About Me
Should an artist consider financial gain, take into account bread and butter when working his sculptures? In commercializing art, will market forces fuel the expression of the artist and bring his art to a new level of perfection or soften his art with sterilizing political correctness? This could all depend on the platform of expression and the amount of censorship inflicted on the artist. Michelangelos Doni Tondo is the masterpiece of modern art with the Virgin, Joseph and the Infant masterfully entwined to create an animated composition of incredible beauty and depth, sold on contract to the state or church or some other big shot in the glory days of Florence. But is art true art when it is sculptured to fit a crowd and furthermore should art be commercialized and sold to the simpler of man?
Lately, the general art community seems to be no more than an oversized group of freak gimp jokers, hiding in their own twisted minds, drugging their demons with alcohol, pot and art. These escape artists, when huddled up in some artist hangout, practicing some weird communal psychedelic cannabis and alcohol yoga celebration often belief that they are experiencing art magic and that they have found a magic solution to the many ins and outs of life by following the set artistic pattern to the very letter of political correctness. Soul viper, being an avid researcher of human behavior, a pessimistic realist, an atheist and a punk rocker, simply feels this lifestyle to be a brutalized Buddhist technique, an algorithm shy a few numbers in order to have the bottom line make much sense in the long run, an approach to life that resembles something that he has read about at one time or another, something to do with Jonestown and cyanide.
He suspects that when a conventional artist finds him self alone and sober, the unwashed windows of the artists soul gets hit by cleansing rain from the clouds of reality and that if the artist is brave enough to take a peek through the clean patches where the water runs down to touch base with the frame of it all, he can see flashes from another time, a time when the artist had a sense of purpose. During such a moment the artist comes face to face with his own demons and is hit by a breeze of clarity, a faint whisper that gives a slight punch at the chest from the inside, telling the artist very softly that all he really is, is a stock broker in disguise, and that life isnt the magic walk through wonderland that he read about in some fashion article decades ago, words that changed his life at a time when he was desperate enough to take the thing seriously, that there are no ways to escape his own personality, that life is simply series of unpaid debts, and that meeting the payments in support of ones children, ones partner and ones family, is the key to happiness. And more importantly that all the artist really wants to do is to go back home and stop lying to himself, that or in a search for something solid and fresh, turn to Soul Viperism.
This theory of his, although hard to prove, underlines the absolute importance of not floating too far away from a shot of rum when you are serious about creating traditional art forms. Who knows what happens if an artist finds himself outside of the intoxication envelope with no lifeline what so ever. He might then become sober long enough to embrace the banker, or lawyer or doctor or whatever his parents wanted him to become and return to the real world with nothing to support himself with except for a worn out T shirt that says FUCK THE ALAMO, and a fading memory of some art work that will be rotting away under a bench at an art resort or being torched by a pack of crazed tourist teenage midnight lovers on ocean front rocks under frying marshmallow sticks or molding beyond the point of no return in an abandoned artist work shop in Amsterdam.
Soul Viper has felt the stormy weather of artistic middle age approaching, seen the bloody thing beating up the horizon and he suspects that other artists have seen it as well. He has felt the impending doom, the utter horror felt by any man that wakes up drunk in a deserted alley in an Acapulco shirt at the age of forty plus and all telephone calls to the woman he left behind some years before are answered by a silent person on the other end of the line, someone who has the good sense of hanging up the damn thing without saying a single word. He has felt the frightening pain in the abdomen when all letters sent to the real world go unanswered and there is no real prospect to fall on to soften the arrival when the mind finally succumbs to the laws of gravity and comes back down to earth where the rest of the human race chooses to live. He has his suspicions that other artists have been combating their own common sense as well. He has caught glimpse of this bloody invasion of reality demons in the eyes of his fellow artists. The sightings are as rare as finding a looker in London, but the demons are there.
He has started to register a pattern and the demons seemed to be living in a moment in time just before intoxication kicks in, somewhere between the fourth shot of rum and the second shot of tequila, a time when they can materialized in the form of a faint spark of disillusion in the corner of an eye, or a hesitation before a shot is executed, or when the signs are strong, a combination between those two. They are signs of unwanted and ugly chemical combinations living inside a conflicted mind and they will vaporize and become nothing if brought out into the open in public where they can be scrutinized and treated with respect, dealt with, tagged and categorized as acceptable emotions then finally put in their place in the puzzle of the human psyche.
He has caught sight of the demons, but the sightings are hard to prove because the bastards only stay for a second or two. Because of the difficulty in nailing the bastards he has taken up the habit of counting the drinks as he waits in deep anticipation for a sign of the beasts. An out of focus stare into the far distance, off balance and out of place, a stare at an image from the past giving a sign of a twisted thought that stings the gut of the avid thinker while he relives a broken promise from another time. Then, as suddenly as they appear, they disappear; drowned by the fifth shot of rum or the second shot of tequila and the hope to bed a poor desperate young girl searching for an identity, too drunk to realize what dirty bastard was getting off on her at some un-Godly hour in the morning.
These are some of the issues that passed through Soul-Vipers membrane as he sketched up his dirty little drafts and his dirty little blue prints of politically correct art forms while clocking 300 hours per week in a neatly located workshop just down the street from a gay sauna, a place where much inspiration could be found if one knew exactly where to look for it.
His attempt to fit in as an artist, a mainstream flirter, eventually burned his fuse and he in return torched all his mainstream work, fine but sterile pieces of art that would have been welcomed warmly within the walls of the public arenas that demand art work to showcase in order to elevate their own image to a higher platform, such as government buildings, public libraries, speed trains and public lavatories.
Soul-Viper decided to commit commercial suicide (after having witnessed still born art being published for the simpler of man for much too long), by taking the whole art show one step further, broadening the sonic palette a bit with an element of free jazz, platform shoes and pink tight pants (and a couple of blue pills in order to add a little juice to his cannon), and transformed himself into the conflicted front man of the art/music/theatrics scene widely recognized today as Soul-Viperism or by the noun describing the act to Soul Viper or to pull a soul viper on something, meaning to freak it up a bit and take it further while setting it free.
The ability to transform oneself into something larger than life is a virtue claimed by few. The act of creating art by balancing life on the very razors edge of norm, an area with a kink and tremendous sex appeal where the art form survives somewhere on the edge of reality, requires a complete remake of the artist himself with no guarantee for safe transport back from those forbidden realms of art making for neither the artist himself nor any poor bastard that witnesses such acts of foul art making.
Many artists have gone over the edge while tasting this particular and very forbidden fruit of liberal expression, teetering along the edge of their own personal cliffs while creating art and eventually and very possibly taking it all too far, by finding themselves being run back and forth from a psychiatric hospital on day release while continuing their die hard work with this art form. The tortured tones and outfits set on display during any of the Soul-Viper performances are your guarantees that the transformation from man to a machine dressed in pink is not a pretty process; the proof is in the pudding, with regards to Soul-Viperism the punks have moved in and chased the hippies out of art town.
