M49 Mike Brown

I don’t know what to think about anything (It don’t matter, nohow) (1972)

In July 1972 the Australian radical nonconformist artist Mike Brown (1938–97) distributed his punk manifesto ‘I don’t know what to think […]’ at the opening of his solo exhibition of paintings, text works and collages at the Watters Gallery in Sydney. Inspired by the American novelist Kurt Vonnegut, the manifesto is a rolling polemic against consumerism, mass culture, and the grasping realities of the art market and the advertising industry.

Together with Ross Crothall (b. 1934) and Colin Lanceley (1938–2015), Brown had been a member of a revolutionary art collective designed to shake the foundations of modernism in Australia. They were known initially as the Annandale Imitation Realists (after the location of their shared studio in Sydney). The word ‘imitation’ was ironic, reflecting the artists’ need to borrow or parody other cultures due to the paucity of innovation in Australia’s modern art scene. The trio had first met at the East Sydney Technical College in the late 1950s, where they had become interested in Aboriginal art. They also embraced Dadaism and humour, and paid little attention to conventional art practices. Their exuberant assemblages combined designs and symbols from Aboriginal and Oceanic art with pornography, pop lyrics and everyday trash, resulting in works which they believed reflected the chaos of modern life. Although the group disbanded in 1964, Brown continued to make art in the spirit of Imitation Realism, ironically appropriating pop culture and taking scabious delight in attacking the commercial art world. In this respect, he can be regarded as one of the pioneers of post-modern art.

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This is an exhibition somewhat in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of the arts of the planet Tralfamadore, where the flying saucers come from.

If you’ve read any of the novels of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t read any Vonnegut you’re an ignoramus ill-equipped to survive the 20th century. Peace anyhow.

Here we all are, huddled together for failing comfort, in the near-ruins of a civilization marked for early destruction by a wide array of gruesome means: – ‘art’ has meant a lot of different things at different times, what can it possibly mean in 1972?

You tell me, I’ll tell you, and then we’ll both know. Here’s a bagful of muddled thoughts I guarantee you’ll find most unhelpful …

Recently I moved from the city which was driving me nuts to a farmhouse 100 miles out in the country. From that vantage-point the machinations of the art-world seem more weird, remote and incomprehensible than they ever did.

Why do I bother to scribble and paint pictures and do all that sort of stuff?

For me, the answer comes back clear and strong – NOTHING BETTER TO DO.

That is to say, out of all the woeful array of non-activities that this society makes possible and permissible, art has for me the look of something at least marginally worth doing. Yet I am constantly reminded that even that narrow margin of ‘worthwhileness’ is probably a mirage: by the time an exhibition of any kind has been mounted in the hallowed, stilted, exclusive air of an art-gallery, it has been turned into something that one’s healthiest reaction would be to throw mud-pies at.

What started out as a metaphysical inquiry has been turned into a sale of high-class chattels, and a public examination and judgement of something that was never meant to be either bought-and-sold, examined or judged, but lived.

… But so what? Is this then a complaint, or proclamation that something ought to be done? That we need different, better types of art-gallery, or that they should be done away with? That artists should change to nonmarketable artforms, or simply be ‘better’ artists than they in fact are?

We could make any or all these changes and still find ourselves just where we were.

The truth is that art considered as a separate subject from anything else has quite abruptly run out of validity; it can derive no more vitality from within itself until it is well into a process of becoming indistinguishable from science, politics, sociology, religion – & – philosophy, etc., etc., etc., until the ‘artist’ has been recognized for what he is, a sort of dinosaur doomed by fantastic over-specialization to extinction.

Alienation from people and their ‘ordinary’ doings has resulted in Art becoming an unforgivably dull subject. Visual art especially has alienated itself from fruitful social context and exists in an eerie limbo peopled by everyone-you-wouldn’t-want-to-know-about about: socialites and hip bank-clerks, businessmen and art-scholars, professors and ‘instant’ newspaper critics, art-teachers, government officials and horse traders.

