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Subject: Re: <eyebeam><blast> art dead
4 messages, from Damian Toro, Ricardo Basbaum, Robert Simon, and krumm
Damian Toro <death_kunst@yahoo.com> writes:
After the neuro-modernist interpretation of Art, and still having now,
almost alive, the post-modernist "deconstruction", is not possible to
find any content on the philosophic, political and/or technocratic
(technological and or post-technological) discourse, that could support
the idea of Art as a Concept or as a Non-Concept (...the idea of Net Art
as a posthuman-social-expression represents again a demo-conservative
question, and is an attempt against freedom).
The taxonomic and naive definition of Greenberg is an example of the old
tradition, of the victorianism in Art. This formalist and neo-romantic
interpretation of Art (that I can find also in this forum) is the best
demonstration of the Real affirmation about Art:
Art is Death.
This affirmation is not a secondary subject to be analyzed. The
political and economical facts are like art, elements that has to be
take into account when we talk about Art-theory.
Art like anything, comprehends everything.
The limitations of technology are obvious, is not correct to say that
art is death because of technology... On the contrary, technology is a
medium to do something that for some people can be or not Art.
The affirmation about the Death of Art has not its basis on the
capitalist societies. The philosophies and the critics about Art that
come from Europe or United States are not the point to analyze why Art
is already dead.
In "Latin-America", Art has never existed like mode of social expression
(the case of the indigenist and the Mexican painters are an example of
the "copy" and of the false "originality"). And the necessities of the
so called "Latin painters" was never to create something "new" (like the
modernists in Europe) or something transgressional (as the Dadaists also
in Europe), but was, to do "something" with that "theoretical thing"
that was and is everyday coming from "the big Centers".
The corruption of the governments (see for example what is happening in
Ecuador, Colombia and Panama) means also that in "Latin America" has
never existed an evolution of politics. Politics are also dead, not only
Art!
The example of United States of America is good for the North-Americans.
Andy Warhol has been praised because he reflects a concrete pattern of
the North American society, pattern that has not any relation with the
reality in countries like Brazil, Bolivia or Ecuador.
Warhol is alive in the United States. He like all the artists in North
America before and after him (and here we should put in, all the
"Chicanos" ...and other groups) is a merchandise, and represents the
Death of Art only because he not express anymore the "American Dream":
he can not have his "Ford" because Ford is dead and the Japanese cars
are cheaper and better, also because Warhol is 6 feet underground.
The catastrophic vision of Baudrilard is a French thing. Sure!, is also
a Universal thing. But is not a profound research of Art in its totality
(as social expression art is not American or European, but
"terrestrial").
The use of technology, for what and for whom, is an excellent question;
specially if we are not going to sleep over the North Hemisphere of this
immense globe, that has more than two sides... having no sides.
Damian Toro
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Ricardo Basbaum <rirobas@visualnet.com.br> writes:
Obviously art can't kill art, therefore we artists can't kill art.Who
can? Who would be interested in that? In my posting, I just wanted to
point out that in cyberspace the life/death/life/death... game has to
happen somehow if cyberspace has to be colonized by 'post-humans' (Do
they need to?).
Colonizing cyberspace is to dislocate it inside ourselves, letting
computer screen membrane slide softly through our mind, carrying
words/images to the body as materials to perform "symbolic metabolism"
(Lygia Clark, the artist who helped to invent and develop another form
of interiority, as ever changing continuous internal-external symbolic
space). Re-embodiment. Impossible to do that without risk.
Carlos, I did not talk about "death of art", which I feel as a quite
unproductive old hegelian tricky question, already surpassed by modern
art, etc., not to say contemporary art - the continuous
reinvention/redesigning of the territory of art, working on the borders.
I wrote: "The question is not asking if art is dead, but if, in a domain
beyond life/death like cyberspace, is there yet possibility for
something beyond art, closer toanother quality of affect?"
