I.
Sam Hyde’s creation of the ‘Candyman’ persona, and his demand to fight Hasan Piker, is the greatest work of performance art in decades.
It reveals the next great artistic frontier - indeed, perhaps, the only remaining artistic frontier: action art.
Contemporary art’s connection to reality has been severed by a century of over-intellectualization. This decline is an extension of the trajectory of our society, which is increasingly sterilized and untethered to beauty and truth.
What Hyde is doing represents a return to the rawest form of expression; a stripping away of intellectual dead weight and the re-emergence of the centrality of physicality and emotion.
It is impossible to look away from, and breaks through all cultural programming. It is captivating and undeniable, and the only response his opponents have is to hide from him.
It's just when you lock eyes with somebody and you know, genetically, that you're programmed to be their enemy.
— Sam Hyde
II.
It is time for the Right to take up its rightful role as the true artistic avant-garde.
The modern Left is a symptom of a civilization undergoing spiritual collapse. The Left is mortally tethered to this civilizational moment; it cannot reach outside of our dying society because it is symbiotic with it. The confluence of atheism, materialism, scientism, lawlessness, and excess that serves as the foundation for progressivism has its unique historical expression in our late-stage culture. If the parasite was to depart its host it would die.
The Right is untethered from these constraints - drawing its energy instead from perennial and transcendent sources: the truly physical and the truly spiritual. We alone can move forwards - not along the arc of ‘progress’ - but to pass through our civilizational winter into what lies beyond.
III.
Those of us who subscribe to a cyclical view of history recognize that we are in the ultimate stage of our civilization; the point at which the Western culture has “realized the complete sum of its possibilities in the shape of peoples, languages, creeds, arts, states, and sciences”.
We can make no more truly great progress in our current mode: our politics are dysfunctional, our institutions crumble, and the health of our people decays.
All late-stage civilizations experience some version of this. James Blish, taking from Spengler, writes in his 1979 essay Probapossible Prolegomena to Ideareal History a description that fits our moment strikingly well:
In such a period, politics becomes an arena of competing generals and plutocrats, under a dummy ruler chosen for low intelligence and complete moral plasticity, who amuses himself and keeps the masses distracted from their troubles with bread, circuses, and brushfire-wars… Technology flourishes (the late Romans were first-class engineers) but science disintegrates into a welter of competing, grandiosely trivial hypotheses which supersede each other almost weekly and veer more and more markedly toward the occult.
Among the masses there arises a “second religiousness” in which nobody actually believes… This process, too, leads inevitably towards a revival of the occult, and here science and religion overlap, to the benefit of neither. Economic inequity, instability and wretchedness become endemic on a hitherto unprecedented scale; the highest buildings ever erected by the Classical culture were the tenements of the Imperial Roman slums, crammed to bursting point with freed and runaway slaves, bankrupts, and deposed petty kings and other political refugees.
Our particular expression of this cycle has a distinct flavor, brought about by the advent of mass media and new technologies of propaganda. All of us are familiar with the attempts by media companies to obscure the true nature of things, with overt but crude attempts at progressive indoctrination. Sacred ideals are discarded and replaced with assurances that new material configurations (racial, sexual, technical) yield the keys to paradise.
But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence … truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred.
— Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
Perhaps unexpectedly, this dynamic is captured brilliantly in the first chapter of Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’ (before it devolves into desperately boring attempts to fit this insight onto a Marxist framework):
When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings – figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.
The spectacle is the ruling order’s nonstop discourse about itself, its never-ending monologue of self-praise, its self-portrait at the stage of totalitarian domination of all aspects of life.
It is in this unreality that art has died.
In nineteenth-century America the most extreme modernism held that man was made by his environment. In twentieth-century America, without abandoning belief that we are made by our environment, we also believe our environment can be made almost wholly by us. This is the appealing contradiction in the heart of our passion for pseudo-events: for made news, synthetic heroes, prefabricated tourist attractions, homogenized interchangeable forms of art and literature (where there are no ‘originals,’ but only the shadows we make of other shadows).
— Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide To Pseudo-Events In America
IV.
The moment is thus ripe for the revitalization of art.
