Notes. This was decade of exile and impending and immanent global ecological and financial catastrophe.
There was important new research on ecological crisis and its solution from Dr Suzuki and others. There were intensification of new types of consumption. A more rapid rondo movement of styles and changing fashions which move at a whirlwind pace. There came about a penetration of advertising, media and TV, etc into every crevice and cell of society from the child’s bedroom to the local hotel. Everyone was exposed to thousands of media messages per day and night. It becomes a credit card society with many people and nations going into massive debt. Enormous debt is now everywhere. Citizens in first world countries attempted to live their life as an unending kind of party.Simultaniously there occurs the growth and expansion of super malls and superhighways.It is the age of the WWW and a revolution in information and entertainment. It became a jet seting culture.Ontologically everything starts to become more abstract including the nature of money.
Photos of the artist (with daughter Anna) from 80’s and 90’s
The ecology crisis looms. Political horizons darken .The decadence of the Howard, Bush and Blair years is with us, which puts progressive hopes back twenty years. At every turn western leaders use double think to communicate and totally betray their societal interests. The economic crisis deepens and unfolds with its Capitalist contradictions. The drug culture penetrates further into society reaching even remote Aboriginal communities. New and expanding illegal drug products are manufactured and distributed through burgeoning organised crime networks.The whole culure becomes drug infected. The conservative bulk of the petty middle class of settler societies and countries find themselves surrounded by crisis, which conflicts with every conservative, ideological petty middle class position. They swing psychologically ever further to the political right, but find no answers. Consumerism becomes ever more problematic and consumers are at last forced to bite the bullet of their historical predicament. The push for global capitalist solutions creates global dilemmas and global crisis. Many citizen attempt to avoid thinking about the big picture of life as much as possible and live as much with shallow cultural diversions.
Many concerned people were seeking answers and were reading Chomsky on Linguistics and politics. J.R Saul had important things to say about how the pragmatism of consumer society was creating an unconscious attitude towards its problems. The head and consciousness of society was disappearing. Western society was stumbling forward like a headless, over satiated, consumerist cadaver.
David Attenborough’s photographic naturalism invigorated jarred sensibilities over the last twenty years with images of pristine wilderness and its animal life.
Students are reading post modern philosophy and literature from Barthes to Baudrillard from Julia Kristeva to Jacques Lacan, etc and were scratching their heads. Others were curious about M .Bakhtin and Medvedeva and 20’s style Russian formalism. Others are getting more from Susan Faludi’s book Backlash. The Feminist Movement was being derailed by conservative forces across the globe. In literature, the magic realists from South America appeared and forced aesthetic re-evaluation of Realism, especially Marquez, who slipped under the post modern ideological net. The brilliant young Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson make their mature appearance to reassert radicalism, etc.
In particular, I concur with Jameson’s thoughtful work on financial and cultural patterns from his brilliant essay titled ‘Culture and Finance Capital’ in his book ‘The Cultural Turn.’
