Basta! and Buffalo
Excerpt from a Speech Delivered at the National Association of Artist Organizations (NAAO) National Conference, Gayle Gates, NYC, July 2000
by Craig Reynolds
NOTE: this short speech was intended to introduce Basta!, Big Orbit Gallery’s music programming and ultimately, Buffalo to a national audience of artists, curators and arts professionals. A strict time limit was enforced, resulting in an overwraught thesis.
Basta!, an 80 page art, music, literature and theory zine distributed free, with a circulation of 2,000, on the streets of Buffalo, dedicates itself to investigating the architecture of modern American power. Initially aspiring to reconnect Buffalo’s younger “alternative” scene with the legacy of radical creative activity behind Buffalo’s reputation as “the cradle of postmodernism”, Basta! quickly transcended its role as artsy fanzine by reflecting upon the experience of living in Buffalo, a city Johnny Carson once joked “would be a great place to view the end of the world.” Rather than wallow in the media’s premature diagnosis of Buffalo’s demise, Basta! proposes a blueprint for human renaissance rooted in ideas explored by the city’s avant-garde. The works of these and other individuals now or recently associated with the city invoke principles diametrically opposed to the industrio-rational project which abandoned us at the forgotten edge of the fading modern world.
Basta!’s embrace of post-industrial theory grew not out of careerist ambition but a sincere desire to articulate the experience of living in the shadows of empty grain elevators--that is, of making one’s home in a city abandoned by the American economic machine. Today, as each successive factory grinds to a halt, Buffalo, at one time emblematic of modernist power, must face the fact that it never actually had any. Our fortunes followed outsider interests, the master narratives of East Coast shareholders. Buffalo, like most rust-belt cities, was never more than merely functional, a factory of life that (like all factories) must eventually grind to a halt in deference to the newest, cheapest, most convenient commercial alternative.
Much of the outrage that Basta conjures stems from the fact that we have inherited, at the end of the Modernist rainbow, the empty shell of a city, of a history once ripe with American meaning but now almost entirely evacuated of it. In this regard, we must shoulder the legacy of industrial modernism, which has come to define the country’s, and by extension, the Western World’s central tenets, but which in Buffalo now burns with the phosphorescence of its final undoing.
In consolation, we have been blessed with a peculiar awareness: as the city deconstructs itself before our eyes, we are enobled by the opportunity to forge new artistic, social and spiritual strategies consistent with the fact of our own instability. Once we recognize that our economic failure represents an act of leadership--rather than proof of lapsed significance--we can begin to envision a place for ourselves in the futureless present, a state unencumbered by the pretense to pre-determined order that the Western concept of history assumes.
******************************************
Living outside the new American power centers, we are like trees falling in a personless forest, condemned to make of our condition its own meaning. And in this regard Johnny Carson was right: Buffalo is a great place to view the end of the world––for better or for worse, we already know what younger cities will learn when their 100 years are up. Our hope is that through Basta!, Murder the Word and the new non-visual programming at Big Orbit Gallery, we will evolve new cultural strategies consistent with the frayed fringes of 20th century modernism. Thank you.
Excerpt from a Speech Delivered at the National Association of Artist Organizations (NAAO) National Conference, Gayle Gates, NYC, July 2000
by Craig Reynolds
NOTE: this short speech was intended to introduce Basta!, Big Orbit Gallery’s music programming and ultimately, Buffalo to a national audience of artists, curators and arts professionals. A strict time limit was enforced, resulting in an overwraught thesis.
Basta!, an 80 page art, music, literature and theory zine distributed free, with a circulation of 2,000, on the streets of Buffalo, dedicates itself to investigating the architecture of modern American power. Initially aspiring to reconnect Buffalo’s younger “alternative” scene with the legacy of radical creative activity behind Buffalo’s reputation as “the cradle of postmodernism”, Basta! quickly transcended its role as artsy fanzine by reflecting upon the experience of living in Buffalo, a city Johnny Carson once joked “would be a great place to view the end of the world.” Rather than wallow in the media’s premature diagnosis of Buffalo’s demise, Basta! proposes a blueprint for human renaissance rooted in ideas explored by the city’s avant-garde. The works of these and other individuals now or recently associated with the city invoke principles diametrically opposed to the industrio-rational project which abandoned us at the forgotten edge of the fading modern world.
Basta!’s embrace of post-industrial theory grew not out of careerist ambition but a sincere desire to articulate the experience of living in the shadows of empty grain elevators--that is, of making one’s home in a city abandoned by the American economic machine. Today, as each successive factory grinds to a halt, Buffalo, at one time emblematic of modernist power, must face the fact that it never actually had any. Our fortunes followed outsider interests, the master narratives of East Coast shareholders. Buffalo, like most rust-belt cities, was never more than merely functional, a factory of life that (like all factories) must eventually grind to a halt in deference to the newest, cheapest, most convenient commercial alternative.
Much of the outrage that Basta conjures stems from the fact that we have inherited, at the end of the Modernist rainbow, the empty shell of a city, of a history once ripe with American meaning but now almost entirely evacuated of it. In this regard, we must shoulder the legacy of industrial modernism, which has come to define the country’s, and by extension, the Western World’s central tenets, but which in Buffalo now burns with the phosphorescence of its final undoing.
In consolation, we have been blessed with a peculiar awareness: as the city deconstructs itself before our eyes, we are enobled by the opportunity to forge new artistic, social and spiritual strategies consistent with the fact of our own instability. Once we recognize that our economic failure represents an act of leadership--rather than proof of lapsed significance--we can begin to envision a place for ourselves in the futureless present, a state unencumbered by the pretense to pre-determined order that the Western concept of history assumes.
******************************************
Living outside the new American power centers, we are like trees falling in a personless forest, condemned to make of our condition its own meaning. And in this regard Johnny Carson was right: Buffalo is a great place to view the end of the world––for better or for worse, we already know what younger cities will learn when their 100 years are up. Our hope is that through Basta!, Murder the Word and the new non-visual programming at Big Orbit Gallery, we will evolve new cultural strategies consistent with the frayed fringes of 20th century modernism. Thank you.