THE
NEW NEGLIGENT ART
[1] The NEW NEGLIGENT ART is neither New,
nor Negligent, nor Art. It is none of these because it has no history
and acknowledges no past. There is no Art History. There is no History
of THE NEW NEGLIGANT ART. There is nothing
New in Art nor Art History. And because of this we have the NEW
NEGLIGENT ART.
[2] We will have to say it again. The NEW NEGLIGENT
ART is not DADA. The NEW NEGLIGENT ART
is not Surrealism. The NEW NEGLIGENT ART is
not Fluxus. Neither is it Conceptualism, Post-Conceptualism, Performance
Art, Minimalism, Neo(any of the above) or Post(any of the above). The
NEW NEGLIGENT ART has no history.
[3] We have forgotten Art History. Art History is a dead weight. It
is sometimes nice to look at pretty pictures in the Louvre and funny
films of people nailing themselves to VW Bugs. But we have forgotten
all about it. None of it matters. We're negligent of it all. And we're
negligent even of our own Negligence. Which is not to say that we simply
don't care. DADA was about dissing Art. Surrealism was all about attacking
Bourgeois Life in the Name of the Unconscious. That's nice. Fluxus was
the last one to try and pull it all together. We've forgotten what it
even was these people were trying to pull. We weren't even born then.
[4] We don't feel Guilty about the Past. We're irresponsible to the
Past because we've forgotten it existed. We steal from it, but it's
not the past, it's now the Present, the Here and Now. We're not responsible
to the Past and its correct Art History, its canon, its stuffy associations,
and so on. We're only responsible to the Here and Now. This isn't an
abdication of responsibility: it's a call to a responsibility of what
we're doing.
[5] Forgetfulness is a Virtue. Stealing from the Vaults is a Virtue.
These Virtues have no Histories. They only echo in the Here and Now.
There's nothing wrong about yesterday. There is no lack: only desire.
[6] THE NEW NEGLIGENT
ART has stolen everything it stands for. It even stole the title.
But it's all new. The Theft is not from the Past: it comes from the
Future.
PART II
Why new? Because it's not old. It's always new. Everything excites us
because we've never seen, heard, felt, tasted it before, because we
don't live our lives through the rotten corpses of the old, because
for us it's new, really new, and it makes us live new because everything
is NEW.
Why negligent? Because we've forgotten not only what art means, but
what it means to be NEGLIGENT.
Why art? Because art means nothing. It's a word without history. Its
got an A and an R and a T. They're all strung together and it makes
a sound like ART.
THE NEW NEGLIGENT ART is tasty. It tastes
real good. Super good flavours.
THE NEW NEGLIGENT ART
is healthy. Makes you feel good. And your body looks fit!
THE NEW NEGLIGENT ART costs nothing save
what you fail to give.
III.
CONVERSATION WITH OLO J. MILKMAN | CONVERSATION
WITH SSIESS
> negligently. no prescribed/proscribed form: the only axiom is that
all
> axioms never hold in all situations. hence, negligent art is empiricist
from
> its origins: it procedes by taking nothing for granted (there is
no
> history), and therefore everything must be experimented anew. the
idea is to
> stop living through other's rotting corpses. the criticism that
"so and so
> already did that" means nothing to me because I am doing this
art exterior
> to dead-history: I am doing this for myself and those who experience
it in
> its affirmation, because the point is to live life to its fullest.
brooding
> over the dead and what they may or may not have done should be
utterly
> forgotten.