How to deal with the political emergency in the so-called United States of America?
I’m working on a funding proposal which means I’m online a LOT. Application is online, I also need to liaise with my collaborator – and then there is pinball brain. The brain I’ve written about before.
And so I click.
And so I see, and see. I read and read. Acres of online print – the Tweets, the links, the lot. I’ve used up my free reads on The Nation and the New York Times, I’m following dozens of US journalists. My need to keep up is voracious.
I question my motives. Is this obsession. Yes. But it is also work for me.
I am understanding at first hand what fascism looks like and how it grows. It’s a crash course in this digital age, and the unresolved hows and whys of European history in the 1930s and 40s are suddenly revealed.
A generation is waking up though we don’t sleep. We’re getting it.
And as I click I see also that resistance is rising. My work is a vigil – like all my other vigils. I am watching. Waiting for justice.
As an artist I do what I can. I march. I make. I write and publish these thoughts.
My laptop and my studio form the sites of my resistance.
Yesterday I made a start with some sketches on improvised boards.
Today I bought 12 canvases for a new installation to be shown in May. I have my work cut out to produce a series which will be called Landscapes of Resistance.
It may not seem much. But it’s all I have.
