why did the church want gorgeous churches full of fucking sculptures why did they want paintings up and down the pews that represent scenes from the Bible that have, you know, tell you about penance, they tell you about the dangers of sin, they tell you about how to live your life in a chaste, obedient way,

they tell you about the horrible fires of hell. All this visual information that the church is spending a lot of money on these beautiful paintings it does a couple of things number one it creates a sense of awe and power if you're a poor person who goes to the fucking church all throughout the renaissance up until the early 20th century and you're a poor peasant you go to the fucking church you walk in beautiful marble columns gorgeous fucking statues that are sculpted and these huge paintings that represent biblical scenes you're present you're it's it's like going to the cinema times a hundred you now have a sense of awe and you're in awe at the power and the terror and the beauty of these

images the church were using them as a way to maintain power using fear and beauty and emotions and that's why there was that's why that structure existed whereby it's incredibly talented artist existed whereby it's incredibly talented artist makes a painting paid for by the church painting what the church tell them to paint and trying their best to be creative and subverted in any way they can but in general it's it's propaganda it's church propaganda that's what that was the role of art of painting in the church contest context propaganda to maintain obedience of the masses weren't noting as well that uh you know people couldn't read and in catholic churches the masses were being said in latin so people even when the fucking priest is reading the bible the average person sitting down hasn't a fucking clue what he's saying because they don't speak latin but

they can look around the pews and see the just the spectacle spectacle of fucking christ nailed to a cross like what the fuck is that do you know what i mean it's a strong image that just says there's love here if you want it but don't fuck around Christ on a cross is a warning like if you break down the image of Christ on a cross and you take it to it's

like my personal belief of Christ on the cross and what it represents it's in primitive societies like long long ago the local powerful person would cut their enemies fucking heads off and leave them on a stick or on a pole as a warning you see it today with drug cartels if they want to warn the populace cut someone's fucking head off and post the video online isis were doing it too in societies where you don't have fucking democracy instead you have

brutality the spectacle of utter violence is used to maintain power and obedience and that to me is what the crucifix is what the fuck else it? Here's a painting of someone with nails driven through their fucking hands. And blood coming from their head. That right there. The traditional image of Christ in art is a big warning. Don't fuck with us. So that was one way that art was viewed as right the church used it as a way to maintain power let people know who was in power who was in power and not to fuck with him

and that was its role obviously it's fucking beautiful as well but i'm not going into that today i'm going into its role as as a device of power I'm not being binary about it I'm not saying that's the only thing that art did I'm saying it's when you look at it in a in the cold light of why did the church commission so much paintings and sculptures this is what it did for them it made them powerful also by the time of the industrial revolution where you have now not just kings and royalty who have money but you have like factory owners they were also commissioning art if you were a wealthy factory owner or a wealthy landlord essentially a capitalist if you were a capitalist in the 1700s the 1800s a very very wealthy person you had the ability now to commission artists to paint your portrait or to paint a portrait of your house and to then place your fucking art on the walls of

your house or in your factory where the workers are and now you've got these beautiful paintings up on the fucking wall which places the landlord or places the factory owner in a religious light now it's like wow how powerful and important is this landlord or this factory owner that they now have a painting the same way that Christ has when he's in the fucking church so what it also did too is it makes when when a painting is just this beautiful thing on a wall, it works within capitalism as a commodity to be fetishized. And it makes the audience, it's...

What it does is the general public just becomes spectators then. You become a spectator to the art the art is a reminder of know your place your place is behind this line where you are spectating at this beautiful piece of art and this beautiful piece of art represents the church your landlord your factory owner and you are a spectator you are not permitted to participate it is not your place to participate you stay where the fuck you are because you're a worker and you're not entitled to beauty you're not entitled to the the beauty and power and everything that this art represents so it creates spectatorship right and delineated rules of access and it's what also is the situation too is the cultural knowledge of art art became by 1910

