Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Good and bad are relative concepts, being the poles of an axis of value. That axis might be personal or public but it is always contingent. It does not exist as an absolute geometry but is variable, depending on context. That context is prescribed by other values of equal contingency. Art is a relative concept. Some people consider something to be art, others do not. There will rarely be agreement and it will not include everyone. You cannot please all the people all the time. It is only a good idea to get into arguments about relative concepts if you enjoy interminable word-play and the ultimate outcome of agreeing to disagree. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:13:43 -0600 To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: 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 Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
Re: [-empyre-] complicit post
Sean, reading your comments is always so interesting. You write: Reversing their polarities, what if connectivity comes first and the elements it connects are secondary? Isn't that what the aesthetic experience infers? You have always been very sensitive to the ethics and politics of relating. I find it impossible to separate personal from social relations - the individual from the social - exactly because I see myself as (in)formed by the sticky set of connected relations I am and have been part of. I am interested in the way the networks of connected technologies spill out into familial, professional and intimate relationships and vice versa. I am also interested in my own 'objecthood' as a performer in my own video work - what do I become a mediator for? Where do I slot myself in? What ripples of relations and associations do I send forward? For me, the present dominance of technological networks does not offer an alternative (how long will access be this wide for?), but brings to the fore associating, relating, connecting where 'identity' was the dominant trope. ... the complex partnerships that predate the people or things that fill those roles ... is a fabulous paradox, as the partnerships exist only as long as there are Seans, Cinzias and Johannas to enact them and perform them - therefore evolving them, betraying them, and so on. One more thing: why the cyborg of the actor-network? Best, Cinzia openvisions.org 2010/1/4 Sean Cubitt scub...@unimelb.edu.au Thanks for the kind words Johanna Aesthetic - in the old Greek sense of aesthesis, of sensory, sensual - isn't that about a mode of appreciating? Some days even the things you prize most, poem, song, food, seem tired and jejune. Seizing on something beautiful remedies that soul-sickness, and isn't essentially about a class of things (art) but a way of overcoming the objectness of objects, the isolation of the psyche. A branch of bougainvillea, a Stephen Gerrard goal, the scent of roasting garlic wafting over a wall, watching your grad students argue about Agamben and games engines: these things are aesthetic, without the preciosity of art. The elegance of an algorithm - as Gelernter argued - has this quality, if a more mental one, also profoundly sociable, and on scales (vide Linux, P2P) far beyond the amiable but in this case unambitious Nicholas Bourriaud. A friend sends his review of Baudrillard's last book, with this passage on existential subjectivity, whose ³great disappearance² is, in his belief, not just that of the virtual metamorphosis of objective reality, but that of the ceaseless annihilation of subjectivity For JB this is a matter for distress: but isn't it the cost we have to pay for the renewal of a polity which has advanced by exclusion? If the subject par excellence of globalisation is the migrant, and the subject of the coming network society the cyborg of the actor-network, cultural identity and human identity are in question, and with them the idea of subjectivity that has dominated modernity (even in schizophrenic forms). So perhaps we have a few more twists and turns before we can shed even the 19th century dialectic of individual vs social. I guess this is a way of saying: we will almost certainly go 'beyond art' before we go beyond the dialectic. Co-dependence and autopoesis are too invested in the primacy of individuals to resolve the question of the social (as witness for example the truly unreadable paroxysms of Luhmann as he tries to make the autopoetic model fit human lives). Luckily for the empyre community, tho, both also include a far more important and as yet un-worked-out idea of mediation, flow, flux, connectivity. Reversing their polarities, what if connectivity comes first and the elements it connects are secondary? Isn't that what the aesthetic experience infers? So yes indeed, negotiations and complexities that do not offer themselves for resolution, but the dialectic is about the difficulty of contradiction, together with its necessity Now this is getting too 'academic' - sorry! But one last effort at relevance: complicity derives from the Latin 'complex' which, to add confusion, means 'accomplice' or 'partner'. (There's a false etymology which suggests it's from the French 'pli', fold, for all the Deleuzeans out there). I like the idea that the complexity of accomplices is implicit in 'complicit' - the complex partnerships that predate the people or things that fill those roles (the system chair-table-computer-modem . . .) which I slot myself into to write this . . . Best sean On 4/01/10 1:21 AM, Johanna Drucker druc...@gseis.ucla.edu wrote: Nice post, Sean. I agree, it's the pessimism that we have to get over -- we can't afford it, personally or culturally. What I want to salvage from Adorno is his insight into the workings of aesthetic objects--the qualities that make them distinct from other objects-- which of course
