"Now you see us-now you don't/I am your reservoir of poses/I am your slice of life" (Barbara Kruger, Photographic Collages, 1983, 1983, 1981.)

"The notion of a universality of human experience is a confidence trick and the notion of a universality of female experience is a clever confidence trick."(Angela Carter, 1978)

"Being forced to comment on your culture, your gender, and your society may not be what comes naturally. Shrugging it off is a different thing..." Nina Gordon, Veruca Salt.

Click for GIF "A Sacred Prayer for a Sacred Island,"1991 (detail from centre panel of three, Jane Ash Poitras, Alberta)

"Had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim and for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for...like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous..." (Toni Morrison, Sula.)

Click for GIF "Carried off by a Bird" (by Napachie Pootoogook, 1980.)

"Courtney explains how she took the name for her band from Euiripede's Medea. There's a line in the classic Greek play where Medea talks about a hole piercing through her soul. With a shrug, Courtney says simply: 'It's about the abyss that's inside.' " (From Grrls, by Amy Rapheal).

click for GIF "You Invest in the Divinty of the Master Pieces" (Unique Photostat, 1982, Barbara Kruger)

click for GIF"Buy Me"(Unique Photostat, 1982, Barbara Kruger)

While in Toronto, renting a flat on the west side of Spadina Ave., Emma Goldman delivered a series of lectures on women's rights, birth control, as well several writers of interest to her, among them Henrik Ibsen. In 1899, Ibsen published the play, "When We Dead Awaken." The protagonist, Rubek, is a famous sculptor. It is impossible to read this play without the certainty that it was inspired by Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel. As well as being "illicit" lovers for over a decade, Camille did a huge volume of work for Rodin, and during the period that their styles were similar, experts on Camille's work can recognize arms, hands and torsos rendered by her in such works as Rodin's monumental 'Gates of Hell.'

Click for GIF "Claudelle as a young woman" (photo, 1894.)

"Camille was also model for several of the damned figures in 'Gates of Hell,' an irony that resonated profoundly in her later life. She continued to be a powerful Muse throughout her lifetime. She is "Thought", "Aurora", "St.George", "France", and "The Convalescent."

Scholars of both sculptors still dispute major works attributed to Rodin. An example of this is the marble work Galatea. Claudelle excelled in marble. Stylistically, Galatea shows none of the characteristics of Rodin, and all the characteristics of Camille Claudel's individualistic method as it broke away from Rodin. Among Camille Claudel's remaining works, her sculpture, "Young Woman with a Sheaf" is a mirror image of Galatea, rendered again in her own naturalistic style that mirrors Galatea and which Rodin could not acheive.

CLick for GIF "Seafoam" (Camille Claudelle 1905)

CLick for GIF "The Sheaf vs Galatea"

"...It" (the refusal of marriage after the exposure of their affair) "represented a professional failure that filled her with feelings of powerlessness and worthlessness-later no doubt, the cause of her unhappiness and self-destructive tendencies...Rodin, surrounded by glory... grew remote, and when he invited Camille to receptions, she refused: 'I can't go where you suggest, I have no hat or shoes-mine are all worn out.' Sculpting is a costly occupation-Camille accumulated debts and was hounded by creditors. Proud and mindless of social success, she was looking for new avenues in sculpture while barely managing to subsist in semi-obscurity and poverty...As Rodin's fame and glory grew, so must have her scorn...Rodin's work, instead of following more experimental paths, had become progressively commercial..."

Click for GIF Cacountala,1905. (seen below)(Camille Claudelle)

Camille Claudelle was ultimately overcome by paranoia and an obsessive delusions that Rodin and other artists were ripping off her concepts. On the 10th of March 1912, she was seized and imprisoned in an insane asylum until her death in 1943. She never sculpted again.

Click for GIF Camille as Old Woman, (photo, 1935)

Courtney Love: "There's a book ...called Meeting the Madwoman, and I've just begun the chapter on the Muse. Some of it's very Jungian, but some of it's applicable to me on a certain level, although on another it isn't. When I was younger and listening to Leonard Cohen songs, I'd think, 'I wish that was me,' -that fucked-up Lady of Shalot making men crazy. Now there are a lot of songs about me-my husband obviously wrote some songs about me-the muse thing is fulfilled in me. But it's sick. It doesn't mean too much any more. It's more vampiric than fulfilling anyway..."

