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Darwin's Manifesto III
Darwin Leon
Thus did modernity degenerate into the staticism of pseudo-dynamic post-modernism. Frightened by its own self-caricature and afraid of profound interpretation, post-modernism settled for the illusory dynamism of fleeting frivolity justified by a subjective anti-art ideology even more stultifying than the arrogant gods it sought to depose. Reason, dismayed by its confines, rebelled against history and memory and rationalized its own destruction with the foolish ideology of the ludicrous, reducing the conception of the human race to prehistoric nonsense. Thus are enemies determined by their enemies. Disorder was jokingly condemned in a disorderly fashion, in senseless, grotesque parody. But once the joke was taken seriously, once disorder became conventional, the anti-art movement lost its life in contemporary relativistic mediocrity, a static ideology rationalized by self-destructive dogmatic skepticism most often expressed in the dictum, "There is no right and wrong in art."
Yet Surreality remains. The truth prevails. The superior 'underground' movement endures. Instead of denying the way, I embrace it. Painting is a self-controlled meditation for me. I am not a robot: my paints to not automatically flow from the tubes. I relax and submit myself to the flowing stream of waking dreams when I am painting. I do my best to keep the errors of prejudice and preconception to a minimum while meditating. But when Surreality surfaces, I must admit that I am aware of it and that my art is intentional. My dreams, then, are guided: I am at the wheel, and the fundamental wheel is traditional - I did not invent the wheel nor does it need to be reinvented. That is not to say that the wheel may not be modified or that tradition is forever set in stone. Some of the innovative modes of negation devised by the anti-art and postmodern artists to challenge traditional conventions are "new traditions", valuable modifications of the rebellious approach creative minds have always taken.
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