Abstract Asemic Graffiti in the Neoliberal Age
Spending 3 days a week in the gallery has been a real privilege. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday I pack my bag with books to read, notes I’ve made on what must be done next, lists of what I need to do in the day involving contacting new galleries/museums for the next shows, social media posts to create, updates to the website and more. But, invariably, and without complaint, I rarely get to finish or complete anything because I have the joy of conversing with the public.
Most of the interactions have been really pleasant, interesting, and informative. Many have been about Neoliberalism, given the show is called ‘Abstract Asemic Graffiti in the Neoliberal Age’. It’s encouraging to hear many people are angry, disillusioned, and want change right now. We have either discussed the problems of Neoliberalism or I have spent time explaining what it is and how it is affecting us all. How, in very simple terms, it wants to replace democracy with competition, with free market ideals, and turn everyone into consumers and no longer citizens. Which, when we look around, it already has.
Yesterday, Sunday, there were about 30 people in the gallery, and I was relaxed sitting on my chair with my sign ‘I am the artist’ next to me, so as to inform them I wasn’t a steward, when a chap with a guitar and a bag, looking somewhat dishevelled and homeless, walked in. He stood there poised, almost motionless, while others moved around him looking at the art. He seemed transfixed on one of my pieces, almost statue-like, and without worry, confidently asked, ‘Do you like Pollock?’ I replied ‘Of course’ — it’s certainly no mystery to see this — and as the other visitors filtered out, we struck up a conversation after I offered him a chair.
I explained how Pollock had been one of my earliest influences, how I thought his work looked like DNA. He agreed, and then we spoke about many different artists — my now love for Rothko, Matisse, and Franz Kline, his love for Giacometti, and how we both loved the work of Picasso. I explained how I had recently visited Madrid on a pilgrimage to see the great ‘Guernica’, one of Picasso’s finest, and we both expressed our love and admiration for the Blue, Rose, and Cubist periods, and particularly the really early works where Picasso could paint to the exactitude of a photograph. I was enthralled by the conversation. It was by far the most educated art conversation I had had since the exhibition began.
He then told me a bit about his life story, how he had a degree in art, worked as a graphic designer, but was now homeless. He was leaving for Cyprus on Thursday to go and live with family, and then proceeded to speak to me in Hellenic, and then explained to me the differences in the languages in the area. Of course, there is no reason why a homeless person couldn’t know all this, and I wasn’t astounded that he could simply because of his current situation. I asked why he was in the situation he was in, and he very kindly said, ‘I don’t want to put that on you, man, let’s just say I had a run of bad luck.’ I didn’t pursue it any further.
We spoke for another 20 minutes, and it was evidently clear that he was bright, intelligent, knowledgeable, cultured, and worldly. It made me think of the system we live within and how the current pressures and attacks on the population may send many more to the street. In a world that is now centred around the individual rather than the community, where we are all being separated from working together and, to use the most ugly and neoliberal of terms, ‘we are all our own brand now’, where competition, growth, and the pursuit of wealth and glamour are held up as the ultimate goal in life — this will only lead to further deterioration of an already struggling society.
Thatcher famously said, ‘There is no such thing as society.’ This statement came straight out of the neoliberal handbook by Friedrich Hayek, one of the main proponents of Neoliberalism, and has certainly come true.
It’s now our job to recreate that society where we work together for a more just, equal system. And we can do that through many different avenues, including Art. The first thing we must all do is start conversations. This is where the change begins.
I asked to take his photo but he politely declined, so here’s a pic of my empty chair and sign instead.
