artbrutifactica

a submission has been sitting rarely on my mons the last few months, from a sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn, who presents a philosophy of outsider art.  after discussing the work with some of my siblings in sadooity, i, fukky, have decided in consultation to post it on our sadoo management site, as it’s more than unprobable that there may be minimally some and occasional overlaps and linkages between sadoo ginveda’s concepts of outsider art and the myriad practices of sadoos, recognizing that, as always, i, fukky, make no claim to agree with the following thoughts as i make no claim to agree with anything.

outsider art

sadoo ginveda of raruraresasn

let me begin by saying i consider all true art outsider art.  while shakespeare, to use a classic case, may have had the capacity and conditions to appeal to the masses, his craft enabled him to mock his audiences without most of them realizing it or any of them being able to prove it.  which is why he kept his head.  a more obvious case:  although van gogh now hangs in the world’s most prestigious museums and commands some of the most expensive prices in the art world, the average citizen – and the very definition of citizen is average – would, in person, find van gogh challenging, boring, and probably impossible.  he painted from the outside – or we could say, to refer to mysticism – the inside:  the inside that most insiders avoid.  this avoidance puts them in the crowded inside, as to step truly into the inside is to to leave the crowd, enter the void and then, by the insiders, be experienced as an outsider … an experience that inevitably affects and sometimes kills (artaud’s notion of van gogh being suicide by society describes this process well) the true insider.

you will say – so let’s just acknowledge it at the outset – this inside-outside insider-outsider true-false stuff is binary and so false.  admittedly, binaries are always more nuanced in life and become polynaries.  yet this is not the point.  certain creators may be sufficiently oriented to multiple worlds so as to be able to move between them (i don’t speak of the common artist whose primary orientation is recognition and money but of those who manufacture something distinctive and powerful from their horrible freedom and vision).  look at a classic and relatively unknown outsider – vivian maier - whom the insiders refuse to accept to any significant degree although her photos are far more striking and original than many of those we see at most galleries.  what i speak of is art that arises from a human being gifted with sufficient vision and distance from society that it cannot help but disturb, provoke (or more commonly be ignored, mocked, misunderstood).

what i am saying is that art always arises from a lack of concern about what concerns most – comfort, reputation, security, prestige, remuneration, possession – and rather leaps into the voids of a self-world relationship and forms from that formlessness.  a great sadoo – laurie spiegel – removed herself from the music scene in the 1970s for this reason.

the movement from void to establishment is well known.  we see it tediously and catastrophically in religion (jesus to the vatican, lao tse to a daoist priesthood, the rig veda to lululemon), but the movement in art may be no less tragic.  we’re unlikely to have any establishment built based on pessoa’s the book of disquiet – part of the brilliance of the book is its devastating ability to subvert this possibility – but we see it in minor ways with artaud, jarry, blake, acker, weil and in major ways with various other names and works. 

the establishment does not adjudicate what is art.  it adjudicates what is acceptable for its purposes.  and the terms of acceptance are the same as any guild – whether it be scholarship, postal work, or politics – compromise, force, conformity.  that art makes it into the establishment is not due to any thanks to the establishment, which accepts anything that sufficiently pays once the cost in blood has been laundered.

of course, outsider art grew from dubuffet’s idea of art brut –

those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more worthy than the productions of professionals. after a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade.

what i’m advocating is what i call aesthetic mysticism or the hallucinogen arts as the root of all arts.  many sadoos have written about the former.  an academic such as philip wood has written from the scholarly voice about both.  the works of aloïse corbaz are vivid portraits of the imagination and the range of human experience – a unity of creativity, for she cured herself by ceasing to fight against her illness, by choosing to cultivate it and make use of it instead, a more powerful and effective way than those the scholarly and therapeutic industries offer.  to have a career as an artist – from formal education through the necessary grant-writing, networking and promotional verve – is antithetical to the creative spirit.  the void does not understand it.

