ann klefstad wrote:
But that's another instance in which the physicality of art is so important. We do know something of what they intended, because we're human, like them; we share a great deal of life experience with them. Our bodies and their insistences create large areas of meaning that we share with all other humans. And we cannot rest with mere "appreciation"--at least I have always speculated about the reasons, the means, the pleasures, the needs that made those images happen. ( I think that they are evidence of the primacy of mimesis as a way of learning the world, assimilatingyes, as you said, our physiological similarities can help us to speculate about their possible intentions -- but contrary to what you said above, this does not enable us to 'know' their intentions.
the world--a way of enforcing observation of prey animals, learning them inside out, you might say [still a practice into modern times by hunting cultures, surviving even into duck-stamp art, in which accurate mimesis, tinged by the 19th-cent positivism that is the bedrock of rural culture, is the primary virtue]).
One possibility is that these cave paintings were not strictly mimesis at all... not necessarily only responding to their surroundings, but also participating in their environment through a projection of their intentions. It has been suggested that the cave paintings @ Lasçaux and other sites where successful hunts are depicted, that these were prior to such conquests, and not merely 'primal' mimetic recordings of them.
possibly an early example of human hope that life may imitate art
Imagemaking is a technology, predating the species itself, and likely wouldn't have occurred and remained, universally, all over the world, if it were not an efficacious technology. Well, I think artmaking is still most interestingly thought of as a technology at the borders of the inchoate. That is, there is the human world of designated meaning, a tiny beachhead in the vast realms of the inchoate, of the material, of the --well--the everything else.fair enough, but don't we still 'intend' to do this? A silly rebuttal, I know. but on the scale of rhetorical balance between describing artists (and yourselves) as either having too much agency and having too little agency, you and Jason are both narrating about the same story. you both present a well organized picture in which the person (in this case the artist) has little idea, and even less control, of what they do (clearly not too little agency as to be a puppet, but curiously not enough to be able to have any self direction when it comes to the co-production of meaning). Isn't is possible to maintain intentions (for the meaning of their work, and otherwise) while at the same time recognizing that there may be other connotations, functions, and significance that others may derive from it... and that this is beyond the control of even the most careful, thoughtful and skillful manipulator of materials and meanings?
smart art, by the strategies of indirection so popular now, by ironizing gestures. I'm also usually bored by art that exists solely to ask questions about the role of art,but many artists do work with (their own and others') intentions that they and many other people consider important or disagreeable, meaningful and irritating, etc. games, jokes, self-referenciality, and 'smart art' are all ways to keep intended sets of dialogues circulating... and are not always ends in themselves. though artists may not always know the extent of what they are capable of in advance, or exactly what other ideas they may be contributing to... not all artists work completely in the dark. there is a difference between the ability to recognize intuition (along w/ the understanding that one can't know everything), and believing that artists shouldn't have any idea where they want to go or where they are headed. certain notions surrounding 'intentions' are problematic, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist or that they aren't as valuable as they can be interesting.
or art's ontological status.oh, come on... who is still concerned with this?
These are questions that can be laid out and answered most productively, I think, not in terms of the artworld but in terms of culture and communication more
generally.many contemporary artists would probably agree with you (except for the ontology bit), which is why 'art problematics' now also take into account more and more the dialogues of sociology, pop-culture theory, etc.
It's harder to do that now. People are much more likely to understand what's going on and thus, unfortunately (in part because art has such a bad name in this weberian, puritan, functional society--) they say, "O that's art." and then proceed to ignore it, because they figure it's just meant to fuck with their heads and they hate that.well, that's what 'artists' get by choosing to label themselves and their work as such. But clearly, there are some advantages to weigh in against the disadvantage of no longer being able to nurture the fantasy that these insightful geniuses are going to shock an unwitting public into some kind of illumination.
contemporary art serves a social function, or a number of them. It is at least implicitly functional in many ways. Of course as an institution it is well monitored, both allowing and accounting for variables in advance. Such is the plight of the aspiring artist, to come to terms with this compulsory 'freedom'. But this is part of what makes it so challenging as a forum.
Is it just me, or do I sense a vague 'anti-contemporary art' sentiment on the FLUXlist?
p.s. how many Fluxlisters drank beer at 3 yesterday?
Scott
