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<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>If artists are to engage in any dialog of
a public nature such as exhibitions, publications, performances and whatnot, how
shall they build enough wealth and capital to sustain their activity and carry
on a home life (support a family)? Capitalism as in produce objects to be sold?
The public dole? Maintain poverty? Work for a corporation?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>If artists wish to engage in helping to
shape the world to come, toward what are they moving in terms of a desired
result?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>Is it enough just to complain about, point
out the problems of, or screw with the things you don’t like? Assuming
the answer to be no, what else should one’s time be spent doing in order
to feel that one is making a difference or helping to move the world in a
better direction?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>I notice that universities are training a
lot of people to work for corporations and show them how to find ways to screw the
general public out of small enough amounts of money to avoid calling it
criminal behavior, yet we all know it is and are being screwed over regularly.</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>How do we train ourselves and our children
to shape the world into a place we are not afraid to live in? </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>How do we establish and honor higher
standards of living our lives so as to generate joy and peace?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>What ideals should we establish among
ourselves that we can all support together? </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>Why should we merely accept the ideals
that organizations and governments and corporations want to instill in us for
their benefit?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>Why do we allow ourselves to be thought of
as corporate consumers and properties of a state?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'>What would it be like if artists decided
to shape a world where artists would want to live in? What would be important
to them? How would they do it?</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal><font size=2 color=navy face=Arial><span style='font-size:
10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<div>
<p class=MsoAutoSig><font size=3 color=navy face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;color:navy'>Cecil Touchon</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoAutoSig><font size=3 color=navy face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;color:navy'>http://cecil.touchon.com</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoAutoSig><font size=3 color=navy face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt;color:navy'>817-944-4</span></font><font color=navy><span
style='color:navy'>0</span></font><font color=navy><span style='color:navy'>0</span></font><font
color=navy><span style='color:navy'>0</span></font></p>
</div>
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10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:navy'> </span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=2 face=Tahoma><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma'>-----Original Message-----<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>From:</span></b>
idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net [mailto:idc-bounces@mailman.thing.net] <b><span
style='font-weight:bold'>On Behalf Of </span></b>Alan Clinton<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Sent:</span></b> </span></font><font size=2 face=Tahoma><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma'>Friday, March
30, 2007</span></font><font size=2 face=Tahoma><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Tahoma'> </span></font><font size=2 face=Tahoma><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma'>9:02 PM</span></font><font size=2
face=Tahoma><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Tahoma'><br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>To:</span></b> dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Cc:</span></b> idc@bbs.thing.net;
dewharrison@yahoo.co.uk<br>
<b><span style='font-weight:bold'>Subject:</span></b> Re: [iDC] Art, Lifestyle
& Globalisation</span></font></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>A couple of thoughts here related to the questions you
have posed. First, the rhetoric of purity (is there an outside of
capitalism?) can be, I think, an endgame producing the sort of corporate
artists Stallabras describes and those who are overly concerned that they may
make a mistake with their art (or their theory)--no one wants to be called a
hypocrite. </span></font></p>
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style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>The problem of artists, intellectuals, and capitalism
is a real one. Should I refuse to teach at the Georgia Institute of
Technology because of its ties to the military industrial complex? If
I had refused, when I was just out of graduate school, I would have had
little opportunity to critique the system in anything resembling a full-time
way--I wouldn't have had those impressionable students either. But then,
if I had gone too far in my critiques, I would have been fired. Artists,
it strikes me, are in a similar position. How to survive in an organism
long enough to destroy or recreate it? </span></font></p>
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style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Rather than attempting to start from a position of
purity, perhaps we should recognize that people will find themselves starting
out from various positions of impurity within the system. And, there will
be many ways of working against this system, of speaking to it in ways that I
call, borrowing one of Derrida's metaphors, "Tympanic Politics": </span></font></p>
</div>
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style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>"In his elucidation of marginalia as a discipline
unto itself, Derrida gives a poetic anatomy of the tympanic membrane and its
surroundings. The ear is swirling, labyrinthine, and cavelike.