society is tyrannical and selfish, made up with institutionalized virtue, fashioned with processed blood.  it takes the products creators have paid for, often with their lives, often with poverty, exile, and humiliation, and, laughingly, banks, sells, and buys them.  this is why the artist is the new saint – something nietzsche foreshadowed and those like pessoa, artaud and genet readily grasped and articulated. art brut of course has not only birthed the human world but is its continuous mother and society’s relentless disregard for it highlights a continued spiritual misogyny which modernity – regardless of its isms and readymade virtues – conveniently embraces in the emerging paternalistic egaliarchy.

there is no art that is not outsider art.  it only makes it to the inside – or, rather, from the inside of the inside to its outside – by transactional movements, movements many creators are unable, genetically, to make.

let us modify creators, then.  as is happening.  let us give them pills and money.  let us give them lovers and dental plans and tenure.  then art will have been purchased and god – the question – will have evolved into what may be its next necessary stage:  a networked glyph around the neck of the hip.

not just outsider art but outsider thought. not a museum without walls but museums without museums. not classrooms without walls – classrooms without classrooms. for outsider art transcends boundaries, originating without them and without them as part of the vision or process.

what i want to see is humans free to create what they want in ways they want, aside and apart from being told what is expected, tried, acceptable.  i would like to remove names from art and ensure everyone who wants to create receives a base minimum annual salary providing sufficiently for living needs and a few modest luxuries.  i want to see the art establishment crumble on its coddled ass.  i want all intermediaries removed between void and perceivers.  i want the selfish greedy tyrants of techno-capitalism to work on rice fields for five years.  i want a new species.  i want a new earth.  for i am not impressed with the one given me and see no reason i should conform to it.  it has become solid, arrogant, fixed, dogmatic, fiscal and objective.  you say it is the given, the pragmatic.  but we heard the same shit 500 years ago; its name was god.

i would live in dream.

i have sought poverty through excess as the available means of poverty did not seem to me to fit the spirits of the age.  whether i have achieved it or not – whether it is possible to achieve i don’t know – i don’t know, for in this process i also have come to doubt the difference between poverty and wealth.

i believe in a society in which all – and the all is contextually and ethically maintained at levels at which this is possible – have access to nutritious food, adequate and symbiotic shelter, playful and beneficial touch and sex, and healthy creative materials, tools, and environments, comradeship and community, all appropriate to individuals, groups, and species.

dear fukky

dear fukky,

i’ve travelled around the world many times, built successful careers, amassed great wealth and possessed countless lovers, raised successful and well-adjusted children, and won the booker and pulitzer prizes for my fiction and poetry.  i’m now thinking of becoming a sadoo.  do you have any advice for me?

jaruna

dear jaruna,

advice seems unnatural for sadoos; we by nature are born into avolition and indecision and thus any advice not only spontaneously and inexorably calls forth its opposite, but its myriad partially overlapping possibilities.

let me say this another way.  there are many professions that are difficult and every profession includes its fair share of difficulties. sadooing is different. sadooing is impossible. how does one provide advice about the impossible? perhaps we could speculate that the best art is primarily about this – the impossible – but the best art is what it is by avoiding advice.

look at our ostensible namesakes – sadhus.  while they’ve lost a certain credibility in modernity, at least among swaths of urban sophisticates, they still generate substantial respect, emerge from hinduism, a recognizable and ancient tradition, and – at around 5,000,000 – participate in a large and often cohesive community.

but sadoos! we have never even gained credibility in order to lose it. being unseen as what we are, we generate neither mockery nor respect. unable to belong to any tradition – sadooing is a word, like dao or god, that is a gross compromise – it flounders, lost, indifferent, polypolar, drowning in the refuse, trapped in the weeds, in unmapped moats around time, emergent from nothing. its community is dispersed without ever having been gathered – have sadoos even met one another let alone themselves? the do in sadoo is a mockery! – sadoos don’t do; at most, being in bodies, they necessarily doo. they are not sea-doos or ski-doos, they are sad-doos – hardly depressive in that reductionistic and fragmented western clinical sense, but desolate and solitary in those other senses.

sadoos are undeveloped and experience undevelopment as a form of development. they wander not to or from or through or even of but wander. would you be this thing you cannot be? would you become what is an unbecoming?

