ART AS PROVOCATION

“Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.” – William S. Burroughs

As a ceaseless pupil and participant in the creation of varying forms of art (predominately Art, Tattoo and Music) I am constantly attempting to explore and expand perceived boundaries, seek out seemingly impossible objectives, and most importantly confront and agitate reality as I understand it. This is no easy task and I’ve come to understand that this is a means with no end, an infinite process on an experimental continuum. Yet with every step forward this momentum brings me closer to realizing the potential for art to embody a tension which keeps hope alive.

For myself art is a very personal experience. I don’t just create it, I live it. In art, as in life, I seek no shallow and vain attempts to impress or captivate a complacent audience. Nor to participate in the stale parameters and ideologies set by a high end fine art world which at times can seem rather pretentious, elitist and bourgeois. I have little desire to allow my creativity to become victim to hyper commodification and ultimately exploited by an empty consumerism. From my perspective art should not be neutral, it should be a weapon, it should be dangerous, it should be a threat. It should breathe new life into old ideas, dismantle the tyranny of tradition and stoke the flames of discontent. It should serve to subvert an oppressive social system, to undermine and liberate us from the banal mediocrity of daily life, and to transform reality as we acknowledge it.

Motivated by self determined interests my objective is to utilize creativity as a way to culminate change; personally, politically, spiritually. To peer into the depths of cultural depravity, structural violence, and social injustice and to facilitate the creation of radical new methods of engagement with the status quo. To invoke the spirit of rebellion and set the stage for revolution. To be realistic, to create the impossible.

Art as provocation. Art as a declaration of war.

Let the battle commence.