Penetrating its depths presents a difficult, frightening prospect. In addition
to traversing a maze of passages, one must confront the wall of the tympanum
which has the capability to muffle the loudest of noises. If normative
discourse/art does not reach the inner ear with the proper sense of volume or
urgency, then how is one to suggest the political or historical importance of a
particular issue? For the alternative would be to shock the system in
such a way as to puncture the tympanum altogether, effectively dismantling the
apparatus so that nothing can be heard at all. It would be as if Constantin
Brancusi, on the verge of rejecting Rodin's method of clay modeling with taille
directe, had shattered The Craiova Kiss with the first hammer strike into
formless stone. Derrida's answer to such questions, of course, is always
a more specific anatomy of the situation at hand. He suggests that since
the tympanum is oblique with respect to the ear canal, its subversion requires
an oblique approach as well (taille indirecte?), some form of rhetorical
ambush. How does one 'unhinge' something that cannot be shattered?" </span></font></p>
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style='font-size:12.0pt'> </span></font></p>
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<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'>Alan Clinton<br>
<br>
</span></font></p>
</div>
<div>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span class=gmailquote><font
size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span style='font-size:12.0pt'>On </span></font></span><span class=gmailquote>3/28/07</span><span class=gmailquote>, <b><span style='font-weight:
bold'><a href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</a></span></b>
<<a href="mailto:dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk">dew.harrison@rgu.ac.uk</a>>
wrote: </span></p>
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><font size=3 face="Times New Roman"><span
style='font-size:12.0pt'> Dear IDCs,<br>
<br>
I have been enjoying the recent discussion sparked off by the
passing of Baudrillard and would like to move the
debate at a tangent to this, but continuing with ideas
surrounding forms of social control, power and politics.
I am concerned with the domination of the corporate
within the cultural and wonder at the position I find
myself placed in as an artist and academic working in
an educational instituion. <br>
<br>
> Digital media and new technology is reconfiguring our relationship with
the world and is also affecting how artists relate with their public. Now, new
locative technology can position art in the everyday of people's lives and
activities outside the gallery space. Although psychogeography and mobile media
enable the 'interactive city' for artists to key into, they also promote ideas
of corporatised play in an urban space and tend to be interventionist and
intrusive. 'Big brother' media and cctv surveillance allows for few
informal, ungoverned social meeting places. This means that artists are having
to find interstices between the formal constructed and observed social spaces
where unorthodox art can happen to engage with its audience. Just how is such
practice being supported within the neo-liberal economic structures of
globalistation? Julian Stallabrass suggests that this only produces artists (in
Brit Art particularly) who posture as edgy, risky individuals but who are in
real terms busy establishing market positions for themselves. The answer lies
somewhere in the inter-related issues of art, lifestyle
and globalisation. <br>
><br>
> In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan predicted a technologically enabled 'global
village' and issued the warning -<br>
> "Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has
become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of
science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes
inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of
panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total
interdependence, and superimposed co-existence." <br>
><br>
> I would be extremely interested in your thoughts on the extent to which we
are 'aware of this dynamic' and offer some questions which might
help probe the territory -<br>
><br>
> Corporations are rebranding themselves around lifestyle, is this
influencing creative practice or vice-versa? <br>
> How do the principals and aesthetics of open source and democratic media
sit alongside corporate products (iPod etc)?<br>
> How should arts organisations and institutions respond to open networking
and ideas exchange, what is a node and a network in cultural terms? <br>
> Are artists the software for the corporation hardware, or the activists in
sheeps clothing?<br>
> Where does government funding for the arts sit in the global cultural mix,
or is corporate money driving the cultural agenda? <br>
><br>
With thanks and kind regards,<br>
<br>
Dew </span></font>Harrison.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
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