Text written for the Pizza Space-Time exhibition, an exhibition by João Marçal.

This text is 100% human generated

Joao Marçal is a painter, born in 1984, in Lisbon. He lives and works in Benfica in a live-work studio, that he shares with Ana Manso, a painter and his partner, their daughter, and their dog, a nervous beagle. He has a passion for all these things, as well as the soccer team Benfica, and single malt scotch. I write these things because first and foremost we are talking about a person. A person who has loved and suffered. Who dreams and cringes. Who you most likely know nothing about. Also, it’s what the culture says is most important. It’s not whether João Marçal is working in the formalist tradition, or if he is a post-abstract painter, or a post-conceptual pop abstractionist. Right? He asked me if I could write a text, for his show at ZDB. The first thing he mentioned was that it was going to have custom pizza boxes in it, which sent my mind racing.

But before I get to the pizza boxes, and post-conceptual pop abstraction, I want to think a bit about the task at hand: writing a gallery text. Gallery press releases are the precursors of AI slop, the trash modeled by stable diffusion image and video generators, and statistically generated stochastic copy pumped out at dizzying rates ever since ChatGPT hit the ground running. This makes the hordes of pre-AI BFA, MFA, Lit Majors in their role as gallery assistants, as the precursors of LLMs. They’d maybe read a few gallery press releases. Maybe they’d waxed poetic as undergrads on ‘there is no outside text’ (il n’y a pas hors texte) while writing their thesis about Derrida’s ‘On Grammatology’, which they only read in the Spivak Translation, therefore missing most of the fun of the French punnery that makes the ‘inside jokes’

of Derrida’s text even a little bit jolly. Or maybe they had labored hundreds of hours on a masters thesis about the intersection of Deleuzian folds and Bronzino drapery and how these intersect with post-marxist critique of the Medici’s systemic oppression of Florentine orange farmers; or the notions of totalitarianism in Hannah Arendt’s work, who was German and Jewish, vis a vis notions of ‘Being as Care’ in Heidegger’s work, who was German and a registered Nazi, and Arendt’s lover, and how this relationship might function as a trans-temporal mirror explicating how Ana Mendieta’s carvings in Cuban forests were prescient in ‘problematizing’ Carl André’s work vis-à-vis him having most likely murdered her, his lover, out of jealousy. Then, in order to write
a 3 paragraph blurb of copy on ‘X’ artist, this gallery assistant, would try to remember the shreds of grab bag post-rational post-marxist french and german punnery (already diluted and rendered meaningless through the linguistic meat grinder of the translation they read, if the original weren’t already potentially meaningless, as Sean Kelly, the premiere north American specialist on Heidegger suggests might be true about ‘Being and Time’). Hungover at their gallery desk, getting paid close to minimum wage, they would try to conjur these distant fragments (the little naughty BFA student in me is greedily telling me to refer to them as ‘syntagms’!).
After gathering enough fragments (‘Language Games’, ‘emancipatory practice’, ‘revelatory genre’) in the salad mixer of their memory, they’d take 10mg of Adderall, turn the synaptic machinery up to 12, and, like good old LLMs, spit out how X artist, now showing, engages with the complexities restructuring interstices and are hegemonically revelatory, referring to the systemic oppression complexifying the politics of the post-colonial,

reconfronting notions of appropriation… in other words, they’d spit out 100% garbled, human slop. This recipe has been more or less faithfully followed for generations, to create the genre of the Gallery Press release, notoriously maligned as the most vapid, boring and meaningless piece of garbage writing known to grace the earth.

For these reasons, I wanted to step ‘outside of the text’, or more precisely, outside of the genre. I promised myself I would try to avoid saying that Marçal’s work relates to the hegemonic, interstices, the intersection of, engages with systemic oppression of, complexifying, the politics of, confronts, reengages with, etc. This will be hard, because, yes, I too, was graced with the honor of receiving a BFA.

