Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
thanks and happy new decade all, lots here to mull through; where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad causes? kia ora sjn From: empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au [empyre-boun...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Johanna Drucker [druc...@gseis.ucla.edu] Sent: 03 January 2010 01:52 To: emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic All, Many interesting new ideas today in response to other postings. Of course an artist, poet, anyone can make art without attending to all this cultural scaffolding. I wager none of us here are really outsider artists however much we may scribble in the corners by ourselves, but we are quite aware that only certain work gets critical attention and acclaim, much of it really good, some of it kind of puzzlingly not so, and much that is derivative as well as much that is mediocre or wonderful or fashionable or enduring. But so what? I'd rather see good money go to bad art than bad causes. But I'm intent on addressing the rhetoric that accompanies the high art high stakes game--because that's where the greater disconnect occurs between what I perceive as good faith and bad (faith, not art). I use the term academic to suggest a critical practice based on a set of teachings that are passed through the academic environment as a kind of consensual code that cannot be questioned. I don't mean it to refer to scholarship or all critical study, but to a particular vein of belief premised, in this specific case, on a 19th century analysis of capitalism and its cultural manifestations (Marxism), revisited through a particular set of ideas about the demonic effects of mass culture and the necessity for art that resists that culture through difficulty (that, in a nutshell, is the Adorno position). I'm all for alternative spaces, for the creation of possibilities of thought, expression, experience, that the mass culture by its industrial nature rarely offers, but the attachment to an aesthetics of negativity and resistant difficulty seems counter-productive when produced for its own sake and on claims of serving a political end. I think GH makes a good point -- who outside the academy cares about Agamben and Adorno. Who, indeed, inside the academy? And why? I can't read Agamben. Sorry. I haven't the patience for the convolutions of his text. I spent a summer reading Adorno's aesthetics and translating it into the vernacular, distilling and paraphrasing, to get at the ideas, knowing full well that this was heretical practice to the critical community committed to expression as substance. But remember, I come from the realm of Language Poetry, was schooled in its teachings, and so know up close how close the relations of self-justifying obscurity and imaginative experiment can be. Artists should make what they want. But when we get to the critical discussion of the cultural role and function of aesthetic objects, the claims for the work often come out of a need for critical discourse to find suitable objects rather than out of an engagement with the work. I don't mean this to sound reactionary. I think it is radical to suggest that art has a purpose own its own terms, and that the engagement with those terms might unseat some critical assumptions that have held sway for a long time. My favorite example? Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate, which I think is a splendidly complex and inexhaustibly interesting aesthetic intervention in communal civic space. Complicit? Kapoor has no conflict with being a crowd pleaser. Why should he? If an essay appears in a critical art journal discussing Cloud Gate as a work of negative aesthetics, I think only a fool will take that stance seriously. What I think is useful to learn from Cloud Gate is the way an aesthetic artifact succeeds by not being difficult and by sustaining a complex and open-ended experiential relation to viewers. Johanna ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] Guilty as Charged?
To pick up from yesterday, language reflects the conflicts in the term's history. If art is complicit with the system, then logically it must also be implicit in the system. Conversely, the system must then be implicit or explicit in the art. This is mere wordplay, but already the blame game has shown its power -- but also some limitations. No one would say that the system is explicit in the artist. You can see how lawyers and linguists earn a living, so I had better pull out the dictionary after all. If I ask what complicit” means, as opposed to implicit” or explicit,” it seems reasonably clear. It also has a surprisingly distinct etymology. It has a modern English cognate in accomplice.” This makes sense, since the system is presumably the culprit, with the artist along for the ride. It also shares roots with a more innocent word, compliment.” That, too, makes sense, if one thinks of the traditional role of history painting and court portraiture -- or the extremes to which Jeff Koons will go to flatter his audience. Note, though, the distinct ethical associations of a word's twin roots. They correspond to the ethical history that I found in the twentieth century. For many an older Marxist, the system is criminal, with the artist aiding and abetting the crime. In turn, as for Walter Benjamin, the system my respond by betraying its abettors, not just by sentencing artists to prison or death, but also by making such ideas as fine art and originality obsolete. For him and others, before and since, artists can respond as well -- by speaking truth to power. Feminism and appropriation art have had just that aim, especially for generation of artists starting in the late 1970s. I felt their urgency again just this past year with Jenny Holzer at the Whitney. However, a compliment is also a nice thing, especially if paid the artist. And this corresponds to the murkier version of critical theory. People argue no end whether Warhol and his successors compliment or subvert celebrity culture, Cindy Sherman compliments film noir, or Sherrie Levine compliments Walker Evans. Perhaps they would not be able to subvert their inheritance unless they did compliment it. No question, however, that they take the inheritance as a compliment to them. This has to do with what I have called the postmodern paradox” -- how, for all the antagonism, Modernism and its critics keep one another very much alive. Look up explicit,” and its cognates come from other sentences entirely. Chief among them is to explain. Political art tries to explain something, but so does formalism, in making explicit the nature of a medium. Both promise alternatives to complicity, as when Clement