"Raven of Shartoweetok (carrying enemy the owl on back)" (Mayoreak Ashoona, Cape Dorset, 1983)

"And you know that she's half-crazy, but that's why you want to be there..."

"Before I had gone down to NY, (my mother) said, 'Now Leonard, you be careful of those people-they're not like us...(My mother) was right. Some of the renaissance folk singers I met...pilfered a lot of my work-stole my songs-"Suzanne," "Strangers." I surrendered half my publishing on all the songs and all the publishing on my hits."

Click for GIF "Angry Boy on Strange Street," (Unknown Artist-destroyed as degenerate art- Germany, 1933)

"Gwendolyn MacEwen, the Toronto Poet and novelist who died in 1987, was...unashamedly, almost casually, a mystic...among Canadian writers...Margaret Atwood, in an essay writen in 1970, suggests that the dominant figure of MacEwen's poetry was The Muse, a reoccuring male figure, who is, she says, 'author and inspirer of language, and therefor the ordered verbal cosmos.' Unlike some of her sexually ambiguous characters, ("It is possible that I am a woman-I have long debated that,") this figure is strongly masculine- (and) he often appears as a lover. "

CLICK for GiF of "kat and shannon" (Jennifer Gillmor, colour computing by Janet-Lee Spagnol, Toronto, 1994)

Sometimes too, as Atwood says, he is the creator and inspirer of the poet's language, and as such, he is...terrifying, the "man-fish" who leads her into the sea, the "shadow-maker'. With this Adam, (Muse) inescapable other, the poet struggles as she does with the world, to transform herself and that which is not herself...

In the poem, "Two Themes of the Dance"...Adam, in a quest for redemption, "dances down his own throat/...dives down his own gut."

Click for GIF of "Untitled: Three Belts,"(Cynthia Delrosso, Toronto, 1994)

"As she struggles...she fears reducing the world to the patterns of her own poetry, 'it rains, you see, but Hell it comes down cuneiform.'" (From Apocalypse Jazz by Maggie Helwig, 1993.)

(Courtney Love reads from Meeting the Madwoman:)

Being a Muse is appealing because it has been an acceptable role and a feminine ideal for women in our culture throughout the ages. At the archetypal level, as the "eternal feminine", the Muse inspires the spirit and leads the soul on its creative journey, a Beatrice did to Dante. To inspire means breathe life into, to ignite the creative fire. Women in touch with the Muse energy...tend to give without expecting in return. Often they are trusting...receptive and caring...their simplicity opens the way for new images and ideas to develop...the difficulty with these women is that they often inspire others at their own expense."

Courtney Love comments: "See Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, a slew of women who were victimized -by not being able to have the 'Mary Shelly' outlet as I call it..."

CLICK for GIF of "What is it?" Diane DiMassa, 1993)

Marianne Faithful on overdosing: "I had gone onto the other side. The place looked like...those Durer engraving of Hell. (I was) walking along with Brian (Jones, who had died 5 days before). He didn't know he was dead...Then, when we got to the...edge, over which you went, or not, Brian slipped off, but I didn't...Six days later...when I opened my eyes, I saw my mother and Mick- my mother was by my side all the time. I think Mick wasn't...he's got to be ultraprofessional, wouldn't expect different. If Mick tried to kill himself while I was working, I wouldn't stop either...I must have caused a tremendous ammount of trouble. I've always taken my anger out on myself..."

(Courtney Love reads from Meeting the Madwoman:) "According to Jung, women who are Muses have a special capacity to reflect the 'anima'...or the feminine spirit or the soul of the man."

CLICK for GiF "The Angel of Anatomy," (1949, Leonor Fini)

Courtney Love comments: "there's a cartoon character called the anima based on me-how cute! She's sort of a cross between me and L7's Donna Sparks. She cuts off rapist's dicks...like 7-11 feminism, quite base actually, but a super herione, anyway. .."

