Re: <eyebeam><blast> art? and identification

[morse@sirius.com (Margaret Morse)]

Things that stick in my mind:

Ricardo's favela

Will's evocation of  "Bataille's animal night. So many times it hits us
just
> there: in the car on the highway/parkinglot/suburb of the contemporary
> desert of the possible."

reg-gay mer-ulay-- I like that name in children's secret language

and the off-list posts (built-in public/privacy)

        Is there too little talk about art on this list? It depends on
what you think art is. My friend who will be remembered next week in a
retrospective and memorial came out of the art/life tradition.  That
meant that for her, academic life was not just bread and butter or a
separate part of her life from art,it consisted of "opportunities for
performative interventions.  By framing didactic situations (lectures,
conference presentations, panel discussions, etc.) as performance art
occasions, I can achieve an aesthetic distance that allows for a degree
of self-conscious manipulation that would not be possible in a less
relfexive enactment of the same activity.  The underlying ideological
aspects of the activity can be recognized and addressed as part of the
activity itself."  (Christine Tamblyn, selection from "Statement about
my Work")

        By that standard, it is possible for even  e-lists to offer
possibilities for "art," given a degree of self-consciousness about
them. Christine also viewed her own art criticism as "collaboration with
the artist, participating in the creation of a work of art by
influencing the way viewers receive and interpret it.  Not merely a
parasitic vampire, the critic deserves credit as an auteur of the art
works she discusses, if these art works are seen as open texts that
begin at their physical boundaries rather than stopping there." 
Christine helped me to reframe my own critical writing in my mind from a
kind of duty seen from the perspective of endless deadlines and as a
choice that precluded exercising my own artistic talents to part of my
art/life praxis. I was not as self-conscious as I could have been in my
postings here, since my stance was to treat this list as an opportunity
for dialogue, and a certain spontaneousness on my own part, not as an
intervention.  (Consider, though, that dialogue may be a series of
interventions). This Bakhtinian ideal governed my somewhat intimate
stance and my goal (as ever) of linking my intellectual and rational
life to the contradictions, surprises and enigmas I encounter in
experience with the other. My postings did apparently elicit a few
responses in the vein of reverie or lyricism. Note that a posting on
statistics is as potential a candidate for "e-list" art, considered in
this art/life tradition.

         Another thought on identification. Film theory (part of my
cultural capital/baggage) has a highly developed model for
identification with narrative fiction film based on Lacanian concepts. 
What film theory doesn't address very well are the other modes of
documentary, experimental and non-narrative film.  I'd rather think in
terms of the ways "enculturation" and cultural maintenance depend on a
far broader range of the habitual and on beliefs and practices that are
introduced not just in narrative, but in every mode and person of
language and degree of embodiment.




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