Re: [-empyre-] Unfolding Complicity
gh comments below: On Jan 4, 2010, at 9:01 AM, John Haber wrote: Want a moral or two to make sense of this? One is that in the past it was plausible to set a strategy to avoid complicity. You could set yourself apart from commerce, or you could embrace it as a storyline My collaborative group Artists Meeting has a piece called Artists Meeting Art Machine. It's an automatic art machine that's made for art fairs. You purchase a token, put it in a slot and the machine randomly selects an art work either a drawing or a small object. The piece is actually a transactional art work that deals with the public and is specifically made to critic the market within the marketplace.We recently exhibited this at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami and hope to travel it to other places. Here's the url if anyone is curious. -- http://artistsmeeting.org This work does function just as John says. It also has some other implicit meanings. The aesthetics of choice are taken away from the purchaser. It's amazing how people have been geared to walk into a gallery and snap into an aesthetic choice mode. They equate the art experience with shopping. You know, do I like this? does this appeal to me? Does this reinforce my viewpoint of the world and my social position etc.. The Artists Meeting group mans the booth and explains to people who ask what the machine is that it's a DIY hack. They also explain that although choice is taken away the element of surprise is given to the purchaser. It's an attempt to give the creative surprise and discovery that an artists finds naturally when making an artwork. The piece is actually not about the objects it dispenses but about the whole situation. ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] poets patrons and the word academic
Simon, I agree with your post, wholeheartedly. But would add an extra emphasis to your statement and suggest that it might be a bad idea to deny the contingency of relative axes of value. Sometimes, there is a tendency to push art into purely aesthetic or purely moral scales of relation, and I think there is something important about evaluating the relationship between aesthetics and ethics. It is find to impose a separation between form and content, as long as people acknowledge that this itself is a word-game. The beautiful and the grotesque are never purely aesthetic, but they are expressions of ideas, social relations, philosophies, etc. I think there is something great about engaging and arguing over questions of values that can lead to progress, provided, of course, there are certain values to which people are going to accept (either willingly, by hammering out a minimal sort of social contract, or through coercion, simply imposing them). It is a hard-handed approach to social existence, but social existence is what we make it, and if we don't make it widely agreeable then it will be, as it is today in most parts of the world, increasingly disagreeable (and even murderous). The disengaged view (which says there is nothing to agree upon, so just worry about yourself) is increasingly ugly. There might have been a time when being venal and trivial was considered brilliantly clever but today it just seems obvious. Early on these moves might have conveyed an unpleasant truth about art's complicity... but I think this is something that most people kind of understand (that artists, styles, ideas are promoted by institutions in accordance with market logics). And I think this is why you see such a bloom of great works that convey such a strong desire for sketching out and cultivating a social consciousness, that might start with a foot in the art world, and might make use of those institutions, but which yearns for something else (see, for instance, http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7projectId=57). In some cases, this desire for social existence is not even political in the conventional sense (I recently sat in on a children's workshop sponsored by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts http://www.mnbookarts.org/aboutmcba/aboutmcba.html and spent some time in the Robot Store in Michigan http://www.826michigan.org/, both of which are examples of a wider interest in teaching communities how to make... More importantly, they teach people that art is not something you appreciate it's something you use. Take care. Davin On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 5:06 AM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: Good and bad are relative concepts, being the poles of an axis of value. That axis might be personal or public but it is always contingent. It does not exist as an absolute geometry but is variable, depending on context. That context is prescribed by other values of equal contingency. Art is a relative concept. Some people consider something to be art, others do not. There will rarely be agreement and it will not include everyone. You cannot please all the people all the time. It is only a good idea to get into arguments about relative concepts if you enjoy interminable word-play and the ultimate outcome of agreeing to disagree. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 3 Jan 2010 19:13:43 -0600 To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: 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
Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 4
One thing about Johanna's example, since it bears on complicit. If you make people lose, it doesn't enrage them; it just makes the beg to buy in more. You have to make them win. John ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
