dear all
trying to grapple with the response sent by Simon and am not sure i can disentangle his sentences [see below] << simon schreibt>> Education and the employment of the young are about the future, have or have no future, imply the future, whereas the arts are about funding, receive more or less funding, imply and unfold from funding, when and where it is rolled out. Where it has been, arts institutions are healthier, exist, even, at the level of the power. But has-beens are not what they were, existing in a perfect past. Wannabes - won't be what we all wanna - from an imperfect present - if education has no future, if the rates of unemployment continue ... as they are, as they were when punks everywhere around said No Future. It is the futurity of education and opportunities for the young which I wanted to draw attention to and the history - the will to recover it, to plumb the depths of the past - of the arts, of arts funding: it seems as soon as we want to discuss the future of the arts, we are pulled, by an undertow, into the past; as if the future of the arts were its history. >>. surely the arts are not about funding, unless you choose to look at it from that angle of material support, institutional infrastructure, markets, venues, sales and all the other things (distinction, symbolic value, educational/pedagogic benefit, etc) that accrue around arts' valuations. the notion of an "occupying" (or as it was called 'squatting') of an inter-face (towards banking and financing industries) is incompletely thought out (I have not had time to think it through or observe the action and reaction patterns). i felt the interface the activists staged was primarily and symbolic and theatrical one, but also a tactical maneuver; arts organizations and artists have often used tactical maneuvers to generate work or have an impact on the present (the site, the neigbhorhood, the media, the scene, the form, well, the audience and the public mostly), and here Geert's commentaries on the "anti- cutback" rhetorics used by theatres and art galleries in the Netherlands are of course illuminating, and similar 'protests' will occur in other lands and territories, and i remember reading about the clowns in Columbia and have forgotten the context within which the Mayor of Bogotá asked them to perform or they came outdoors to the streets to perform..... but not always has the cry been heard. artists also often have danced (refering now to the form I know best), they moved their bodies into place(s) through time, and a distinction "artworld / real world" of course would be nonsensical. it's hard to keep talking about the future or past of money when you think, for example, of movement as we tried to do it last month here in this place, after the month when many here on this soft-skinned space had apparently been traveling to ISEA in Istanbul and report about their tourist experiences in Turkey. moving or performing in light of the question of publicity (the public) or privacy, or in light of body and cellular consciousness. how would that change the rhetoric? There must be innumerable creative people working in their private and their shared public spaces demanding of themselves that they live through their process (without that that process is measured through monetary awards, claims and stakes). when we demand to get paid for services, we can of course charge ticket prices or invite donations. but are we not discussing also different kinds of consciousnesses? [i am writing this being influenced by having watched a documentary about/with choreographer Deborah Hay (who's worked in her art since the 60s without institutional support) shown this week at Cinedans Festival in Amsterdam -- "Deborah Hay not as Deborah Hay"] In that film, she says at one point that all through the last decades she tried challenging conventions of "facing front", through "practicing surrendering the pattern of facing a single direction" and being open to many possibilities of being in the here and now - in relationality, in relation to the audience and the world.* regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab london http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap * (cited from "Deborah Hay not as Deborah Hay", film dir/ed. by Ellen Bromberg, 2011) _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
