I am reluctant to simply abandon putting up posts on this blog but I’m also increasingly uncertain as to just what purpose I think doing so actually serves? Originally, I felt I was addressing myself to an audience of, broadly speaking, kindred spirits – artists and those interested in practices like deep mapping – so that the issue of “purpose’ wasn’t a problem.
Today I am far less sure that I have anything of value to say to that constituency or that it’s even plausible to assume the existence of such a constituency. In part that’s because both the “art world” and I have moved on since I began this blog. In part because my own concerns, which are now increasingly animated by a relational view of the world, make it difficult to take “art” as a legitimately singular preoccupation, something that can be addressed as if it is somehow isolated from a whole host of relevant contexts “outside” the cultural sphere. And yet I remain concerned with both visual and poetic aesthetics and with the ways in which they provide a necessary counterpoint to the horrors of our age.
Horrors at one level typified by the “necro-economics” discussed by Eyal Weizman in his article of that name in the November 5th edition of the London Review of Books. An article that, for example, tells me that the Pentagon originally named the software used to estimate the likely number of deaths caused by any US air strike “BugSplat’. An article that sets out the calculative logistics that underwrite the Israeli Government’s genocide in Gaza. A computerised logistics that means that, because a bakery near a Hamas base ‘will have a phone full of contacts who are Hamas operatives’, and that ‘this is enough to authorise their killing, along with their entire families’. That as part of this computerised logistics, Israeli intelligence also has a system called “Where’s Daddy?” that allows it to listen to ‘conversations between family members, including a targeted person’s children, happy that their father is home’. A technology that allows the remote killers employing drones to ‘listen to the everyday conversations of the people they are about to kill, and later to the moans and screams of the injured’. The language alone signals a profound disconnect, a chronic failure of empathetic imagination, that is deeply chilling.
I find it difficult enough to comprehend that any Nation State, even one as intent on fostering a deeply paranoid mentality as that of the late Israeli government, could indulge in these, and all its other carefully calculated, genocidal actions. But that numerous other State governments, most obviously that of the USA under Trump, but also the current British government, can condone all this, for example arguing that pro-Palestinian activists are “terrorists”, I find too nauseating to engage with. And this continues unprotected, let alone unchecked, while the Israeli State authorises military action against the Palestinian community as a whole due to the death of two Israeli soldiers in the occupied West Bank while, simultaneously, having long encouraged armed, and illegally settled, Jewish farmers to terrorise and murder members of that same population.
In the past I have tried to make art work that speaks to all this obliquely, that being the only way I could manage to do it , most obviously by drawing attention to the work of the Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s resistance to the unholy wedding of US-Israeli interests. But today such an indirect approach seems about as useful as pissing into the wind. I will continue to write on topics of concern to artists in specific contexts. namely those where I see how what I write might serve some useful purpose. But to do so here now involves making assumptions about a context of trust, goodwill, and shared concern in art making, that I no longer feel able to make.