CLICK for GIF "Demon Girl-detail" Millie Chen, Canada 1994)

"In a commercial society ruled by greed for money, fame sucess and power, the misuse of the Muse can feed the destructive side of the Madwoman: Women hungry for love literally starve themselves to be the thin, glamorous model that feeds male fantasies...undergo psychological and even physical torture...face-lifts, liposuction, even the remodelling of their bones...outwardly, the Muse can be beautiful and brilliant...Despite her alluring mystique, the rage of the Madwoman simmers...fed by her divorce from her personal energies and desires..."

CLICK for GIF "You are Seduced by the Sex Appeal of the Inorganic" (Barbara Kruger, 1981, Photograph.)

Patti Smith on "What I was Groomed to Be" (conceivably tongue in cheek)

"A mistress. I came to New York not to be an artist but to be a mistress. I have a completely French view of art. I used to read biographies of great people like Piaf, who really dug their men and worked for them..."

Patti Smith on "What Happens When I Write"

"It's a completely physical act. I pee, I sweat. If I write something sexy, I wet my pants. When people say writing isn't physical, I get pissed, because when I'm pounding my Hermes and am completely at one with my work, I just shake."

"'And what about your dreams?' The doctor one day asks me. I tell him I do not dream. I dare not tell him about the dream I have every night that terrifies me." from Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker.

GIF click "So why I had that Stupid Dream?" (Julie Doucet, Montreal, Quebec.)

GIF click "Mean Woman Blues" (Carol Moiseiwitsch, Vancouver, Canada.)

Neil Young: "I think there are women inside of all of us, and men inside of all the women. ...Woman I'd most like to be: Eve."

Harriet Hosmer, a contemporary of Claudelle, fled America for Rome in the mid 1800's and wrote home, "What a country is mine for women! Here every woman has a chance if she is bold enough..." Hosmer was issued a warning by the Chief of Police. Her sculptural work, "is full of...immmobility, stillness and silence, (a contrast to) the way in which contemporary male artists used the medium...to convey movement. The subject of Beatrice Cenci, ( a woman suspected of the murder of her tyrannical father) imprisoned and chained, (created) a theme of woman weighed down and imprisoned in sin, a reflection of Judeo-Christian notions of woman's guilt inherited from Eve....a suggestive metaphor for social bondage..." -From Old Mistresses, Women, Art and Ideology by Rozsike Parker and Griselda Pollock.

GIF click for "Beatrice Cenci, 1857" Harriet Hosmer.

Another expatriate (American) sculptor and contemporary of Hosmer was Edmonia Lewis, born near Albany, NY, to a Chippewa Indian mother and Black father, she was orphaned as a child and raised by two (Chippawan) aunts.

GiF click for photo of Edmonia Lewis.

Her brother, a sucessful gold miner in California, financed her early education. In 1859, (eight years after Sojourner Truth's famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech,) Edmonia Lewis entered Oblerin College in Ohio, the first and probably only American Institution of its kind to accept women of all races. In 1862 she was accused of poisoning two white schoolmates. Although she was aquitted, and they recovered, Lewis was badly beaten by a mob before her trial. Edmonia moved to Boston, making enough money selling her work to get a passage to Rome in 1865. It was at this time that she carved the surviving, "Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter." She began to attract a number of interested patrons.

GiF click for photo of "The Old Indian Arrowmaker and His Daughter" Edmonia Lewis, approx. 1865.

Lewis's best known work ,"The Death of Cleopatra," was a twelve-foot sculpture weighing two tonnes that took four years to execute. At the 1876 "Centennial", critics declared it, "the greatest statue in the exposition." Today it is one of her many LOST works. Lost? How could you lose a twelve foot sculpture? The word stolen comes more freely to mind. After 1885, there are few records of Edmonia Lewis, although it is known that she was still alive in 1911.