if you're to understand art in 1910 it means you then need to have access to education and to have access to education back then you needed to have money so it was a way to separate the classes so not just having access to have art made about you or to be in a gallery where art is going to be there to even have knowledge of art at that time connoted your higher status in society so these radical artists of the early 20th century they their thinking was essentially sparked and rooted in the new ideas of marxism right which i'm going to speak about very cautiously because i'm not very brushed up in it like I said the last time I fucking properly looked at Marxism was my master's in 2015 and the great irony of Marxism is that in 2020 Marxism has become intertwined with hipsterism so this philosophy and concepts

which is supposed to be about democratisation, is actually incredibly heavily gatekept by hipsters. So if I get something wrong about Marxism, I'll have a very upsetting time on Twitter for the next week. So before I move on, I'm going to do the Ocarina pause. We just do it really quickly. Have I got the nice one? I don't. I've got the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

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that was the ocarina pause um this is the first time i get to talk about the patreon whereby speaking about it is actually entirely relevant to the theme of the podcast so like i mentioned there right patrons like a patron a patron is someone who gives an artist money and allows them to create art right but one of the issues I was speaking about there with the historical problem of art is that most of the patrons of the artists from the Renaissance onwards, it was either the church or the incredibly wealthy.

And the problem with that patronage was the artists have to create the art that keeps their patron happy so if your patron is a bishop or a cardinal it's do a bunch of religious shit regardless of how the the artist themselves feels about it they have to find as much creativity as they can and explore what they can but within the confines of religious paintings if it was a wealthy fucking banker or a landlord paint my estate paint a portrait of me the patronage allowed artists to survive and to make a living from being artists but they didn't their creative freedom was limited because they had one fucking patron with an agenda the the patreon right and how this podcast is supported is actually a form of participatory

art because the patronage so like this podcast right is supported by the listener by you okay but instead of it being one patron it's multiple listeners together becoming patrons right it's a participatory type of patronage, which means that we're not beholden to one ideology. If, we'll say now the equivalent of a patron would be an advertiser. So if I didn't have a Patreon and instead I'm struggling to get advertisers all the time, right, and just advertising, then there's certain things i'm not going to talk about i can't talk about the advertiser might come in and go i didn't like it when you did that podcast about the ira and then i'd have to go sorry coca-cola i'll be a good buy but with

patronage and multiple people coming together to be patrons that's no longer a problem so the art of this podcast podcast has been liberated from the confines of spectatorship by becoming a participatory form of art by everybody participating in the patronage of it so that's the first time ever i've done a a request for the patreon patreon patreon whatever the fuck you want to call it that's relevant to the theme of the episode patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast all right you know the score um because of coronavirus i don't have any gigs for the foreseeable future i've incurred quite a lot of debt because i have postponed some gigs so the patreon is my only fucking my only source of income so if you're enjoying the podcast look if you're listening to

it if it's getting you through the quarantine please consider uh paying me that's that's all i'm asking for just pay me for the work that i'm doing um the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month that's all i'm asking for patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and also in the spirit of participatory fucking art if you can't afford it you don't have to someone else someone else's patronage is gonna look after you listening it's it's a model based on soundness and kindness and it's working fantastically and thank you to everyone who is a patron of this podcast so going back to that point there that i said that we'll take it to the futurists we'll say so the futurists were started around 1910 i think and futurism like i said i did i did a

a podcast before and a fellow called luigi risolo who was a sound artist within futurism but futurism incorporated many different types of art futurism is a dodgy one to talk about because the futurists went on to become part of italian fascism so it's it's quite a problematic movement which but unfortunately yes it did go into italian fascism but the roots of futurism they were inspired by marxism and they're quite important to 20th century art so the futurists they it was pure modernism in that they were very forward-looking they embraced technology and they 100 had like faith in in science and technology and speed and all these things.

This is what the Futurists were about. The Futurists is an art movement that's born out of the first generation of people who's seen human beings flying in planes. And what that would have meant for society. Like being a part of the generation who are like fuck we can fly now. Wow like birds. That gave humanity kind of an arrogance and the futurists had that arrogance of humankind being much greater than nature. And rejecting a concept of God and rejecting a concept of nature and embracing factories and speed and all of this

so that was that's the bare bones tenet of what futurism was about but the futurists very much wanted to inject a kind of a class consciousness in all of Italy in particular the the working class who would have been the masses of italy to what the futurists really wanted was war they wanted italy to enter world war one they were very a very war hungry art movement like i said speaking about the futurists is it's problematic because they're not the nicest bunch of fucking lads but you can't leave them out of the story and the futurists would have very much have rejected what they would have seen at the time as traditional art and as i mentioned the sense of spectatorship you go to a gallery you go to a gallery, you go to a church, you go to a play, you go to the opera.

