The Antisocial Socialist

You asked for more art history posts so I'm afraid that you have no one to blame but yourselves for yet another lengthy dip into the early 20th century avant-garde. If anyone had "Sabs holds forth about John Heartfield" on their bingo card, congrats, you are correct, and your prize is that you get to read about me holding forth about John Heartfield.

But first! Happy Easter to my Christian American peeps!



As they said during the time that we acknowledged the covid pandemic, "Easter will look a little different this year." Which is to say, despite ostensibly electing Trump because of the high cost of eggs, the price of eggs has not come down and in fact has gone up, leading the regime's propagandists to pen numerous articles suggesting that Americans instead dye potatoes, turnips, and marshmallows. What was supposed to be an American golden age of economic prosperity is in fact, more of the same, with the change that you probably no longer have a job.

And while for another week or so I can laugh from over here in Canada at the irony that America can't even properly produce eggs, literally one of the easiest things in the world to produce, it's a little horrifying to see how quickly the failed state has managed to trash the economy. The right wing tends to talk a good game about economics, but that's only because your average slob doesn't understand how economics work. I include economists across the political spectrum in that "average slob" designation, by the way, which is to say that the vast majority of economists believe in a critically dangerous fiction—that of infinite growth. Only those on the extreme left and the extreme right acknowledge that line can't go up forever on a planet with finite resources. This is self-evident but society as we know it would crumble tomorrow if anyone acknowledged it. The extreme left proposes extreme left solutions like "maybe we shouldn't keep burning fossil fuels and redistribute the existing wealth better than we currently do," while the extreme right proposes practical, reasonable solutions like "if we purge all the immigrants and transes, you can live in the houses they were forced to abandon and get all their stuff and thus we can keep burning fossil fuels until we get to Mars." For whatever reason, most people in the Anglosphere are suckers for the latter approach.

Interestingly, despite all of Trump's rhetoric around the return of factory jobs, most MAGAs don't actually want to work in factories themselves. Nor do they want to pick blueberries, judging by a since-deleted post with hilarious comments by a farm desperate for workers now that the mass deportations have started:

My favourite comment on the post: "Y'all better ask Chat GPT to pick them bluberries😂😂😂😂."

It would seem that the right doesn't actually buy their own propaganda on the economy. As it turns out, conservatives, let alone fascists, are predictably awful at managing money (unsurprising; their economic model is the casino, which they're also not good at); not only will the trains not run on time, but the planes will fall out of the sky.

So if all of these Trump voters knew deep down that he wasn't going to make their eggs any cheaper, why did they vote for him? What is the promise of fascism?

( I promise I'll get to art, I promise )

Happy Easter everyone, and enjoy your painted turnips!

P.S. If you need a chaser, of course Heartfield also had a big influence on industrial music, so here is is name-checked along with Hoch (and Marinetti) by Einstürzende Neubauten:

 I made a comment in my AI post the other day that a few of you rightly took issue with, which was that AI art is shitty and the world doesn't need more shitty art. Take a bow if you called me out on that because you're correct and I was not—shitty art is a stepping stone to good art. Shitty art—made by humans—is valid even if it's not a stepping stone to good art. Having recently been the recipient of a shiny new Apple Pencil, I am currently teaching myself Procreate, and I've never really done digital illustration before. Are my drawings on it as good as my acrylic paintings? Not remotely. I have a baseline competence at drawing, so they don't look like shit or anything, but I'm learning the tools and it shows. Am I absolutely just doodling random people on transit, TTRPG characters, and characters from my books? Yup. Am I having fun? Well, that's the important thing, isn't it?

(Why are you harshing on people playing around on AI, then, sabotabby ? Because it is destroying the fucking planet and killing jobs. Covered that already.)

The word I should have used is mediocre, and even that is problematic, because there's a place for mediocre art too. Sometimes I want to kick back with a competently made Marvel movie. But there are definitely enough people making good-enough-but-not-creative art that I don't see a need to add to it, and I would argue that even mediocre art needs great art to inform it. Marvel movies don't exist without George Lucas' original Star Wars movies, which were actually good and innovative, and MCU occasionally still does something mildly interesting. But they have been getting progressively worse due to model collapse, which is to say that they're cannibalizing their own work and shitting it back out rather than incorporating new influences, and it shows.

