Not sure what you are trying to get at here Rob? What¹s the target? I mean, I understand A&L¹s target. I don¹t agree with it (I don¹t like moral grand-standing glass houses, etc). But to what end are you quoting it?
Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art [email protected] www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ [email protected] www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Rob Myers <[email protected]> Reply-To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <[email protected]> Date: Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:13:23 +0000 To: <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Call for Submissions: MultichannelVariableEconomies Screening Programme Deadline 28th January 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 Oother artists [who] got on concentrating and developing the potential of art and society within a constantly changing set of socio-economic circumstances¹, 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 Owor1d¹ is a chimera whose function is to tell him that he is indeed Oengaged¹ 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 Othe world¹. 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, OSmugness¹ (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 Otheoretical practice¹ or subsequent discourse theories. Since the mid 1970s, many artists and intellectuals have seen their specialist Ointervention¹ in representation or culture as the decisive factor in the project for social change. In the end, such approaches to Oart and politics¹ 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, OArt & Language¹s Doubt¹ 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 Othinking¹ they are doing another. Britain is full of teachers pretending to be Oartists¹, OArtists¹ 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 lefty¹s 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, OArt for Society?¹ Art-Language, Vol. 4 No. 4, June, 1980, pp. 1-23. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
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