If Lewis was anything like her white bourgeois counterparts, "Hosmer and her 'sister' sculptors...(conveyed) a pronounced refusal to conform to limited notions of women's decorative accomplishments," and she no doubt used her formidable talents to some political degree. The difference is that we have clear records of what Hosner and her white peers were doing, and discussing, which was mainly the reinforcement of the age-old theme that women are subjegated, while in the case of Lewis we have very few. It is not impossible to speculate that the twelve-foot sculpture of an African Queen was powerful and provocative enough to challenge European sculptors of all genders, and that Lewis did not have enough of a lobby in Europe to protect it from being "dissappeared." As for the rest of her work, it was routine for a predatory male to seize the work of a female artist and claim/sell it as his own.

Click for GIF-"Portrait of a Species: DECONSTRUCTIVISTS,"( detail, 1990, Joan Cardinal-Schubert, Canada)

Giuletta Marchini, an italian painter ruined when a lover stole her designs and sold her paintings, was confronted with this when she tried to sell one of her pieces to a dealer: "The design of 'I Barbari' is not of a feminine hand. It is purely masculine-look at the anatomy, and colouring. It's a man's touch all over-nothing feminine about it."

Click for GIF "Fighting Stallions" (Anna Hyatt Huntington, 1950)

The possiblity that the creative life of Edmonia Lewis became mired tackling more than her share of male con "artists" is not remote. She did make a decent living for herself at least for a while doing portraits and busts of impressed patrons in Rome. But there are no records so far of any effort being made to assemble her work into a comprehensive show, and as a result it has become scattered and in many cases will probably be attributed to someone else. A twelve-foot two tonne sculpture seems like something that could be seen by a satellite orbiting the earth, and the mind boggles at the theft of so much creative labour by a critically celebrated genius. Edmonia has left us very few clues in her passing.

In the early years of the twentienth century, the Anarchist artist in Revolutionary Russia were extremely integrated in the rest of the Anarchist and Revolutionary dialogue. In Moscow there were more than 25 Anarchist clubs. "These clubs were more than meeting places, they were cultural institutions." One such anarachist was non-objectionist painter Vavara Sepanova, who debated in the journal Anarkhiya. Stepanova reviewed an exhibition of paintings by artists in her group, praising "the destruction of the square and a new form, the intensification of painting for it's own sake...pure painterly effects, without being obsured by incidental elements, not even by colour...a new and interesting facture and just painting...in a single colour..black."

CLICK for GIF of Vavara Stepanova, (photo, April, 1919)

By 1920 the Communist Party's drive to crush the anarchists had reached its crescendo. Hundreds of anarchists were killed or taken prisoner, the journal Anarkhiya and those like it were shut down, and in 1921 Stepanova and her husband Rodchenko, "I am sure that working people want true creators not submissive beurocrats" capitulated by forming "The First Working Group of Constructivists." They drew up a statement in which they dedicated themselves to the design of useful objects guided by "the philosophy and theory of scientific communism."

The date of their mainfesto- the 18th of March. The night before the Bolsheviks had crushed resistance at Kronstandt, a free "Soviet"- Russian word for collective-which had resisted the Red Army and set up its own collectivist community, so much so that Red Army soldiers abandoned their officers in droves to fight along-side Kronstradt sailors and social activists, until a final brutal series of air raids and an assault by soldiers imported from the far east of Russia shattered the besieged Kronstadt resistance.

To anarchists this day marks the end of the Russian Revolution.

Anarchists of this period were also fascinated with mysticism, something that created a strong link for Anarchists and Surrealists of the same period. Leda Rafanelli was an anarchist mystic who identified strongly with Individualist writing of that time.

Rafinelli set up a publishing house, the "Casa Editrice Sociale" and printed the works of a diverse group of writers, among them Max Stirner and Nietzche. Rafinelli was strongly committed to anti-colonialism, and opposed European imperialism. This was reinforced by her conversion to Islam, although she had wrote many articles raging against clericalism, militarism and the oppression of women, Leda's Arabic culture became a social and political alternative in which to oppose Western civilization.

CLICK for GIF of "Leda Rafinelli ," (photo, approx. 1935)30sphoto.gif

Echoing the Surrealist desire to mix the unconscious with the waking world, Leda wrote the arguably racist opinion of her Moslem world; "The Moslem when flattered does not dream of effort nor scanty struggles; s/he loves laziness and especially s/he loves sleep which brings her/him closer to god..." she continues, "The Moslem people still know how believe, pray, and meditate. It was exactly for this reason that they will never be animated by the vulgar desires and low ambitions of European people who, in general, are without...sincere faith."

