Hi, Johanna et al!
First off, I must say that I enjoyed David’s re-branding post immensely. In
particular, the trope of re-branding is absolutely loaded—especially within the
context of Business Art and the fraught relationship between art and
advertising. I know that Johanna is quite interested in the history of the
graphic arts, and, from my firsthand experience as a writer for various NYC ad
agencies, can testify to the critical connection between (re)branding and
Creative Departments, where graphic artists, writers and creative directors
oversee the presentation and perfection of concepts to the public. Here, the
wild, varied orthographies of Dada and Surrealism become so many Banners,
newsletters and billboards, Breton and company achieving a complicity with a
future throwaway culture in which Kiki of Montparnasse sells violins, and where
Rrose Sélavy’s perfume bottles are the hit of Bloomingdales.
Within this context, the word ‘concept’ looms large, calling to mind first and
foremost the Hegelian identification of the idea as realized concept. For me,
this notion recalls the realized concepts of Conceptual art, the one art form
which has filtered through this dialogue as the place where theory and praxis
meet, however dissonantly (although, here, the idea is not so much an ideal, in
the Hegelian sense, but is more of what results when concept confronts
world/reality through irruptive event). Everything from Hans Haacke’s
Shapolsky et al to those fab Jenny Holzer diodes quietly assaulting slot
machine junkies and high-hair mafia princesses at Las Vegas’ McCarran airport
in the 80s as they retrieve pink suitcases from the baggage claim. And then,
of course, there is the perennial and pervasive use of the word in ad agencies,
which are largely concept-driven, even when we see them via Darren Stevens on
Bewitched. Here, ‘concept’ is both noun and verb, something one develops and
the very act of development or conception itself. “How are you concepting
that?” is a question that still makes me laugh when I hear it, the same
response I emit to the use of ‘party’ as an action verb by Eddie Murphy or
others (“My girl wants to party all the time, party all the time, party all the
time…”).
But the concept is very much at stake for all of us on this forum, whether we
are Sally Jane’s Over-identification Squad, or a Donald Judd box humming purple
notes in the corner. Of all aesthetic movements, it is conceptual art which
works the hardest to expose complicities—Chris Burden’s excavation of La La
Land’s MOCA is a paradigmatic instance. And yet it is also the zone of the
conceptual where important complicities flower in their own right, so many of
them social, sexual —the marriage of Jeff Koons to La Cicciolina, or the
relationship between Björk and Mathew Barney. The work these connections have
created truly amazes me, all those racy photos of La Cicciolina with her glass
dildoes, and the potential work that Matthew and Björk will perform with fauns,
satyrs, and Cremasters if, unlike the Koons, they make it.
*******************************************
Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA
http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:36:05 -0800
From: david.chi...@gmail.com
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 13
I don't really think of what i am questioning as being part of a "moral
conscience" per se--i think of it as a looking into the functions and
functioning of language, which might include also a language which is in itself
a form of silence.
An area which i have been writing about in the last couple of years more and
more is that of the Literature of the No. This involves several writers and
several examples of methods and "appearances" of the No. These are unwritten
works which in themselves refuse to be written, while creating a space which
nonetheless exists as a an area in which the writings while unwritten have
effects in their own of writing--this is just one aspect--
In a sense, i am concerned, interested in a way with the call to the spaces of
art which claim with some degree actually, paradoxically, to a morality, of a
moral nature--to not be concerned with being the moral conscience of a
culture--
The political analogy is not necessarily silence at all, but on the contrary, a
continuing functioning of writing which claims to a certain form of "moral high
ground" as/for art in that it is in a sense "above" such questions--
What interests me are the questions which Pierre Vidal-Naquet raises re
language and other issues within a culture's existence which are effected by
the practice of torture (in his case)--when it is practised by a society as it
is now by the American society. How has this affected the language
itself?--What do the contradictions between what a culture purports to be for
itself and what it actually does open up as spaces of various kinds of silence
and writing?
