While writing a reply i came to a conclusion i hadn't foreseen: <B>art is
not speaking from a reality any longer hence can't speak to other
realities</B> (not as a matter of strategic or intellectual elegance..., as
a matter of fact) Probably the thought isn't new to the academic lurkership
(please give me some historical reference -- if you know of any -- on this
insight, so that i can deliver it in other debates).
Having slept over it and after rereading it, it starts to make more and
more sense. Once art fabricated realities. Often while/by/as refering in
one way or another to other existing realities. And speaking to them, in
some sort of in between (mediating) space. In/as complex referential
systems. Most of the academic questions/answers/theories today mean to say
that in the contemporary spectacle the art<->realities reference has
corrupted, complicated beyond interpretation -- and indeed: beyond artistic
production. It rendered art speechless. The observation of referential
complexity is not total bull of course, but too much part of the problem it
signals. A problem otherwise articulated in the fact that no creative
practice is analysed anymore from its drive to create and install alternate
reality -- not even by its practitioners.
This means poietic ground fell from under (some, your, my?) art, rather
than that art got lost in the complexitiy of reference built and mediated
by the society of the spectacle, mass media and so on and so forth. All of
mediation got corrupted, but more importantly: dragged along
creatio/inventio in its fall. A mass media trade marked abundance of
'fabricated realities' swept art's alternate realities from the face of
culture -- at least in problematized Western society, and one will argue,
on a global scale.
It will not be easy to reinstall art's poietic ground. Since I'm an artist
i can't afford to regard it impossible. There's as always plenty reason for
it, the more when we look at the surrounding realities. Any new reality art
is prepared and capable to speak from deserves our full support (if we are
not by any chance the ones fabricating it from spectacular debris collage:
de-bricolage) If art can't find/fabricate a reality under its own
conditions, conceived for contemporary man, art as we know it is finished:
history. Which is not a loss per se and to some including myself a matter
of museal fact. Like XD: retrospective.
Technology by itself is no new reality. Communication isn't. Information we
could make. Reality is a critical position: it is grotesque, but it works.
Jouke Kleerebezem Amsterdam
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