Leda was also a soughth-after clairvoyant. Among her admirers was Benito Mussolini, whose destiny she predicted with remarkable accuracy. (This line on your palm indicates to me that you are a murderous boot-lickin' fascist dick-wad, who will kill and imprison almost everyone in my milieu.) Leda's 1921 novel, "Enchantments" is a direct testimony of this bizarre relationship.

In 1923 a fascist raid destroyed her publishing house. Leda continued to write. "I see comrades who, because of a word or two which offends them, forget the brother/sisterhood, the solidarity that should bring us anarchists together. It is natural that there should be some disagreements among us. But when someone expresses his/her opinion on people or facts, those who oppose those judgements should do so without personal antagonism." Her self-obituary reads, "Leda Rafanelli, leaving forever, salutes all her comrades, Viva l'Anarchia!"

Surrealism flourished in Europe between World War 1 and 2, a reaction against the "rationalism" that had guided european culture and politics in the past, and culminated in the horrors of WW1.

Cubism was also a departure from anything seen in art to that point, as seen in this pioneer work,

CLICK for GIF "Electric Lamp" (Nataliia Goncharova, 1912-debated as"masculine"for her studies of machinery)

It is also best seen in such works as Picasso's portrayal of the bombed cityscape "Guernica" during the Spanish civil war. Cubism placed its emphasis on formaility and the abstract, Surrealism was a major alternative to the Cubist movement, focussing on the traditional emphasis on realism, but organized in a revolutionary way. Joan Miro, at the extreme end of Surrealism, discards Dali's "colour snapshot" effect for an expressionistic distortion of shapes, a pursuit of "musical" colours, and freedom on the canvas. "Guernica", an image that is haunting in it's portrayal of one of the first "total air raids" of the Luftwaffe, borrows the Surrealist impact of shocking images in juxtaposition, created in the classic planes and angles of Cubism, and is rendered using only black, white and grey. Picasso's anger at Franco displayed no "musical " colours, and the flags that flew in resistance to Franco were predominantly Anarchist Black, and Rage Red.

"No Pasaran-It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees." (Dolores Gomez Ibarruri "La Pasionaria" in opposition to Franco's troops.)

There were many women in the Surrealist movement, among them Leonor Fini, see The Angel of Anatomy, 1949, above, and The White Train, of which she commented, "The woman on the left is perhaps contemplating making love to her sleeping friend.."

CLICK for GIF "The White Train" (Leonor Fini, 1966.)

Leonora Carrington, who both rejected her family's efforts to place her in English aristocracy and mocked them through her art, was a lover of Max Ernst, a German Surrealist painter, who was arrested and imprisoned in a concentration camp. Leonara fled France to Spain, where she collapsed and was placed in a psychiatric hospital. After several months, she was taken to Portugal under the care of a nurse hired by her family, who prepared to send her to a hospital in South Africa. Horrified, Leonara slipped away from the nurse, and escaped to America. Her drawing, "Tiburon," shows her feelings about this journey. At the bottom of the sketch are three naked people, two hanging by the neck and one by the feet. Below them, two other figures are hanging by wires, with leaves growing out of their heads, and their limbs transforming into something else. These two figures are the most strange, because it is unclear whether they represent death, rebirth, or both.

3rd Reich "non-art" of the Nazi period- rendered almost entirely by males, has several (striking) characteristics: the naked comic-book hero/warrior as monotonous motif, and a reoccuring homo and even lesbo eroticism- buff males and athletic females pose unclothed together exchanging admiring glances in a culture where an actual homosexual identity was a ticket to Auschwitz.

CLICK for GIFS of homo and lesbo erotic nazi-era art

A second irony about Nazi "art" is that by purging all contemporary influences through death and exile, it is distinctive in that it imitates other cultures, most strongly Greco-Roman classicism, appropriating other (fallen) military slave-owning societies and claiming it for its own.