The audience are simply spectators. And spectators are staring at the spectacle. And the art is the spectacle. And that art simply represents power. And when you're a spectator, spectators don't participate and spectators are disempowered so what the futurists futurists want to do with their art was to get people participating like the founder of futurism marinetti was his name he said participation was the end of spectatorship and was a commitment to cause so they viewed audience participation in the creation of art the logic is almost if art in churches and art in

galleries and art commissioned by landlords if these things can be used as powerful spectacles to maintain to keep people in their place then if you remove that barrier of spectatorship and then blur the lines of artist and art you then empower people to go hold on a second we can participate we can do more we can have revolution we can be self-determining in our own lives collectively that was the kind of the thinking behind it which is absolutely inspired by marxism but the goals of the futurists it wasn't necessarily Marxist they didn't want communism like Marinetti

who founded the futurists they had very strong political goals from the outset they wanted to use art to tear down that spectacle to stop people being spectators in art. But use, to get people to feel that they can participate in art, because art was so important at the time, culturally. If people could participate in art, then you could get them to participate in much greater things regarding society.

you could get them to participate in much greater things regarding society and what the futurists wanted was to overthrow the bourgeoisie the rich people who were ruling italy get rid of the fucking church and to have this patriotic nationalistic italy that was heavily industrialized and warlike that was the goal of the futurists and art was the first step in them trying to get it and Mussolini got into power Mussolini was friends with the futurists he was a fascist friend of Hitler's you know so the first foray into their attempts at participatory art that the futurists would have done they held this regular thing called the Sarat or the Sarate, which was a type of theatre. But the thing is, who the Futurists were trying to reach,

and this would be about 1912, who they were trying to reach were the workers, the poorer people, the people who worked in didn't who worked in the factories or worked in the countryside and who didn't have access to education and so theater in Italy around 1913 the bourgeois who would have been the middle class and upper class who had access to education and money when they went to the theater the theater for them it was like there was plot and structure and actors on stage and you dressed up very nice to go to the theater and you shut your mouth and you sat down and you had a

grand evening at the theater the futurists wanted to do the opposite of that because they wanted to appeal to the working masses. So they chose variety theatre. And variety was like, it was more, there wasn't like a plot, there wasn't actors on stage. It's like you'd have a gymnast and then you'd have a bit of comedy and then you'd have someone singing. Or you might have, I think what were then you'd have someone singing or you might have I think what were called freak shows were part of it as well so a variety theatre

it was continual non-stop stimulation of entertaining things but not a long plot that you had to follow for the whole thing so the Futurists took that style of theater and turned it into what they called the surreys but as a way to deliberately get the audience to participate and what i find really interesting about this is like i said the goal of the futurists and their surrey theater yes it was to create art yes it was to get people participating but their ultimate goal was

political they wanted to drive nationalism right and how they did this is the shows themselves became kind of nasty and antagonistic the audience would be sitting down and the performers would be up on stage doing this futurist variety show, but the actors on stage would start attacking each other or heckling each other and then they'd start attacking the audience and they would deliberately try and provoke conflict with the audience, like they even fucking, so the futurists put glue really powerful glue on certain seats in the audience so that if someone in the audience sat down they'd be stuck to the seat and then the people around them would start laughing at them and then fights would would happen the futurists with their theater their theatre, they wanted to almost start riots and fighting

with every single show. Also what they do is that if you went to one of these Futurist shows in the auditorium, they might sell the same seat to 10 people. So 10 people will go down to their seat, and now they're all fighting over who gets to sit down. And you have this angry chaos, and people digging the heads off each other People would go down to their seat. And now they're all fighting over who gets to sit down.

And you have this. Angry chaos. And people digging the heads off each other. And screaming and roaring. In the audience. While the show is going on. On stage. And then the actors on stage.

