Post-Contemporary Art: Where Tomorrow becomes Today as it Turns into the Past: A Manifesto
By Michael X. Rose
ART TIMES online Feb 2010
I. The Problem
Contemporary Art has runs its course and now adds to the ennui of Modern Life. Made from the detritus of society with such banal objects as nylon stockings, rusted auto parts, dismembered laundry baskets, crushed beer cans, discarded packaging, and a thousand various plastic products mainly made by Chinese slave labor, these plastic products contain no inherent aesthetic value and merely changing their context by placing them in an art gallery does not make them worthwhile in the sense of which we are dealing — the aesthetic. The Contemporary Artworker, for that is how they self label, is limited by the nature of their artistic endeavors to only commenting on and reacting to society — using offal re-organized into anti-aesthetic polemical diatribes. Nausea ensues. The suicide of the soul.
II. The Solution
The Post Contemporary artist radically breaks with this dead academic tradition, Contemporary Art. Art is created new, fresh and solely with the pure fruits of the artist’s own labor. The artist now insists on creating new visual images in the most dramatically conceptual technique, from scratch; fashioning them out of colors alone. Using only Light and Dark, hues and glazing, ground pigments suspended in an emulsion, the artist magically creates illusions that are true Art — neither Nature or Realistic representations of it, nor literal concrete objects plucked from the material environment. Realism, as an end, is to be rejected as much as Materialism. We seek the sublime moment, that in which philosophical transformation through terror and awe occur.
III. The Sublime Goal
Our subject matter is Romantic and Sublime, that which we cannot posses and which may even destroy us. Overwhelming natural forces assemble in stupefying combinations. Beauty, when placed under the pall of these forces heightens the tension to volcanic proportions. Tsunamis of unnamable awe threaten the most vital beauty found in existence — the human body. The Crown of Creation, muse for eons, the human form contains all our aesthetic and philosophical ideals — happiness, hope, desire, love and ultimately loss, despair, and decay. The forces of Chaos eternally assail this perfectly ordered manifestation — Man. Whether dark beasts and animals of primeval and unknown origin or ultra-violent maelstroms, this eternal cosmic battle is our muse.