I want to ramble a bit about my favourite periods of art history, as I am wont to do. Let's talk about 1896, and Tsar Nicholas II's coronation. About half a million Russians attended. The thing you have to understand about turn-of-the-century Russian peasants is that most of them loved the tsar. It's easy to love a tsar; you almost never meet them face-to-face. It's your feudal lord doing the oppression, and if the tsar knew, well, he'd never allow it. So you can imagine that many jumped for the chance to actually be in the guy's presence. They were also giving out free food and drinks—sure, it's not Elon Musk's million dollar cheques, but to a starving population, it's not nothing. The problem is that neither the tsar nor any of his officials gave any more of a flying fuck about the peasants than Musk or Trump and so they didn't bring enough, and in the rush to get fed, 1400 people were trampled to death, and thousands more injured, in a country with a healthcare system that was presumably no better than modern-day America's.

So when I say nice things about the Russian Revolution, especially in its early days, it's not out of any love for the USSR. It's that every bit of violence that happened, all the crimes against humanity that followed, were a direct result of a political system in which it was fully unremarkable for over a thousand people to die in a single day simply to flatter an inbred tyrant's ego. You can't blame the early communists for at least trying a different thing.

The art of the early Russian Revolution is some of my favourite that has ever existed in the world. You can tell it's great because it has staying power despite looking like nothing before or since. Witness Eisenstein's Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin, or Mayakovsky's Porky meme, or Lissitzky's minimal masterpiece, Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge. The one closest to my heart, Tatlin's Monument to the Third International. These are works of genius, really groundbreaking work for a moment where such innovation was possible, even desirable.

And within a few decades, it was gone. Both literally and aesthetically, the rulers of the country were back to murdering peasants. The artists were in exile, or dead, or forced to do boring-as-shit socialist realism, Stalin's preferred style. I once went to a museum where they had the largest collection of Stalinist era art, and they described what was basically a factory, in which each artist specialized in painting the leader's nose, or eyes, or moustache. Alienation of labour, as Marx would have it. By the time World War II broke out, Russia's propaganda looked barely better than that of America or Britain or Germany None of those are artistically bad, per se, and to a degree the context has made them enduring. But they're mediocre compared to Beat the Whites With the Red Wedge. Something about war and nationalism tends towards samey-sameness, the laziest kind of imagery. Real lizard-brain garbage. You'll see fascists resorting to this aesthetic again and again, and AI has made sure all your feeds are flooded with it.

A similar devolution occurred in Italy, though Italian art under Mussolini never quite reached the depths of socialist realism under Stalin. The Futurists were radicals, for whatever good or bad that entailed. Beginning as anarchists, they turned fascist and got their guy into power. Their guy, as it turned out, preferred derivative art, and ordered them to stop being so fucking weird. Unlike most of the Russian Constructivists, they largely complied, and thus died of silly things like falling off horses. I'm sure nothing that happens with 8chan or the Proud Boys will echo this trajectory.

(But Sabs! Sabs! What about Nazi Germany! They were the worst but they had Leni Riefenstahl, who is at least as important as Sergei Eisenstein. To which I will reply that 1) she was nowhere near as interesting as a filmmaker even if she was talented, and 2) they had the Degenerate Art Exhibition, proving that with the occasional exception, they mostly still had terrible taste.)

All of these strongmen would have loved DALL-E and Midjourney and the like. Even a five-year-old can create more interesting art, but these people don't want interesting, they want safe. Predictable. The most obvious thing. Even the software's occasional Dadaist turn, like Lobster Jesus, is weirdly soulless, devoid of any of the batshittery that bad or substance-impaired human artists can produce. It can only steal, and average, and since the average person prefers Thomas Kinkade to Varvara Stepanova, it will regress to Kinkade, always. It cannot surprise you with an idea unless you've never had a genuinely new idea of your own. It's mediocre propaganda at scale, minus the talent it takes to perfect Stalin's moustache, and Some More News did an amazing job of explaining its appeal to fascists, if you have an hour or so to watch a video. 

So maybe bad wasn't the right word. Maybe mediocre isn't either, except for a particular value of mediocre. Soulless, or aura-less, art that makes your brain work less well when you look at it. The reduction of the diversity and imaginativeness of humanity to a checklist of tropes, a Pixar plot outline, a Kinkade rendering. A story that always ends the same way, with the two main characters knowing that whatever comes next, they will face it together. The coldest of comforts to the most heartless of ghouls.

Make your bad art. But for fuck's sake, don't make any more of this.

I'm not having the greatest day and I have so much to do but also I have completely burnt out on being a responsible adult and I need a break, so I'm going to shitpost.