(Hold it there: – I’m not trying to start class-war fare, but hell, what a heavy mix artworld people are!!)

Since art can never really be distinct from, and certainly not superior to, its social context, it follows that this exhibition, and this screed as well, is the uttermost bullshit. It’s the best I could manage, yet bullshit it remains.

I should die of shame to exhibit it, especially when not far away, at La Perouse and Redfern there live the embattled remnants of a race that was massacred by mine, whose art-and-culture and way-of-life, superior to that of my own race in every important sense, was ferociously, contemptuously, deliberately suppressed and destroyed. I refer, of course, to the Australian Aborigines.

I sense an immense self-satisfaction in Western art still, that is quite void of justification: we think we’re really somewhere, when in fact we’re truly nowhere; lost a million miles from home: the most blazing heights of modern visual art are a tiny spark, albeit a healthy one, in an eternity of screeching blackness. We don’t know what we’re doing: we don’t know what-the-fuck we’re talking about. We grope, we dither, we idly fool about with concepts and notions that are as thin and tasteless as thin-air; the moment a feeble ray of light chances the way of one of us, we go into orgasms of adulation and crown him a genius.

The arts-&-culture of the Aborigines, the Africans, New Guineans, South Americans, Indians and Chinese, Red Indians and Polynesians, in fact of almost every-one but us except perhaps in our far-distant past, were no mere sparks of confused talent; they were, at best, lights that lighted up the universe. In their light men became scarcely distinguishable from gods.

We are sick, sick, sick, and in self-disgust we’re doing our best to destroy ourselves: the Bomb, poisoning-and-asphyxiation, social-collapse and starvation, what’ll it be?

And then again, so what? It don’t matter nohow … In fact, the collapse of Western civilization will be a blessing to the earth vastly greater even than the collapse of Rome, and that in its day was a blessing beyond compare.

The point I want to come back to is, what in the name-of-all-that’s-merciful do I hope to achieve, what do I imagine I’m doing, hanging a row of daubed sheets of canvas on the walls of an elegant salon in this doomed putrescent shitheap of a city, then sending invitations out to those scum-of-the-earth, the art-intelligentsia, to come and gawk at the mess I’ve made?

Precious-fucking-little. I am utterly pessimistic about the prospect of any event within the teacup-whirlpool that is the Australian artworld having any effect, good or ill, on anything whatsoever. However deftly one might deploy one’s alleged aesthetic sensibilities, the fact remains that in utilising the existent art-vending machinery one is barking up the wrong tree entirely. Nor does any ‘right tree’ exist, at least as yet. The only earthly present use for the artist’s imagination is in devising social circumstances, and means and methods of communication that will combine to create a ‘meaningful’ human situation. What ‘meaningful’ means, don’t ask me – but we have all experienced isolated, usually happenchance events where some normally-moribund artform has sprung into sizzling life: a song sung at a fireside by an amateur guitarist, which combined with the flickering shadows and awesome background silence to strike joy or holy terror deep into one’s heart; a street-poster pasted-up at clandestine mid-night which by morning light is a flash of brilliance against the peeling paint of a factory wall … a poem or speech at an impromptu meeting which fills one with indignation and lust-for-action against some injustice … a Bob Dylan verse heard above the din of a riotous party … a room that has been made into such a warmly human environment that artefacts such as pottery, furniture, even paintings can ‘live’ there without appearing to be mere status-symbols, and are freed to deliver up their messages of utility or philosophy as they were meant to.

If an art-form doesn’t ‘live’ in this human-environmental sense, then it is meaningless, and dead, and the best thing to do is to bury it. We have a lot of burying to do: 99% or more of our culture is stillborn, never having even been intended by its makers to have life-abundance but merely to serve as a distraction from, a decoration to, a justification for, a way-of-life that is leading us nowhere, or to hell.

The first step for artists should be to despecialise themselves, so that they are no longer dependent on any one type of communication machinery (art-gallery, publishing-house, cinema, etc.) nor moulded by its inherent limitations or corruptions into a crippled stance.

