Dangerous dreams, desires and denials: myth, manipulation, and psychic rape

Why we can't sleep at night

It's becoming increasingly clear that Western civilisation, and by default the global project of consumer capitalism, is based on deceptions and a fundamental insanity. Unlimited economic expansion in a world with finite resources is simply not possible.   Despite the efforts to conceal the suspect designs of marketing executives from contemporary media, more and more people are becoming aware of the unseen consequences of our actions.   We cannot enjoy cheap food in the supermarket without someone being exploited.   We cannot hoard wealth and resources without millions of others being deprived.   We cannot expect the formidable military industrial complex to just fade away and stop giving guns to African boys.

            Despite the fact that people are becoming aware of interconnectedness and the sticky swamp of global ethics, the news media continues to cling to the framework they've built for themselves.   Instead of exploring some of the obvious fallacies and hypocrisies of our society, they continue to package war and suffering for consumption in a way that prohibits empathy. In disorientating visual non-sequiturs, the nightly news cuts from the swiftly edited, normalised horrors of a suicide attack to the commercial break selling a new SUV or an 'improved' brand of deodorant.   Such is the investment in the reassuring authority of the television that the newspapers and evening news report on the actions and words of George W. Bush as if he was a perfectly sane and credible leader.   There's no one pointing out that he is cribbing speeches from Orwell and generally divorced from reality when he talks about terrorists who want 'global enslavement' or 'democracy on the march'.   Where is the voice shouting, "The emperor is not wearing any clothes!"  

            We believe passionately that art has a greater obligation than ever to examine the cracks in the foundation and façade of our society.   The corporate silence of journalism and the commercial endeavours of cinema make art the only domain where it is possible to speak openly about the difficult realities of our world. The freedom from editorial and commercial pressures allows art to hold up the mirror to society and behold the bloated visage.   More just a clinical mirror, art also holds the possibility of dreaming of a new order of things and has almost the only non commoditised arena left to share that vision in all it's utopian wonder.  

            When Heather first released Witness:AnAesthetic in 2001, some people were quick to criticise, saying, "political art is dead."   This was just before 9/11 and before the 'perpetual war' on terror. This was also at a time when art had become yet another hall of mirrors with the shocking or the explicit becoming the currency of the day. One of the problems in our society is that everything has become de-politicised in an effort to make us more complacent, pliable consumers.   To be 'political' has almost become a term of derision.   Politics has become just one sphere, with an increasingly de-motivated, demoralised, distracted, depressed western public barely able to rouse themselves from the wheel of consumption to vote, a right many have fought and died for.   But in reality everything we do has political implications.   We wear clothes from sweatshops, drive cars that kill millions by contributing to global warming, causing floods and hurricanes around the world, and we drink coffee from Ethiopian farmers living in squalor.   If we ceased to view politics as one area of interest, but rather the domain where we examine our relationship with society, with others, it would be a discipline where we become conscious of consequences.   If the news media did not relegate politics to the meagre and literal discussion of what politicians are doing, we would develop a new awareness of what it means to be a global citizen. Above all, the belief systems that create the tenuous conceptual scaffolding that underscore our actions and self-centred western lives must be questioned, must be analysed, in order that they may transform. This is exactly where art must stand, the last 'free zone', exactly where the media refuses to go for fear of loss of ratings, loss of advertising, loss of 'status quo'.  

            This drive to dismantle and reconstruct the paradigms of everyday orthodoxy, and the insistence on consequentiality is central to all of our work.   In Wargasm, we explore the consequences of accepting the 'othering' of human beings.   Once we perceive people as 'different' from ourselves, once we accept wholesale the illusions of nations and ethnic groups, then we are able to inflict violence, war and suffering on those who are 'not like us'.   We try to cover a vast terrain of difficult, but fundamental questions, from why do humans create groups and tribes, to why and how do we use these tribes to justify violence. Finally we ask if there is a connection between the perpetual war machine and the consumption of fictionalised violence on the movie screen.   These are basic and apriori questions that should be asked by the news media and each individual human being, but unfortunately the media has failed raise the questions, even as military spending exceeds $1 trillion per year.   The obvious question we sought to ask with pieces like Wargasm, was why is there no public outrage, in this age of 'democracy', why do we simply accept this deadly status quo as 'the way things are'?   Is it really 'human nature' or primal 'instinct' that drives us to destroy each other?   Or is the alarming increase in violence and war related to the way we see the world through the media, and the formidable machine that manufactures and distributes arms around the world?  

We firmly believe that the latter is the case.   Just as society has evolved through consciousness to reduce the omnipresence of slavery and racism, we believe that an examination of the foundations of societal paradigms, like identity through 'groups' and ultimately war, can be reduced and one day even abolished if we take a deep look at the reasons why they exist.   Art is arguably the last domain that allows this sort of direct examination to be shared with the public, the internet being a more abstract public, and literature having the distinction of bearing a more viral method of conceptual seeding.   Academic texts on the subject are many but they always carry the burden of exclusivity within their scholarly framework.   Indeed much of the logic laid out in Wargasm is derived from a myriad of academic sources, like Chris Hables Grey or Baudrillard, who are equally concerned about the monstrous war machine and it's technological development beyond human control or imagination.   But much of our work, and Wargasm in particular, is an attempt to re-package this sort of rigorous examination of paradigms in to a familiar and even digestible format of audio-video inundation.   Instead of intellectual colloquia on the subject of identity and violence, the subjects are rapidly transmitted in the form of movie trailers and MTV video style sequences.   The goal was to use the very forms that create the divisions and distractions that underpin the status quo, and to use these comfortable media to subvert the accepted thinking on the subject.  

Critical Societies represents a manifestation and distillation of the urgent impetus to examine the perilous thought structures that support and guide our global society.   It is a concentration of voices who recognise a similar discord and danger in the way society thinks and operates.   The series of shows opens for the public, a forum to question the basic tenets of our society.   It is a rare opportunity in this age of perpetual information to find the distance required to think or reflect on the philosophy of our lives.   By design, we have our faces glued to the screens and follow with interest the minutia of everyday life.   24-hour news means that we never get stories that look at the big picture.   So long as we are focused on the little pictures that flash before us at an increasing speed, we cannot recognise the thought prison that has been built all around us.   One of the supreme ironies of Bush's imposed democracy and freedom is that the societies that supposedly enjoy the most 'freedom' are in many ways the least critical.   In the United States, only 1/3 of the population exercises the right to vote and only recently has open criticism of the war policies become possible without the charge of being 'unpatriotic.'   The point is that each individual has an obligation to criticise our society.   This is the only hope of breaking the status quo and perhaps beginning to dream of a better way to live as human beings, in peace.   As artists, much though we love to immerse ourselves in the sublime, in the purely aesthetic, we feel compelled to work with the raw mud of imagery, myth, manipulation and psychic rape that is the modern media, the now global medium for our dangerous dreams, desires and denials. How can we sleep at night, when the waking world is a nightmare?