Click for Keith Haring-like imagery in Paul Klee GIF

"The fact that Paul Klee and Edwin Scharff have been dismissed from the academies in Berlin and Dusseldorf by Minister of Culture is an important step on the road to liberation...from the enslavement (sic) of German art by alien elements...How could they exert such an influence on the artistic life of Germany?...they were renegades...turned into ruthless dictators in matters of taste...They...made expressionism and cubism...(and) borrowed from the wild art of the Negro...we do not reject modern art because they are modern, but because they are spiritually destructive." -Deutsche Kultur-Wacht, 1933. click for gif "Buff Teutonic athlete subtly fists rowing friend up ass"-approx. 1934

The pre-Nazi climate was similar to that in North America today, where artists are only minimally supported by the State, in the U.S. State funding to the Arts is "somewhere in the budget of one frigate," and artists form an "underclass," a subculture which supports (and purges) talent, with its own socially concious and unconscious/comatose participants, subversive power, social influence, and destructive underbelly of despair.

The state of being the "artistic underclass," is something that the rich in the highest form of flattery pursue and impersonate by adopting a "punk" aesthetic, a "grunge" look, while exploiting a consumer impulse to "be at one" with poor, dispossessed, underfunded talent, while serious artists are forced into semi-poverty in order to pursue their craft.

It makes sense then, that in the search for funding for arts-related projects and "to feed one's family" many artists are drawn to corporate funding, our twentienth century "patrons." These "patrons" are those same corporations that control our global economy and destroy working-class solidarity, forcing visual artists to pursue self-destruction and self-expression in the same stroke, self-emolation as art. By creating emotive images, the (commercial) artist as cultural worker places her/himself at the helm as the engineer of desire. The commercial artist that uses the power at their disposal to sell something that is environmentally destructive is creating the propaganda art of global meltdown. Obviously, the assumption is that society is media-savvy to make up its own mind.

Betye Saar is one interesting American artist who uses found (and junked) objects and advertising images in collage/assemblage form to great impact.

CLICK for Gif "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972, Betye Saar).

Aunt Jemima was created by advertisers to look like what a white person's idea of what a kitchen slave should be. In front of a wallpaper of Aunt Jemima's face, Saar places an Aunt Jemima doll holding a miniature broom and a toy pistol in one hand and a rifle and hand grenade in the other. In front, a postcard shows Aunt Jemima holding a crying white infant, her skirt obscured by the emblem of the Black Power movement. The assemblage piece spoke to so many people that it became her most famous work, and Saar the artist found herself turned into Saar the overnight spokeswoman by the media.

CLICK for GiF "Stay Pun Crooked and Cut Straight" video still from "Maigre Dog" (by Donna James- 1990.)

"One of the draws of network technology is its role in the upsurge of collective authoring processes, collaboration across disciplines and distances, collaborations which spell out POWER...Speaking out to be heard, not reduced to information, remains ever important...Women need to wobble cyberspace, occupy it, and send it topsy-turvy. The current access to tools and resources for the marginal, may be a temporary aperture, one we need to squeeze through en masse, not one by one." Sara Diamond, Alberta, 1994.

"It always comes back to the same necessity: go deep enough and there is a bedrock of truth no matter how hard."-May Sarton.

"We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-plusses for that." -Toni Morrison.

Click for GIF "East End Bad Girl's Club" (Anon. Graffitti Artists, Susan Dyment -Photo, 1990, Vancouver, B.C.)

Artists are creating diverse social commentary at a rate never seen before, integrating the Anarchist belief that the act of expressing oneself in a repressive society reinforces personal freedom, regardless of the consequences. Michelle Shocked's late eighties song dedicated to Michael Stewart, "a young black grafitti artist, killed by ELEVEN WHITE TRANSIT COPS while painting graffitti on a subway wall," is testimony to this resistance. At the same time, our senses are assaulted by advertising, and public critique of "the media explosion" that makes no distinction between art and artifice, so that laws designed to force artists underground are supported by an image-numb public bombarded with MISinformation, corporate lies and propaganda.