Taunting the audience who are fighting. And then the futurists would give. They'd give free tickets. Right. To people who were drunk. People who were seen as really eccentric. They would encourage people to fucking pinch women, to fucking punch men in the face. They'd put itching powder on seats so people would start fucking itching and what the Futurists seemed to have wanted to be doing is they wanted to blur the boundaries between audience and performer and create this sense of fucking angry chaos.

In 1913 like because they'd riled up the audience so much and made the audience like think of it in contrast to the bourgeois shows at the time. The middle classes and the upper classes were dressing really well, going to their shows, sitting down, being polite, and as spectators, obediently sitting and watching the art unfold on stage with its lovely plot and its lovely music. And the Futures were trying to create this other theatre that was the exact fucking opposite where instead of simply sitting

and admiring the spectacle of the art you're now in chaos fighting with each other fighting with the performers and everything is blurred and they believe that that empowered people to the point that and this is how you know it kind of fucking worked if you're talking about this society whereby art is this spectacle that you stand back from and you watch with reverence and respect in 1913 at one of these Futurist shows, one of the audience members walked up on stage, right, even the fact that the audience felt comfortable,

this is 1913 now, felt comfortable to walk up on fucking stage, and they took a gun out, and they handed the gun to Marinetti, the leader of the Futurists, and invited him to commit suicide on stage. And when you think of that, when you think of what they'd managed to do there,

that's the radical act they're looking for. The audience feel okay now to walk on fucking stage and ask the performer to shoot themselves. That's a radical tearing down. Of the boundaries of. Spectator and spectacle. Of art and audience. No one knows what's going on now.

It's a theatre of fucking chaos. And also what's interesting is that the futurists. When they did a show. They didn't want the audience clapping they didn't want to put on a good show they wanted the audience to fucking hate them they wanted the audience to spit at them to throw things at them to come up on stage it wasn't about creating beautiful art it wasn't about entertaining people it was about in a culture whereby art is revered as a holy object that depicts gods and the rich where art is this commodity that only the powerful can have you go to a future show and that that's broken down the artists are pieces of shit and it's it it was it was an experiment in

chaos and the audience used to come to the shows with banners and the banners would read perverts pederasts pimps charlatans buffoons they'd have banners like talking shit about the people up on stage and to take it back to that fucking marinetti quote participation was understood as the end of traditional spectatorship and they were doing it for political ends it's back to that concept of the ideological state apparatus

if art is being used by the ruling classes to maintain power as part of the ideological classes to maintain power as part of the like the ideological state apparatus is power that's being held in place not by soldiers and police but the ideology and the ideological state apparatus like we'll say the church for example like i mentioned with how the church commissioned paintings and art that right there is ideology to maintain a structure of power

so if art has all this power in italy in 1913 what does it do to a society who can now go to a theater and art has no respect where you're encouraged to spit at the art, it creates, it's, it's, the overt message, was not just, you're challenging art, it's,

you're challenging power, and power is meaningless, and there's no boundary between stage and audience, just the same way that there's no boundary between, the proletariat, and the bourgeois, the poor people, between the proletariat and the bourgeois. The poor people and the rich people who have the power. And that creates an environment for fucking revolution. And Mussolini was friends with the fucking futurists.

It ended in fascism. It ended in fascism for the futurists in Italy. It ended in fascism. It ended in fascism for the futurists in Italy, you know. One of the most radical and batshit mad artistic movements that turned art on its head. And the modern equivalent of this shit, if some of this is sounding familiar, it's not in art, it's in the media.

