TWENTY OF THE MOST DIFFICULT, AWKWARD AND SEARCHING QUESTIONS YOU COULD ASK ABOUT THE ART STRIKE 1990-93

1. What is the Art Strike? Art Strike is the total withdrawal of all cultural production for a period of 3 years (1990-1993). All artists will cease to distribute, sell, exhibit, or discuss their work between January 1st 1990 and January 1st 1993.

2. What art will be struck? Art Strike is a total assault upon all cultural activity within the modernist and post-modernist traditions.

3. Strike for what? To dismantle the cultural apparatus.

4. Is this a joke? Absolutely not. How can you have shows when people don't even have shoes? 5 What is the Art Strike? Art Strike is the rough undressing of creativity. What an artist considers to be his or her identity is nothing but a divisive set of schooled, snotty attitudes.

6. What's wrong with being an artist? To call one person an artist is to deny another the equal gift of vision.

7. What will I be if I'm not an artist? Think of how many people have experienced sexual ecstasy without even talking about making art.

8. What's wrong with making art? We're living in an isolation tank, only instead of warm water we're bathing in bullshit. Within the information economy, opposition spreads the flow, each statement creates its own negation, context shifts constantly, and the only principle that emerges from the din is the principle of the flux itself, consumption.

9. What is the Art Strike? Silence.

10.What do you expect to accomplish? We will step outside of history.

11. Why should I go on strike? Self-interest.

12. Is this a joke? Sure: a joke, a fraud, the worst idea ever.

13.What is the Art Strike?. In its origins, just another cocky whiteboy spectacle. Now, however, girls are playing too.

14. What's in it for you? We hope to promote our own careers. Of course, only the Strike's failure would accomplish this, so you don't get out of it that way .

15.Why do so many people hate this idea? Because they stand to lose everything the don't have and wouldn't deserve even if they did have it.

16. Will sex be better in the years without art? It goes without saying.

17. What is the Art Strike? Art Strike is the ceremonial mask of a movement away from competitive art making and toward an acognitive culture.

18. Who's behind it? Better that a thousand movements fail than one leader succeeds. Anyone can organise the Art Strike, many have.

19. Why 3 years? In the first year the world will be a field of undifferentiated experience. In the second year figures will emerge from the background. In the third year an acognitive culture will arise.

20. Why must we stop making art?. Because the refusal of artistic identity is the only weapon left to us and the demolition of serious culture the only way ahead.

Compiled by the Art Strike Action Committee of California, originally published as a flyer, Summer 1989.

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