The R.A.W. Manifesto is in progress. We invite you to contribute feedback, input, thoughts, and suggestions:
The revolution may not be televised, but it will be written, it will be drawn, it will be sung. And just as assuredly it will be bought and sold. Revolution? Just Do It!
The primary challenge facing contemporary art, if it means to serve a liberatory purpose, is to avoid being swallowed up by the spectacle and reduced to mere slogan for easy consumption, how to create art that explores and dialogs rather than defines. When the forces that convey artistic media have been structured in such a manner as to reduce every expression to an easily categorized self caricature, trivializing revolutionary concepts of reality as fashion statements to be worn until the style changes, when not just art but people are valued and articulated merely as exchange commodities, not only does honest self expression, not only does worthwhile art become difficult if not impossible, but human interaction itself is endangered. The revolutionary artist must struggle not only against the perversion of art but against the perversion of human existence. No easy answers are available to those undertaking such a Promethean task, and RAW will not provide them. RAW cannot provide them because to do so would contradict the revolutionary struggle; it would codify methods for dealing with problems, situating life in the abstract, and promote an artistic model analogous to what Paolo Friere describes as the “Banking style” of education in which identity and knowledge are imposed from the top down and not created through collaboration. Moreover, to proscribe a certain set of artistic techniques puts the focus exclusively on the artist and not on those responding to the art; it narrows aesthetic knowledge to a possession and fails to adequately assess the rhetorical situation, the context, in which a work of art is created. Worse, it pretends to understand its audience by simplifying and over-generalizing audience characteristics, denying possibilities rather than expanding them.
Nevertheless, considering the enormous and pliant monolithic powers that the revolutionary artist must contend against, it seems useful not to proscribe but to at least suggest a not over delineated course of action, one we expect to alter as our understanding of each unique rhetorical circumstance arises.
First, the revolutionary artist should attempt, through whatever means are appropriate to her audience, to expose “reality” as a socially constructed and malleable perception. For large portions of the modern populace, and especially those most assaulted by the current purveyors of oppression, reality appears as an ineluctable and ordained disclosure, a dream imposed by alien and unconquerable forces. To cope with the doom of their lives, some have learned to internalize their oppressors, to idolize and mimic the values of the consummate ruler, the jefe of all jefes. Some, keenly aware of their victimization, to lessen at least the appearance of their impotence, will ask that the suffering be thrust upon them, convincing themselves that they have chosen their plight, that they are suffering because suffering will cleanse them of their plebiean stink; and they may even learn to like, or think that they like, the idea of suffering, even more so the afflictors of that suffering whose masks they construct to cover and conceal their shame. The oppressed in this condition do not try to usurp power, thus earning the master's scorn; they merely mimic the oppressor's customs and prejudices so as to earn his praise and be rewarded with a counterfeit dignity. This false dignity, this masochistic egotism, replaces awareness of the actual conditions of their oppression, replaces a more realized individual, and gives rise to an increasing alienation, to a human being who stands against himself, whose values and ideas are counter to his interests and self-respect. To counter this defeated mindset, the modern artist must not antagonize the natural and reasonable enjoyment of escapist entertainment that such people find pleasurable. In fact, the modern artist must feed the people's yearning for escape, but at the same time, she must be careful not to satisfy or assuage it. The artist must make clear not only that a better world is possible, but that this other world, or the many other worlds, are incompatible with the world as it has been created in man's image, and she cannot present in full what those alternative worlds will look like. She can, to borrow a Buddhist metaphor, point to the moon, ensuring that the finger that points is not mistaken for the moon it points to. The artistic work, that is, must resist becoming yet another tool of satisfaction in the commodified society of unlimited satisfactions. It mustn't comfort and pacify. It mustn't serve as a substitute for the other world it yearns for. To the contrary, it must disturb, make unsatisfactory, an existence that defies liberation, and make possible an existence beyond the stunted visions presented by our vitiated media. It should make man's yearning as painful as it is beautiful.
It is not the artist's job to fully present his vision of redemption to the world. The new world we create in the wake of this one must be created collaboratively—through dialog and painstaking discourse, through labor and love and sacrifice and communion. For that reason, it is imperative that the artist of today promotes a negative aesthetic, one that must repeatedly denounce itself in order to escape commodification and which never pretends to be completed or independent of its audience. A work of art must find the cracks between the worlds and take residence there, inviting visitors to join the artist in peaking out over the precipice and into the measureless beyond. As such, a work of art should not attempt stylistically to wow, to render its audience awestruck and thereby alienated by how and not by what is articulated. It should not attempt to showcase the artist's specialized talents. Rather, it should provoke and prompt creative responses. It should aim not for perfection, at an objectified and finished and unalterable photo of reality, but for help and furtherance. It should do more than fail to conceal flaws; it should actively call attention to them, and it should never appear to be finished. It should imply that the artist, who exists only as a relation to others, is an equal part of all of us, a naturally created agent who, properly engaged and collaboratively nurtured, might save us from the oppressive masks that retard our humanity. The artist, that is, should invite herself through her expression to be further worked on, to continue the miracle of creation and destruction she has thus far begun.