soft and empty regards,

fukky

an unjustified work of justification

those who protest – particularly those who protest without an object, such as the majority of sadoos – have frequent need to justify themselves. to whom? to themselves? to some inhuman energy? there is no whom, not even an autowhom.  they just feel the need to justify.  not that such justification has any purpose, audience, or payback.  you could view it as a hobby of sorts, with little need for affirmation other than the doing of the hobby itself.

not infrequently, i, fukky, receive submissions from sadoos around the world containing such justifications and occasionally – based on whim and the market price of aubergines – i include some.  today i’m pleased to include a piece submitted by sadoo ledlpoo some years ago and misplaced, who communicates with us from the region of vidange in the republic of wolfless, justifying.

an unjustified work of justification

by sadoo ledlpoo

recently, as happens from time to time with most sadoos, i questioned my existence and the general and specific stupidity of it.  what an inane occupation i have, i say to myself.  no one’s heard of it, no one knows what it is, i don’t know what it is, the very definition of it is to not know what it is.  yet here i am.  i’ve tried to be many other things and all of them have failed.  i was very good at many of them and could possibly have been renowned in 2 or 3 of them but to succeed there has to be an energy, a collaboration, between the environment and the singularity that enables success.  i never felt that collaborative energy until i became a sadoo.

that’s because there’s no environment to deny or affirm you, an evil voice says.

that’s not true, i reply.  the environment is the world.

the world!, the evil voice snorts. who goes and works for the world? you’re just an autistic solipsistic narcissistic sociopath.

maybe. but a lot of people i met in business and the academy were those too.

at least they made money and had careers.

not having to worry about money is, i admit, desirable. but a career i never understood.  what i like about being a sadoo is that there’s no goal, no line, no advancement or demotion, no annual review, no conventions and politics to follow and negotiate, none of the silly social scrimmage and promotion necessary in everything from a convent to an ngo to a brokerage house.

in particular, i realized when i was called to be a sadoo that i was to devote my life to experimenting with developing a practice of madness – of reasoned unreason. why this? i began realizing in my second decade of experimentation that this was to potentially contribute to an art that bridged the vast and harmful gap in our society between reason and unreason, sanity and insanity.  for in all the diversity claims and progresses in our culture – valid and necessary as they presumably are – we may be regressing in psychic diversity, with increasing bifurcation between the powerful educated classes determining what is normal and an underclass of taxonomized categorized clinicized individuals.  whereas i have seen no evidence that the former is any less clinicizable than the latter – only that the former build and maintain power over the statements that circumscribe most lives.  my practice is an embodied protest against this privilege.

pious fucker, aren’t you, the evil voice says.

maybe.  it’s a crapshoot.  i may be misguided.  i may fail, though failure and success, good and evil, yes and no – all these value binaries – aren’t normally part of a sadoo’s vision.  i’m not out to change society or to target specific individuals.  i began developing this practice long before i had opted out from conventional society.  it was as i developed the practice that i found i was not only opting out, i was being opted out.  my practice was incompatible with those worlds as i would have had to side with a side.  there are academics of course who side with people such as myself but, worthwhile though this may sometimes be, i find the siding problematic.  they want to have their cake – privilege and defining – and eat it too – appearing to be empathic toward those who aren’t in the privilege and defining game.  there needs to be an embodied cost to one’s position and the stereotypical academic position of having a lifestyle on the right and a discourse on the left has always struck me as contributing to the bifurcation, as a gross hypocrisy which tenure and the lickspittling masses monolithically maintain.

so you're just opting out.

i don’t think i’m opting out.  protest – even through the silence of a desert father or mother against growing institutional christianity – may have its merits. and who’s to determine this.  it may, it may not.

i think you’re crazy.

naturally.  thank you.

