Translation of ANATHEMA: I SHIT ON ART 100%

All literature is TA, TA, TA, TA, TA!*

“I shit on Art, and yet…”

*Let us forge Rimbaud & co.:

Now me. The story of one of my madness. One among countless others…

For a long time, I boasted of possessing every possible landscape, of knowing the gears of cosmic chance and the subtle musical mechanics governing, up there above, the celestial harmonies; besides, I found the celebrities of modern art and literature utterly ridiculous.

I liked idiotic paintings, carved lintels, decorations, circus fabrics, religious prints, postcards of babies riding cows; antiquated literature, church Latin, village sayings, 1930s comics, erotic books riddled with spelling mistakes, ontological anarchist pamphlets, my nieces’ multicoloured drawings, Rosicrucian ads in Mexican editions of Popular Mechanics, Punk magazines banned during Francoism, our grandmothers’ novels, fairy tales, dervish tales, Mail Art loaded with clandestine and marginal literature, the TOO COOL series: unreadable 4-kilo tomes sent to me by friends from Nihilonia (various rhizomes in USA/Argentina/Russia/Czechia); little children’s books, tarots of every kind, medieval alchemical manuals, Masonic documents, Discordian propaganda, Pataphysical notebooks from Granada, Grandville’s Other World, the cats of Louis Wain, old operas, silly songs, naïve rhythms. Venetian glass, saints’ relics, vacuum tubes, bibliophiles, cathedrals, astral travels, poetic novels, Moroccan cafés, mental illnesses, the blazing star, peasants, and a thousand-year-old beer mug smashed across your fucking face, a new kind of Rocío! (haha). I found more art and poetry in obscene graffiti and toilet-wall messages than in any VIP gallery.

Yes indeed, friends! Certain galleries and museums (ALL?) deserve the occasional brick through their windows — not destruction, but a slap across the face of complacency. What do ugly and beautiful even mean?* There are artists everywhere, for fuck’s sake! Soon the streets will contain nothing but artists, and we shall have the hardest time in the world finding a man.

Artists, who ought to be the most fraternal and charitable of men, have instead become exclusivist and evil; and contemporary art (which oscillates between the banal and the pretentious) has been degraded, domesticated and, ultimately, whored out — for honour is bought and sold like the ass — this is not a good sign, and we accuse you of loving everything out of snobbery so long as it is very expensive. Therefore, we do not love art, nor artists.

They sell their world, or what they believe to be someone’s world. Writers write their trash, everybody drinks their alcohol, snorts their cocaine, swallows their pills, remains (un)happy and numb; hypnotised by the infinite scroll; adultery is merely another everyday minuet, day after day. Behind this world, in Nihilon, there is nothing: pure façade, ever more opaque and transparent upon the absorbing screens. The world reveals itself completely, in a certain sense, within a distorted frame; the painter is a fucking liar, writers want to sell their shredded trees with printed ink spread over them.

To move away from (...) where art lives only through theft, deception and contrivance, where passion is calculated, where tenderness is replaced by syntax and the heart by reason, where not a single noble artist breathes, and where a hundred people survive off counterfeit novelty.

I experienced more nobility of soul and spirit — even a genuine code of honour (the Johnson family) — among schizophrenics on the streets, neighbourhood thugs, dealers, pushers, and outlaws tattooed in the slammer.

Whistle, scream, smash my mouth in — and then what?

I will always tell you that you are sheep.

Always licking the letter, always chewing on it,

what great thing do you accomplish?

No wonder you look so famished.

Honour is horror.*

(POEE)

Maybe: Translated, revised, and corrected by Juan el Iconoclasta. Ⓚ

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