FLUXLIST: A._S.L.O.T.H.

[Aaron Kimberly]

A._S.L.O.T.H. MANIFESTO Artist’s Society  for Leisure and Other Thoughtful Hooplah or,  Artist’s Society Against Labour and Otherwise Tedious Humdrum...    (EXCERPTS) No One Should Ever Work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic conviviality, commensality, and art...Play isn’t passive. -- Bob Black  In the spirit of play, we submit this Manifesto:  A._S.L.O.T.H’s Mandate is simple: 1. We reject all forms of work on the basis that they are not necessary components of a productive and fulfilling society; and accept that “to work” is to participate in the hierarchical structures in which we are alienated and alienate others.  2. We resist the ways in which current activist models reinforce problems on a structural level by failing to give up work.  3. We dedicate ourselves, above all, to the fine art of play.  --cut--  IV.  ART AND A NEW SOCIAL ORDER Art is useless. For this reason, we pursue art inexhaustibly.  Many art movements of the past and present have situated themselves either in alliance with, or in opposition to, work. Da Vinci was a renowned procrastinator who was slow to complete paintings and who invented hundreds of useless objects. His notebooks overflow with accounts of time spent staring at clouds or plaster walls. Marcel Duchamp preferred chess to work. The few hours he would spend in his studio involved little more than the haphazard placement of art elements and it would take him years to complete a project such as the Large Glass. His “ready-mades” especially epitomize a bold hypothesis of work that anyone could replicate. Greenberg’s camp of Modernists also made useless art but isolated themselves with a strict “high art” vs. “kitsch” distinction. Rather than inspiring the working classes to be less “useful”, they alienated them and so did not problematize their relationship with any dominant order. Because the dominant voice is central, their art too quickly became ordinary.  Every oft-repeated act will eventually become “ordinary”. The best ones, though, change us in the process.  In contrast, current Activist Art often becomes too usefully engaged, insisting on itself as work much in the same way as Liberalists lobby for equal economic opportunity. Because many of these movements emphasize their activist, rather than aesthetic merits, they undervalue the very transgressive nature of the aesthetic itself. The aesthetic IS a sensibility, IS a philosophy, IS political and need not, should not, be collapsed into any specific ideology.  --cut--  What Marxists call “Creative Labour” is a similar concept applied to all forms of activity. Creative Labour is an endeavour of passion and is therefore fulfilling. Einstein believed that while, at best, science could provide a means to an end, only personality could provide an end. In our society, individual personalities are muted by industry. Art can serve as a model for creative livelihood---a glimmer of humanity. We believe that better communities aren’t mass produced,  but are created slowly, by passionate means and together by individuals.  As an Artist’s Society, we are dedicated to the aesthetic change of communities. The physical environments in which we live greatly influence the quality of our existence. The aesthetic and functional decay of our surroundings is internalized by individuals and communities, thus leading to social decay. Passionate play should be built, literally, into our lives. For this reason, A._S.L.O.T.H. calls upon the union of architects, engineers, gardeners, musicians, writers...anyone whose activities contribute aesthetically to our environments... to quit work and devote their skills to play.  V.  MODELS OF BETTER COMMUNITIES Co-operatives, collectives and the like are models of a new order. However, we provide this warning: not every organization that claims to be a co-operative actually is one. Many reproduce old distributions of power in new ways. It’s difficult to shed this tendency as these are often our only models of behaviour. Decisions made by consensus, for example, may, out of a sense of obligation or impatience, prevent full individual expression. Such residual effects, or “withdrawal symptoms”, will eventually be eliminated with patience and commitment to the process and not to the product.  VI.  A._S.L.O.T.H. SUMMARY “Play is always voluntary. What might otherwise be play is work if it is forced.” (Black) - We defy compulsory production; - We don’t want to end employment discrimination, we want to end work; - We don’t want full employment, we demand full unemployment; - We don’t care if bosses are men, women, black or white; we want to eliminate bosses; - We demand the conservation of endangered human resources, including thought processing and free speech; - and we reserve the right to eliminate any plague of apathy.   Rules can be played with. Meanings can be played with. LET THE GAMES BEGIN!