Dystopia, Grafix for the Apocalypse

By Bogos Kalemkiar

I worked as an industrial engraver and itinerant artist most of my adult life. I have always been an outsider, as a first generation immigrant of colour, as someone who never went to college or got a degree of any kind and lastly an outsider because of my radical political/social/artistic bent. All these turned me into a pariah from the get-go. The 'establishment' would call security to turf me out even before I got a foot in the door. Not that my peers were any better. Black, brown artists face the same discrimination within the 'art' community as with any other community in the 'white' West.         

            This book was first printed in 1996  as "The Heart of Progress, an illustrated guide" under the pseudonym, Paul Klem. It was conceived in the 1980's as a series of relief-etched prints from steel plates which included intaglio text. What you have here instead is the prints from those plates, scanned, revised, and cleaned up by computer.

At the time of its conception and execution, I too was working in those 'infernal Satanic mills' in Montreal's Pointe St. Charles as an industrial engraver and lived in St. Henri, right  next to the Lachine Canal; that cesspool catchment of the rich at the foot of Westmount.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that so-called high art (read intellectual) is a crock of shit. The true artist has always been the grunt in the trenches working at their métier with blood, sweat, and tears; not the rarefied pseudo intellectual crap and drivel executed by others. Any artist worth their salt works their art with their own hands and doesn't need faceless slaves to do their work for them. Elitist and pseudo intellectual thinking says it's ok to exploit the manual labour of others because it considers work of the intellect superior to any other kind of work. This is of course a vulgarity, a lie of the first order. It is the main reason why the planet is going to hell. Since the intellectual elites are at the helms of power and control of all institutions, they are therefore responsible for all the shit that's catapulting the entire planet into perdition – namely the extinction of the human animal, hallelujah. Privilege goes with responsibility – total privilege, total responsibility.

            It is the duty of Art and the artist to fight and resist all forms of oppression and exploitation. Our main tools and methods are our Art. If we sell out to the marketplace, we become worse than traitors. We become collaborators. Of course, it is naive to think that the art we produce has a hope in hell of changing anything for the better, when all the forces of KKKapital are dead set against it. But we can try. As has been said. It is the Struggle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Crow Books
• Release date: Aug 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223254904

Bogos Kalemkiar

Bogos Kalemkiar is an artist engraver sculptor who lives in Toronto. He is a multi-disciplinary straddling various fields of interest from the mythic mystical to the socio-political in art and life.

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