What is the purpose of a press release? Is it to ‘explain’ the art we are about to see? Is it to suggest the work’s relevance by describing it next to key words, like ‘post- colonial’, ‘ancestral indigenous practices’, ‘the crises of climate change’? Is it to critique the work? The point of a press release, as I know it from the movie business, where it has a more functional purpose, is to give little snippets of copy that a journalist at a pre-premiere press screening can quickly paste into an article as they rush from screening to screening. I was shocked to find out that time after time, a fragment from the little synopsis, bio, or director’s note of intention I had written for the press release was quoted verbatim in some article. This seems, however depressing, and revelatory of the lack of care and time that journalists are obliged to have in the light of plummeting readership, wages and staff that all print is having in the era of the attention apocalypse, to be a laudable function – it is the providing of information, of quotes. This doesn’t seem to happen with gallery press releases. Rarely does the mangled lexical labyrinth of a gallery press release lead to a pull quote for a review. That might not be exclusively the poor texts’ fault, but also because there are less and less reviews. Culture section Journalists, at major newspapers, are either
being fired due to downsizing, or wage cut, expenses cut, told to write too much, suffering burnout, having crises of their own. The contemporary art section, ahs already been relegated to the back of the cultural section of any newspaper, and then compressed in size over the past two decades from one page to one column. So that’s one reason maybe the gallery press release has no function – there is no press to release it to. But the other reason is it is usually absolute garbage.

So what could this press release be? Could it be a good one? So far how have I done? No good. I agree. Not sticking to the subject matter.

I’m trying to write something that helps us think about art and appreciate art. Painting specifically. I’m not sure this is the role of a gallery text. Or even what Joao invited me to do. He said I was free to write whatever. It could be a fiction, a dialogue.

The first thing he said was that the exhibition had custom pizza boxes, which sent my mind racing. What was the meaning of the pizza box? Why a pizza box? What was the relationship of the pizza box to painting? What was the relationship of the pizza box to Marçal’s body of work?
Marçal’s paintings have often used found imagery from popular culture – oil paintings of retro vaporwave video cassette covers, for example. So is the pizza box one more iteration of pop in his work? What is pizza anyway? What

is a pizza box? A pizza box is cardboard. Had it always been that way? No, they didn’t have cardboard back in Naples when it was allegedly invented by the King Ferdinand I. Back then, during a, a tour guide told me during covid Naples had been afflicted with another pandemic that led to famine, poverty, and a general nutrition crisis in the great Castilian state of Naples. So King Ferdinand held a competition across the city, to see who could create, invent, a recipe that would feed the poor, cheaply, that the city could back. Chefs, home cooks all scattered to their basil and laurel filled kitchens, bakers rushed to salt bae their ur-zero zero flour, pastolos kneaded their semola egg mixes, and one man decided to do something simple, have some flatbread cooked in a brick wood fired oven, top it with a veggie – tomato – pulverized into a mash so it could be more quickly served, dairy on top – some mozza ball slices, scattered, easily melt in the oven. Oven at high temp 450Cº – A large slab of this would then be quickly sliced (had they invented the pizza slicer already?) to create the small al-taglio square slices you find all over Italy – batta bing, batta boom – pizza was invented in the early 1800s. The king, disguised as a ‘lazzaroni’ common person, went to taste all the offerings, and pizza was his favourite, and it won the competition. This is all information I got from a man selling me pizza in naples, so take that for what it’s worth. To this day – the best pizza I have eaten was in Naples. But It wasn’t always this way. When I was a kid my favourite pizza was stuffed crust extra cheese offered by ‘Pizza Hut’. When I would harangue my mother because of my insatiable craving for this glutinous dairy bomb, she would complain in her Russian sounding accent that ‘isso é ‘junk food’. These two words signified so much for her – Junk food was American, lacking nutritional value,

