The Industrial Culture Handbook is simply a reference guide to the philosophy and interests of a flexible alliance of the following deviant international artists: Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK, Z'ev, Non, Monte Cazazza, Mark Pauline, Sordide Sentimental, Johanna Went, and R&N. Most of these artists have been working creatively a decade or longer, in varying degrees of obscurity. The impetus in common is rebellion.
By "industrial" we mean the grim side of post-Industrial Revolution society-the repressed mythology, history, science, technology and psychopathology. By "culture" we mean the books, films, magazines, records, etc which have been plucked out of the available information overload as relevant and important.
There is no strict unifying aesthetic, except that all things gross, atrocious, horrific, demented, and unjust are examined with black-humor eyes. Nothing is (or ever again will be) sacred, except a commitment to the realization of the individual imagination. These are not gallery or salon artists struggling to get to where the money is: these are artists in spite of art. There is no standard or value left unchallenged.
The values, standards, and content that remain are of a perversely anarchic nature, grounded in a post-holocaust mortality. Swept away are false politeness, etiquette, preoccupation with texture and form-all the niceties associated with several generations of art about other art. Starting on a realigned foundation of "black" history, "black" science and the "black arts," these artists have presented their visions reflecting the world as they see it, not the official realities. The problems of morality and critical evaluation are left to the eye of the beholder, and to history-what remains of it . . .
All art has as its source dreams, the unconscious, and the imagination. And in dreams as in the imagination as in art-nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted.
By "industrial" we mean the grim side of post-Industrial Revolution society-the repressed mythology, history, science, technology and psychopathology. By "culture" we mean the books, films, magazines, records, etc which have been plucked out of the available information overload as relevant and important.
There is no strict unifying aesthetic, except that all things gross, atrocious, horrific, demented, and unjust are examined with black-humor eyes. Nothing is (or ever again will be) sacred, except a commitment to the realization of the individual imagination. These are not gallery or salon artists struggling to get to where the money is: these are artists in spite of art. There is no standard or value left unchallenged.
The values, standards, and content that remain are of a perversely anarchic nature, grounded in a post-holocaust mortality. Swept away are false politeness, etiquette, preoccupation with texture and form-all the niceties associated with several generations of art about other art. Starting on a realigned foundation of "black" history, "black" science and the "black arts," these artists have presented their visions reflecting the world as they see it, not the official realities. The problems of morality and critical evaluation are left to the eye of the beholder, and to history-what remains of it . . .
All art has as its source dreams, the unconscious, and the imagination. And in dreams as in the imagination as in art-nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted.
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~Excerpted from Re/Search #6/7: Industrial Culture Handbook, by V. Vale and Andrea Juno �
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