We have to consider art circuit as a not innocent game and to play there
is to create groups, build formal and informal alliances, experience
confrontaion and anihilation as well as open up spaces and territories.
My (silly) observation concerned the impossibility of producing art
without having any kind of comprehension of "death" (brrrrr..., cold?
warm? Has anyone ever experienced it? Duchamp: "only the others die"),
as it is a conceptual part of any human culture.
And, as "posthumans" [" the posthuman offers us a way to think about
human-machine interfaces in ways that are life-enhancing rather than
life-threatening" - K. Hayles] we 'have to' find out another way of
conceiving life and death, facing both. (Can we talk about "posthuman
nature" or is it a paradox or contradiction?)
"I see the rhetoric of disembodiement (e.g., Gibson's "Neuromance," John
Perry Barlow's take on VR) to be politically dangerous." K. Hayles
Louis Schwartz wrote:
"Every work thus puts into play its producer's death."
The producers renew and transform themselves after they produce the
works.
They become 'an autre' (as for Rimbaud).
Margaret Isabel Sundell wrote:
"I was struck by the almost anachronistic aspect of e-mail (in 19th
century Paris local mail was delivered something like three or four
times a day and people carried on extensive communications in writing)."
Allan Myouka Sondheim wrote:
"For a membrane has no nodes."
-----------------------------------------------
Robert Simon <robertms@euronet.nl> writes:
Not "What is (net) Art?" but "What is (net) Artist"?
Part 1
Understand: I'm no netishist. And fact is, there's not much art or even
Art on the net that I've seen that seems very good. But hey dude, what
makes art good, or anything Art? (ie is art more good than not-art, or
rather is it just more good at being Art? etc etc) Well, I couldn't
agree more with what somebody said here the other day that big Questions
are only frustrating, so like the judge said about pornography, I can't
tell you what (good) art/Art is, but I know it (It) when I see It (it).
Seriously though, I don't like much of the stuff I see in actual (as
opposed to real) galleries either, or even in the contemporary wings of
the museum. And these are the places for Real (as opposed to actual)
Art. What I tend to like is pre-20th century stuff, but that's another
story. But for this story what I tend to attach to the word art/Art is
whatever has been judged as such in the courtroom of Tradition. Sounds
pretty conservative, but since as far as I'm concerned (the) Tradition
is entirely (well, not entirely) constituted retrospectively--or named
and assigned value, in its instances and as a hole--maybe this is not so
conservative a judgment after all. But let's leave it at this for now:
fuc* universal judgments, it's all just a matter of taste.
Part 2
So. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Art is the stuff made by
Artists. In the old days, starting around the very end of the 18th
century, or probably in the early 19th, the Artist was a
melancholy-looking guy (Warning: this is a Eurocentric
story).Middle-class mal-de-siecle. Then came bohemia, and declassement.
You could be a gal-de-siecle too. Live in a garret and wear raggedy
clothes and quaff absinthe and hang out in cafes and write poems.
<snip>
The beatnik look still seems pretty viable for Artists: skinny white
cats in black. Black cats with goatees. Chicks too--black, goatees,
whatever. (Though no more bongos, which were pretty cool, and are to be
missed)
What about netartists? Do they look the same as Real Artists? Or just
like actual artists? Or like something entirely new?
Has the discourse, or have the social facts, produced interesting
images, or facts following images, or images following facts? Or the
other ways around? Sorry, I probably mean imagos.
I mean: will there be--are there already--netartist Heros? *uck that
old-timey death of the author/subject bul*shit--I mean Barthes and
Foucault and Lacan assigned their names to their works--heroines (and
believe me I mean heros too!) go with the artist-territory. And what
about with this virtual territory? And its
protruberances elsewhere?
N.B.: I'm not at all interested in proper names here, just Types
(thinking allegorically you see)
Robert Simon (" ")
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krumm <krumm@btinternet.com> writes:
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krumm@btinternet.com
http://www.btinternet.com/~debris
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