There is one form of the Romantic culture that does not advocate the return to the past, but a detour by the past, towards an emancipated future. This we call revolutionary Romanticism, which begins with Rousseau, followed by Blake, Shelley, William Morris and many others.
I think every place has a lot of lost souls, but also there's the impossibility of representation. We're from here. I'm from this town, Carbondale, Illinois, and we're familiar with the nature of the loss here in a way we might not be intimately familiar with in other places. But the sort of impetus was the realization the art space is a theatrical space.
The effect is important, not so much the actual individual piece of work. So if you have some good effect, of course you can have good effect or bad effect, but let’s hope that whatever you’re creating has some good effects. As long as that good effect fertilizes the soil that’s what I care about.
The following interview from 2020 was included in Locust #3. Adam Ray Adkins, a.k.a., Dirt: Son of Earth, is a mixed media artist and poet.
In December 2019 the Born Again Labor Museum and Locust Review issued our first “Irrealist Worker Survey” as part of our quixotic attempt to map the gravedigger’s multiverse. A selection of responses from you — our dear comrade readers — along with the survey questions, as printed in Locust #2, is posted here.
I had two epiphanies during my artistic development. One was that our current political/social system was unjust and the second was those systems had always been unjust. I, like so many, had been conditioned to be obedient and not rock the boat. Sadly, it took the upheaval of the perceived status quo to open my eyes. Seeing that the mass media had replaced our subconscious, I wanted to subvert that in my work.
MARK MILLER is the author of The Librarian at the End of the World (Montag Press, 2019). Adam Turl interviewed Mark Miller for Locust Review in early 2020.
WHEN JON Langford was at art school – University of Leeds, the college he refers to below – it was right around the time that TJ Clark showed up. Clark, the Marxist art historian and one-time only British member of the Situationist International, apparently did a lot to pull the university’s art college away from its staid and stale academic approach to art. Langford, in other interviews, has jokingly likened him to a Che Guevara figure for the art department.
