Insurrectionism By Justin McKeown (2007) NOTE: This text was originally published a pamphlet with illustrations by Vector and Archibald I feel compelled to write this because I fear that something I love may be dieing. For want of a better word, for the thing itself is as unnameable as it is untameable, lets call it Insurrectionism. Where oh where in this drudge era are those who would fly the flag of desire over that of reason? Where are those who are the stuff of future mythologies? Where are those who would die for something more inspiring than a State pension? Some in the art world would point their finger towards the field of Performance art and those artists who roam its pastures carrying the remnants of the gauntlet of the 20th avant-garde. Indeed some performance artists would raise their hands skywards in affirmation of such a suggestion; for they truly believe theirs to be the most unmediated of mediums. But more and more I am bearing witness to the gentrification of performance art. More and more I hear its name mentioned in polite civil circles as the new fetish of ‘right-on’ leftist boredom. More and more it has become the topic of conversation in the great roving revolutionary talking shop of the intellectual non-doers. More and more I see young artists willing to prostitute themselves as dumbed-down peddlers of quirkiness in an attempt to sidle through the door of the nearest gallery. The cultural entrepreneurs have moved in and made a building site of what was, until recently, Arcadia. Their goal: another crappy cathedral to misery. What is to be done? It seems that in the rush to turn performance art into a legitimate part of the cultural money machine what is being lost is the freedom to organise, behave and be exactly as one wants. What was once a bastion of personal liberation has become yet another vehicle for dogma. Perhaps it’s time to get back to basics. It’s time to sift through the detritus exhumed in the preparation of the cathedrals foundations, to see if there is anything raw and beautiful that can be salvaged before the smiling but poisoned conviviality of middle class morality and economics takes hold. Pay attention: For the most part, we have forgotten that reality is reality by consensus only: there is no inert order lying latent in the objects that surround us. Tables are not tables unless we say so. Mountains are not mountains unless we agree on what a mountain is. Laws don’t mean anything unless we decide to let them. The events of the past may have some truth in themselves but their representation in history has all the potential of dubious manipulation. Reality is not the solid object that we have been taught to believe in. Rather, it is a material to be experimented with just like any other. Let me be quite clear about what I am saying here: There is no such thing as ‘objective’ reality. Reality is created through a series of continuously made inter-subjective agreements and in the speed and frequency of the passing of these agreements we have ceased to recognise them being made. The universe has an existence beyond the subject/object binary constraints we have been conditioned to condition ourselves to think inside. This existence is invisible to anyone who has not learned how to perceive it, yet it is entirely accessible to all, so long as they are willing to take the time to discover it. Sorcerers know about it, so do all good artists, musicians, madmen and lovers of good sex. This invisible reality is not some hocus-pocus separate reality. Rather it is the sensual embodied experience of ‘being’ that all situations we inhabit are pregnant with. So, relax and enjoy: let yourself be given birth to. To have this experience all anyone need do is find a way to remove the goggles of subject/object binary reductionist thought. To speak again of tables and mountains: When our eyes do not fall upon them and our memories do not reach out to them, their silent existence is something truly alien to how we imagine their being. If we want to enter into the realm where subject/object binaries collapse then we must learn to shatter the illusion of the object. Doing this is essentially simple: all we need do is invoke a material to act upon our materiality and await the phenomenological results. Go and stare at rain falling in a puddle for an hour. Repeat a word or phrase till it looses all meaning. Spend several hours in your local park watching the shadows of the day slowly shift, change and fade. For those who desire a much more stirring entry point, why not get down and dirty with someone you desire: fuck each others brains out for hours till you have shattered the boundaries of mediocrity and mundane reality really is no more. In such a state meditate upon these few simple and obvious points: 1. We have only our boredom and the things we choose to do with it 2. Reality can be anything we want it to be 3. We really should get out of the house more often In the midst of such contemplation do not attack performance art or damn it. Rather, thank it for carrying the flame of the avant-garde across the threshold of the 21st century. Though we must also recognise performance arts limitations: For its ephemeral vessel has already become too entwined in the materiality of the world to contain the volatile spirit of Insurrectionism. Therefore, sadly, we must push our way through the cocoon of performance art as we know it, out into the terra incognita beyond. We must bid adieu to those who have forgotten the most basic lessons they learned in their first baby steps in ontological awareness and we must shake ourselves until we remember that reality is ours for the making and the only thing we stand to lose is a sense of our own mediocrity. The prizes are great, greater than money. Life is to short to abdicate responsibility for reality to any part of the misery machine of big business and the State. Reality is ours to win in the name of anything we so desire, all we have to do is recognise our part in its creation and act upon it. Et in Arcadia Ego…