consumerist, for fast consumption, commodified, packaged, the dirty sheen of capitalist product imbued in the grease stained cardboard, subliminal imperialism bubbling up through the fat and cholesterol. In short – it was stupid and bad for you. But we see pizza is also, at its heart, in its genesis in Naples, the food of the common man, the working poor, the famished – a public service, a public health strategy, and the king of Naples as a sort of 19th century Fauci rolling out a pandemic cure-all. How could she, as a public health specialist, not see this!?
Marçal sees the pizza box in these two ways – as pop, fast, commodified – but he also sees it as having its foundation in the emancipation and empathy with the common man – ‘Pizza, in New York, it’s the food for the everyman, it’s a two dollar slice, in a city where most ‘cheap’ meals are over 30 dollars,’. This intersection ( just kidding, I promised I wouldn’t use that word) – in the
conflagration… no… it is this Janus-head of pizza… no, sorry, my BFA shadow self is strong, I’m doing it again. The pizza box, for Marçal, I think, represents two things at the same time – the oppressive weight of capitalist commodification as well as the easy, popular, and emancipatory cheapness of working class. How can I say this without resorting to the douchy artspeak – it reminds him of the freeing simplicity of anti-elitism and also of the chains of the sociopathic consumption culture. It means two things at once, and probably more, which muddies its meaning, and makes it complex. And there is so much more in the pizza box. We can relate it to Warhol’s brillo boxes, which essentially did the same thing, representing the simple everyday common object of the common man, as well as critiquing the fetish object of capitalist commodity. But this also gets more confusing when we think of how much Warhol was selling his work for and what his work represented – he literally sold silkscreen paintings of dollar signs, for millions of dollars – how can you be making work that is critical of dominant capitalist oppression yet be profiting from it? Warhol started working in earnest in the 60s, and then hit peak fame in the eighties, accompanying the arc from anti-establishment hippie counterculture all the way to the Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal turn of the 80s. His work is a direct reaction to more ‘stone-faced’ contemporaries like Brakhage, Judd, Stella, etc. They would all hang out at Max Kansas City in New York, and the minimalists would be at the front of the bar, while the pop Warholites at the back of the bar – the two factions brimming with contempt for each other. The back was pop, queer, fun; the front was serious, straight, less fun (according to Schjeldahl, the New Yorker art critic, who would oscillate between these two worlds). But this is New York, not Benfica. Marçal lived in New York for a brief period, and holds the city and these references dearly, but why is he bringing back the pizza box from the Bowery to Benfica? Can we find an answer in ‘Mystic Pizza’, the 1984 Julia Roberts comedy about a Portuguese-immigrant pizza parlor owning family living in New Bedford – yes, Julia Roberts plays a Portuguese immigrant. Probably not. But a conspicuous reference. And pizza has so much more to offer in terms of references. Pizzagate, the right wing conspiracy theory that claimed ‘Comet Ping Pong Pizza’, a small family owned pizza restaurant in Washington D.C, was secretly keeping children in its basement, trafficked for abuse by a cabal of left-wing elitists like Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. This theory tracked to the point of virality, leading Edgar Maddison Welch to drive up from North Carolina to ‘self-investigate’ and find the children, armed with an AR-15, and shoot up the pizza restaurant. After confirming the conspiracy was not true he turned himself into the police. But soon after Epstein’s Lolita island was uncovered, and on those flight logs, indeed we can find Bill Clinton. And then there is the evolution of this conspiracy theory that the Epstein island was actually a psy-op colab between the CIA and Mossad as a honeytrap to entrap politicians and other powerful figures, so that they could manipulate them to do their bidding. So maybe they weren’t so far from the truth. Just what did Comet Ping Pong have to do with it!? Nothing, except that Cheese Pizza was said to be a code word for something far more nefarious – CP. There is a long tradition of using food as sexual metaphor or prop – whipped cream, honey, oysters, cucumber dildos, eggplant and peach emojis, sushi served on naked human bodies, apple pie being used as an organic fleshlight by X in American Pie, George Costanza eating rotisserie chicken while having intercourse in order to join his two favourite things- or the genre of ‘big sausage pizza’, a porn microgenre that gained popularity in the early aughts, that consisted of a pizza delivery man, knocking at a customer’s door, asking if the customer had bought ‘big sausage pizza’ and then opening the box, to reveal a pepperoni pizza with a hole cut out of the center, through which the delivery man’s intimidating equine proportioned member would be standing erect – ‘I put extra sausage on it for you.’ he’d say with porn actor smirk. This microgenre, regrettably, inspired me to make my own pizza inspired artwork, where I attempted to ‘queer’ the genre, by taking a photo of a pizza decorated with rainbow