We, The Post Artists by Alex Bienstock
Art is excess, Post-Art is recess (a manifesto by artist Alex Bienstock)
Post-Art Meta-Manifesto
Post-Art is not Fluxus, Happenings, Conceptual, Post-Conceptual, Neo-Dada, Post-Internet, Alt-Lit, Alt-Crit or any other name. But it may have been these things before the names were invented. Once the names came to be, then they were not Post-Art. Post-Art can’t escape itself and is always after Art and happened because of Art. It is not Anti-Art and it just comes after Art because of certain things that have happened. You may think of someone, not because of their art activity, but because of their Post-Art activity.
Post-Art is also not Situational Art or Relational Art or any other name. It is also not what anyone else has ever called Post-Art, as of course others have thought of this name. Actual Post-Art would never be mentioned on a specifically intended art platform and would never be considered seriously or earnestly. Post-Art is too serious to be taken seriously. Post-Art has no references and no one has truly conceived of it in this way. Post-Art is a meta-manifesto because it paradoxically comes before the manifesto and thus is beyond the manifesto. It is a manifesto in quotations. Post-Art is actually Proto-Art and that’s what makes it revolutionary and beyond a name.
Post-Art understands meta-politics and is not under risk at this point, yet also knows apolitics is contradictory and a pseudo-concept. Anyone of any political persuasion can be a Post-Artist and it is not a proscription. It welcomes difference, but rather not cause harm. Post-Art is aware of all the mainstream, right, left, woke, alt-woke, fancy culture, folk culture and all political languages and since it is only a concept and joke theory-cum-dogmatic meta-manifesto, does not exist in the material world as a suffering human and cannot solve any problem.
Post-Artists are familiar with the idea of a Joke Band and apply it to other things. Post-Artists don’t know what taste even is because they know it is a pseudo-category. Just because you read some books with graphically pristine covers and listen to European music does not mean you are better than Low Brow Lawrence or Granola Gabriella. Post-Artists don’t care about careers, but they will take money because money helps them not die. Since they are Post-Artists, if they make money doing something else other than “art”, they are actually still selling.
One special quality of Post-Art is that it accepts and celebrates cringe and corniness and has no time for being “cool” or playing it “cool” – unless you’re intentionally doing it to be uncool, then it’s “cool”. The Post-Artist is interested in embarrassment and is not afraid to look dumb, poor, needy, or human. In fact, they revel in it.
Post-Artists know that everything is not art. Everything.
The Post-Artist sees galleries only as material that they sometimes can or want to use, but is not necessary.
The Post-Artist is not impressed by pedigree, money, laborious ambition, or skill – only ideas, attitude, seduction, compulsive will, and unfettered energy.
Special Interest Entertainment
Art with a capital A, the type that needs certain contexts outside of solipsistic and therapeutic reflection follows a certain path to realize itself. That place is regulated and heavily networked and takes time to fulfill. That network and system is social, sexual, economic, bureaucratic, emotional, intellectual, historical, and special interest entertainment - all with various nodes of hierarchical pathways that only the naïve believe to be aesthetic judgment. There is no right or wrong, only power, influence, strategy, time-management, and the basest forms of politics. Everything is permissible, yet there’s always a catch. Certain people matter more, for reasons that can never be scientifically proven but stand the test of time. Post-Artists know this and are not in shock. Post-Artists don’t truly care or respect art in a solemn way because of this realization. Post-Artists are always Post-Art. They are, in a sense, over art, yet still participate in some of its channels because one is not yet born a Post-Artist, due to its fetus status.
Mock-Heroism
First and foremost, Post-Art is aware of its irony and influences. It knows it is a trap and already contains its end by declaring it is related to Joke Bands, and promising to never mention it in any intentional art context. Post-Art is aware of special names of reference but has a love/hate relationship with posterity and simply can’t escape paradox. Post-Art is not scholarly or for the (wo)man of letters. It is not sophisticated, and is more related to hustling, fast food, cheap laughs, and Spencer Gifts, managed by a freshly fired Vineyard Vines employee. Post-Art is not against sincerity. In fact, it is ostensibly the sincerest option at the moment, and doesn’t even align with an irony vs. cloying sincerity binary, due to the nature of fluid and slippery emotions that can’t define its relationship to affected reality. Post-Art does not even know what smart or dumb means exactly because it is most-likely both or most-likely neither. It is so smart it is dumb and vice versa. It is not so much a theory but a purported existence of a prescient and present alliance. Also, it is of course mock-heroic and uses the language of arrogance to parody its own metaphysics.
Art, Post-Art, Proto-Art, Shallowness, and Identity Olympics
My concept of Post-Art does not simply say everything is art or can be art. What it entails is that because of the expanded textual history of art, every instance of, not even just a “frame”, but 360-degree view, sound, situation, screen engagement, etc., can be mentally contextualized to be just as meaningful or valuable as the proposed notion of art, beyond its intention. This eliminates material specificity, i.e., gallery, museum, stage, important books, and other hierarchical status indicators. The point is, and most artists know this, is that the mind is what creates “art”, and artists have throughout history proposed new ways the mind can conceive art, and that is important because artists do not like limits and rules. Again, we Post-Artists are past art, and paradoxically Proto-Art. We do not take history’s textual materiality at face value as we understand relativity in perhaps even in a, arguably, immoral way. Post-Art prioritizes other things, that are perhaps even shallow, because we have seen that the notion of shallowness is probably what mobilized certain art to begin with if we want to accept the notion of wills to power, identity Olympics, and so on.
