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PAUSE: One-Dimensional Man , by Herbert Macuse, teaches us that we need to slow down in making our assessments,. Take a close examination of not only the products you want but why exactly it is you want them. Who benefits? Can you see an emperor without any clothes?
REFUSE: the packaged certainty and the manufactured needs to which we have become accustomed. If the world you’re trying to change is a fantasy world that doesn’t actually exist that was given to you by a product, you’re not going to end up changing anything, and the culture industry mass produces these kinds of people all the time.
The Great Refusal, in order to be done effectively, has to be an extremely individual; personalized, self directed and self initiated.
To refuse, use your own imagination and play. Play is seen as useless, it has no productive value, it is not rational to waste precious time and energy.
Negative thinking — challenges the legitimacy of someone else's reality.
CHOOSE: The system we live in claims to be democratic, we are presented with choices – “false choices” – that encourage us to “buy” our happiness.
Freedom to choose does not produce freedom. Make real choices. Alternative ideas in the form of artworks, books, other acts of imagination have been scary things to most totalitarian regimes.
Supported by capitalist structures, the destructive effects of wasteful consumption, environmental damage and the damage to human health are ignored, as social connection through the acquisition of material goods is the promise but not the result.
Is art revolutionary, has an artwork actually changed your behaviour?
Or more interestingly, out of ALL the 'Art' you have seen, how many pieces have made you CHANGE YOUR MIND, seeing that you have been asleep and accepted the status quo, even if this is the very seductively packaged 'eccentric' and 'liberated' artworld status quo?
I can speak from first-hand experience and say, yes.in 30 years plus of involvement in "art"; making, exhibiting, viewing, studying; One work - Lee Lozano's "Acts of Refusal". A change in your thinking (theory) demands action (praxis) . Thie change I made to my own practice is a personal refusal I have called Artstrike. If you then act as you believe, refusing to continue to believe in that which is all around you, this takes self defence and self belief not to perpetuate systems you no longer see as the only one viable.
I can speak from first-hand experience and say, yes.in 30 years plus of involvement in "art"; making, exhibiting, viewing, studying; One work - Lee Lozano's "Acts of Refusal". A change in your thinking (theory) demands action (praxis) . Thie change I made to my own practice is a personal refusal I have called Artstrike. If you then act as you believe, refusing to continue to believe in that which is all around you, this takes self defence and self belief not to perpetuate systems you no longer see as the only one viable.
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- Artstrike, 2010 - ongoing, materials:variable Jane Naylor