The Left have faltered, stalled, turned inwards. Now it is for us to take up the mantle of the avant-garde and to break through into the next cycle of history - through to the birth of the ascent.
A civilization is born at the moment when, out of the primitive psychic conditions of a perpetually infantile [raw] humanity, a mighty soul awakes and extricates itself: a form out of the formless, a bounded and transitory existence out of the boundless and persistent…
— Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West Volume I.
The correct vehicle for this expression must necessarily be action art. Physical performance has long served as an escape for artists who find traditional mediums too conservative.
Action is the only expression available to us; it is best able to capture the raw energies that we must unleash. Already, our movement is characterised by an embrace of our physicality that the Left - in their physical weakness and gender confusion - seek to reject.
The centralization of the body - the most fundamental aspect of our existence on earth - must underlie action art.
Because the body is at the boundary between biology and society, between drives and discourse, between the sexual and its categorization in terms of power, biography and history, it is the site par excellence for transgressing the constraints of meaning or what social discursivity prescribes as normality.
— Nelly Richard
This is precisely the energy that Sam Hyde is channeling in his performance as the Candyman - the entertainer turned warrior, demanding that his intellectual opponents become his physical foes.
“I'm your genetic enemy somehow, we are destined to do battle,” that's what I see when I see Hasan Piker.
This is territory in which Piker cannot follow; despite years of advocacy for ‘punching nazis’ - he is unable to physically embody his proclamations.
Hyde has him.
V.
How must these energies express themselves?
Ultimately this is a question for the artists.
The medium of ‘action’ has certain advantages that artists will exploit: the ephemeral nature of action results in an event that is difficult to seize and destroy. This is especially true if the action is not overtly political, and indeed these actions will not have to be political, in that they are not trying to grapple with the old order, but to create something new.
Hyde, for example, is smart to always refer to his performance as a personal rather than political confrontation. The system knows how to suppress political challenges; but it uncertain how to respond to bizarre behaviour.
Actions can be organized in secret and can rapidly coalesce into a singular events. The lack of the existence of formal and enduring organisations again makes prosecution harder. By converging only at particular moments, enough focus on the spectacle of the action can be generated to break into the public consciousness, as Hyde has done spectacularly.
These events will leverage all our natural advantages: physical beauty, fitness, aesthetics, tradition, myth. Our art must draw its power from its authenticity, and will likely encompass acts of tremendous physical (as opposed to ‘intellectual’) daring.
Marina Abramović discovered something of this making Rhythm 10 - a 1973 performance art piece in which she adapted the Slavic knife game ‘five finger fillet’ to stab rapidly between her fingers with knives of varying size and shape:
Pretty soon I had gone through all ten knives, and the white paper was stained very impressively with my blood. The crowd, including Beuys, stared, dead silent. And a very strange feeling came over me, something I had never dreamed of: it was as if electricity was running through my body, and the audience and I had become one. A single organism. The sense of danger in the room had united the onlookers and me in that moment: the here and now, and nowhere else.
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Sic transit imperium,
Johann
This was transformative and the topic needs to he explored a lot further.
I have already felt the need to live my entire life as an act of resistance, to raise my children to have faith in God, to be fit, know the classics, to tell them the myths of our people from a young age. To incarnate the eternal in every mundane moment, but this is a life lived in private, not in public display, as such a display would be unseemly. To the left the contortions in public, to us the good life in private.
This goes beyond that, into public art, to wrap the mass mind around public heroic deeds.
Is it finally our time to emerge and conquer?
Sam Hyde is an incredibly deep artist and I am glad he is being studied.
There was a skit of his where the cop bursts into the virginal blonde's room and she, already a cynic, makes theatrically muted protest. Then it cuts to Chastity Belt Drone, a feminist song with hopeless lyrics ...
"It was just illusion
Stuck in my own bad air
I thought I had freedom, but
I was stuck there
I make
Choices without reason
Choices without reason
Invite strangers in and leave them
He was just another man, trying to teach me something"
In that moment all the layers of MDE were stripped away to something showing more real understanding for their subject than anything at all in contemporary media. It was sincere and poignant.