A short text by Icteric founder Ron Hunt. 'The Arts in our Time' was handed out in the bustling Newcastle Haymarket two months prior to the May 1968 uprising in France.
THE ARTS IN OUR TIME
THE ARTS IN OUR TIME
THE ARTS IN OUR TIME
A WORKING DEFINITION
The Arts in our time are nothing but a distraction - encouraged in order to prevent us understanding the shape of our reality and lives. They survive as part of the 'media' whose aim is to distract us from some essential facts - e.g. the polarisation of annihilative power; the permanent arms economy; the fact that peace is synonymous with the brink of war; that half can treat as waste (planned obsolescence) what could be nourishment for the other - starving - half. Also, that in the technologically advanced half we have become enslaved by a notion of rationality to the extent that we can no longer perceive the totally irrational framework within which this so-called rationality operates - (It is better that 500 men be killed in Vietnam rather than 1000. Today one can read in the papers of a French couple who committed suicide because they where unable to understand the complexities of taxation. Truly, our control over our lives becomes increasingly diminished.)
Within our society freedom exists only among styles - there is rarely a negative alternative offered. Now is the time to demand such alternatives - in negation lies our greatest possible hope. Abstract landscapes, objects, minimalism, 'theatre' of revolt, aleatorism, indeterminism etc. are merely styles -gimmicks to help the artist sell himself.
It is time now for the Great Refusal; to demand the end of repression exercised by the provision of the 'goods'; to reclaim life from the media; to insist on freedom as an absolute and negative ' 'Freedom from politics, freedom from economics, freedom from the mass persuaders' (H. Marcuse). Then perhaps art may re-enter life -as play, as celebration, as critique - but not this apology for life!
March 4 1968
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