1. Art comes from places where people can afford to live. Art comes from places left behind by governments and the grand narrative of art. Art comes from dreary places in supposed decline, managed or otherwise. Art comes from places that people wring hands and dogwhistle about. When a place ceases to be these things, so it goes.
2. If someone writes a glossy magazine article about the art that comes from the place where you make art, move across the country and completely change the kind of art that you make.
3. If you begin to think that you are part of a scene, set fire to it and/or yourself.
4. Tear down the hagiography of the Rite of Spring.
5. If the revival has gone on for longer than the original movement, then both should be put to bed, transfigured, ritually sacrificed.
6. Mourn lost pasts without wallowing in versions of them that never existed.
7. Merely depicting something isn’t an inherent comment on it, but nor is it an inherent endorsement.
8. Linearity is the enemy of art. Top-down structures are tools of death.
9. Genre is descriptive, not prescriptive. Do not create within a genre. Where the descriptive becomes prescriptive is where expression goes to die. "[Tony Conrad] said that whenever he was labeled something...he usually abandoned what he was doing and wiped the slate clean."
10. Become unstuck in time: cyclical time without thirty-year cycles or point-time, linear time without abolishing the past or predicating on the future.
11. Do not offer yourself to anyone who wants you to be anyone else. No temp scores, no type beats, no “in the style of” unless as détournement.
12. There is no such thing as a singular platonic ideal of authenticity, so don’t feign it. Rockism is for Disco Demolition Night celebrants.
13. All irony eventually becomes sincerity. All sincerity eventually becomes dogma. The fear of sincerity becomes the fear and hate of everything. The fear of irony becomes the fear of engaging with suffering.
14. All of our instincts and emotions are colored and twisted beyond recognition by psychosocial conditioning. We do not know who we are. It is a strength to realize this and depict the occlusion of human connection while striving for the unreachable nonetheless. In other words: there is no authenticity. Study what keeps you from authenticity; this is the source of art.
15. Hide from the sun. Resist the sun.
16. Create upwards from materiality, imbued with it but not solely expressed through its monolith.
17. Create to a sense of place.
18. Make art with materials left behind or deemed kitsch in an era of overproduction. If other people start doing the same thing, do it backwards and put a silly sticker on that old Eastern Bloc fuzz pedal that’ll go for three times as much now. The radical union of high and low culture.
19. Never use the word “we”.
20. Contemplate all the blood soaked in the patch of earth beneath your feet. You will fail to reconcile it with yourself. Create to that feeling.
21. Sometimes things that don’t exist exist because we think they do.
22. Don’t forget what you stand for amidst what you stand against, lest you become the reified antitype of what you stand against in self-perpetuating conflict. Moving your position within a binary established by the structural forces of power in their death-drive solipsism does not challenge those forces: that is, unless they establish the binary in opposition to something they fear but which does not exist, which can be a destabilizing force if brought into hyperreal being.
23. Where history has been torn up, reconstruct it. Where history has become suffocating, deconstruct it.
24. Synthesize with what you oppose. Know when to disobey each of your overriding principles.
25. The senses have veto power over aesthetic principle. "If it's right, you can tell" –R. Pollard
26. Each paradigm is a lens through which to view the world, not absolute truth unto itself. And so on recursively.