Concrete Realism and Ironic Realism
To work inside the art system (historically, spatially, theoretically, politically, interpersonally, geographically, institutionally) is to be aware of its specific material and virtual networks. This I want to call “concrete realism”. This to me is classical conceptual art’s fascination with tautology as well as the Brechtian method or even earlier experiments with modernist formalism. As much as art wants to be about things outside of its concrete realism, which I admit can pretend to be for theatrical and rhetorical affect, its concrete reality is simply something I can not ignore due to certain artists who have highlighted and bracketed this importance, dogmatic as it may sometimes be. Now there is no reason to make every single work of art hyper aware of its networked ontology to the point that it is only a dry structural experiment in indexicality, thus leaving out psychology, humor, emotion, poetics, mystery, and technicality. It has always been my intention to attempt to do both, as art about art can get tiresome and just as conceptually bankrupt as one more expressionistic painting or politically motivated text work. Inside the textual history of art are many arguments that are impossible to ignore if one wants to see art as more than entertainment or a selection of stylish shoes, which in all honesty I am not all that critical of, because, whatever. But like any other field with a history, I do think there is always space for innovation and an avant-garde, and I think the more one is familiar with those textual arguments, the more one can forge ahead with their own synthetic argument, or to be less polemical – expression or mood. These arguments, at this point in time, are certainly relative and open for prodding, expanding, and foreclosing. This is what I mean by a type of satire. Satirizing existing concepts, trying them on, and tripping them up to add my own idiosyncratic spin. I can then take one logical step forward and even satirize that satire, creating what I have deemed “ironic realism”, as I am ironizing, parodying, or simulating that proposed first notion of “concrete realism” with what conceptually lays outside of those material and virtual networks.
Pseudo-eternal game of infinite negation
The satire of satire, the critique of the critique, is a type of skeptical realism that remains dialogical and refuses to be a partisan. It is not “anti”, it is outside and is more Socratic than Socrates. Though Sophistic, it is not for money or livelihood, but for a pseudo-eternal game of infinite negation for the sake of a robust relativistic philosophy that remains open to its own self-judgement. It is not that it is too self-critical to be criticized, but that it is not claiming affirmation in the first place.
The Post-Artist and Cringe
We know the Post-Artist knows that nothing is properly art, due to the realization that all is subject to revision and anything can be sold. We know that the Post-Artist is well aware, that while they may have individual standards, there are no universal standards. There are 4-year-olds who sell more art than 40-year-olds with MFAs. We know now that an art space is just a space that is for art, which happens to be controlled by just a person with a measly agenda. We know now that a magazine or handsome book is just a magazine or handsome book with a collection of people with a measly agenda. We know that collectors look to these things to find out what’s worth caring about and we know that “important” people spawn “important” artists. We, the Post-Artists, call ourselves important, before others do, and that may be embarrassing. Now, to be embarrassing, is important in Post-Ironic times. The Post-Ironic finds intentionality ambiguous and is interested in being dramatically automatic, yet knows the automaton is filled with codes. These codes can be subverted though by embarrassing them, tripping them, trapping them, and fooling them with what the old call knowledge, but what the Post-Artist calls information. By information I mean idiosyncratically, data that does not depend on “truthiness”. Cringe, and the Post-Artist’s interest in its celebration and circumvention, is expression and response beyond “truthiness”, for its goal is ambiguous and psychologically refreshing. The forms such as embarrassment or “too much” or “expiration”, are forms to be reckoned with if one wishes to surprise themselves and others.
Notes on Cringe
Cringe is the new punk. It doesn’t matter whether it is intentional Cringe or unintentional Cringe because Cringe, as an aesthetic category, is Post-Ironic, and as such, does not shift due to intent. Post-Irony does not care what the intent is, because the intent is ambiguous. Finally. Cringe, as an ideal, upsets both hipsters and normies. Good. Cringe is how you respond when something is supposedly used-up, not fresh, cliché, dorky, overdone, expired. However, it is you who are those things. Cringe, as an ideal, to both embrace and circumvent, is where things get interesting. Finally.
Hierarchy of speculative irony
Meta-Post-Art (Post-Art about Proto-Art)
Post-Art (life about life after art)
Meta-Art (art about art)
Art (art about life)
Life (Proto-art)
© Alex Bienstock 2019
Cover image by Daniel Graham Loxton
Alex Bienstock is an artist that draws, paints, writes, makes music, and performs. His practice is a fluid seepage of stream of consciousness creative thought that disperses itself throughout the digital space and infects our minds, like a virus. Read an interview with Alex here.
"theory-cum-dogmatic meta-manifesto"
rare as fuck
i wonder about the relation between cringe and kitsch. kitsch seems to have disappeared or been reduced to the status of consumer irrelevancy. 'cringe' ascends as the omnigenerative engine of tastemaking. does being cringe have anything to do with being kitsch?
Hey, Alex and your words, well done. Hoping that soon the text will get post-being, too. What fun. It could trump itself like this: "We knows the Post-Artist trumpets that nothing is properly art, due to the realization that all dreams subject to revision and anything can be sold." Or any other of thousands of post-self and post-being constructions. One could go on. Just cheering the writing on here. That statement that all art comes from the mind. Good call. But post-Art? All from the mind? Might it be from the toenail? The clipped toenail kicked into the corner with a dropped Kleenex? Heck, there's lots of body territory the mind walks over with its elephant gun, looking for the big game. Hemingway is dead. Post Art lives. Let's see what can be done in a disembodied body! Thanks for this. A great start to the day.