The S.C.U.M Manifesto

The Society For Cutting Up Men (Valerie Solanas 1968) ______________________________________

I'm sure she would hate me for saying this but after reading her manifesto, I am quite convinced that if Valerie had been born a man, she would have been quite similar to me. Apart from the most extreme and vitriolic of her anti-male views, their is much to be admired in her manifesto; and given the creative nature and sporadic chaos of her often turbulent life, I feel a definite affinity, and creative kinship with her. Their is absolutely no doubt in my mind and social experience, that men are clearly responsible for the majority (if not all) of violence and war all over the planet. In this respect I am an ardent feminist.

her view the Ego-centric male as universalis harder to justify, but in my experiences of life and art she is largely correct, men in general (I include myself) and especially those who claim to be artists are incredibly self-centred and ego-driven. This is not always a negative trait for it depends upon what the goal and aims of this drive is directed towards.

You can clearly see the self-centredness in the persona of Damian Hirst who preoccupies himself with the role of the artist as celebrity, the defining example being Andy Warhol, who is also the main protagonist for the anti-male S.C.U.M manifesto.

But one could hardly claim that Nelson Mandela was self-centred or ego-driven for wanting equality and democracy in South Africa, but that is exactly what his drive and ego-consciousness fight for. Is anything really possible in life without some expression of the individual ego? I believe it is just a question of how much we express of ourselves for ourselves, and how much of ourselves we express truly in the service of others? A notion that to my mind that is not incompatible with itself, for it seems to me that it is possible to fully express the self, and therefore the individual through means and ways that are in complete synthesis with the expressive needs and wants of others.

I do not believe the individual (expression) must be oppressed for the greater needs of the community (Society), or that the wider community must only serve the needs of the most powerful individuals in Society. There is, and always be relative social tensions between the individual and the group(s) to which s/he belongs at both the micro and macro level; the central creative issue in terms of personal, social, and economic development of all our individual and collective human potential, is how to create a sustainable socio-economic balance that allows all of our individual and community strength to emerge and thrive in tandem, which clearly is not how our current Society is at present maintained or governed.

This is an argument that I feel sure the extreme views of valarie Solanas would agree with, because of course she would argue that the reasons for the individual, collective, social, and economic imbalance is simply down to the self-centredness, ego sex, and power drives of men.

Black And White Expressions

Was Bored, Went For walk,
Found Board, Painted.


Warhol's On My back

Part Seen, Part Felt



Untitled

Warholian Meditations on Media

A film of the life of the great artist Jackson Pollock, played and directed as part of the great actor Ed Harris' life, being viewed on television, recorded on digital camera, and placed on the internet as part of a creative process in art and life.

Notes on a Manifesto

"Art is a universal and real expression of the creative energy which organises the progress of humanity."

(Congress of The International Union of Progressive Artists: Dusseldorf, May 1922)

(Art in Theory 1900 - 2000)

Joseph Beuys believed in universal creativity as a transformative social force, which is why he coined the term "everyone is an artist",. I interpret this statement more generally as everyone having "creative potential" them rather than a specific "artistic potential" which is an ever changing social construction determined by the artistic and social values of the time. If people discover their creative potential, or are given the opportunity to develop and express their artistic potential into an acceptable creative form, then it becomes socially accepted and called art.

The notion of art I take for given, as do I that specific forms of art are either accepted or rejected upon the given whims of the culture of the time. However, when I read anything concerning the notion of creativity as a transformative resource, rather than specifically as a power to make art, I am uplifted; As I am when I read about theories that also view art as having the same transformative power, above and beyond the notion of art for arts sake.

I do not see, nor feel there is a need for this separation between the idea of art as either a social force for change, and art simply for arts sake. To my mind these two competing ideologies are to be understood as relative parts of the whole; and in order to understand this point it helps to look at the social and historical concept of beauty...............but unfortunately it is now almost two 'o' clock in the afternoon, and as my kitchen cupboards are bare. The only thing I have eaten today thus far is a single kiwi fruit, so I must stop this babbling, become a temporary consumer of capitalism, and go to the supermarket.

