The Philly Free School were a clan of younger artists for whom sexual magnetism was no issue- we had it, and used it. Because our sex appeal was and is backed up by many years of exteriorized sexual behavior, and the many soap operas attendant on this behavior, there is nothing about our lives which would not satisfy a public carnivorous for such exploits. PFS were no slouches about intoxicants, either- our dissipation skills were well-honed. Even a small amount of research into the bar and club circuit of Aughts Center City Philadelphia would reveal this to be the case. Thus, the mythological antecedents to the Philly Free School artists cannot be the most vaunted haute-culture stalwarts of the twentieth century (with the possible exception of Picasso), who led tame personal lives in comparison (particularly acute with myself in relation to the likes of William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot)- our lifestyle would seem to be more normative for pop culture heroes like The Rolling Stones and Marilyn Monroe. Indeed, PFS's pin-up potentialities are extreme- and that Neo-Romanticism also included a version of Philadelphia Babylon is not only true for us but obvious and beguiling right on the surface.
Thus, the whys and hows of marketing the Philly Free School artists as potential cultural figureheads/icons- with renegade sex appeal on one side and European classicist chops on the other- are very contorted against the process being either easy or open to rapid, combustible progression. However, I would not be writing this if I did not believe we would win in the end, even on surface levels. This, simply because I do have faith that, once the press embargo has ended, a substance-starved American public will go for us in a major way. It is an interesting and very singular congeries of circumstances around a group of younger artists- numbers on the Internet indicate strong grass-roots support for us- while the media black-out against us, in favor of a cornball and very rote plebeian paradigm, demonstrates the American media's ferocious hatred both of complexities, and of anything extreme, threatening, thoughtful, or generally serious. I have no convincing way of imploring the American press corps to get off their flabby behinds and do anything- its just that the Internet itself has created its own egalitarian power-block against them, which is gaining momentum and brawn, towards a black-out of American public confidence in said press corps.
Many sectors around American culture are standing, it would seem, at a crossroads here- and part of the fate of public/cultural America hangs in the balance. I want to state with confidence that, willy-nilly, myths will be made of the Philly Free School and its exploits- our work is already securely set in place, and with enough authority, that crowds around it will continue to gather, and mythologies beyond my ken establish themselves. Conscious myth-making is what I am up to here- a risky venture, and one for which middling batting averages, even for the hyper-articulate, are often the norm. Yet, if I continue, against this limitation, it is because I believe that, despite our profligacy, we will be a positive cultural influence on the United States at large, and a solid long-term bet as well, solid body of work in tow.
****attached photo: Adam Fieled and Mary Evelyn Harju at Montreal Botanical Gardens '03****
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