Ain’t No Dispute’n The Rasputin
Is yielding to temptation the most effective avenue towards proving your power over it? Is choosing to starve in cinderblock hovels (ahem, “studios”) in the name of the nameless actual self flagellation, or is it merely a further display of our bourgeois potential, unlimited? Is questioning the role of the artist within late capitalism fertile ground these days?
I don’t know; I don’t know; yes, definitely. Respectively.
Though the transcendence offered by the artist is no accident, it’s up to debate whether or not it’s by design. These folks are notoriously bad at stating their intentions; hence, the code. As Rasputin’s role in Czar Nicholas’ regime, so is the artist’s role in material culture. Mystic? Visionary? Huckster with dynamic style? Does it matter? Could it not matter?
Layers?
Jay Hines, everybody. Miami artist and blue collar schlep at once, representing the Siberian trickster in full querent regalia. As fabled as the whereabouts of Rasputin’s moribund tool is the purported transcendent capacity of the art object… or rather, the what-it-is behind the object, and why one with the means would purchase the object. Ownership is a question prickly enough, but does it even begin to satisfy the itch of knowing, feeling?
I don’t know the answer to this, I have to be transparent. I’m an artist writing a series of questions about a set of suppositions. But this is good, right? This is how we need to do it, tackle the whole thing together: producer, consumer, observer?
–Mike Taylor