colored architectural models as toppings, and my own, diminutive member sticking out through the center, non-erect, because it was incredibly difficult to stay erect as I was nervously trying to click the hydraulic shutter extender on the Hasselblad medium format camera in the cold photo studio of the art school, which, of course, did not have locking doors, which meant someone could catch me, compromised, as I was trying to take a self portrait of myself with my penis sticking through a pizza box. Art students have done dumber things, but this one is close to the top on my personal list. I later showed this work in a gallery, which both of my grandmothers went to see. When my Grandma Fernanda visited the show, she was accompanied by my cousin Susana, who led her arm-in arm around the gallery, and tried to get her to walk past the embarrassing and explicit photograph none the wiser. But Fernanda already knew about her grandson’s ‘big sausage pizza’ photo, and jerked her granddaughter’s arm, stopping right in front of it – ‘I want to see this one.’ I watched across the gallery, face flushing, shamefilled. She adjusted her glasses and got ungodly close to the center of the pizza where the shriveled mushroom tip revealed itself and commented ‘is this it?’, seemingly disappointed – I’m afraid to think about what exactly. And as dumb, embarrassing and cringey as that work might be, it uses what I’m willing to say some of the same ‘strategies’ or conceptual techniques, as Marçal does with his pizza box – an allusion to pop art, a reference to popular culture, a modification of the pizza box with retro-futuristic adornments (silkscreening galaxy wormhole in Marçal’s
case, rainbow dodecahedron models in my case). And this gets to the modification Marçal made to his pizza box – in the center he printed variations on a retro-futurist vaporwave styled graphic of a wormhole, or the center of an ouroboros. Marçal is writing his current PhD about the link between painting and blackholes. He says he sees painting as ‘a warping of space and time’. He describes his vision of space, of the world in general as constant, and the creation of a painting will literally deform the space time continuum – it alters the meaning of the space it is in, and warps time – by slowing us down maybe, in this hyperactive attention economy. I can imagine him seeing, like Neo, in the Matrix, the world in code, and where he is painting, he is literally altering the fabric of reality, altering the green letters of waterfalling vertical strands of the code of reality. Black holes were originally discovered by Karl Schwarzschild, who was thought to be a madman, was discredited by his contemporaries. It seemed impossible. But the math was right – if you took the equations of the theory of relativity to their mathematical conclusion, if you worked them to their extreme, they would posit what was named as ‘the singularity’ a point where all light and mass ceases to seem to exist, later proved to be the mathematical discovery of the yet undiscovered black holes, that would be documented only decades later. The men that came up with these theories, held in close esteem the mystic and the mathematical. Marçal, replaces math with pizza, and, coincidentally like Cosmic Pizza, or Comet Ping Pong – relates the mysticism of the black hole to pizza. He said he got this idea when he was on the subway and saw a person carrying a vertical pizza box. He said it shook him with a strange notion of ‘gravity’. The code of the matrix was altered by this vertical pizza box, the weight of the pizza smushing the compounded mozza, sauce, oil, down onto the thin side of the box. The pizza box, sideways, in that subway, altered time and space for Marçal, and therefore it was equivalent to painting – an object that alters time and space for a viewer. Every painting in the show, besides the pizza boxes, is a blown-up version of mass produced public transportation upholstery patterns. In this sense the imagery is, like the pizza box, mass produced design, of the common man, part and parcel of a history relating to public services. It is also funny. At least to me, because there is rarely anything as banal, corporate, mass produced, and often ugly, as public transportation upholstery design patterns. To spend the time to ‘uplift’ this lowly, ugly imagery to the status of unique exemplar fine art oil on canvas is, a transgression – you’re not supposed to paint big paintings of bad design used in mass produced public transportation. Like the pizza box as sculpture, the transgressive elevation of a popular form to fine art status, is funny. But Marçal is also earnest. He lives in Benfica (bio always comes to haunt you), the most well known ‘popular’ working class neighborhood in Lisbon. He loves Benfica, the most well known popular working class football club in Portugal. Marçal feels for the working class, for the working man. Where we ate lunch was the tasca next to his studio, and it’s the restaurant by far where I saw more uniformed police men and women eating together, I think ever. And as Pasolini said of May ‘68 uprising, the true working class are the young uniformed men getting cobblestones hurled at them by petty bourgeois ‘revolutionary’ nepobabies. So Marçal’s use of public transport design patterns as the main subject matter for his work – it’s funny, and ironic but it’s also earnest and sincere. Again – meaning two contradictory things at once, muddying the waters.

