Back at it again

HELLo.

It´s been awhile (sorry). But here we are again.

This will be a philosophical, art-laden, mildly abrasive blog-post about why art is sadistic by nature, and why you should worry if you are not sadistic as well! Should be fun.

I keep (of course) working on the second chapter of my comic, but it´s grown into such an ambitious project. I´m aiming for the stars here, aiming not merely to "entertain" and queue up a bunch of cheap cliffhangers, I want to make a sizable addition to the human soul, a great leap towards greater glory and complexity. So it takes some doing, it takes some time, that´s just how it is. Just how the cookie crumbles.

I know, trust me, I KNOW that people don´t care. People just want a page-turner, they just want something emotionally stimulating to chew on while waiting for death. This generation, it really feels like people have completely forgotten about the fact they are going to die.

The despair that made people more noble, that made life a weighty, REAL thing, an important thing, has been traded in for a profound desire for sedation... "Netflix and chill". Something you should "turn your brain off" to enjoy.

Well that´s not what we are doing here. I´m doing something difficult and, it takes time.

You have perhaps heard the expression "nothing worth doing is easy".

That definitively applies to art. Art is, I believe, entirely defined by difficulty. Art is the act of making things more difficult. I remember a discussion I had with a friend of mine, in which he told me about how these tribes in Africa hunt lions armed only with spears.

Hunting lions with spears.

(Hunting lions with spears)

The funny thing is though, that these people in Africa, they follow elaborate rituals while hunting lions, it´s kind of a religious practice, fraught with specific, prescribed actions that go way beyond the merely practical.

My friend commented on how amazing man is, that, not content with the difficulty of hunting lions with spears, creates elaborate rituals around it.

THAT, my friends, is ART-ART. The furthest possible thing from "Netflix and chill".

It is the total opposite of "entertainment". Entertainment is about ease, about sedation, about "turning your brain off" about "chilling". Art, on the other hand, is about, yes "hunting lions with spears"... WHILE juggling rituals on top of it.

Viktor Shklovsky, the famous literary theorist, argued in his seminal essay "Art as Technique" that art´s purpose is to disrupt/counter the natural "familiarization" of life that occurs naturally as we go thru it, not just as individuals but as cultures. We think we know what things are, things become automatic. We couldn´t, of course, live if everything was a constant source of overwhelming awe, but we do want awe, we want to GROW cognitively, and, for that, we need not only to encounter new things, but make old things new once again.

Does this feel dead to you, Barbie?

Art aims to make the world new again and is thus the core human activity, the one that pushes towards the future. Art aims to make the familiar UN-familiar, to complicate, to make life, yes, HARDER.

You can say that artists work to create problems while everyone else works to solve them.

Art is also what structures reality, what grants meaning to things thru order. Art is the actual human activity, the rest is BUSYWORK really, as it does nothing but serve art. Whatever you do, you understand thru art. It needs not necessarily be a specific, remembered work of art, but the very language of references, the web of accumulated fictions, myths, memories. We live for art, we live in art, we are art. "I" is an art-work. Different languages have different pronouns to refer to yourself, said pronouns are key to the image of yourself you hold in your mind. Art is not locked in the museum, art is what happens when you look at anything, when you think about anything, you are at all times experiencing a construction someone created and creating new structures... there is no such thing as a "transparent" gaze, it is all accumulated culture.

Our "nature" (meaning our concept of "nature") is but accumulated culture.

The notion of "natural" is cultural.

And it is, well, what we make of it.

People believe that our current existence, cradled in culture and technology, is far more comfortable and easier than the life our ancestors had. I am talking apes and trilobites here. They think we have it easier now... This is not the case. The more we quiet the demands of external nature, the more hellish internal conflict becomes. The ascetic impulse, the impulse to rage against hunger instead of eating was, the consequence, to a large extent, of the development of agriculture and the abandonment of sedentary life. We became like an animal in a zoo that, though well-fed and protected from the inclement weather, spends his time gnawing at his own flesh or pacing up and down its cage out of boredom and pent up energy, eventually somaticizing some nasty disease; the fruit of his frustration.

The more society becomes civilized, the more man feels trapped within it, the more he yearns for harsher porn, westerns, yakuza flicks, outlets for their pent up, caged libido.

The human adventure is not about comfort, it´s not about escaping from pain. Our adventure is a SADISTIC one, one that is all about hunger, not for food, but for SENSATION, for EXPERIENCE, for NEW HORIZONS OF MEANING.

All of that hurts, it hurts way more than whatever pain and anguish an ape endures in his mercifully short life, free of the humiliation of decades of old age.

Art and technology exist to make life HARDER, not easier. As we harness more and more energy, we suffer the effects of inner conflict more and more.

This is the punishment nobility inflicts on the rabble: to be unwittingly carried along in a restless, ravenous journey, one that is not of their making, one that they feel victimized by... towards greater heights, greater power, more and more varied pleasures and the concomitant deeper depths and miseries that inevitably come along with them.

Are you part of the nobility? Are you an aristocrat? Or are you just CARRIED ALONG? Would you be among those that would rather be up in some tree still? Are you this world´s victim or its victimi-ZER?

All about pain as proof of weight

So, art is HARD, art is about making things HARD-ER, yep, that´s the goal here folks, to complicate your life, to make it grander, to help me and my readers grow, that´s what these comics are all about, making life more, not less, intense. Making life even more painful, because pain and pleasure are co-dependent, they are in fact, the very same thing really, deep down.

It´s not that I don´t want my work to be entertaining, it´s not that I don´t enjoy entertaining things, rather, I endeavor to do difficult, dense art because I find difficulty entertaining and, more importantly, I find it nourishing, thrilling, fulfilling and delicious.

Life should be lived aggressively, not defensively, and those that look at culture as "rest" instead of "sport" are, fundamentally, people that live their lives as victims. I mean, many many people explicitly, proudly, call themselves victims.

Which is, well, a shame.

...

In the next blog-post I shall delve into what makes "IN HELL" and the rest of my work "hard" and why that is the ultimate way to express the deep respect/love/gratitude I feel towards you all, dear readers.

I will be all about language that showcases itself as such, but without guilt, about blissfully self-aware language, the antidote to the current blight that ails most of culture: miserable, judgement-laden self-awareness thru nihilistic self-aggression.

Look forward to that!

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