The notion that one was ‘meant to be’ a painter rather than a writer, musician, philosopher, scientist or politician is a self-perpetuating cultural hypnosis. The only valuable quality any of these types of people have, is not their special skills, but their acute awareness of the world and what it’s about: if this awareness is genuinely present it only takes time and work to develop the skill needed to translate it into any medium or activity.

Anyone with a brain in his head can write; anyone with soul can play music if he tries; and everyone should develop political-philosophic-scientific understanding and integrate it with his activities.

So: this precious exhibition of mine, what does it represent?

An exercise, in de-specialisation, yes: but still so coloured by its art-worldliness as to make it nearly worthless as a human experience, except perhaps in a very negative sense.

Implicit in the act of painting is the expectation that it will be exhibited once or twice, and there-after either put in a cupboard to rot, or displayed in someone’s lounge-room, or in a public collection if it’s incredibly lucky. This is what actually happens: so it goes.

What have I to say to anyone within such an environmental context?

Certainly nothing to the cupboard, nothing to most people’s lounge-rooms, and nothing to the gallery-going jet-set. Nothing, that is, except DOODLY-DAH, and YAM, and HOO-HAA, and GRUNK … and fiddle-twiddle with the brush, and scribble-scribble, and humm, that looks quite nice there, and I’ll just slosh a little bit of red stuff on there, and any colour will do for there, it’s all the goddam same … within the context of the art-world, I don’t know what to think, I don’t know what to do or say, except: WHAT-THE-HELL ARE YOU PEOPLE DOING IN AN ART-GALLERY ANYWAY?? IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR ART YOU WON’T FIND IT HERE. You might as well hope to find religion in a church, health in a pill-bottle, youth in a jar of cosmetics, or true-love in a brothel.

A few of the paintings have ended up despite themselves looking as though they mean something or other, or are trying to. Well fancy that. And so what. And big-deal. Forget it. It wasn’t what I meant to say, anyhow.

You and I, we’re a row of dummies in strait-jackets in a dungeon. And what have dummies in strait-jackets to say to each other? Nothing much except, let’s get the hell outa here. And that’s what I’m saying to you now.

We have grown so used to constraint that we have forgotten that it’s possible to be free, that there’s a whole world outside our dungeon-cell, and outside that again a whole universe, and outside that who knows what? We have forgotten that art isn’t some special condiment you splash on life to make it taste a little better: – if it’s anything at all, its everything there is, or was or will be, everything that a person can do, think or say to another. It’s a way of living and thinking, a way for me to transmit to you the totality of my being and for you to transmit your totality to me.

But that’s not the way we use it.

I see modern art generally as the first strivings of a healthy consciousness; but hundred of years will probably have to pass before it has evolved into any-thing worth pissing on.

It won’t evolve by the efforts of artists slugging away manfully at artistic problems, because artistic problems don’t exist as such: they are merely mental blocks created by absurdities of our social condition. Artists should forget about art a little and start wondering about what they were born onto the earth for, where they stand in relation to everything that’s happening in this world, whether what they are doing is as meaningful in a total sense as, say, planting a row of beans or cabbages, building a chicken-coop, or going for a walk in the bush.

Does one really enjoy art, or is it just another rat-race? A truthful answer to this question should in the end produce some positive results, but it’s unlikely that they’ll take the form of anything we now recognise as art – except sometimes.

Painting pictures is O.K., people were painting pictures before the Flood, and probably they’ll still be doing it when the moon falls to earth. But painting pictures isn’t the problem: first we have to revolutionize the world, and that’s a tall-order, a long nearly-hopeless task.

SMASH U.S. IMPERIALISM

DOWN WITH EVERYTHING

CAPITALISM IS A FAT MAN EATING A THIN ONE

ORDER = CHAOS

EVERYTHING = NOTHING

WE ARE NONEXISTENT VIBRATIONS IN A FORMLESS SEA OF NAMELESS GUNK

EVERYTHING’S ALL RIGHT JUST AS IT IS

IT DON’T MATTER, NOHOW; and/or SO IT GOES.