There is another ironic/earnestness, that I think is decoded by the pizza box wormhole – most of the patterns, taken off their intended supports of
polyurethane and fiberglass bus and metro seats, and spread out onto the flat image of a canvas – have a cosmic appearance. Orbs, multicolored, float, suspended, like celestial spheres. The vanilla swirls echo galactic spirals. Primary color Platonic forms, triangles, circles, squares hang suspended, like shadows in a cave, warping the prisoner of reality’s time and space. Could Marçal be warping the time space of the common man, by flattening poor design and elevating it to the status of earnest, hand painted fine art, that sees the very tapestry of overlooked social service design as subliminally hinting at the cosmos, the galactic, the mystical secrets that surround us everyday?

And there is a third ironic/earnest duality (can I use the word duality/ is that fair game?) which is that it looks like abstract expressionist painting. All the paintings look like some funhouse distortion of Motherwell, Rothko, Pollock. This is where the formalism comes in – art for art’s sake – art that isn’t political – art that takes painting radically to its most basic definition – paint on a surface, on a canvas, on a support. But Marçal is also at odds with the tradition of abstract expressionism. His is a practice of appropriating existing popular designs, and in this sense, like Richter before him, he is making a joke about expressionism. Unlike Pollock, Motherwell, Rothko, who claimed and professed to be expressing ineffable truths about the mystical secrets of the universe, by moving away from social realist painting, and naturalism, and figuration, they were tapping into the secrets and mysteries of life itself. And they were expressing the artist’s genius, the singular mastermind, usually male American painter’s ‘master’ mind, most iconically typified by Pollock literally jettisoning cum-like expressive splatters across a raw virgin canvas. And, in abstraction, since then, most clearly and famously in Richter’s painting, there is the creation of a fake- expressionism. Richter smears his canvases, slowly and methodically, with an extra large window wiper squeegee. He is functioning like a human printer, not expressing anything – just simulating expressivity. Marçal’s abstractions are the same. They are appropriated images, that simulate an expressive image, but that are meticulously and methodically hand painted, thread by thread, for excruciating amounts of hours – they seem expressive, but are actually the opposite. This questioning of abstract expressionism was first clearly done by Ad Reinhardt and Frank Stella, who, in reaction to Barnett Newman’s mystical (read cheesy) vertical stripes representing ‘souls’ or ‘essences’ (his words, not mine) painted similar imagery, but with a new style – one that was cold, and calculating and sought to remove the hand of the artist to the maximum extent possible. This led Frank Stella to create abstract paintings that were not expressive improvisations like Pollock or Motherwell – they were improvised in no way – they were cold and calculated by the algorithm of the actual support of the painting – by this I mean that he took the material of the painting – canvas with a certain weave, and stretcher bars with a certain layout – and used those elements – the edge of the weave of the actual canvas, and the cross orientation of the stretcher bars, and painted those very things, by painting ever repeating, coldly calculated black crosses on his canvases. In this sense he created a conceptual meta painting, a painting about painting, that was only about the materials used in the making of the painting. It one-upped the abstract expressionists ‘reduction of painting to its most basic primary form, leaving behind figuration’ by even reducing beyond expressivity – the painting said nothing beyond saying ‘I am a painting’. Marçal is working in the same coolness, with the same calculation. He paints on extra thick weave burlap canvas, where each weave is clearly visible, and uses the actual threads as a guide for where to paint each brush stroke – each brush stroke is meticulously hand painted onto each thread, having the painting tell him where to paint. This dedication, to slowly, monotonously hand painting repetitive patterns can be related to Agnes Martin’s hand drawn and hand painted meticulous grids, that she related to the mystical. Her practice, I think, warped her reality. Likewise, Marçal’s method, calm, patience are a form of warping his own reality – of slowing it down – creating a wormhole where he gets lost in the practice of this repetitive meditative production. The apparent expressivity of the designs is contradicted by the fact that they are appropriated mass produced images. This is what I was getting at with post-conceptual pop abstraction – it has Stella, it has Warhol, it has Richter, Martin. But there is an interesting other contradiction here that is hidden. In between a class consciousness and the history of abstraction. MoMA was founded by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, Nelson Rockefeller’s mom. He called it ‘mommy’s museum’. The Rockefellers were rich because of Standard Oil, the largest oil company in the US at the time, founded in the 1890s by their grandpappy. The Rockefeller’s standard oil was represented by Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, run by the Dulles Brothers, who, the elder, during Eisenhower ended up becoming secretary of state, and the younger, Allen, became the director of the CIA. So here we already have a triangle – big capital (represented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers), State (represented by Eisenhower and elder Dulles), Intelligence community (represented by Dulles and the CIA), and the confluence of these through the law firm representing the interests of capital (Sullivan & Cromwell, the Dulles law firm that represented standard oil) – side fact, they also represented I.G. Farben, the chemical company that produced Zyklon B, the gas used for the gas chambers, and coincidentally, the source of Prussian Blue. Dulles was an actual