I’d like to blame it on the pandemic, and for the most part I will, but I look back to my last blog entry (2019!), and it’s clear that something stopped me in my tracks a few months before the Pandemic took shape. But at this point, I don’t pretend to remember exactly what happened. I only know that I’m glad to be back.
There are lots of things on my mind these days, and without digressing
too much, I just want to go over some of the things I expect to write about in
the next weeks ahead.
It snowed in Montreal today. I rode my newly refurbished
winter bike home from work with great enthusiasm, and look forward to the three
and a half months ahead of winter cycling. This is the foundational theme of
kyotomotors, in the sense that it is the only real way in which I know I can actively
not contribute to the problem of spewing GHG into the atmosphere on a daily
basis. Is my carbon footprint where it should be? Probably not. Some impacts
are beyond individual control. We do what we can… but interestingly enough, my
last post before my hiatus was on this very subject, and you might like to
check that out here. It seems just as relevant today as it was when I wrote it
three years ago.
Apart from the theme of biking, which I know is not for
everyone, I am inevitably going to want to talk about recent news related to
energy and money, and the future. Is there a reason why the headlines don’t
read “ENERGY CRISIS LOOMING”? Well, the answer is probably “yes,” but it’s not
because there’s not an energy crisis looming. Instead, we get breaking, er, “news”
about the promising breakthrough in fusion technology. So, I’m planning on
rambling on a bit about propaganda in the weeks ahead… Wait for it!
As an artist, I have also been watching the financialization
of the “industry” of art over the years: a high-stakes, hijinks/ hijacking of
an otherwise introspective, solemn often solitary endeavour; but when you’re a
civilisation high on fossil fuels, everybody is jumping on the bandwagon of
creativity, not to mention the museums, collectors/investors and mega-galleries.
Nero ain’t got nothin’ on this! But that’s an aside, really. Like everything nowadays,
the art world is simply wrapped up in the maelstrom that is the perpetual
growth paradigm, which is to say, as we consume the planet at breakneck speed, many
our would-be “best achievements” become distorted and grotesque, as does our
celebration of them.
So, any enthusiastic discussion of art in this forum will be
dampened, as a deliberate antidote to the hype. One rule of thumb I go by, is
that, if it requires hype from the get-go, it probably hasn’t go legs to stand
on. Block-buster Museum shows and “immersive” exhibitions that re-frame
historic works for the world of attention deficit disorder consumers, will not
get a hall pass in these corridors. But I do wish to wax enthusiastically about
art here, don’t get me wrong. I’ve touched on the idea of “the work of art in
the age of the combustion engine” in the past. There is much more terrain to
explore in this thematic realm, and I will do my best to try and broach topics
not typically talked about in the art world.
Ah, promises, promises…
Kyotomotors! Where,
and how did it all start? And who really cares? I thought rather naively, back
then, that we would collectively tackle the challenges of global warming much
better than we have. I now think we have created a dark age ahead that is
unavoidable. I would like to think the themes of biking through to the future;
deconstructing the lies we tell ourselves about that future; and that of
genuine artistic endeavours, will lead to helpful discussions about how to deal
with the post-modern stress disorder that most of us suffer from in one form or
another. I certainly think embracing these themes will provide plenty of
material for discussion in the months ahead. I hope this time I have the energy
for the long haul!