Confession time: I have never successfully finished the first Dune book. I'm sorry frandroid ! I tried! I will probably try again! On paper it sounds like everything I like but for some reason I bounced off of it. I did see the David Lynch adaptation and of course the Denis Villeneuve adaptation and for some reason I was Googling about it when I came across spoilers for the thing that happens later in the series.

Which is to say—and sorry to spoil a 43-year-old book for y'all—in Children of Dune, Leto II Atreides, son of Timothee Chalamet, realizes through his prophetic visions that the only way to stop all of humanity from dying is to fuse with a larval sandworm, and by God Emperor of Dune he is almost all sandworm except for his head and arms, and has been ruling for 3500 years. Obviously the idea of a giant sandworm guy with a tiny little human head and arms is the most hilarious and perfect thing ever and also I think he eats all the other sandworms??? maybe?? If I'm wrong about this don't correct me.

Listen if Villeneuve doesn't give me a giant sandworm with a tiny head and arms eating all the other sandworms what is even the point of adapting this series, I ask you?

Anyway being a visual sort of person I had to go look up how artists had portrayed this fellow over the years and I was not disappointed. I mostly stuck to actual covers but there were a few pieces of what might be fanart that I thought were cool so I left them in.

I tried to credit as much as I could but also I'm very tired and lazy, so if you happen to have more information, let me know and I'll edit it in.


( God Emperor of Dune illustrations, ranked from worst to best )

Anyway, that is my ranking; let me know if you agree, disagree, or found even cooler ones that you'd like to discuss!

If you're anywhere near Toronto before March, you owe it to yourself to check out Kent Monkman's Being Legendary show at the ROM.  Monkman is hands-down one of my favourite contemporary artists—he creates some of the most technically spectacular, politically charged, and scathingly witty art I have seen. This is a show of entirely new pieces, combined with critical curation of some of the pieces in the ROM's collection. It's not just amazing paintings—though it would be worth it for the paintings alone—but an interrogation of the concept of museums and museum curation and its long history of colonialism and theft.

Also, I had no idea that Monkman's paintings were acrylic. I'd assumed he was working in oils from the luminous finish of his work. But no. He's just staggeringly talented.

Anyway. It's quite incredible.

Happy Solstice everyone!

Last night marked the 30th annual Red Pepper Spectacle Arts Festival of Lights in Kensington Market—in my opinion, the best event Toronto has to offer. It's a parade filled with samba bands, clowns, papier mache puppets, paper lanterns, Indigenous art and activism, Doug Ford effigies, raccoons, and of course, a giant burning thing at the end. It's beautiful and joyful and in-your-face and there's nothing else like it.

I attempted to capture some of the energy on the street last night. It's too crowded to shoot properly, so I just take a million pictures and hope for the best. Here are the least bad.



( more photos )

I can't believe I've made it this far. I am rather stubborn, aren't I? I actually ended up doing a fair bit of art this week.

( inktober )

I didn't hit life drawing this week (alas! It will probably be awhile) but I did get some other arts done!

( other arts )

Are you ready for round two of my Inktober drawings? I continue to draw something every day based on prompts generated by a neural network. Some of these I actually like.

( cut for drawerings )

I also did some serious drawing this week, so here are my three least-embarrassing 10-minute poses from life drawing.

( contains a naked lady )

I'm finally sorting through the many, many photos on my camera. It's taking some time. I've narrowed it down to 36 that I feel are worthy of showing the intertubes. But how to group them? So I just named them things and put them in alphabetical order.

( so organized omg )

( bonus )

Just came back from the premiere of Sook-Yin Lee’s Unsafe. It’s one of those pieces, I think, that benefits from not knowing much about it, but I can tell you that I thought it was really amazing and is in many ways the nuanced take on censorship and free speech that I didn’t know I wanted. It’s kind of cool that 40-year-old me and 12-year-old me agree that Sook-Yin Lee is awesome for entirely different reasons.

Also, it will make you very angry at the CBC. If you weren’t already. I mean the basis of Canadian identity is being vaguely angry at the CBC, is it not?

Sick to death of hearing about immigrant kids getting shuffled off into literal concentration camps, I made some posters that I plan to distribute in the community around where the children are being held in my city:



Postering is a legal act. I am giving information that's easily Googleable. But what has been seen can't be unseen; people who catch sight of these cannot later, during the historical reckoning and/or Hague tribunal that will ultimately come to pass, claim that, "oh, we had no idea this was going on."

I also made some for Americans, if you want to fill in local information.



I'm happy to send PDFs/add local specifics for anyone who wants to plaster these around their cities and towns. Just let me know.