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Let's be thankful that anti-art is only a
theoretical concept
for, I think it's generally
agreed
between art critics,
that
should art and anti-art ever come
together
there will be a gigantic
explosion
and all the art in all the galleries of
all the world
will simply disappear in a puff of
smoke
scott rigby wrote:e
yes, 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.
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. Well yeah--what I mean by
"mimesis" is not narrative mimesis--like, tell the story of what
happened yesterday--but a more general idea of it. I know that drawing, as a
practice, tends to help one to "realize" another entity, to know
it from the inside out, so to speak. So yes, the paintngs at Lascaux could
certainly be projected intention, telling a hopeful future, whatever. What I
mean is, the attention that had to be paid to the animals to be able to
represent them in the way they're represented, that attention-paying, close
attention-paying, made for better hunters.
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? I never said we don't
intend, as artists. Of course we intend. And of course we know what we
intend. What I'm saying is that other stuff sticks to those intentions, like
seaweed. What I'm talking about throughout this little bit is a situation
where borders exist but are not clear, where stuff can pass from the
nameless to the named, from the inchoate to the spoken. This stuff can be
from any realm, from, say, an archaic realm to a current one, or from a
nonhuman one to a human one.
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). I
don't think I present a picture in which artists don't have agency, or don't
control their intentions for their work. I do try to present a picture in
which the resultant work can be larger than the intentions that generated
it.
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? Of course.
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. When it does exist to keep a dialogue going, or for
transformative purpose, then smartness can transcend itself. All too often,
though, it simply seems to exist for the purpose of , well, grades, proof of
smartness.
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. I agree with
this, certainly. I carry no brief against intentions. I have them myself all
the time.
or art's ontological
status. oh, come on... who is still concerned with
this? The notion of anti-art is in one sense an ontological
question.
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. Which is often fun, but more fun if
practiced by someone with a sufficiently large notion of what gives rise to
the social, to culture, etc. My current example, current candidate for big
fun art, is Sigmar Polke's work, in its entirety, start to finish,
Kartoffelmaschine to Illuminations and beyond.
well, that's what 'artists' get by choosing to
label themselves and their work as such. No, that 's what
artists and culture get by disdaining the "label," and the role as
well.
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? I'm certainly not
"anticontemporaryart." I am, however, not crazy about what one
might call "suburban art," art done by people whose primary
environment has been an entirely humanized one, and a fairly anodyne human
one at that. In my vague notion of things, this tends to give rise to work
constituted more by conceptual strategy than by physical praxis. (P.
Schjeldahl does a nice tiny summation of this in a brief article on late de
Kooning in the New Yorker, of all places) I think that such work risks
cutting the artworld (and thus the culture, because the artworld was a
primary gateway for this stuff) off from important generative sources that
are solvent to simulacra, that dissolve rigid narrative, that inspire
cultural turnover and change. I'm tired of the solely social smell of much
current young work. I think it's monotonous, and tends to promote a steady
state, more of the same, you know. However, there are other sorts of work
being done. It's just that the suburban stuff is quite dominant at the
moment.
p.s. how many Fluxlisters drank beer at 3 yesterday?
Does rum count?
AK
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