On 08/01/10 21:40, martin mitchell wrote: > Instead of pointing finger and making unfounded accusations it would be > educational, if you could make constructive comments about my reply. >
What kind of critical authority is unable to make a distinction between self-regarding and self-critical? What is worse is that he is blind to the possibility that the ideals of engagement and social effect are often the journalistic or administrative sentiments of art world redemptiveness. Career-building bullshit that cares. In writing approvingly of 'other artists [who] got on concentrating and developing the potential of art and society within a constantly changing set of socio-economic circumstances', Gillick joins a long succession of adolescents, young and old. His mistake is to think that an idealised world constituted by and in the fraction of the /art world /in which he participates professionally (and boy we mean professionally) is indeed a robust reality. This 'wor1d' is a chimera whose function is to tell him that he is indeed 'engaged' -- or something. This is the idealisation -- we might call it /solipsism --/ which we and anyone who takes on a project of realism will seek to avoid (even if that realism is more often striven for than achieved). The first thing is to try and liberate oneself from various institutional determinations and from certain illusions concerning the power of art robustly to engage with and even recognise 'the world'. And insofar as we are liberated from these illusions, we are bound to locate our practice /in relation /to a material tradition in whose ruination we have tried hard to be complicit. There is no abnormal melancholy in this. Loss makes for the best approximations of necessity. - Art & Language, 'Smugness' (Letter to the editor), /Artmonthly, /September-October, 2000, p. 18. Art & Language have maintained a high level of scepticism about the politics of virtue that has dominated art theory, and much art practice, since the waning of Conceptualism. Theirs is a practice built upon refusing the consolations that much of the academic left have found refuge in during a period of political reaction, whether Althusserian 'theoretical practice' or subsequent discourse theories. Since the mid 1970s, many artists and intellectuals have seen their specialist 'intervention' in representation or culture as the decisive factor in the project for social change. In the end, such approaches to 'art and politics' boil down to the idea that if you write enough books, or paint enough pictures, capitalism (or patriarchy, or colonialism, or... ) will collapse under their weight. Galleries, publishing houses and bureaucratically assessed projects seem to have benefited more from this output than have the oppressed and the exploited. - Steve Edwards, 'Art & Language's Doubt' in/ Art & Language in Practice, /Vol. 2, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 1999, pp. 249-255 (p. 254). The mediocrity and corruption of the English art world, its absurdity, selfdeception, ersatz thinking and intellectual cowardice are in part due to the enormous number of individuals within it who are doing one thing while in fact 'thinking' they are doing another. Britain is full of teachers pretending to be 'artists', 'Artists' pretending to be French Philosophers, curators pretending to be revolutionaries, etc., etc. Now bourgeois art teachers pretend they are socialist artists -- feeble work gets a righteous theme and is churned out monotonously by dullards. It is the same recurring problem: the historical conditions they are really in are ignored in favour of the historical conditions they want, need, believe, feel intimidated into supporting, feel as though they ought to be in. Recently there has been a crop of offensive volunteers to be experts, who will enable the people to appreciate lefty's art. That such obvious agents of bourgeois legitimation should be able to get away with this is evidence of how easy it is to intimidate the British with art and of how bogus the English art world is. - Art & Language, 'Art for Society?' /Art-Language/, Vol. 4 No. 4, June, 1980, pp. 1-23.
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