Contemporary artists are audacious people, dangerous for the consumptive society of today's informational age, which praises comfort and dull prosperity. Azart has become an almost criminal word, associated first of all with gambling and extreme pastimes (cards, roulette, the breaking of public order...). In previous lives, contemporary artists would have been pirates, adventurers, highwaymen, revolutionaries and other troublemakers, disdaining the replete and dull life of bourgeois dolts. In a word, an azart is tied to the crossing of a border, the transgression of the boundaries of "common sense", aesthetic aggression and Anton Artaud's theater of cruelty.

The word itself produces energy; it surmounts the Norm established by society for the sake of the nice and painless existence of the gregarious domesticated animals otherwise known as Homo sapiens. A contemporary artist is a bio-psychic mistake, a non-sense, a black hole amidst a post-human universe, a fly in the ointment of a depraved civilization, an individual marginalized to the periphery of social existence by the frenzied international community just to keep from complicating the lives of other members of the society by their aberrant free-thought. Some of these more radical elements are quickly domesticated or bought by conventional society through a crafty award system at international exhibitions, biennials etc. There should be no artists in this cynical and mercenary society, yet there are. This is not as a result of the false principles of the liberal-democratic community, but in spite of them. Artistry continues to exist in the world counter to the common sense espoused by the followers of Descartes and Hobbes, and to spite the impudent initiators of unipolar globalization, who have privately approved the mental genocide of the prospering sophistication of world culture. Contemporary art upsets the shameful conformism of post-industrial civilization. An artist lives and actualizes his presence in the world through a special effort of passion directed as a subtle energy to overcoming global marasmus. In our pragmatic times - where time is money- only audacious and foolhardy people can occupy themselves with such a useless and profitless business as the contemporary arts. The place that does not exist in this fallen world resides within each of us as spiritual potentiality, as a possibility of paradoxical self-manifestation at any moment of time, or as a space of absolute freedom ("The kingdom of God is within you") - freedom from the absolute human stupidity and ignorance that have turned this planet into a gigantic trash bin, an ultra-liberal capitalist chaos, where craftiness, corruptibility, and hypocrisy are the only virtues. So, the artist, impossibly present in this world, giving form to an equally impossible art is the sole purveyor of a Vivifying Space. This restless and unneeded art is the only autonomous region where free imagination can be called to demonstrate that there is another dimension to life for contemporary humans besides their fussy existence dedicated to the satisfaction of endless needs and slavish service to conventional society. 

 

© Teymur Daimi