Archive for the 'theory' Category

The Art of Knowing

Published
by
Lucas
on September 21, 2006
in odds and ends and theory
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"It is by the manipulation of materials that we come to know those materials, that is, to know a part of our world, and this is also how we come to know how to do various things with materials. That is, knowledge is, paradigmatically, the skilled making that is the primordial meaning of 'art'. And of course: in this process, we also come to know various propositions, for example, those embodying procedures for the further development of skills. We come to be able to describe, say, clay, and the vessel made of clay, with a depth and an appreciation that only arises in thorough and involving experience. And this in turn ramifies into our experience of the vessel thus made, and of similar vessels: as we understand more, our experience of use is enriched. Indeed, the experience of making a vessel may lead to a cherishing of vessels and their makers, an understanding of and respect for persons and things that could not arise by other means."

 

p 131 - Crispin Sartwell, The Art of Living: Aesthetics of the Ordinary in World Spiritual Traditions, State University of NY Press, 1995.

compartmentalisation

Published
by
Lucas
on August 18, 2006
in odds and ends and theory
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The idea of art and the aesthetic as a separate realm distinguished by its freedom, imagination, and pleasure has as its underlying correlative the dismal asumption that ordinary life is one of joyless, unimaginitive coercion. This provides an excuse for the powers and institutions that structure our everyday life to be brutally indifferent to natural human needs for the pleasures of beauty and imaginitive freedom. These are not to be sought in real life, but in art, whose contrast and escape from the real gives us human sufferers temporary solace and relief. By thus compartmentalizing art and the aesthetic as something to be enjoyed when we take a break from reality, the most hideous and oppressive institutions and practices of our civilization get legitimated and more deeply entrenched as inevitably real; they are erected as necessities to which art and beauty, by the reality principle, must be subordinated. Still worse, those rigid and cruelly divisive institutional realities then further justify and glorify themselves through the high art our civilization produces in trying to transcend and escape them. Art becomes, in Dewey's mordant phrase, “the beauty parlor of civilization,” covering with an opulent aesthetic surface its ugly horrors and brutalities. These, for Dewey, include class snobbery, imperialism, and capitalism's profit-seeking oppression, social disintegration, and alienation of labor.

-from Richard Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics, Rowman and Littlefield, Oxford, UK, 2000, p24.
(referring to John Dewey, Art as Experience, 1934)

commodification of the artist

Published
by
Lucas
on January 25, 2006
in spatial politics and theory
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This chunk of text comes from a book called One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, by Miwon Kwon, 2002, MIT Press, p46-7. It struck a chord with me because it seems to cut through some of the rhetoric I crap on with from time to time. I was thinking about this paragraph in terms of my project Bilateral Kellerberrin, which although not site-specific in a late 1960s sense (ie inextricably anchored to physical location), does grow out of the circumstances of the time and place in which it was planted.

Thus, as Kwon writes, "site" is not only a physical place, but also a set of conditions, social, discursive, temporal, and physical, which situate a project, make it comprehensible to its audience or participants. But the idea of Bilateral Kellerberrin is transferrable (in fact I am looking to transfer the same project to my home suburb of Petersham in Sydney, to see what will happen) - hence the following:

Generally the in situ configuration of a project that emerges out of such a situation is temporary, ostensibly unsuitable for re-presentation anywhere else without altering its meaning, partly because the commission is defined by a unique set of geographical and temporal circumstances and partly because the project is dependent on unpredictable and unprogrammable on-site relations. But such conditions, despite appearances to the contrary, do not circumvent or even complicate the problem of commodification, because there is a strange reversal now by which the artist comes to approximate the “work”, instead of the other way around as is commonly assumed (that is, art work as surrogate to the artist). Perhaps because of the absence of the artist from the physical manifestation of the work, the presence of the artist has become an absolute prerequisite for the execution/presentation of site-oriented projects. It is now the performative aspect of an artist’s characteristic mode of operation (even when working in collaboration) that is repeated and circulated as a new art commodity, with the artist him/herself functioning as the primary vehicle for its verification, repetition, and circulation.

nontheatrical performance: Kaprow

Published
by
Lucas
on January 13, 2006
in performance art and theory
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the following is taken from 'Nontheatrical Performance (1976) by Allan Kaprow, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life…

…artists themselves, [...] today are so trained to accept anything as annexable to art that they have a ready-made “art-frame” in their heads that can be set down anywhere, at any time. They do not require the traditional signs, rooms, arrangements, and rites of performance because performance is an attitude about involvement on some plane in something going on. It does not have to be onstage, and it really does not have to be announced.

[…]

here is the ball game I perceive: an artist can

(1)    work within recognizable art modes and present the work in recognizable art contexts

    e.g.,    paintings in galleries
                poetry in poetry books
                music in concert halls, etc.

(2)    work in unrecognisable, ie nonart, modes but present the work in recognisable art contexts

    e.g.,    a pizza parlour in a gallery
                a telephone book sold as poetry, etc.

(3)    work in recognizable art modes but present the work in nonart contexts

    e.g.,    a “Rembrandt as an ironing board”
                a fugue in an air-conditioning duct
                a sonnet as a want ad, etc.

(4) work in nonart modes but present the work in nonart contexts

    e.g.,     perception tests in a psychology lab
                anti-erosion terracing in the hills
                typewriter repairing
                garbage collecting, etc. (with the proviso that the art world knows about it)

(5)    work in nonart modes and nonart contexts but cease the call the work art, retaining instead the private consciousness that sometimes it may be art, too

    e.g.,     systems analysis
                social work in a ghetto
                hitchhiking
                thinking, etc.

[…]

Performance in the nontheatrical sense that I am discussing hovers very close to this fifth possibility, yet the intellectual discipline it implies and the indifference to validation by the art world it requires suggest that the person enganged in it would view art less as a profession than as a metaphor. At present such performance is generally nonart activity conducted in nonart contexts but offered as quasi-art to art-minded people. That is, to those not interested in whether it is or isn’t art, who may, however, be interested for other reasons, it need not be justified as an artwork.