smoking because we have no future
Posted by Aeron Bergman
I am teaching early video art to an interested yet skeptical class of very smart young Norwegian artists. Apologizing in advance because the perspective is mostly American, I am explaining the political situation of the time, and how these artists actually believed they were going to change perspectives by making video artworks. Top Value TV´s documentary Four More Years of the Republican convention of 1972 debuts a generous, funny, wandering art documentary style that actually made it to the mainstream TV of the time. One student was quick to point out that the illusion of reality and reliability created by the media was not broken, and in fact it has only gotten worse what with Fox News and all.
I gave Peter Campus a call to ask him if he really thought he was going to change anything with art. His work questioned and re-evaluated our sense of self with existential dead-pan humor. He said that psychology and self awareness has changed since those days, exploration of self is now mainstream. I asked him if the creeping, increasingly pessimistic utopianism of those days is comparable with things happening now. He said his students smoke, when he asks them why, they say because they have no future. Perhaps this is just art school nihilism, but it does seem that starting from my generation, we just dont buy this utopian stuff anymore. Yet we are still here, plugging away at art and sometimes politics, knowing that no one wins in a lottery.
(Above comic “Art School Confidential”) Thinking about Martha Rosler´s Semiotics of the Kitchen, equal rights for women was an uphill battle, noted even by the defensive posture on her face. But while today women are still fighting against nut jobs such as Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard, unequal pay, under representation in the MOMA New York (etc.), western societies have been slowly fixing themselves over the past 35 years. Perhaps the best example is Hillary Clinton who votes for war, gets chummy with lobbyists, and seems to be as skillfully vacant as her male presidential candidate counterparts.
In yesterday´s entry about Martin Luther King Jr. day, I debated whether to end with an optimistic or pessimistic word. In the spirit of those giddy days of technological promise, and the depressed looks on my students faces when they thought about the failings of earlier generations, I decided to keep my chin up. While Buckminster Fuller´s view that”world society is lethally shortsighted” may still be true, we can choose to operate slightly outside normal bounds.