Tabloid media in particular today, how it conducts itself reminds me a lot of these futurist serates the way that they have utter contempt for their own audience the way that tabloid media is deliberately inflammatory about political concepts and ideas the way that tabloid media chooses to enrage people rather than get them to think and if you want to see the most vicious inflammatory comments on the internet they're under vicious inflammatory publications it's as simple as that the more inflammatory the publication the more inflammatory and horrible the comments are you know and it's no coincidence it's no coincidence um the people who the the

thinkers behind this type of media and a lot of political thinkers they look at fucking art they do i mean i covered this before in a podcast about russia about how putin's top political advisor took a huge amount of his approaches from the world of performance art and applied it to politics to create a sense of chaos and it used to be the case in Russia five years ago now it's the case in Britain and the case in the US where politics is such an enraging circus of nothing but emotion that most people just give up like what do you do with Trump and fucking Boris Johnson it's too insane the news is too insane these days bizarre things happen every week you just you just you just give up you know but i need to yeah i just want to be important to make it clear that i'm not in support of fucking futurism or fascism

it's they fucked up they fucked up they took a beautiful concept and the beautiful concept is who says art has to be spectator and spectacle and they turned it on its head and said let's remove spectator and spectacle and make everybody a participant beautiful idea but because it was poisoned by a nasty political agenda and their way of doing it was antagonising and hurting people, they ended up getting pretty shitty results. And Leon Trotsky in 1924 had a lovely comment about Futurism. He said, Did not Italian fascism come into power by revolutionary methods? He's referring there to revolutionary methods,

that means futurism in revolutionary art. By bringing into action the masses, the mobs and the millions, and by tempering and arming them. It is not an accident, it is not a misunderstanding that Italian futurism has merged into the torrent of fascism it is entirely in accord with the law of cause and effect so that's trotsky right there the communist um basically saying what i just said there it's it's they had a noble potential but they did it in the wrong way they antagonized and they ended up with

horrible rotten fascism and mussolini and that's what they wanted well they they they wanted it and they thought jesus fascism is going to be class isn't it they got it wrong so one other thing i want to move on to and it's just when speaking about participatory art, why participatory art was traditionally considered avant-garde and radical. Another concept, and this is going to move on from the Futurists to how participatory art was used in Russia after the Russian Revolution, after 1917 and the early 1920s. revolution after 1917 in the early 1920s um you have to look at the concept of individualism versus collectivism okay um one critique of art at the turn of the 20th century and it was a critique against capitalism too is that in an individualistic society right now we live in an individualistic society like western society

that we experience is individualistic it's individualism is whereby your society is competitive you are mostly concerned with yourself There's not really any external help. So you must be in the rat race, looking out for yourself, earning as much for yourself as possible to survive. And as a result of that, a culture of selfishness, which is expressed through how we fetishize commodities and all of this. That's individualism versus collectivism which is where you're not 100 concerned with your everything you do isn't just for you a lot of your actions are about benefiting your community everybody i mean look no more perfect time to talk about it than right now the coronavirus pandemic is really confronting

individualistic societies with some serious fucking challenges right the countries that are experiencing the worst impact of coronavirus are the us and the uk two hugely capitalistic individualistic societies two colonial empires. Right. In individualism. Like in America. There's armed protesters. Who won't socially isolate. They believe that.

Social isolation is a violation. Of their freedom. You know. In like. The culture of mask wearing. I did this before in a podcast but the culture of wearing a mask in countries that are collectivistic not individualistic but countries that are collectivistic a lot of asian cultures are collectivistic people wear face masks right

not to stop themselves getting sick but to prevent them from making other people get sick that there is a is a tenet of collectivism people wearing face masks to protect other people for the benefit of the entire community that's collectivistic thinking in individualistic countries like in ireland or to a greater extent the US and fucking Britain. Extreme individualism means that people are struggling even with the concept of social distancing. That people can't understand that it's not about you. People saying, I'll take a risk, I'll chance it, I'll get sick,

I'm young and healthy, and then having to drill it into their heads that it's like, yeah, you are young and healthy and then having to drill it into their heads that it's like yeah you are young and healthy it's not about you you must behave as if you have it so you don't give it to someone else you must think collectively and this was present this is presenting a huge challenge to western societies and it's been reflected in the higher amounts of fucking coronavirus right but individualism and collectivism is also a part of early 20th century art and the critique against participatory art wanted to get people collectively working together right because one goal of of participatory art and this is what makes it truly radical within individualism and capitalism the concept of art right as you create a painting you then have an object and this object

