Re: <eyebeam><blast> dissenting voices

[Jordan Crandall <crandall@blast.org>]

Ursula Biemann wrote:
>Now that art/museum and the cultural industry have formed some kind of
>homogenous totality of the capitalist organisation of symbolic
>production, we might soon lack any type of specificity and have to find
>other fields of activity that could open up spaces of resistance and
>contestation. What could those other strategies be if not relentlessly
>inserting dissenting voices to complicate the discussion and to
>critically deconstruct a fake unanimity?"

Ursula: that is why I brought up the newscast-platform, because I was
wondering if this was a format that could possibly open up such a
possibility for deconstruction/dissention - for a gathering of diverse
voices and an insertion into an officiating discourse, that would have
the potential to open up a space of contestation.   This format is so
widely recognized as official - it is culturally and economically
sanctioned, when we see the CNN broadcast we pay attention, because it
is supposed to speak a certain truth, stand for an event that occurred. 
There is a certain global uniformity to this platform, so I wondered if
it was used (or could be used) as a cross-platform for participants, as
a recognized vehicle for miming a discourse of power.  Because such
tools/formats are needed in order to develop situational forms of
political agency -- group articulations among a divergent constituency.

It could provide another frame to the art-project, with the capacity to
globally frame a local articulation:  as when a "window" opens to show a
local community mobilized to resist its land being used as a military
test site (as you showed at the Swiss Institute).  A window that when
opened via the newscast is endorsed in a way that it can't be as an art
project.  It's a platform that could negotiate the local/global in a
particular way, creating a new tension within the field of legitimizing
media culture, as a form of critical artistic speech (though not
necessarily recognizable in that way).

I guess the question is one of the limits of artistic practice, and the
tools that we need in order to have the capacity to critically intervene
in the ways that you suggest.



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