Brief Encounters With [the art work of] Hideous Liberal Men #3: Paul Chan Special Edition, by Adam Lehrer
Adam Lehrer encounters the new drawing by liberal artist Paul Chan and finds that there's little more to say on these issues that he hasn't said before
This is a society which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself and thereby feels absolved from the duty to examine, demonstrate, or justify (let alone prove) the validity of its outspoken and tacit assumptions. – Zygmunt Bauman
I really loathe vulgarity, so common
Your disgraceful cellulitis
You'll never be the same again, you fucking stereotype – William Bennett
Thank fucking god for Paul Chan. Lord, bless this man, this radical artist, for his courage and his convictions. If you’re real Lord, wrap this revolutionary truth teller in your heavenly glow and guide him with your infinite wisdom. Chan, may you lead us, may you set us free!
I joke of course. Paul Chan’s new exhibition at Greene Naftali, A Drawing as a Recording of an Insurrection, is a shocking new low in the contemporary art world’s commitment to espousing left libtard propaganda. Debuting on January 6, the one year anniversary of the FBI-engineered simulacra “riots” at the Capitol, Chan’s new drawing (yes, there’s only ONE drawing in the entire exhibition) strikes a pantomimed mournful tone as it renders images of the “insurrection” in monochrome with literary license applied to the additions of both the sun and the moon depicted in heartfelt tears over the alleged tragedy unfolding on the world below it. If anything, the imagery is at least a useful metaphor for the narcissism that shapes the libtard’s political worldview. While hardly anyone other than he cares about the fraudulent insurrection in question, the libtard is so buried beneath the totalizing forces of his contradictory ideology that he feels the universe and the cosmos agree with him and lament with him the “loss” of American “democracy”. Paul, I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you need to get the fuck over yourself.
The wildly out of touch content of the artwork is only one of the many levels of depth in this potent artistic statement. See, it’s not just that Chan has the bravery to politically align himself with MSNBC and shrill feminist Elizabeth Warren supporters on Twitter – no, Chan takes it a step further into the realm of direct political action! He’s out here, doing the real work! That is, coinciding with the exhibition opening, the gallery sent out press releases that mimicked the political donation requests made by Democratic Party politicians (thanks to the political cowardice and betrayal of ol’ Bernie Sanders, who I volunteered for during both 2016 and 2020, I get these requests all of the time, even though I hardly vote and when I do, it’s usually for Republicans). In what I can only imagine was some kind of a case of totally collapsed judgment, the gallery constructed a stunt in which art world affiliates received a text message from an 862 number designed to look like it was being sent by the team of Speaker Pelosi:
“It’s Nancy Pelosi, I’m in disbelief,” says the text message. “Tomorrow is the anniversary of the violent, deadly insurrection on our nation’s Capitol, and several reports show REPUBLICANS SURGING in the run-up the midterms.”
I momentarily hoped that the text message was a spoof on the DNC’s fundraising tactics, but was quickly burnt once more when I realized that the entire exhibition was indeed one designed as a pledge of allegiance to the Democratic Party. But it gets worse: at the opening reception of the exhibition, the gallery held a (likely illegal) voter registration drive. It was like any voter registration drive, other than the fact that you weren’t being asked by some government employee whether you’d like to register as a Democrat, Republican or Independent voter. At this very special and artistic voting drive, there was only one option being offered to you by the gallery’s (surely embarrassed) employees: live Democrat or die.
Some might feign surprise that Chan, an artist who has prided himself on his fluency with analytic philosophy (Drawings for Word Book by Luddwig Wittgenstein, 2020) and transgressive literature (Sade for Sade’s Sake, 2009), would have such a stereotypically urban liberal hysteric and reality-divorced political viewpoint. The Counter-Agents amongst us, however, saw through Chan’s intellectual veneer years before it collapsed beneath the weight of the Capitol riots.
There’s a certain kind of academia-fried petty bourgeois knowledge worker. They come from middle class backgrounds, and often enter into humanities departments. While they absorb countless works of literature, philosophy, and history, they do so as compelled by the need to succeed in academia, the media, or one ISA or another. It doesn’t matter what these types read. All that text will only fuel an inherently and repugnantly conformist mindset. These “types” can consume texts as unrelated as Nietzsche, Junger or Burroughs, extrapolate from them specific concepts that all inevitably fuel the singular mantra: VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO. The leftist influencers of Youtube, largely known on the Internet as BREADTUBE (a loosely affiliated army of reductive libtards, one of whom is PhilosophyTube who was recently outed by Max Blumenthal and Kit Klarenberg as a paid asset of MI6), have turned this tendency into a whole cottage industry. Any video by the infamous Contrapoints can reference several complex philosophical texts and apply them to that very simplistic political end.