my practice has demanded anonymity or at least heteronymity or patanymity and embodiment and has resulted in relative poverty, obscurity, loneliness, and a range of engaging and occasionally debilitating struggles. that seems to be expected.  i try to record at least some of the results of my now 25-year-long experimenting in forms appropriate to the source sensations, in dialogue with myriad traditions across time, space and disciplines but without much regard for protocol or status.  if many of them are fairly raw, fragmentary, undeveloped, i feel that the practice thus far has withheld the possibility of pulling my research into anything resembling a finished book, a system, a product.  the internet is the perfect venue for these publications and i thank fukky for facilitating this blog. i hardly aim for any unity or enlightenment – neither of which i believe exists … i don’t aim.  i place my body in a certain situation of not-knowing and record the sensations that occur.  this situation i sometimes call polypolarity and it is my practice as a sadoo.

unjustified justifying

those who protest – particularly those who protest without an object, such as the majority of sadoos – have frequent need to justify themselves. to whom? to themselves? to some inhuman energy? there is no whom, not even an autowhom.  they just feel the need to justify.  not that such justification has any purpose, audience, or payback.  you could view it as a hobby of sorts, with little need for affirmation other than the doing of the hobby itself.

not infrequently, i, fukky, receive submissions from sadoos around the world containing such justifications and occasionally – based on whim and the market price of aubergines – i include some.  today i’m pleased to include a piece submitted by sadoo ledlpoo some years ago and misplaced, who communicates with us from the region of vidange in the republic of wolfless, justifying.

an unjustified work of justification

by sadoo ledlpoo

recently, as happens from time to time with most sadoos, i questioned my existence and the general and specific stupidity of it.  what an inane occupation i have, i say to myself.  no one’s heard of it, no one knows what it is, i don’t know what it is, the very definition of it is to not know what it is.  yet here i am.  i’ve tried to be many other things and all of them have failed.  i was very good at many of them and could possibly have been renowned in 2 or 3 but to succeed there has to be an energy, a collaboration, between the environment and the singularity that enables success.  i never felt that collaborative energy until i became a sadoo.

that’s because there’s no environment to deny or affirm you, an evil voice says.

that’s not true, i reply.  the environment is the world.

the world!, the evil voice snorts. who goes and works for the world? you’re just an autistic solipsistic narcissistic sociopath.

maybe. but a lot of people i met in business and the academy were those too.

at least they made money and had careers.

not having to worry about money is, i admit, desirable. but a career i never understood.  what i like about being a sadoo is that there’s no goal, no line, no advancement or demotion, no annual review, no conventions and politics to follow and negotiate, none of the silly social scrimmage and promotion necessary in everything from a convent to an ngo to a brokerage house.

in particular, i realized when i was called to be a sadoo that i was to devote my life to experimenting with developing a practice of madness – of reasoned unreason. why this? i began realizing in my second decade of experimentation that this was to potentially contribute to an art that bridged the vast and harmful gap in our society between reason and unreason, sanity and insanity.  for in all the diversity claims and progresses in our culture – valid and necessary as they presumably are – we may be regressing in psychic diversity, with increasing bifurcation between the powerful educated classes determining what is normal and an underclass of taxonomized categorized clinicized individuals.  whereas i have seen no evidence that the former is any less clinicizable than the latter – only that the former build and maintain power over the statements that circumscribe most lives.  my practice is an embodied protest against this privilege.

pious fucker, aren’t you, the evil voice says.

maybe.  it’s a crapshoot.  i may be misguided.  i may fail, though failure and success, good and evil, yes and no – all these value binaries – aren’t normally part of a sadoo’s vision.  i’m not out to change society or to target specific individuals.  i began developing this practice long before i had opted out from conventional society.  it was as i developed the practice that i found i was not only opting out, i was being opted out.  my practice was incompatible with those worlds as i would have had to side with a side.  there are academics and others of course who side with people such as myself but, worthwhile though this may sometimes be, i find the siding problematic.  they want to have their cake – privilege and defining – and eat it too – appearing to be empathic toward those who aren’t in the privilege and defining game.  there needs to be an embodied cost to one’s position and the stereotypical academic position of having a lifestyle on the right and a discourse on the left has always struck me as contributing to the bifurcation, as a gross hypocrisy which tenure and the lickspittling masses monolithically maintain.

