The darker, the better...
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A particular way of thinking has gotten us into the eco-mess we're in. Reactions like hybrid cars, carbon offsets, and organic meat spring from this same way of thinking and can only be seen as stop-gaps at best. To cultivate deep systemic change requires an entirely new way of thinking. Drastic situation, drastic measures, all all that. To illustrate my point, I'll tell you about Jackson Pollock.
Pollock—and others like Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Motherwell—revolutionized the art world by shattering painterly pretensions and deconstructing the very concept of expression. What tied this group of "action painters" together was not a particular style but a spirit—the spirit of revolt. And no one better exemplified this radical freedom of expression that the man Time magazine called Jack the Dripper.
Transplanted from Cody, Wyoming, Pollock worked for the Federal Art Project from 1938 to 1942. Shortly after that, he abandoned traditional painting techniques and trusted his instincts. This included laying massive canvases on the floor where he could circle and stalk—dripping and dribbling not just traditional paint but house paint, nails, coins, and the stray cigarette butt. "On the floor I am more at ease," Pollock explained. "I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally 'in' the painting."
De Kooning put it simply: "He broke the ice." Therein lies the rebellion. Pollock and his contemporaries painted what they felt with little concern for rules or conventions or critical understanding. When one critic wrote that Pollock's paintings lacked a beginning or an end, the painter replied, "He didn't mean it as a compliment, but it was."
WATCH VIDEO: Picasso Horse
When reporting on the aforementioned New York School of abstract expressionist painters in 1947, art critic Clement Greenberg pondered, "What can fifty do against one hundred and forty million?" It wasn't so much an entire population stacked against a band of radical painters that Greenberg was contemplating. Rather, it was 140 million Americans essentially ignoring a movement that would eventually change the face of art. The U.S. population has more than doubled in the fifty-plus years since Jackson Pollock dripped his way onto the cover of Life magazine and there are still plenty of movements being ignored by the majority. In fact, lurking beneath the homogenized, one-size-fits-all surface of today's consumer culture, there's a broad range of indefatigable rabble-rousers doing their thing.
Join a Movement and Become an Architect of Change
William S. Burroughs sez: "Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact." So let's be creative and collective by checking out some of the many green movements already in existence—Green Anarchism, Social Ecology, and more—or perhaps, start a whole new movement of your own.
