ME AND MY HERO

Me and my Hero are children on a beach. Me and my Hero find everything hilarious: how pink and juicy our skin is, the eerie water like a humungous lime cocktail in a seedy bar with strippers, the fact my Hero is a mustachio’d man with girl legs and a dress on. We are laughing so much that our bodies contort. We are jumping on the sick-coloured sand so much that our muscles ache. I squeeze the hand of my Hero so much that our hands begin to drip. I scream and my Hero yells. His gob is a big red peach with a bruise right in the heart where his mouth blackens into his throat going down inside. Big words come up from my Hero’s throat and tear out of his mouth, scrambling on his tongue, knocking his teeth out, rushing rushing rushing like drunk sick into the big cocktail ocean that turns from baby green to red. Me and my Hero find all of this hilarious and we are laughing so hard that our cheeks get all raw and juicy. My Hero yells so hard his eyes wobble in their sockets. Then they spin like blue marbles and pop out and my Hero’s peach explodes and he is a big rosy mess on the sick-coloured sand and I am stood there dripping with laughter.

RICHARD LINKLATER'S SLACKER, with footnotes left out

Slacker is a postmodern spin on the concept of ‘the outsider’. It shows that what it means to live outside society’s norm has changed since modernist times. To understand how Slacker achieves this, one can relate it to Albert Camus’ modernist novel The Outsider (1942).

In the film, there is an overlying sense of alienation for all its characters, whose “lives traverse eachother with no sense of community or connection.” From Madonna pap-smear promotors to dreamers of false civil war heroisms, all the people (slackers) in the film seem to exist outside ‘normal’ lifestyle in 1990s America. They are outsiders because they act for themselves independent of society. This, according to Linklater in his essay on the film, is the foundation of the ‘slacker culture’: “the intention is to be constantly discovering your own path”. For this reason the slacker “prefers a nomad education of movement that features a changing curriculum of their own making, based on the passion and pursuit of the moment”. Linklater’s use of the Surrealist anti-narrative technique heightens the feeling of disconnectedness and nomadism. In fact, Linklater anthropomorphises the camera into a kind of slacker. It moves freely from person to person, vignette to vignette, following the slacker method of transient, self-directed, outsider living. Meursault, the protagonist in The Outsider, also lives and thinks in a way that seems quite foreign to the social, judicial and even moral norms of his society. He shares the slacker present-mindedness – that goal of “attaining a realm of activity that runs parallel to their desires.”

Meursault, in his seeming lack of basic emotion and simple, amoral honesty, does not relate to the culture of his time. When he kills a man because of the stress and the heat of the sun, the courts calling him a monster does not feign him. “He observes the facts of life, death and sex from the outside.” Fifty years later and beyond this modernist simplification, Linklater provides a sketch of the new outsider – or a collection of outsiders – who has developed a paradoxical trait that makes him different from his predecessor. In the film, Linklater shows that a slacker will exist outside or against the cultural norm, but unlike Meursault, he will always be drawn to it. Post-Reagan cynicism and various ‘anti’ philosophies are collaged with theorists on the NASA cover-up of alien existence and comments like “I don’t know…I’ve travelled…and when you get back you can’t tell whether it really happened to you or if you just saw it on TV.” The can of soda is a recurrent motif in the film and it is a symbol of the participation of mainstream, commercial America. For all their anti-conservative intellectualism, abnormal obsessions and alternative opinions, the slackers in Slacker are wading through Austen knee-deep in mainstream social and political culture.  

Linklater’s film has a cynicism that Camus’ novel does not posess. It is the cynicism of the post-cold war, post-Reagan outsider who, according to Giroux, spends time “trying to put off the future rather than take on the modernist challenge of trying to shape it.” On the one hand, Camus wrote with a purpose. According to Cyril Connolly, in writing about an outsider in a French colony, Camus opposes the outlook of the French bourgeois. This relates to its delusion (Meursault is told he may be acquitted if he repents to God) and lies (his total honesty about how he feels is considered evil). On the other hand, Linklater mirrors the lethargy and ennui of the postmodern slacker: having many opinions that ultimately don’t really mean anything. Camus wrote about the outsider with a message but Linklater merely follows with interest. Camus opposes mainstream bourgious culture but Linklater understands the American passive acceptance of magazines, MTV and celebrity. Both philosophise about the outsider in relation to their world in different ways.

Emin as Emily Kngwarreye

Jianni

Random Reflective Understanding of WHY

 

Foundation has initiated me into the life-long and dynamic discovery of why I make art. I left a degree in History behind and came into Foundation solely based on some instinctual impulse. I did not know, in rational terms, why I decided to surrender all my ideas like sacrificial lambs to such a mind-alteringly broad subject. Now I am finding out. I am on the road. Whilst I have always been analytical about my art, the constant art-making and art-critiquing in Foundation has taught me positive self-awareness in my practice. Positive self-awareness is a new thing for me. Before, not at all understanding why I was creating (and not knowing how to find out), my self-awareness was riddled with self-deprecation and cynicism about the relevance of creating art at all. Now nearing the end of Foundation, with focus in my practice and self-assigned limitation in my medium (see Billy Childish manifesto 'freedom through limertation' - http://www.billychildish.com/dhm_manifesto.html), I am overwhelmed with the feeling that what I am doing is the right thing and that it is important.

PEOPLE AS OTHER PEOPLE

Big words can make you look stupid

I am sick of cringing at grown-ups writing about art.

This is from the Stephen Friedman Gallery’s description of Mamma Andersson’s exhibition.

“The sense that there is something beyond the painting is constant in all her works where multiple meanings overlap and amalgamate… These paintings constantly challenge our everyday assumptions and appeal to our senses on a multitude of levels.”

These sentences are as lifeless as an egg without a yolk. They read like someone bored, hungry and probably hungover wrote them. The term ‘everyday assumptions’ doesn’t really mean anything and anyone who uses the word ‘multitude’ is a cock. Note how the author pluralises all but one of the nouns in the last sentence to maintain the illusion that he knows many many things (that you will never ever know).

What a fucking bore.