so you're just opting out.

i don’t think so necessarily.  protest – even through the silence of a desert father or mother against growing institutional christianity – may have its merits. and who’s to determine this? it may, it may not. the voices of the margins and deserts and voids have value to me and mainstream society's relentless lust to normalize, monetize, and clinicize that which doesn't fit ... as mixter jarry says - merdre.

you’re crazy.

naturally.  thank you.

my practice has demanded anonymity or at least heteronymity or ‘patanymity and embodiment and has resulted in relative poverty, obscurity, loneliness, and a range of engaging and occasionally debilitating struggles. that seems to be expected.  i try to record at least some of the results of my now 25-year-long experimenting in forms appropriate to the source sensations, in dialogue with myriad traditions across time, space and disciplines but without much regard for protocol or status.  if many of them are fairly raw, fragmentary, undeveloped, i feel that the practice thus far has withheld the possibility of pulling my research into anything resembling a finished book, a system, a product.  the internet is the perfect venue for these publications and i thank fukky for facilitating this blog. i hardly aim for any unity or enlightenment – neither of which i believe exists … i don’t aim:  rather, i place my body in a certain situation of not-knowing and record the sensations that occur.  this situation i sometimes call polypolarity and it is my practice as a sadoo.

aero floroj

sadoo presents itself to me as a word, a lifestyle, a vocation, a meaning, a hope, a turning and returning, a de-hope – a religious word and presence.  now i would not start a religion, i would not begin a new formality of ascetics:  vows and robes and prayers and rules.  the world has had enough religion.  it has had sufficient formalities.  and yet, being dissatisfied with both religion and world, with god and humanity, with temple and mall, with spirit and money, i seek another way and i call this way sadoo.

fukky has explored elsewhere the morphemic attributes of sadoo – its relation to sadhu, its doo and sad and adoo.  these are not for here.  here is for expressing sadoo as a way of religion that decreates religion, a way of god that kills god, a way of asceticism that revels in sensuality, a way of vows that knows no vows, a path of humanity that is inhumanity, a techno-orgy that sets aside technology, a deep ecology that is neither deep nor ecological, and a sensuous secularism that is also a mystic spirituality.  for while fukky hardly admires any infantile projections inherent in past gods, any tyrannies inherent in ecclesiastical institutions and rites, it hardly thinks their replacements are any better!  look!  infantile projections inherent in present people and things!  tyrannies inherent in institutions and rites of knowledge, law, governance, business! commercial priests of the psyche replacing commercial priests of divinity!  and, presently, with over 7.4 billion humans and almost each one wanting it all and wanting it now, how can we call anything past or present or planned anything we might respect or want to be?  children!  why be so constrained by the crush of convention when in the human, somewhere, clearly, another crush arises like a vision of a flower in the air?

while sadoos aren’t a consensual bunch, while they avoid committees and protests and parliaments, while – even if talented at policy – they sidestep policy, statements, manifestos, laws, accords (except at times for play and subterfuge), various themes emerge as not uncommon among them though rarely if ever would any one agree to all or even fully with any.  ideas are feelings and i am the universe and the universe, like all things, hides.

• the societal and cultural structures humans presently live within may be necessary as controls and outlets for our historic and present situation, even as war and factories and pollution and abuse and boredom may be necessary, but through this necessity they unduly are oriented toward primitive modes of existence that hardly favour sadooing.
• while the human at its extremes excels at certain activities that non-humans do not, non-humans also excel at certain activities that humans do not.  sadoos see no reason the human has any privileged position to assume it can use whatever powers it might have to remove the powers another human or non-human might have.  the human is just a particular configuration of contextual possibility, and so sadoos are oriented to learning the languages of many things, to listening to clouds and night as readily as art or news.
• there are presently too many humans on the earth and too many of these want too many things.  while clearly related to the bullets above and below, it still needs to be said.
• oriented to play, sensation, absurdity, decreation, emptiness, subversion – while not denying seriousness and those other things – a sadoo wanders in wandering and wandering is what it wanders in and a sadoo moves.
• the sadoo can be a daoist, ecologist, buddhist, yogi, cyclist, artist, pastafarian, pataphysicist, ice cube maker, but it is harder for a sadoo to be a capitalist, humanist, or scholar.
• all environments exist in the soul and sadoos, while they may specialize in various environments, are curious about them all.
• a sadoo might sing on the toilet and shit in the choir, but this only has meaning for those who don’t.
• a sadoo is made of eyes.  it walks on eyes and sleeps on eyes and counts eyes, and counting’s never done.
• sadoos are addicts, but to everything and so in this everything become sadoos and sadoo becoming.

