Networks of promotion/control slide imperceptibly into networks of surveillance/disinformation. Formerly one only conspired against an established order. Today, conspiring in its favour is a new and flourishing profession. Under spectacular domination people conspire to maintain it, and to guarantee what it along would call its well-being. This conspiracy is a part of its very functioning.
– Debord, Guy. Comments on the Society of the Spectacle. London: Verso, 1998. pp. 74.
Photo by Adam Rothstein
Creating for the well-being of a system beyond communal control—because it only seeks to sustain itself—leads to a relationship with artistic work and modes of individual presentation which, at the expense of another’s artistic expression, devalues personal expression. If the main goal of individual artistic expression relies on compliance with, and in extension “conspiring in the favour” of a system which will only co-opt artistic expression for it’s own own benefit and rejuvenation, how can the individual artist create work with enough fortitude to sustain the onslaughts of this system and also move beyond the closed pathways it presents? Artistic expression must look beyond the role of an individual artist or writer as a creative entity in order to ensure that personal motivations are not maintained by a system which is in place only to foster its own existing boundaries and further its own existence. This system contains only a labyrinth of locked pathways for the individual who creates for individual aggrandizement. We must think of how to create works which transcend the individual in order to circumvent the treacherous pathways of the system. In this occupation, we should look for opportunities to explore creative artworks and methodologies which challenge these closed pathways instead of furthering them and brings a new sense of artistic practice to contemporary art.
by Anonymous Occupier
