FuturaI'm sitting here and working on
further plans to develop a Center for Art/ Science at The Cleveland
Institute of Art - likewise I'm in the process of dismantling what had
been a fairly conventional fine arts program - seeking to define a new
program knowledge/ research based studio program applicable to all
media - my students tell me what they need is a program that will
supply them with material, formal and conceptual skills as they are
applicable to 2 and 3 dimensions , who almost are on the verge of
believing that technology is old hat or at least the new technologies
are -- for them time base media comes under materials and is used to
realize 2&3 d projects - that is virtual or real -- all images being
virtual. I spend a lot of time talking with the head of industrial
design about aesthetics and visual literacy and the potential politic
of design being the new paradigm-- or atleast today we have the
potential to fulfill the Bauhaus/ Constructivist dream even if it is
detached from social reform and revolution, Maeanwhile, the Dean of
integrated media instead is committed to an art and industry model -
business being the new culture and artist will be used to tame and
humanize it -- which boils down to vocational training in the arts --
meanwhile; culture becomes the shared values of small communities of
like minded people - you students who only want only an audience sing
to the wind " is anybody out there -- can you hear me?" and may soon
lay claim to the heritage of Cluny. It is in this context I would
argue and not the isolated examples and moments of brilliant theory
that we find the terms of cultural complicity and resistance. To
re-orientate and rethink this situation I would again assert that we
are obligated to abandon the fruits of many hard one victories
because the underlying assumptions they represent are no longer
relevant or may be in need of significant reformation both
methodologically as well as practically. For instance we need no
longer worry if there is art or not – obviously, there are those who
will continue to engage critically or aesthetically in the traditional
practices associated with art while others will seek to expand our
means of expression. From this perspective, the question that
confronts us is not how to differentiate cultural production
hierarchically - this is a mere distraction by which the cultural
field is turned into one a valueless homogeneity. So, I Imagine
that if we are to stave off the negative effects of a society willing
to allow to profit to be extract from all aspects of life it is time
to self-reflectively engage in the fluid process of evaluation,
devaluation and re-evaluation rather than seek affirmation.
On Dec 9, 2005, at 1:00 PM, Trebor Scholz wrote:
Ok, let's talk Art. The everyday bread and butter of artists
is to produce
culture. It's personal. All the immediacy and politics that we
discussed
before does not get lost when talking about Art.
Something is happening. For one there is a shift of the artist to
something
that I call a cultural context provider. Two things. Many many media
artists
function in strange ways. In fact, their job description has yet to be
written. They are artists. They are activists. They write. They may
even be
theorists. Many of them curate or have an event-based cultural
practice. And
all of these "occupations" are united in that one person. Ok. Ok. I
know--
that's nothing new. That has been witnessed long before the
resurfacing of
the notion of the cultural producer in the 90s. No need to name names
(Duchamp, Beuys, ...). But there is more than several occupations
under one
hat. I'm talking about a phenomenon that renders the cultural context
provider as the person who orchestrates a context without delivering
the
input. "Les Immateriaux" in 1985 could be cited. Here, Lyotard set up a
situation in which people respond to a task and to each other and the
resulting thing is his artwork (with content provision entirely by
others).
Trace that through the 90s service art to today's participatory design
projects like "Learning to Love You More." I find that my students have
decreasingly, and in many ways refreshingly, little interest to become
art
stars. They want an audience. They want a platform. They are ambitious
with
their cultural practice. But they realize that they can have dialogues
without the ghettoized artworld. Or if not outside then somehow
tangentially
glued on to one of its wings. Extreme sharing networks empower them.
So, secondly: art activism. Media activism. It's as schizophrenic as
capitalism itself. What about all this online art, media activism and
creativity that has political intent? Is it art (uh...)? There is this
Steve
Wright guy who is gripping. He wrote a flavorful essay titled "The
Future of
the Reciprocal Readymade: An Essay on Use-Value and Art-Related
Practice."
[1] There he says: "What they do is not art, yet without art it would
not be
possible to do it." Once or twice in the past I dared to question the
efficacy of tactical media with the result of vehement attacks. There
was a
moment when tactical media suddenly became so fashionable that you have
university courses about it. If we look at how-many-years of tactical
media... how much has it achieved? Before you start throwing rocks at
me-
hear me out. I'm not taking away from TM. But don't we need to revisit
even
super-popular notions like tactical media for their ability to affect?
Also,
the argument Wright makes is interesting. He asks if all this cool
Rtmark
and Bureau d'Etudes work is not merely art-related instead of being
art. Ok,
I always wonder why people would ask the art question to start off
with.
Usually those posing tghe question are curators who look for
definitions to
more smoothly define an institutional inside and outside. But here is a
taster from Wright's essay:
"In a late text, Marcel Duchamp set out to distinguish several
different
types of readymades. Of particular interest here is the genre, which he
punningly described as “reciprocal readymades.” Anxious, he claimed,
“to
emphasize the fundamental antinomy between art and the readymade,”
Duchamp
defined this radically new, yet subsequently neglected genre through an
example: “Use a Rembrandt as an ironing-board.”1 More than a mere quip
to be
taken at face value, or a facetious mockery of use-value, Duchamp’s
example
points to the symbolic potential of recycling art – and more broadly,
artistic tools and competence – into the general symbolic economy of
everyday life. For in that respect, the reciprocal readymade is the
obverse
of the standard readymade, which recycles the real – in the form of
manufactured objects – into the symbolic economy of art. Historically
speaking, the readymade is inseparably bound up with objecthood: it
refers
to a readymade, manufactured object Yet, it would be reductive to
confine
the readymade to its objective dimension alone, if only because it
provides
such a strong general image of the reciprocal logic between art and the
real.
In the same way that framing an object in an art context neutralizes
it as
an object (distinguishing it, as it were, from the mere real thing),
can the
de-framing of an artwork neutralize it, in reciprocal fashion, as art?
This
is an important question, and one to which Duchamp was expressly
alluding,
because it would enable art to produce a use-value. Since Immanuel
Kant’s
influential championing of “purposeless purpose” and “disinterested
satisfaction” as defining features of our engagement with art, it has
been
broadly held that art cannot produce use-values. Kant argued in effect
that
art, unlike design, could not be evaluated and appreciated on the
basis of
its objective purpose – be it external, regarding the utility of the
object,
or internal, regarding the perfection of the object. In so doing, Kant
sought to preserve art from the realm of the “merely useful”; and in
the
contemporary world where utilitarian rationality and the sort of
cost-benefit analysis to which it leads reign supreme, where art is
regularly co-opted by such profit-driven, subjectivity-production
industries
as advertising, to even mention use-value tends to smack of the
philistine.
Of course one might say that in such a context there is something
circular
about defending art on the basis of its uselessness alone (or even its
“radical uselessness,” as Adorno put it), for it would seem to suggest
there
is something worthwhile and thus useful about something ostensibly
lacking
use-value…"
Maybe that can be material for a continued exchange.
[1] <
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Saul Ostrow
Dean,
Visual Arts and Technologies Environment
Chair of Painting
The Cleveland Institute of Art