netfilmmakers' blog

The problem of the passage between the heart and the mind is the one
which exemplifies the western crisis. We see it everywhere, in every
guarded eye, in every calculated movement. Perhaps at different times in
history this passage was blocked by different substances. At the moment
it is choked by the shit of finance.

I think about my last meeting with my friend Ace Phale in the Ville de
Bruxelles. It was at the cafe Le Clef d´Or. Brutal sunglasses, a shaven
head, black attire. Ace was silent for a long time, then he said “You
know the nineteenth century was the time of morality. Dostoyevsky, for
example. Then the twentieth century, that was the time of politics. The
world wars, the rise of communism, the 60s, etc.” He looked around the
smoky French barroom a bit. “And today it’s the time of business.”

It is true of the entire western civilization, but nowhere is it more
obvious than in the art world. It was in the 1960s when the redefinition
of an artist occurred, and it was largely perpetuated by the New York
artists like Rauschenberg, Pollock, and especially Warhol. This is when
the role of the artist turned into being a businessman and the whole art
world entered the field of marketing. Ever since being an artist has
acquired a meaning that it has never had in history before. And the art
community as a whole was largely unreflective about this obvious change.
Only one artist from the older school even had the integrity to mention it:

“The entire world of art has reached such a low level, it has been
commercialized to such a degree that art and everything relating to it
has become one of the most trivial activities of our epoch. Art in these
times has probably reached one of its lowest points ever in history,
probably even lower than in the late 18th century, when there was no
great art but only frivolity. Art in the 20th century has become to a
similar function as a mere entertainment.”
Marcel Duchamp

In northern Europa what it means to be an artist is to fill out endless
grant applications (or to pay for someone to fill them out for you) and
going the route of middle class security. No more taking risks. Yet
everyone has always known that the middle class solution is the most
cowardly- it was always better to be either rich or even poor- but never
middle class. And it is the poverty of middle class aesthetics that
rules the art world these days, along with its flimsy ideals.

Fiction is largely successful only to the degree that the reader buys
the illusion fabricated by the author. Instead of such a brick wall,
which was similar to the Hollywood brick wall of cinema, I prefer a
veil. Like the magnificent statue by Antonio Corraldini of which
Nietzsche might have written “We no longer believe that truth remains
truth when the veils are withdrawn. We have learned to stop courageously
at the surface, the fold, the skin, to adore appearance, to believe in
forms, tones, words, in the whole Olympus of appearance.”

After discovering the absence of a profound meaning behind the world of
appearances, those who seek the true meaning of things end up impaled on
the truth that there is no meaning to be had. Any insistence on
profundity and thoroughness is a violation, a desire to hurt the basic
will of the spirit which unceasingly strives for the apparent and
superficial - in all desire to know there is a drop of cruelty.

This problem of the passage between the heart and the mind is the one
which exemplifies the western crisis. We see it everywhere, in every
guarded eye, in every calculated movement. Perhaps at different times in
history this passage was blocked by different substances. At the moment
it is choked by the shit of finance.

I think about my first meeting with my friend Ace Phale in the Joburg
Bar in Long Street, Cape Town. Brutal sunglasses, a shaven head, black
attire. Ace was silent for a long time, then he said “You know the
nineteenth century was the time of morality. Dostoyevsky, for example.
Then the twentieth century, that was the time of politics. The world
wars, the rise of communism, the 60s, etc.” He looked around the smoky
bar for a bit, sizing up the impeccably branded teenagers in a fluid
gesture of morbid resignation and mordant disdain, “And today it’s the
time of business.”

It is true of the entire western civilization, but nowhere is it more
obvious than in the art world.
by Acéphale and Aryan Kaganof