Show extended to the end of October!
JESSE LEPP
AND MIKE PENNER PRESENT:
“LUMINANTS”
OIL PAINTINGS
BY JESSE LEPP
HERE AT
MIKREATIONS
in
Virgil, Ontario
Artist's
Statement
So, you know what spying
does? It creates privileged information. Such information and such
privilege is never benign, as in, “it was being observed” or “it
was being monitored”, rather, it is always both promissory and
secretive. The question is, “How does such knowledge come about and
why is it valuable?” What is the worth, for instance, of
information tantamount to espionage?
I mention this because
Harper's government is now caught spying on (or in) Brazil (the
details from the CBC are shaky). I emphasize the word, “caught”.
God bless the whistle-blower. What better illustration of Pierre
Trudeau's remarks on authority and obedience:
In the last analysis any
given political authority exists only because men consent to obey it.
In this sense what exists is not so much authority as the obedience.
—Approaches to
Politics (Toronto/ Oxford
University Press 1970, p. 31)
One way to think of the
value or worth of such privileged information, protected under
penalty of law, and so, jail, and so, the threat of battery and rape
(if I am to believe every cop drama out there), is if, by offensively
tapping private correspondence and individuals, a few insiders
improve their monitory stock, then this is a matter for our courts—as
there are laws against the use of privileged, propitiatory
information in this way, laws for theft and blackmail—it's called
'insider trading', isn't it? Harper with his economics degree (B.A.)
and M.A. thesis on 'business cycles' comprehends this. . . .
However, let's forget
about Brazil and any and all that court-drama, courtiers and where
they just so happen to live, as that stuff doesn't actually matter at
all. Rather, it's the purposeful creation of a class of people who
have gained access to such insider, propitiatory information – that
creates a distinction between all-out-knowledge and the knowledge
attainable by the pubic, by 'me'—I'm not talking about knowing
secrets of the accepted sort, bound up in the stupid or just childish
notion of a secret that can be broken like one's word can be broken:
I'm not saying that it's wrong or right, good or bad, to reveal a
secret. What is at issue is that whole popular morality of “what
happens in x stays in x” (where x is the
“Vegas” of pop-culture or “the field” of Vietnam War vets)—a
morality with just about as much validity as yelling “Shotgun!”
and expecting everyone to obey automatically and without exception
the command, “I get to sit up front.” Secrets, as facts, have no
claim on one's conscience. You keep them or you don't. No, it's
something greater then the secret that has a bearing on our
freedom—of conscience.
Creating secrecy that
must be obeyed—what do you call that? In this case, “because
we're looking out for you”, “because we have your best interests
at heart”—it is a violation of every Canadians' birth-given
rights. And by birth-given rights, or our so-called 'charter rights',
I am invoking natural and human rights, not just our 'privileges' but
our furthest ancestor-given rights—unassailable. To be
without them is to be better off not having been born. The freedom of
conscience, right? The freedom from class-discrimination, right?
Imagine a government that treats its tax-payers as if they were the
silly child and they the government were the all-knowing adult! What
a bizarre articulation of a class-discrimination! What an aberration
of conscience! On the other hand, how blatant a foe, eh? Just listen
for them to say we owe our allegiance because we are Canadians, to
say that we must not think, we must merely obey.
And yet we, unlike the
child they wish we'd remain, can ask, Why should we obey? Because
they can imprison us? Shoot us? Murder us—? Or, perhaps worse:
charge us compound interest?
Oh, there are the fools
on the CBC I listened to today who called any and all opposition to
such spying “naive”, who said, well, “everybody is doing it,”
well, you could do a show on, “Should bureaucrats just kill their
enemies?” and yolks would call in with their approval of both that
and T.O. mayor, Rob Ford—his awful gravy-train station on the
gravy-train line. Yes, there's something about tyranny that appeals
to people-people who support class discrimination. “The Gravy Train
stops here!” proclaimed Rob Ford and every illiterate thought he
meant to stop The Gravy Train for good! No, just another stop for The
Gravy Train, to facilitate all the more gravy. . . . don't get me
started on that spectacle 'the great' McGuinty (a movie, by the way, by Preston Sturges, mainly
about that suffix turned ironic prefix, 'the great').
“Our actions are
lawful”; yes, but what does that mean given the anarchic granting
of immunity we hear about these days? Why do we say a police officer
'shot and killed' a man and not that that man was murdered? That
protestors were 'processed' and not kidnapped and held hostage? In
reality, our law acknowledges it, that actions taken to ensure our
rights and freedoms are just and courageous—as a part of our
nature. Brandishing a weapon is not tantamount to a death sentence.
No, not brandishing words, neither. In reality, our law is as
incorruptible as our sense of justice.
The class of Canadians
that has access to the privileged information of the sort got by
espionage have capitol the easiest, if not the oldest, way in the
world (in that their system is, in a sense, inherited from better
times): they use the police and collect taxes. Thus their means
toward the propagation and integration of their privileged place in
Canadian society is neigh unfathomable. And yet, I take comfort in
that all such inheritors are ultimately just pieces of shit, and
insofar as their coffins will no doubt be impregnable, worthless
pieces of shit.
Democracy is always a
minimization of secrecy. A minimization of the promissory. The growth
of secrets accessible only by a – by definition – criminal class
in society, who need to be safe more than they need to be human, is
always harbinger of tyrannical forces in government. But like those
CBC guests proved this afternoon, tyranny, and all that gravy, has
its supporters.
Last week, for the first
time in my lifetime, I heard a commercial on CBC Radio, 94.1 FM,
broadcast from Toronto. A fucking commercial on CBC Radio. This week
I heard a commercial on CBC Radio, 99.1, also, broadcast from
Toronto. Someone up there is dealing in restricted and unpolluted
public airwaves—but what is got by the deal can hardly be conceived
of. Except to say that it is definitely something: insentient
non-thought in a place reserved for enlightenment and reason. What
could be the benefit? Benefit to whom? And—they're (I do not know
their names) making it sound like the news? So, what the hell is
going on in Toronto, eh? Have they finally built enough condos to
house the Harper supporters they need to steamroll culturally
un-Conservative (yet, progressive, I think) T. O. ridings? Or is this
more to do with Ottawa? You know, the nice thing about a Bible story
where not ten good (godly?) people can be found in a place bent on its
destruction is the appreciation of how difficult must the necessity
be of a hundred and something appointees to our present-day Senate. . . . Not sure how you feel about the Senate? Here's a solution: make appointees unanimously decided by a vote in the House. The likelihood of the House having an appointee in common should quell opposition on both sides of the issue.
The paintings here today
are insentient. I take sole responsibility. This is between
you, me, and Mike. As I once wrote about another show I was involved
with, “These paintings are more of what there is to say, that is,
if there is room.” A sad, ironical statement. In any case, my
writing will never be all that great, and these days I'm happier
painting.
Jesse Lepp
N-O-T-L