What spaces do they open up for forms of invisibility of the most visible
events,actions language uses, while at the same time how are other areas made
suddenly more visible in order to lessen the visibility of others, and how do
these in turn effect the ways the language is used not only towards the events
themselves, but towards a continually spreading "cancer" which a society makes
invisible to itself in order to focus on other areas which it assumes are
'distant" from the "diseased areas."
These questions are not necessarily "moral;" they pertain as much to human
psychology --and how humans use language to function psychologically when
facing various events, actions, questions--
For example, one may examine language uses in terms of constructing denials, or
in constructing refusals--and from there, asking oneself what are some of the
differences among these--?
Art has always had, i think, quite a wide area of its activities taking place
in areas in which it has had nothing to do with the moral conscience of a
society at all. I think in the last few decades, the question of "the ethical"
has been one which as introduced "moral conscience" under a different set of
names, words; again this has been area long open to writing, literature,
culture--both of questioning the ethical and of in turn shifting this aspect of
writing again into other terms which are those considered to be "in our time,"
whatever time that might be.
In a paradoxical way, I have often found that writers, cultural workers, who
most often call for art, or areas of art, not to be a moral conscience, have
just as many sets of ethical concerns as any other, and to pass as many
judgments as any other--
That ethical concern may appear very much as the area which Joanna points
to--even the words "being tasked with being the moral conscience of a culture"
may also be an expression of a form of ethics, morality, simply saying, that
perhaps one need be "tasked" with an alternative "for a change," although the
predominate mode today in the US is already really one of this nature. In large
part, it might be the attitude in which the most "power" of a kind today
resides--
I am not interested in "tasking" art to be a moral conscience; what i am
interested in simply is asking as many questions possible and learning of as
many exaaples of possible, of the ways in which language functions in the
society i live in at present, in the situation in which it exists at present--
I also very much am interested in spaces which are not "tasked" in the sense
that all too often from al too many differerent directions, each with varying
degrees of power in varying institutions, one is being tasked to function,
think, act, behave, write make art--in short, to live--in a much wider wider
variety of ways than one is aware of, so many of them rendered invisible by
opacities which in turn demand transparences--and transparencies which are
created to enforce opacities--
One of the first things noticed as a child for myself was that language and
actions are often essayed to be forced to correspond when in fact most of the
time they do not--the lives of language and the lives of persons are very often
at variance--in order to make them appear to correspond--how are language and
action used to make it at least appear so? Or, if they not appear so, how to
justify this--and so on and on and on--inolving all manner of subtractions and
additions, appearances, disappearnces misinformations disinformation rebranding
all the techniques involved in the study of what Jacques Ellul calls
"Propagandes" (singular in the English translation of his classic work on the
subject--)
For, at what level are not many of the uses of language not variations on
"propagandes"--
The question of an Outside, the question of the No, of disappearance-all are
questions which find one as quickly as one finds them, by "chance"
or-vocation--or any way which questions choose to "arise"--via reading Mallarme
for example alongside yet another book on the JFK assasination and its myriad
conspiracies, solutions, coincidences--and then turning to say Maykovky's How
are verse made?--poetries which erupt out of the most peculiar places . .
.asking questions, all of them--
On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 5:12 PM, Johanna Drucker <druc...@gseis.ucla.edu> wrote:
John,
Much different. I agree.
I do want to make a space for art that is not tasked with being the
moral conscience of the culture too.
Johanna
On Jan 11, 2010, at 4:09 PM, John Haber wrote:
> The analogy to rebranding is very interesting indeed, in an excellent
> post. Let me ask more about it, though. Now, to me it's only an
> analogy, and of course whatever venting we may wish to have about
> torture and Israeli policy aren't instantly illuminating regarding art
> except as a kind of red flag. (Hey, there's injustice in the
> world, so
> don't let it happen in this realm.) Indeed, it could actually
> disguise
> the problem, by suggesting distinct realms after all, which the whole
> problematic of complicity in art is supposed to question. Thus, my
> question would be this: if the political analogy is silence, then
> does
> that open possibilities for art, in which making visible is part of
> the
> game? Now, I realize that acknowledging something, as argued well,
> doesn't make it go away. But it's still different from silence.
>
> John
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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