Nazi-sympathizer, and saved many of the Nazis from Nuremberg or death at the hands of revolutionaries, and instated them either directly within the CIA or within the newly established West German intelligence office. For Dulles, during and after the war, the Nazis were never the problem (literally his law firm represented the company that made the gas for the gas chambers) – it was the commies. The Soviets. The ruskies. They were a threat to capital – to standard oil, and X chemical company, and the American Fruit company. Nazis were actually great, in his mind, insofar as they could help him fight the reds. Class consciousness was the real demon Dulles wanted to spear dead. But these powers had an issue. The intellectual elite – the writers, painters, poets, musicians – were often left leaning, and as left leaning intellectuals, often sympathetic to communism, marxism, the reds, the commies, the Soviets, the ruskies. Dulles knew that he would have a much easier time fighting the cold war, if he could somehow distract these intellectuals from being so sympathetic to class consciousness. And for this he came up with a fantastic partner, Thomas Braden, a CIA employee, friend, who had an idea – why don’t we come up with an alternative for those intellectuals. His plan, to create an American art and cultural tradition, and promote it internationally – and it would be opposite of the ‘oppressive’ Soviet state mandated and heavily
censored social realism. In America it would be the opposite. Rockefeller, the president of MoMA (remember, mommy’s museum) at the time, instated Braden as one of the MoMA directors of international programs, and they set off to design one of the most impressive cultural coups in history – they organized 18 exhibitions in South America, dozens in Europe, all called ‘new American
painting’, organized cultural congresses on ‘freedom’, promoted tours of the Boston Pops the US’s greatest symphony orchestra, and financed dozens of intellectual journals, including the Paris Review. This network of cultural production was manipulated, consciously, to be an alternative to communist sympathetic cultural production (Picasso, Sartre, Beauvoir, etc). Braden, got lucky, but also picked up on the potential for propaganda of young New York based artists – Pollock, Rothko, Guston, Motherwell. Their abstractions, they were literally the opposite of the stodgy Stalinist social realist murals. He took his idea to Eisenhower, asking him to fund and authorize these exhibitions with Marshall Plan Slush funds – Eisenhower was incensed in the Oval Office. He said ‘But this work is meaningless, it says absolutely nothing – why, a child could make this. The American people will hate this? Why should I fund this. I hate this – it is decidedly un-American!’ and this is where Braden has an incredible turn of rhetorical hand – he said ‘No. This is American. It is freedom. It is freedom exactly because you don’t like it. See, in the Soviet states, no one can paint anything the Kremlin doesn’t like, but in the US, the art we champion, is art we don’t like, and that the American people don’t understand – because we are a free country.’ This spin worked, and off Braden was financing with enormous amounts of money the propaganda arm of the CIA that worked directly out of MoMA, in cahoots with the owners of Standard Oil, trying to conjure how painting, poetry and symphonies could defend the interests of imperialist capital. And this is why abstract expressionism worked so well – it didn’t mean anything clearly. It was open to interpretation. And it certainly didn’t scream ‘class revolt’. Pollock might have disguised himself as a sort of ‘working man painter’, with his denim overalls, filterless cigarettes, alcohol abuse problem, and the very industrial house paints he painted with – but like Chaplin – this was just a look – Chaplin always played a poor man, but never a proletarian – that would be un- American – there is even a scene where Chaplin is holding a red flag in the middle of the street, leading a communist union march, but he is doing it unconsciously, he has no idea the crowd is behind him, because he is just chasing after a truck that dropped the flag. To underline this lack of compromise with the working class, the film, ironically, is in black and white, so we can never be sure if the flag is the red flag of class consciousness, or a white flag of surrender. Pollock was similar – he simulated working class aesthetics – but he was creating elitist art. Adam Curtis goes too far to underline that this CIA program of cultural cold war was actually responsible for creating identity politics – where Braden and his associates strategically decided to use their platforms (like the Paris Review) to push material that foregrounded identity based issues – such as race and gender equality – in order to be able to distract the communist sympathizing left from class politics. In this sense we can see that identity politics are at their foundation, in part at least, a CIA psy- op to turn the left against the left, and to distract from class struggle. Formalism, and abstraction – the very Greenbergian concept of art for art’s sake, and the turn away from figuration – are the pathologies resultant from a CIA psyop that wanted to wrest cultural dominance away from commie sympathizing Paris, and place it, through brute propagandistic subliminal investment in New York City’s MoMA, mommy’s museum. And here we can conclude the contradiction of the meaning of
abstraction – what does formalism and abstraction mean – is it mystic, is it profound, is it erudite and complex – or was it a way to strip art of meaning, to take it away from the common working class struggle. So we have one more contradiction in Marçal – the formalist and the populist. What do all these contradictions add up to? They are complex – we have a few contradictory oppositions – maybe even a hidden dialectic (haha, jk) – that create something that is funny and earnest, class conscious and formalist, mystical yet mechanical, something that warps our sense of space time. A black hole. A wormhole. A glitch in the matrix. A tear in the simulacrum – tear that makes us laugh.