Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis
In the hope of trying to get a little more thoughtfulness going about what people think artists are or are not doing in relation to a/the/ any crisis, let me 'explain' some of the terms and areas I was referring to in my last post. To quote Joseph: I was talking about artist responses. Just not the artists you wanted me, or the list, to talk about. Joseph - I was critically engaging with your generalisation about artists responding to crisis by analysing your use of the term 'response'. As I take it you are referring to quick and immediate art that is made when a 'crisis' - I suppose you might be at the moment referring to the gfc?? – occurs I was countering this generalisation, which is uninformed because, as I was suggesting, there are many many artists working globally who do not 'react' (ie quick, immediate etc) but rather 'respond' via carefully thought out and quite lengthy engagements with what is actually an ongoing period of crisis. Where we might want to locate the beginning of this depends on what part of the world you live but many people would probably say - sometime during the 1970s or 1980s. The recent 'financial' crisis in these more longitudinal views is understood as unfolding in this context, then. And so if some, all or many of the artists I might have named and others are now 'responding' to this recent 'crisis' it is more often than not because they have been thinking about things for quite some time! At any rate, which artists were you taking about? You only named the fictional appearance of an artist within a literary context, so can you tell me who you think is currently responding 'badly' to the financial crisis and who well? perhaps then we will actually have something on the table for discussion. I really don't think my endorsement of interesting and intelligent responses to crisis has anything to do with following a 'market' discipline or logic...which I also find a rather vague and unuseful term. Which market? Financial, the art market, culture market, knowledge market etc? These are not reducible to each other because they do not all pass through the same institutions even though they may share some. It is hegemonic to use 'the market' as a figure for cultural analysis. Which in part is also why one cannot connect the 'art of' with all contemporary art practices. Of course art practices are situated inside capitalism but it does not therefore follow that all art practices pursue the 'art of' capitalism nor are they governed by 'the market'. The 'art of' (to follow Foucault) is a mode of conduct...an ethics if you like. And hence the question of how one conducts an art practice also bears upon one's ethico-aesthetic paradigm (to follow Guattari). While we cannot be 'outside of' capitalism, how we choose to respond to, work with others and conduct our practices living in the culture that we do, can be transformative. These transformations may be temporary, molecular, longitudinal or major - sometimes only time tells. But there is a vast difference, as I have already stated, between pursuing the 'art of' finance and situated within capitalism, conducting or being engaged with practices of transformation and change. None of the artists or art theorists I mentioned have any kind of naive belief in overthrow of the capitalist system; yet all are committed to transforming as a response to crises (some of which are financial, others, political, others ethical, others combinations of all these) I am a guest on this list, this month. Among various posts on a number of topics, I notice these periodic, sometimes truculent, sometimes emotional, calls for discussants to stop talking about some things, and talk about other things instead. I would have thought that as a guest in a space, one would at the very least, want to know something about the flavour and areas that the inhabitants want to talk about...perhaps that is not your idea of being a guest but it's certainly mine! Empyre is a reasonably run longing list and in it's history has had a diversity of people, topics etc but, naturally, there are also shared interests that are intellectually and passionately felt and thought. One of these, if I am not mistaken, is a passion for art, especially networked and or new media art. Indeed many of the list contributors ARE these artists. It is therefore unsurprising that when generalisations are made about this field people will not want to engage with these and will call for a discussion to shift elsewhere. What you see as truculence others might see as being fed up. Anna A/Prof. Anna Munster Assistant Dean, Grant Support Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au
Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis
...@cornell.edu To: -empyre- emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:07:11 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis Dear empyre, It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial crisis--one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times, forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as direct actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the story of Enric Duran: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions within the context of our own theorizing activities? This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this crisis on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester, institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep worry that many have regarding how the crisis might ultimately move to transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is coming to the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .) In response there have been discussions and interviews about how we can use this time of crisis to develop new models that exist in parallel to concurrent struggles to force governments to provide for the basic needs of people. (See in particular Interviewing the Crisis: http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/ .) How might we then reconsider actions and activities of the past and present and future---TAZs, tactical media, pirate radio, and many, many, more---in light of calls for more standardization and more accountability? And whither the academic institution? Corporations have fairly free reign in many departments at colleges and universities in the United States. Are we to expect even more of these so-called public-private partnerships in the future? What is the role of the institution in producing the people who created the crisis in the first place? Who will follow the links between the powerful actors in order to map their impact? I present here a recent project of mine that is my own attempt to face some of these issues. MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org) is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC) complex. It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. MAICgregator is available for download right now: http://maicgregator.org/download . If you want to see what MAICgregator does to a website without downloading it, you can look at some screenshots: http://maicgregator.org/docs/screenshots . This is its first public release, so expect that things might not work properly. I have written an extensive statement about MAICgregator that tries to contextualize it within discourses of net.art, the military-academic-industrial complex, data mining, and activist artistic practices. As the statement is rife with embedded links, please read it online: http://maicgregator.org/statement I welcome any feedback or discussion that this might provoke; if you want to e-mail the project authors directly, please e-mail info --at-- maicgregator ---dot--- org. http://maicgregator.org/ nick knouf ___ 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 A/Prof. Anna Munster Assistant Dean, Grant Support Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics School of Art History and Art Education College of Fine Arts UNSW P.O. Box 259 Paddington NSW 2021 612 9385 0741 (tel) 612 9385 0615(fax) a.muns...@unsw.edu.au ___ 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
Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis
Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly reply NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding (rather than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about) to a social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies and techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever other institution you want to aestheticise. (a la Benjamin et al). The examples that Nik and Marc are talking about (and also what Brian Holmes has been involved with) are emphatically not abut knee jerk response or reaction but are about using nonrepresentational aesthetic strategies - among a multitude of strategies which also include activist, semiotic, political, social and affective ones – to transform subjective and collective situations. These are immanent, critical, positive and productive relationships with crisis ie they do not respond to crisis but rather work amid, through and via crisis to work with what might be transformative about crises. And these aesthetic strategies are absolutely everywhere both in and out of the 'art world' eg Critical Art Ensemble, Harwood and Mongrel,16Beaver, rebublicart project, The Senselab, eipcp, Make World, edu factory, The Thing, Serial Space (sydney -based for all you North Americans who need to get out more ;-) etc etc etc. And these are just the artists/ collectives/projects - there's also a wealth of brilliant art theory around this - try Hito Steyerl, Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes, Matthew Fuller, Florian Schneider, Brian Massumi all the FLOSS+art etc etc etc There is NO relation between these kind of politics, responses and aesthetics and the 'art' of finance - except a relation of revulsion. On the other hand, if you want to find out about a really fantastic installation that engaged directly with the stock market and in fact used a gambling syndicate's money to trade stocks as part of the actual art work - have a look at Micheal Goldberg's documentation of his 2002 work 'Catch a Falling Knife' (http://www.michael-goldberg.com/main.html - go into Projects and select the title of the piece). Just another point I'd like to make about this month's discussion - I have found some of the posts scary and stupid in their absolute lack of knowledge about anything that is going on about contemporary art, aesthetic strategies and politics. I really think some people need to do a bit of preliminary research and investigation before they start sounding off about how boring or naive the concept of aesthetically responding to crisis is, Best Anna On 24/04/2009, at 10:36 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote: nk...another aspect of interest is the way in which the financial realm in itself is a creative act, and artful...with all of the discussion revolving around the perception/reading parallax, I wonder how people in the artistic/academic community may not perceive/read financial creativity as art at all...I suspect such financial activity is a form of art, which contains all of the aspirations, triumphs and failures that any art project may enable, no? nikos Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D Editor, Kritikos http://intertheory.org - Original Message From: nick knouf na...@cornell.edu To: -empyre- emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:07:11 PM Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis Dear empyre, It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial crisis--one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times, forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as direct actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the story of Enric Duran: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions within the context of our own theorizing activities? This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this crisis on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester, institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep worry that many have regarding how the crisis might ultimately move to transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is coming to the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .) In response there have been discussions and interviews about how we can use this time of crisis to develop new models that exist
[-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called crisis
Dear empyre, It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I am), yet there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic responses to this so-called financial crisis--one that exists in a mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times, forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as direct actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the story of Enric Duran: http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions within the context of our own theorizing activities? This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this crisis on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester, institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep worry that many have regarding how the crisis might ultimately move to transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is coming to the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .) In response there have been discussions and interviews about how we can use this time of crisis to develop new models that exist in parallel to concurrent struggles to force governments to provide for the basic needs of people. (See in particular Interviewing the Crisis: http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/ .) How might we then reconsider actions and activities of the past and present and future---TAZs, tactical media, pirate radio, and many, many, more---in light of calls for more standardization and more accountability? And whither the academic institution? Corporations have fairly free reign in many departments at colleges and universities in the United States. Are we to expect even more of these so-called public-private partnerships in the future? What is the role of the institution in producing the people who created the crisis in the first place? Who will follow the links between the powerful actors in order to map their impact? I present here a recent project of mine that is my own attempt to face some of these issues. MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org) is a Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC) complex. It searches government funding databases, private news sources, private press releases, and public information about trustees to try and produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites. MAICgregator is available for download right now: http://maicgregator.org/download . If you want to see what MAICgregator does to a website without downloading it, you can look at some screenshots: http://maicgregator.org/docs/screenshots . This is its first public release, so expect that things might not work properly. I have written an extensive statement about MAICgregator that tries to contextualize it within discourses of net.art, the military-academic-industrial complex, data mining, and activist artistic practices. As the statement is rife with embedded links, please read it online: http://maicgregator.org/statement I welcome any feedback or discussion that this might provoke; if you want to e-mail the project authors directly, please e-mail info --at-- maicgregator ---dot--- org. http://maicgregator.org/ nick knouf ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