David A.

Pop Art Idol

I didn't see this coming about two years ago! It is no surprise to me that the new pet art project of Charles Saatchi is to set up a Britains Got Talent/X-Factor style TV programme for artists. The aim is that the winning artists (who will of course all be painters) will get to exhibit their work in a gallery in Russia.

What he obviously wants is to make as much money from it as Simon Cowell has made from syndicating Pop Idol and X-factor all over the world.

The Social Negation of Creativity

"Man was born free, but everywhere he is in chains"; (Jean Jacques Rousseau: The Social Contract, 1762).

Due to life circumstances I have been unable to settle myself enough to create art, so to try and release the build-up of inner creative energy I've been reading new things on art and creativity theory to try and expunge the daily detritus of everyday nonsense that clouds and confuses our real thoughts. I suffer these creative bursts where I have to indulge (that is what it clearly is)in either making spontaneous free art, or immerse my self in reading, thinking and the expression of ideas. The ideal way to express the inner creative life is to maintain a psychological, physical, and social balance as the foundation for creativity, unfortunately for me, circumstances at present do not allow this, and I am having to cope with a lot of unexpectedness at present....too much of this can be quite unsettling. It's particularly frustrating for the creative (whole) self(see images) which if accessed, intuitively knows what life context and environment it needs to be in to flourish. The harsh reality of our personal and global worlds is that they seems to often prevent the realization of our complete human expression by the restrictive social, political and economic frameworks we try to live within.

Art of Now in The Early 21st Century

The search for a new art is always the driving concern of galleries and the media. The artists themselves seem split in to two distinct camps of the insiders relying upon training, skill, contacts, and the vagaries of the system; leaving a burgeoning complex mix of outsiders, inside- outsiders, anonymous street artists, art-activists, and unimaginable diverse groups of people and individuals attempting to subvert and challenge the accepted art and cultural patterns of the day.

The 1990's were characterised by a proliferation of themes of subjectivity about which it is difficult to speculate, and which do not refer to the concepts and forms of history usually adopted by art criticism. This subjectivity seems to refer for the most part to the individual citizen's legal right to be able to live creatively.

Artists today find themselves more and more acting within a reality or a system that is continuously mobile and fluid, and unpredictable chains of events that offers neither support nor certainties.

Today, artistic sensitivity is now based upon a subjective creativity and an innovative language that lies somewhere between fiction and reality, whose content may or may not have something to with social or political problems. Every artist, like every citizen now observes the World within and without.

The Internet allows for a myriad of complex creative interactions and hybrids of traditional art and futuristic conceptions of reality.

Underground capillary networks of friends and random creative liaisons increasingly take the place of legitimate art criticism from institutional arenas, providing the expanding world of the art creative with more intimate criticism that is emotionally and socially sensitive, rather than being subjected to idiosyncratic reasons for rejection, and have work looked upon as banal or lacking aesthetic connection by those in positions of art power, who are not necessarily best set to judge creative work, often relying upon the aesthectic whims of others themselves to legitimize their selections for exhibition or exposure.

For such reasons the reality of art has now become a cause for individual survival of the creative self, a personal manual of individual and universal creativity that encompasses all the previous languages of the avant-gardes, and includes the artist as scholar, and scholar as artist into a complex everyday art of the citizen - artist, an art free from the professional media art magazine machine, it is a new insider-outsider, underground-above ground avant-garde based upon a do-it yourself philosophy. What has now emerged is an aesthetic of art as an everyday adventure in survival understood by the media and wider public as being centred upon creatives often concealed behind a pseudonym or logo producing clandestine art and interactive social experiences whilst trying to speak their individual truths, rather than express those placed within thier heads by art training or the current latest fad.

It is only through these latter contemporary artistic outputs can we hope to understand, and engage with 21st concepts of art and free creativity in relation to the social, political, and economic events of this new Century.

David Augustine