ART Habens
Will Coles
Cold War was peaking, when Reagan was playing poker with nuclear weapons, pushing the Russians & the world to the edge. Mothers were protesting outside the US airabse that stored first strike nuclear weapons not far from where I lived, artists like Peter Kennard tackled it head on. We were lucky that time, now Trump has just restarted the Cold War, we need to protest about this & many other things, this is how I protest. Maybe it’s a quaint old fashioned idea of the artist to hold a mirror up to society, to try to make them aware of a better tomorrow, to fight against simplistic ideas like ‘The end of history’ where consumerism is praised as the height of human endeavour, that this is as good as it gets so why change it. 26 inidividuals now have as much wealth as the poorest half of the entire worlds population, that’s not ‘as good as it gets’. Sometimes it’s an elation to realise that you were wrong about something you were passionate about, an opinion that you had to change due to new information. It’s quite liberating to realise you can change yourself rather than stubbornly hang on to something you subconsciously know is flawed to say the least. Fortunately the evolution of my art usually makes me hate the work I only recently finished! I see all the flaws, sometimes that’s all I can see when I look back. Contemporary consumer brands are symbols but I try not to be obessesed by brands otherwise I might become rather like the brand whores I hate. There is always the issue of my work potentialy being bought by the kinds of people those sculptures are ripping into The way I see it, even if that happens then the people I hate are funding my war against them.
Special Issue
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