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The Eukariot Art Bureau performs modest propaganda stunts in the field of fetish-production that the bourgeoisie calls “art”. We are, of course, cautious of bourgeois "art", which is one of the most potent liberal-capitalist dispositifs of subjectivation and pacification. Art plays a major role in maintaining bourgeois order's homeostasis and in undermining radical political transformation, not least through its appropriation of the vocabulary and techniques of radical anticapitalist struggle to signify, valorise and commercialise its own, very much capitalist, practices and productions. Even a hipster like Jim Morrisson, while using art precisely in this manner, couldn't ignore its basic governmental function: "The Lords appease us with images. They give us books, concerts, galleries, shows, cinemas ... Through art they confuse us and blind us to our enslavement. Art adorns our prison walls, keeps us silent and diverted and indifferent." The Art Bureau aims to investigate, expose and sabotage the techniques through which this art dispositif contributes to making bourgeois reality resilient. That being said, we will not abandon to the enemy the powerful form of propaganda, analysis and reality-shaping that "art" is. Since the codes, rituals and discourses of "art" are one of the means though which the bourgeois soul is shaped - notice the pains through which any aspiring-bourgeois parents go to "open" their offspring to the "wonderful", "magical" world of art - they pull this tremulous soul's enjoyment triggers. This is something that we need to exploit. Producing "art" as counter-propaganda and for deflating bourgeois enjoyment are important tactics. And avoiding to make an unwilling contribution to this dispositif's usual ideological operations through such productions is a tricky task. But ideally, such productions would expose the myriad of eggs that the bourgeois enjoyment dispositifs are laying all over the place; and the tremendous capacity for consumption and defecation that the subjects formed by these dispositifs have developed By raising a mirror in front of these subjects' probing eyes and slyly making them stare at their own pleasure rituals, their libidinal clockwork might be bewildered, missing beats, ruining their jouissance. Such counter-propaganda needs to plunder, in any manner possible, the well-endowed coffers of bourgeois art. When particularly exuberant, the Bureau will engage in such productions, using the well-stuffed corpse of bourgeois "art" as fertiliser for our own crops. The Bureau also indulges in curatorial and critical commentary activities, testing the hypothesis that a recalcitrant spectator is able to extract something tactically useful from any bourgeois text, irrespective of that text's avowed intentions; and can leave said text disemboweled, removing its mythical powers. We should remember that in French, "bureau" is phonetically close to "bourreau", "executioner". |