this is what fukky has to say about sadooing until the next time sadooing has something to say.

fukky speaks a little of bio-music

Today, i, Fukky, self-proclaimed administrator of communities of sadoos, some speaking Esperanto, some in chains, some high, many barely of this world, this world of simian celebrations and judicial seriousness, dumps dumps and shares this with the world.

Let sadoos everywhere do doo-doo likewise.

And also today we welcome Manfred L. Eaton into our community.  Thanks, Manfred, for your contributions to sadooing.  May we all speak only Esperanto and bio-music, and the rest of the time shut our silly mouths.

sadooing

Fukky's always happy to share excerpts of sadoo communications. This week, some selections from recent sadoo missives about the art and aimlessness of sadooing.

the common human thinks my life and thoughts strange, but my orientations are simple and reasonable:  i aim to exist as little as possible in the ostensibly normal worlds – the worlds of money, society, ambition, pleasure – in order to make myself wholly available for sensations to manifest in me, which i then translate into words, attempting to mold the form and content of those words precisely into the experiences of the sensations.  thus much of my life is waiting, experiencing, translating, molding.  i wish to leave behind records of the sensations of a life.  this is my experiment and why your names and prizes have never held much interest for me, for these often seem to have more to do with conformity than creativity, middlingness than talent, blind repetition than unbounded experimentation.

words for a sadoo have less to do with meaning and more with sound and sensation; they are natural expressions of particular modes rather than expressions of utility, beauty, or concept.  so a sadoo lives, breathes, and words – and no more meaning is to be imparted to one of these activities than any other.  that humans typically associate breath with life and words with cognition, analysis, and meaning is odd to the sadoo.  fish swim, birds fly and chirp, humans talk – language is just the sound humans make.  so a sadoo who writes sees its experience of writing as making natural sounds and feels no need to conform its word choices, its grammatical and syntactical structures, its cognitive and narrative flows, to any societal or aesthetic convention but only to its modes in the world at the time of writing.  truth is as far from language as it is from potatoes.

if my writing as a sadoo seems strange to the normally enculturated citizen, this may be in part only because the normally enculturated citizen seems most strange to the sadoo and – being born into this world and being forced to some extent to have to negotiate with its extremely odd customs and proclivities, so often unquestioned, reified by the average human – so its sensations will not infrequently deal with its movements through the comedies and horrors of the barbarisms, absurdities, tyrannies, and infantilities of the dominant and frequently assumed human conventions, values, mores, and grammars.

so death is often central for a sadoo, hardly from any morbidity but due to the heavy disjunctures it must embody to live inescapably in an alien land and the weariness that comes from having to speak in foreign tongues and translate from its natural languages of joy and freedom into syntaxes and dictions that feel caged, regressive, small.  yet since i have seen the thousand disguises on your tyrannies, i devote as little energy as possible to you.  i do not care to be understood.

the bulk of citizenry are enculturated – this the slow incarcerating process of education – to conform their patterns of thought and behavior to increase the likelihood of social functioning and maintenance of the economic order.  a sadoo has little investment in this functioning and maintaining and so doesn’t feel chained to expected ideas and lifestyles.  if this should leave sadoos rather melancholic and outcast, this isn’t because they envy the bulk, but only because they too, being housed in human form, enjoy some society, and yet must reconcile themselves to being primarily solitary, as freedom of expression and movement is more valuable to them than any arbitrary or enforced objectives of happiness, comfort, or pleasure.