New technologies allow for the convincing removal of people and objects from one place, and the placement of these objects in another place than the one in which they originally appeared.

It is especially interesting to reflect on the impact new technologies are having on those visual artists working in a 3-D rendering environment.The tactility of mathematically generated image-sculptures is nil.The calculation centres of the brain are active, the right brain is passive. The intuitive element has been reduced to a series of binary equations.

The pay-off is long hours, lousy to illegal salaries for contract workers, outrageous deadlines, and questionable job security. Artists and other workers in the so-called "multimedia" industry would be wise to organize in order to protect themselves, create pay standards and address both the abuse of their skills and the ethical issues special to their industry.

The alternative in the infancy of this industry is of becoming the most singular group of industrial workers to ever take off running from a crawling stage without taking a stand for themselves.

Click for GIF "Guardian of Desires" by Betye Saar, (found objects-circuit board, paintbrush, wire and beads, 1988.)

"Who is the body that is being invented, how compliant is 'she'? ...The apparent circularity and non-hierarchical structure of multimedia accomodate some forms of non-Western story-telling...Low-end, accessible technologies are as instrumental as high-end, high-price practice..." -Sara Diamond, Alberta, 1994.

As vital as the demystification of the image-making, which may mimic and/or appropriate artistic mysticism, the accessability to new media and technology is more so. It is revealing to note which artists pursue accessability- and which do not.

Click for GIF "Solidarity Mural-Montreal, 1992." Sponsored largely by the Grand Council of the Cree, Co-ordinated by Farzin Farzaneh and Elizabeth Littlejohn, the project was a collaboration of Native and non-Native artists who visited the Great Whale River in 1991, workers at the anarchist bookstore Librarie Alternative and other Montreal artists in support of James Bay Cree resisting hydroelectric development in their territory.

In 1985, the video-self-portrait "You Can't Keep Us Down," was presented by single mothers living in Regent Park, a low income-housing development in Toronto, Canada, (the largest in Canada) where 60% of the families are led by sole-support mothers and 70% are Black.

Marusya Borciukiw, a Ukranian-Canadian Art Activist schooled in video-making and with a substantial collection of her own productions behind her- was hired as resource-person for the Regent Park Video Project. Women who otherwise may not have had access to this technology or even counted it as one of their interests had sudden, hands-on accessability while speaking to others through this medium. A second video made by this "liason:" "Black Perspectives: Sharing Culture," a documentary of a music/performance group led by Charles Smith. The video was collectively written and produced.

Charles Smith, discussing how the flyers for Black Perspectives were defaced by nazi symbols, relates how some members of the group had problems with their friends when it came to the name. "Why Black perspectives?" Smith responds: "Ask your (white) friends to share the experiences that you have had. As a Black person, you have read Dickens, Chaucer, Tolstoy. They can read Cezarre, Bontemps, Hughes and Fernand. It's not too much to ask..."

GIF "Aryan warrior with suprisingly small pee-pee"-Germany, approx. 1933.

By engaging the notion of artist as cultural worker, we lend creedence to the fact that visual images are emotive-read: POWERFUL. The "commercial" artist who uses their training and ability to convey a message that is manipulative or to sell a product that is toxic, is as accountable as the blue collar worker who knowingly dumps chemicals into the river "in order to feed my family."

The vital part of any kind of propaganda-based art, and make no mistake, commercial art is propaganda, is the retreat from "imitation of life," and the conjuring of an image that is as seductive as it is inaccessable. Just as the naked aryan youths in Third Reich art were inaccessable to those who desired them, the sexy rugged automobile named after a Native American Indian Nation as the ultimate symbol of North American freedom, as our object of desire, our inaccessable Muse, may lead us into a dance with death, a drive into the sunset from which we may never return.

"Ignorance is no crime. But when you trot your ignorance before the world as if it is part of a profound truth, that is a crime." -Lee Maracle.

CLICK for GIF "Rhetorical Questions Against the Global Economy" (Tracy Thomas-Falconer, 1996, Toronto.)

(See link Alternative Motor Fuels, New Energy Page)

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Louise Valadon 's Reclining Butch, mid-20's, Paris.

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