It was created to contrast with absolutism but became itself a dogma that stifled debate by dissolute relativism ad infinitum.
Deconstruction unpicks intense and expert stitching that is set, but it may be a permanent culture war weapon that can only be remembered as a specific cultural instrument to victimize and successfully attack Marxist-Leninism for Moscow and Beijing during the Cold War. So, is it a feature of the past only that its influence would remain locked into the past? Well, the Nietzsche model that deployed an attack on histories ‘March forward’ by the eternal return to repeat over and over may well have given the West a completely unique upgrade on social class (that overshadows the ‘superman issue’). This defines and breathes new life into the ‘rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer’ cliché, but crucially not in any such situation as Capitalism in crisis. Could it stabilize any global recession or depression without revolution! How? Because the part of eternal return is actually just another economic cycle that counterbalances a ‘Bear market with a Bull market’, and vice versa I But what this does mean is that only those who aren’t from the working and billionaire demographics are subjected to ‘mid-life economic crises’ that affect their fate. In other words, history does not offer working people the choice of revolt against the state etc, let alone change the rich, it only offers change for those most prone to income and status insecurity and thus ‘disadvantage’ — the middle-classes! I know, very crude analysis…. But it does tie in Class conflict and Nietzsche, social class and permanent deprivation or institutional wealth and privilege!
I hope this doesn’t completely ignore the ‘structuralist debate of the 60s, 70s and 80s, where relativism and the first initiatives of spin and deconstruction were first prized. But how else did Thatcherism attract such a wide demographic in the 80s but because she deconstructed the electorate and micro-managed the hegemony of the individual, the state and the economy that offered short term wealth for new shares or a purchasing of council houses in her privatisation campaign, but that actually barely transformed the permanent status of the rich or the poor (to put it crudely) when the economy ran-out of the public sector to sell, by 1989? Her game was up, and she left the Tories and PM Major having to clear up afterwards whilst surrounded by Thatcher’s loyalists still high on the fumes of ‘Monetarism’. Why is this important today? Because PM Sunak has had to clear-up the mess made by former ideologue leaders and charismatics who may have seemed bored with trivial day to day realities of post-Brexit, or unable to grapple with the realities of a global economic system without ‘Casino economic risk taking’!
The 1980s Western Cultural response to the Soviet Union actually imposed the ‘eternal return’ that didn’t mutate or evolve but front-lined the stunting of the medium of Painting by imprisoning it between the cage of Figurative or Abstract only! How? By making Painting as only decorative, derivative, or repetitive, but without any progressive value! But this short-sighted analysis was a tactic in a wider cultural conflict, but crucially symbiotically solidified Western Art rejecting and brutalising the ‘Soviet Painting system’ by pre-empting it by friendly fire against the Painting medium in the West. It was not originally a long-term position and failed to resolve what happens when you try to put a wild animal in an unlocked cage — it will break-out! Indeed, for over half a century the West had tried to pioneer its Modernist Painting, and now it felt that by the 1980s it could just ‘do a switch’? Making policy on the hoof? What did it think it could enforce? Containment of resistance? When would other Art media also experience a ‘crash’ too? We now recognise the pendulumic swing of culture as well as in the global economic cycle, where the Bull market and the Bear market self-regulate without any bucking of the market possible I What is the moral of this? You can’t make centralised radical agendas without acknowledging forces that transcend cynicism or ideology, but you can make limited impact on the short term!
A new phenomenon also has appeared to disturb the uneasy Art world, and that is the mutual sustainability of an acceptable status quo of a dual system of adversarial conflict (ironic isn’t it that the figurative and the abstract emerge here) that brings completely contrasting agendas to a mutually acceptable value! Now imposing this new order of ‘Woke and Reverse Woke’ offers diversity and radical opposition??!! The demand for the new and avant-garde has become too wary of the Law of diminishing returns that has degraded and rendered decadent the old formula of Western Art Colleges versus Factories of Eastern mass Soviet propaganda! The identity of the consumer has been reinvented to mean the viewer of Paintings, the producer and the purchaser, but it is the Art market not for contemporary Painting but for the highest bidder that was the first experiment on high status products that became a blue-print for ‘consumer cyber-attack by purchase’, that we now recognise as without boundaries that have moved from Oligarchs to private armies of hackers to destabilize or sure-up a business or a product! The demand for Russian Modernist Paintings was particularly acute before Brexit and was hard copy for future ‘purchase.
Painting as acts of individual free will exist today because of the tough love of Cold War antipathy towards Painters, who learnt the skill set of resistance against centralised and dogmatic imposition from TATT and have self-regulated in a way that no other Artist from any other media has had to! We are anti-tech and non-tech; we are free of ideological or military homogenizing, and we have decades of experience of resistance and a forum for free visual speech. We won’t however be able to fight your wars with Paint, but we may be able to significantly contribute to save us all from starting one I Why? Because we are the ‘Survivor medium’ and the more freedom to Paint that a community has is a measuring stick of how democratic our political system is! Why not upgrade to being Art victim community who have self-managed and self-regulated in adversity, but who could be a weathervane for all creatives or integrate with those who already are?
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