The review does shed some light on G&G's practice, I think. From the very
beginning they have been playing a role. It's hard to conceive of them as
outright Fascists or even heavy right-wingers. Maybe as outdated dandies
playing outdated dandies, a difficult role to sustain and still be taken
seriously.
The tension between aesthetics and ethics is an old one. In his exclusion of
poets from his his republic, Plato recognized the problematic nature of
aesthetic freedom. Millennia later, Diderot and Baudelaire took opposing
positions on the moral qualities of art. Baudelaire's point of view?there is
no necessary connection?has largely won out, though one might argue it makes
aesthetic freedom an ethical position.
-- Paul
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 8:28 AM, Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>
wrote:
I think I should clarify - I'm certainly not saying that
politics, ethics, morality aren't legitimate topics around which
to build art, not indeed that all art that contains a sense of
position is in some way bad..
I'm arguing against there being a *necessary* connection between an
artist's political views, ehtical standards or personal conduct and
the artistic success or failure of her work...
____________________________________________________________________________
From: Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>
To: bob catchpole <[email protected]>; NetBehaviour for
networked distributed creativity <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, March 14, 2012 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert & George in the
Evening Standard yesterday
There's a very interesting - nearly hidden nowadays - history of
discussion, debate and more on this.
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot & more all demanded a politico/ethical dimension
to art (see "socialist realism" which, of course, was neither
socialist not realist ) with horrifying results.
In contrast, Trotsky, thoughout his life and Lenin, at the end of his,
both argued against attempts to embed ethico/political positions in
art.
Unfortunately even amongst those who abhor the Stalinist tradition in
all other respects there is still huge confusion on the question.
I put this down to art, quite understandably, not being seen in the
first rank of importance when one is engaged in a life and death
struggle for the survival of an authentic Marxist politics of human
liberation as opposed to its Stalinist/Maoist negation...
( although even at "midnight in the century", with the seemingly
inexorable rise of Hitler and Stalin and the reduction of the voices
of authentic Marxism to a few hundred, Trostky was involved in
discussions and joint writings with Breton about art and freedom)
Any of Trotsky's writings on art repay reading as does the tremendous
"Art as the Coginiton of Life" by Voronsky...
cheers
michael
____________________________________________________________________________
From: bob catchpole <[email protected]>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 7:35 AM
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert & George in the
Evening Standard yesterday
Michael,
You make an intriguing and thought-provoking point which I'm going to
have to ponder further. I've always seen values ('ethics') inherent in
the form and sensibility of artistic work. For example, I'm not
surprised that much of the work G&G have produced in the last two
decades has been visually 'fascistic'.
Bob
____________________________________________________________________________
From: Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>
To: bob catchpole <[email protected]>
Cc: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, 11 March 2012, 18:09
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert &
George in the Evening Standard yesterday
Absolutely - in art that's worth the name, and, of course,
there's the rub...
Marx's favourite author? Balzac, reactionary monarchist.
Why? because his complex, subtle and careful work embodied
truths about the world *despite* his politics.
cheers
michael
____________________________________________________________________________
From: bob catchpole <[email protected]>
To: Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>; NetBehaviour for
networked distributed creativity <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2012 5:30 PM
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert & George in
the Evening Standard yesterday
Michael,
Are you suggesting that there's no connection between ethics and
aesthetics in the work artists produce?
Bob
____________________________________________________________________________
From: Michael Szpakowski <[email protected]>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed
creativity <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, 10 March 2012, 13:57
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert
& George in the Evening Standard yesterday
There's no equation, unfortunately, between good (by which
I mean left) politics and good art.
There are some artists with rotten politics who repay
repeated, even lifelong, attention as artists.
Morandi, fascist sympathiser, is one of them.
There are some artists you'd trust with your life,
politically, who are deadly dull as artists.
I saw the huge Gilbert and George retrospective at the
Tate a couple of years back and it was one of the most
excruciatingly dull experiences of my life, though
"excruciatingly" makes it sound several degrees more
attention grabbing than it actually was.
My beef with G & G is they make very dull art on an
industrial scale.
It hasn't always been the case - I love their early moving
image stuff...
For me there's something about good art, whatever the
personality or views of the originator, that is inherently
liberating, but that's another and longer discussion...
cheers
michael
____________________________________________________________________________
From: dave miller <[email protected]>
To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity
<[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, March 10, 2012 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: [NetBehaviour] Read this about Gilbert &
George in the Evening Standard yesterday
Hi Rob
This makes sense to me - Gilbert and George have become
the Terry
Thomases of the art world.
dabe
On 6 March 2012 19:31, Rob Myers <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 06/03/12 17:03, marc garrett wrote:
>>
>> I think it's obvious that G&G are elitists, and would
not wish to lose
>> any income from their bourgeois client base.
>
> Their original artistic gesture was to conflate
aesthetic and social
> form. This was interesting but over time it has led to
their public
> pronouncements increasingly being bad form, in the
Terry-Thomas sense.
>
>> Who gives a shit whether they work from 5. am or not -
many work just as
>> hard for much less, and are losing their jobs,
communities, and much
>> more - they are not relevant.
>
> Yes hard work is not sufficient to explain personal
wealth, whatever the
> psychological needs of the rich or indeed the simply not
impoverished.
>
> - Rob.
> _______________________________________________
> NetBehaviour mailing list
> [email protected]
>
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