Greenberg distinguishes fine art and kitsch. At the same time, art can be too explicit -- the heart of all the old complaints about formalism and political art alike. Similar associations come with sexually explicit imagery, as both daring and way too obvious. Art, then, has often felt an obligation to leave a good deal implicit. To continue the associations, it engages in another kind of criminal conduct, duplicity, and a good thing, too Plato rejected art for lying, even while telling stories, but formalism fails in its own goals of making art's nature explicit by refusing to accept a fiction. When Michael Fried traced the notion of theatricality from Rococo morality tales through Romanticism's inward turn and finally to Minimalism's stark public places, he was asking if one could morally accept fictions. To sort out which of the charges still hold, I want in my installment tomorrow to go one step past distinct cognates to roots that explicit,” implicit,” and explicit” share after all. John Haber http://www.haberarts.com/blog/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
gh comments below: On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:52 PM, Johanna Drucker wrote: Artists should make what they want. But when we get to the critical discussion of the cultural role and function of aesthetic objects, the claims for the work often come out of a need for critical discourse to find suitable objects rather than out of an engagement with the work. gh comments: That's been the problem with most recent art criticism. The writers try to find other critical thought that illuminates the art. That's been a good strategy in the past put has recently begun to obscure the actual meaning of any artwork behind a veil of theory. I love your description of Anish Kappoors work. It does indeed take a poet to get to the meaning of art! G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
gh comments below: On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote: where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad causes? gh comments: Bad art is an aesthetic decision that is subjective. I've seen in my lifetime art that was considered bad to become re-evaluated as good. Actually I think the aesthetic kick is in playing with that contradiction and skating close to the line of bad art and bad taste. Otherwise good taste and good art turn into so much decoration. I don't know what you mean by bad causes but in terms of art I would say that when you make art as a political statement its propaganda rather than art. If you make art to make money it's commerce rather than art. If you make art to illustrate a particular theory or piece demonstrate a piece of software it's illustration. I think the only proper cause for making art is to advance the art discourse or critique it or expand the aesthetic milieu. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 3
If I follow right, the argument is that we are all complicit, and have to get used to the idea that we have to work within the beast. That's a good, concise way of putting it. I don't mean to pick on artists who just do what they do, but someone has to help make what they do still potent. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Maybe bad art is art that does a bad thing. There is art which tries to make a moral evil look like a moral good (take, for instance, nature photography that is used to give a notorious polluter a positive reputation or, say, propaganda which seeks to convince people that a human rights abuser is a human rights defender.) Yet, even art which seeks to tell a lie, at least has the good sense to know that the fictional utopian world is preferable to the grim realities that they mask. Then there is the kind of badness is that which wants to wash its hands of ethical considerations, altogether. I would argue that works that aestheticize violence might fit into this category. There are plenty of games, for example, which have no content beyond the representation of killing as fun. But I would also lump purely capitalistic art into this category think about high-concept movie merchandise (novelizations of films, picture book adaptations, direct to video sequels, coloring books, soundtrack theme songs, etc.). For every dozen crap trinkets, the manufacturer could concievably hire an actual artist to make something meaningful but instead they choose to flood the world with garbage, made in sweatshops, that hurts the minds (and sometimes the bodies) of the people who consume them. (But you could argue that the mindless acquisition of tripe represents a different utopian impulse, working in an archival/d-base aesthetic). And then there are those works that are productively complicit that exist in the zone between two worlds... the kinds of things which might fit into one system, but which create change in another. I think of the many movies that actually do make me think, but without the heaviness that comes with message films... (I think that Where the Wild Things Are, for instance, is a great movie that goes beyond simply cashing in on children's desire). As always, where somebody begins is an interesting thing. But where people are going, or trying to go, is much more so. It is always fascinating when someone betrays their narrow interests in favor of broader ones Or when someone unexpectedly questions their own biases. Even if people end up in the wrong place, there is something to be said for effort, intention, affect, etc. Happy New Year! Davin On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 8:40 AM, G.H. Hovagimyan g...@thing.net wrote: gh comments below: On Jan 3, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Sally Jane Norman wrote: where and how do/ can we draw the line between bad art and bad causes? gh comments: Bad art is an aesthetic decision that is subjective. I've seen in my lifetime art that was considered bad to become re-evaluated as good. Actually I think the aesthetic kick is in playing with that contradiction and skating close to the line of bad art and bad taste. Otherwise good taste and good art turn into so much decoration. I don't know what you mean by bad causes but in terms of art I would say that when you make art as a political statement its propaganda rather than art. If you make art to make money it's commerce rather than art. If you make art to illustrate a particular theory or piece demonstrate a piece of software it's illustration. I think the only proper cause for making art is to advance the art discourse or critique it or expand the aesthetic milieu. G.H. Hovagimyan http://nujus.net/~gh http://artistsmeeting.org http://turbulence.org/Works/plazaville ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
