OUT OF IT - We can never stop repeating that art is elsewhere. Life is also elsewhere.

What is it that unites contemporary artists? Stepping back from ones own work, using strategies and understanding the rules of management. If they want to earn a living making art, then they have no other option. The developed cultural world is based on the economy of service and on speculation. The economy is the be all end all, and so artists must become speculators on the commodities market of public interest and servants to private wishes, provided they wish to have at least some slice of that economic pie.
But now we are going to tell you about those, who are, or who at least once were, very far from the art scene and the structures of contemporary art. Once upon a time we called this the underground; indeed, some people still use this term. But most of us have ceased to use any type of categories. Nobody wants to come off as too serious—a habit that some artists learned from politicians. Nobody has any standby opinion of various global problems. Works have formal and aesthetic deficiencies. But these same works, nonetheless, contain a miracle: lost imagination and cruel humor, standing at the edge of interest in the unjust. And perhaps in that the artists are lucky.
We are not going to return to, or reference the pre-revolution underground movement. It’s not necessary. It digests today’s agonistic period of academic publications and their authors, who adopt the habits of classic writers. Not everything written by Ivan Martin Jirous must have a fabric binding, but if publishing houses don’t know what to do with their money, then why not. Common sense must have, first and foremost, an author, and during his/her lifetime, they should avoid any such similar excesses in worship. The following pages are an archaeology of the sometimes unaware underground of the past two decades. The materials were recommended to our editorial staff by third parties, found, or submitted by their authors under the classification: useless. We were, in some cases, able to reconstruct partially the circumstances of their creation, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes the information was vague or hard to believe and other times I received no answers to my correspondence.
I apologize thus for this final cacophonous result.1


1 Some materials that were excessively afflicted in this way will be completed and published in the next issue.

01.02.2008