is a spectacle that spectators admire and then you can purchase this object and it can accumulate value and the value of this art this art can only be valued by how much money it makes these are all tenets of individualistic capitalistic production of art right it's a commodity it's an object it's a spectacle that spectators look look at and it commands power within participatory art and collectivistic ways of making art how how do you sell a performance if the art is not a final product, it's not a painting, it's not a play, it's not a piece of music. If the art actually becomes the act of everyone participating, you can't monetize and sell that. So that was also one of the hugely radical themes of why participatory art was so important it challenged the entire gallery system it's like you can't buy this night that we just had

there's no one to pay because everyone is participating it's collectivistic um where they tried to do this exact thing was in russia after the revolution so in in russia uh about 1920 right three years after the bolshevik revolution russia was trying to you know they were they were communists and they were trying to make the population collectivist it was trying to turn the population away from bourgeois capitalistic individualism and make an entire population collectivistic in their way of thinking specifically to get a largely poor agrarian population how do you get a huge agrarian population to think industrially and collectivistically so they could work in factories together for the greater good of everyone and not just for themselves? radical because they completely rejected any form of art that could be individually produced

like painting things that were founded in taste and produced for a patron market right in favor of practices right artistic practices that were integrated into more industrial ways of thinking so they didn't they tried to get masses of people together to create like performances to participate in artistic performance but the goal was to get them thinking collectively as a training for an industrialized society of collective ownership so in like 1918 russia founded this organization called the prolet cult which was like a soviet institution of art right that's like I said it rejected all individual forms of art art that one artist could produce like a painting or one artist writing a play that was out the window and it was a an attempt at getting and it was run by avant-garde artists all of them would

have been inspired by like what the futurists were doing. And also what Dada was doing. And it was like this community attempt. At having these giant outdoor plays. That took place in fucking factories or in town squares. And it wasn't particularly successful. But the goal of it was to create collectivistic thinking through art but also to create a dominant working class proletarian culture that was completely different to the individualistic and spectacle-based bourgeois culture that would have been before

the revolution a lot of them a lot of these pieces were like huge plays i suppose you'd call them where everyone there's no audience because the audience are the actors and it's this collective giant play where they would be kind of directed to tell heroic tales where workers would give up their lives to save the factory like there was one that happened in a gas works miles outside uh i think it was stalingrad i'm not sure but it was in a gasworks and there was thousands of participants and they tried to tell the story of a gas leak in this factory and three brave workers volunteered themselves to die to save the factory and this is the type of vibe and story of these prolet cult attempts at creating a collectivistic way of thinking

in the population through art and through theatre and what what i find fucking fascinating though is even though this prolet cult thing was seen as a massive failure mainly because one of the issues of the like theemocratisation of art and for everyone to be participating is the plays and the theatre things they were making weren't very good. Because there was no one really stepping up as taking roles. Everyone was together as an equal and that created aesthetic issues and that the art being created wasn't very good but one thing I find fascinating is do you remember that program Chernobyl

last year that was on HBO or fucking Sky Atlantic or whatever one thing really interesting from that and it's based on the true story obviously the bit where the three workers volunteer to die by going obviously, the bit where the three workers, volunteer to die,

by going up onto the roof, of the reactor, and taking the, radioactive material away, and you have workers, literally volunteering, knowing that they're going to die, to collectivistically, save the factory,

and save the population, and I found it so interesting, that, these early Russian Revolution and Soviet collectivistic fucking plays which tell the story of the

brave workers, like this is 1920, this play about the fucking the gas factory, these brave workers that volunteer to die to save the factory. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th, when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play.

Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at TorontoRock.com. Actually, that you actually see that happening 70 years later at Chernobyl. And I just found that fucking fascinating. That it obviously worked in some sense, I'm not saying it's a good thing, I'm just saying it obviously worked in some sense, so look, that was my podcast,

my ramble on, collectivistic fucking art and participatory art versus individualistic art and like I said it's one of the more complex

concepts around art and what art is but my purpose of doing it was trying to get she just to have a deeper understanding of the importance of art and why it's not just a pretty thing that provides entertainment why there's elements of art that are hugely

groundbreaking and changing in our relationship with fucking power and society and to not take art for granted I hope you enjoyed that anyway I hope it was clear Yart I'll talk to you next week Thank you.