It’s shocking the extent to which a faction of the art world can be understood as little more than a glorified and intellectualized mirror image to the political tendencies within that Youtube niche. Paul Chan, with all his academic posturing and citing of seemingly intriguing and even dark philosophers, novelists and outsider artists, is a prime example of these dull and obvious political limitations. Chan’s performance series, Waiting for Godot in New Orleans from 2007, is indicative of the problems that have always plagued Chan’s work. The artist appropriates a classic modernist literary work with vast theological, philosophical, psychological, existential and sexual interpretations and reduces that thematic breadth to one that can square with the liberal do-gooder fetish of the day. Now, that’s not to say that Hurricane Katrina wasn’t a colossal political outrage and ecological disaster unworthy of artistic and philosophical excavation, it’s that Chan vulgarizes both the material that he appropriates AND the political news that he shines a light on, reducing all to mere branding for his overpriced and overrated art work. Everything, absent rigorous criticality that ruthlessly addresses all of society’s contradictions and not just the political aisle that the artist himself votes against, becomes propagandistic, obvious, and ridiculous.
Still, I can’t help but find myself a bit shocked by the extent to which Chan has collapsed his credibility with this lousy drawing and the sickening marketing that led up to its exhibition. I’ve heard from a follower of mine that wrote a thesis on Chan that the artist’s work has plummeted in value and cultural import over the last eight years, and though I lack the desire to run the data through the Agency’s programs to verify that information, I’ll say it wouldn’t surprise me. The A Drawing as a Recording of an Insurrection stunt is so obvious, so stupid, and so brain numbingly bad I almost didn’t want to even write this takedown (I’m in the process of writing several texts at once, so the entire exhibition ended up feeling like a chore to me). It was just over eight months ago that I ridiculed Wade Guyton for making similarly reductive political sentiments in his work, and Chan has gone so much further into the abyss of abject cringe than Guyton’s more muted work ever did. But alas, I wouldn’t be doing my due diligence if I was to forgo driving the proverbial stake into this shitstorm of art world idiocy, now would I? The Counter-Agency’s duties of demystification never end.
What the fuck is wrong with these people? These art world elites, with their absurd and out-of-touch viewpoints? They’ve joyously lauded the devolution of America into a Big Pharma totalitarian nightmare in the wake of the Covid psyop, but clutch at their Trump Derangement Syndrome over a year after the Donald’s exit from office like it’s the most expensive set of pearls they’ll ever own. Does anyone really, in their hearts, believe January 6 amounted to anything resembling an insurrection? Do they not see the obvious contradiction in calling Trump voters upset about an unfair election result Nazis and terrorists while endlessly making excuses for Antifa and BLM protesters burning cities to the ground for an entire summer throughout 2020? But, as Glenn Greenwald recently wrote: “Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.”
The art world is too a center of economic and political power, and its past-their-prime libtard artists will often exploit these political events to jumpstart their careers. My god though, how much further from radical art could this Chan project be? How could anyone with genuine political commitments from any side of the aisle take something so obviously aligned with the exploitative power of the left side of capital seriously? Silver lining here is that seemingly no one does. Chan’s embrace of political cringe hasn’t just been dismissed by and laughed at by the usual suspects — my comrade and friend Mathieu Malouf unsurprisingly staged a delightful bit of dada agitprop performance art on Instagram in lieu of Chan’s exhibition — but by those who until recently failed to see the writing on the wall in front of them. Many people have reached out to me to lament the heinous absurdity of A Drawing as a Recording of an Insurrection and for some of them an important lesson has been learned from it: the left is the vehicle of exploitation in America and the art world occupies space within that vehicle.
Signing off.
IMAGES:
1. Paul Chan A Drawing as a Recording of an Insurrection
2. Paul Chan Sade for Sade’s Sake
3. Paul Chan Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
4. Mathieu Malouf’s Instagram posts