A: Yeah, well, I’ve learned a thing or two in my travels, you know (which, incidentally, are far more extensive than yours), and one of those things I’ve learned is a word, a simple word, and you wanna know what that word I’ve learned is? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s cant. No. Not the contraction of can not, can’t, not an expression of impossibility, but what your hoity-toity ideals are so much of, or (if you want me to be more direct about it) warthog shit. Half the stuff that comes outta your mouth is stuff I’ve already seen coming outta the backside of a warthog. So what’ve you got to say to that?
B: Unh.
A: I’m tryna spark a proper debate here and all you can offer me by way of counterpoint is a grunt? Come on. I appreciate that we’re not all gonna have the same learning style, that some of us, like me, are gonna be more verbal, and others of us, like you, are gonna be more visual (which probably explains why you like to spend so much of your time painting pictures), but, really, you don’t live in isolation, you live in a community, and the word “community” in case you haven’t noticed, has a lot in common with the word “communication” which means that even if you have a visual learning style, even if that’s your primary way of encountering the world around you, nevertheless you have to get along with others who don’t encounter the world that way. You have to push trees across the river and encourage some back and forth with people on the other side. Shit. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve got me talking in clichés.
B: Unh.
A: And don’t tell me that your painting is a kind of communication in its own right, just let it speak for itself, accord the medium the legitimacy it deserves, blah, blah, blah. Oh, oh, oh, and don’t let me forget that obscure corollary: that your swishes and daubs need no explanation, that explanation kills the art, give it the silent respect that will allow it to speak in its own terms. To me, that’s a cop out, an evasion to hide your discomfort with the more verbose amongst us, your fear of argumentation, which itself is a cover for a deeper fear, namely that your side of the argumentation has no substance, that your swishes and daubs are empty, meaningless, useless. You produce these “expressions” of yours, and while they once may have had referents, you know, in the real world of space and time that you and I occupy, you’ve abstracted them so violently from their referents, that it’s impossible to say that they had referents in the first place. You’ve created these “expressions”, these paintings that you call “art”, that are so far removed from the ordinary experience of your viewers, that they occupy an independent discursive space that bears no relation to anything except the interiority of your personal private experience. You fart and that inspires a painting of what it feels like for you and only you to experience a fart.
B: Unh.
A: And that’s just one finger on the hairy-knuckled hand of your cant.
B: Unh.
A: Well, I’ll tell you. The second finger’s implied by the first. Your painting is elitist, you see, because if you legitimize your expression by grounding it in your personal private experience, then you’re privileging that experience while at the same time devaluing the experience of others, or, to take it further, devaluing the experience of otherness, or, if you want to take it to its logical conclusion, devaluing the very idea of Otherness. You end up consigning yourself to alienated solipsism. It’s a power play where you privilege expressions of your private experience of consciousness while treating the immediate verbal expressions of daily life in your community as if they count for nothing. So you tell me that you’ve painted Gor and Rok hunting a bison (and I know from your earlier work that you’re perfectly capable of producing a realistic representation of Gor and Rok hunting a bison) but your present strokes are so cursory that the most we can say of the painting is that it might be your personal impression of what it means to represent hunters like Gor and Rok hunting a bison, but we have no way to be sure because we have no access to your consciousness. You could be lying. For all we know, this could be an expression of your personal impression of what it means to fuck a warthog.
B: Uhn.
A: Really? You want economics to be your middle finger? It’s like you’re scrabbling in the dirt to keep from sliding over the cliff of cant, but you can’t get a grip of anything because your precious fingers are covered in grease from the stag shanks we ate last night, stags, incidentally, that we killed, not you, because you were too busy swishing your mixtures of charcoal, bird’s egg, and blood on the cave walls. Yet you have the gall to suggest that your painting makes a positive contribution to the tribe’s GDP. Yeah, right! Tell me another one. Somehow, we’re supposed to believe that those bird scratches of yours tell our communal story, that they solidify our sense of both personal and corporate identity, that the resulting sense of cohesion gives us an advantage over neighbouring tribes. Meanwhile you take eggs from the mouths of our newborns so you can mix your paints and you end up being one adult unit of labour less on our hunts. The fact is you make a negative contribution to the tribe’s GDP. Your paintings aren’t just useless; they’re worse than useless. They’re a liability.
B: Unh.
A: Don’t give me that mammoth shit. Don’t tell me you’re producing a durable record of life in our community so that future generations will know how we lived and died in this place, and don’t you dare suggest that your durable record is an existential solace in answer to the deep-seated and communally-felt angst that arrives like a vulture and circles the certain knowledge of death. We’re hunter-gatherers for fuck’s sake. We kill to stay alive. After a hunt, we gather around the carcass and know full well that it could just as easily have been one of us as a carcass surrounded by a pack of scavengers. And we’ve been doing this all our lives so we’re reconciled to the certainty of death, not death as some abstraction painted by a loose-boweled coward looking for a way to minimize his risks, but death as a brutal fact that’s gruesome and painful. This is just another hairy finger on your hand of cant. It sounds so noble, painting a durable record, until you smell the cowardice underneath. Let’s be blunt here. This is nothing more than a variation on the “worse-than-useless” theme. And even if you could argue convincingly that your paintings served some socially useful function that produced a positive psychic and economic benefit to the community, it would still be a stretch to suppose that this stuff you do with the charcoal and the boiled roots and the marrow and the blood and the whatnot—I mean, I don’t even know what kind of timeline you’re thinking of when you use the word “durable”. Like, are you talking about lasting through a winter? Or a generation?
B: Unh.
A: That long, eh? If I was in a charitable mood, I’d call you a dreamer, but really you’re just an idiot. Hey! That’s Gor’s spear. When he finds out you put the point in the fire like that, he’s gonna be pissed off, and you know how Gor gets when he’s pissed off. I appreciate that you wanna give a demonstration, scrape some charcoal into a gourd, mix it in with some egg and root and all, but couldn’t you have used an ordinary stick instead of Gor’s special spear?
B: Unh.
A: Aw, fuck. What’d you have to go and do that for? I mean, right into my gut. Is it coming out the other side? I can’t really turn around to see. Why’d you … I mean … I don’t feel so good. Kind of cold and queasy. Get that gourd away from me. Fucking artist. If you wanted blood for your paint, why couldn’t you have killed a warthog or something?
B: Unh.
A: Really? Because you don’t compromise the integrity of your work? That’s your answer? Fuck you. Hey! What the hell are you putting on the wall? I mean, over on that other wall, I can tell they’re elks and hunters and shit, but the stuff you’re doing now, it doesn’t look like anything, just blobs and swishes.
B: Unh.
A: Don’t you dare. Don’t you put any of that abstract expressionist crap on the wall, then call it a representation of your private interior experience of what it feels like to run a spear through a critic. You might as well just piss on the wall, or throw shit at it, or hurl the whole gourd full of blood at it. It’d make about as much sense as the crap you’re spreading on it now. At least do me the kindness of using my blood to make something realistic. Give a man his dying wish. Make a smiley face. Anything instead of this crap you’re tryna pass off as art.