Make More Weird Shit!
I had an interview/conversation today with one of the founding members of the co-op. She’s been reaching out to all our members to interview them with the goal of maybe later putting out a zine, though the real goal is to just get to know each other better and bring a little more positive energy to the group. It was long and rambling, but I really enjoyed it!
One of the last questions she asked was about what I saw for the future around art and culture and social movement type stuff. My first answer was pretty obvious, extricating ourselves from big tech/social media platforms and finding alternative ways to communicate and organize. Not just alternatives, but a complete qualitative overhaul of our values and ideas about scale (and “reach”), “content”, connection and what we mean by engagement or mobilization.
I surprised myself with the next answer though. “Art needs to get weirder!” I said. Weird wasn’t exactly the word I was looking for, but I couldn’t think of anything more precise. I know this makes me sound like a grumpy uncle, but popular culture has been so homogenized, so stagnant and repetitive… what is actually pushing the boundaries (whatever that means) these days? I can't remember the last time I was genuinely weirded out, genuinely shocked and awed. There's a guy in the neighbourhood that walks around in a giant wooden duck suit with orange tights. He's got a great quack, but it's more cute than weird. I want weird like Dada after the atrocity of WWI. Negation. Black Dada. Weird like an actual art movement beyond a 10-point manifesto. Not avant-garde though, fuck the vanguardists. More weird like a filipino copy shop flyer advertising EVERY SINGLE ONE of their services. Early MIA. Third culture kids hacking the internet. Urgent, experimental, visceral and strange… something that actually evokes real desire, discomfort, and a will to change things. The right is fucking weird, full on nutso, and they’re killin' the meme war…
My own work is hardly very weird, I’m always trying to be earnest and precise and clever (if that). And precise and clever is clearly not what we/I need right now. So this is as much a reminder to myself as anything. Make more weird shit. Make shit more weird. More. More. Weird.