Joe on August 21st, 2007 at 11:22 am
I’m quite interested in this topic so I’ll kick off this thread with a thought about an example that appears in Bourriaud’s book of the same title where he’s talking about Gonzalez-Torres’ piece at MOMA where he scattered sweets across the floor. This does in a sense bring everyday life into the gallery (caution, curiosity, greed) but just as this brings new phenomena into the gallery it at the same time extracts and isolates them from everyday life. Our very awareness, intension, reflection as it is curated by the gallery itself places these things more on the side of conceptual art practices than on the side of the everyday. You could just say that all that relational aesthetics is trying to do is to raise our awarness of the importance of our everyday relations outside of the gallery, but there is always a possible danger that it brings the everyday into an aesthetic frame as a substitute for leaving the aesthetic frame in order to engage in the everyday.
“One is an artist at the cost of regarding that which all non-artists call “form” as content, as “the matter itself.” With that, of course, one belongs to an inverted world; for henceforth content becomes something merely formal - our life included.” Nietzche in the Will to Power - p257.
A video of a really good lecture by Michael Hirch on this issue of the aestheticisation of politics in May ‘68 as diversion from real engagement in the political process can be found at http://www.v2v.cc/v2v/Ausnahme_-_Michael_Hirsch
Its in a similar vain that Mouffe and Laclau are re-asserting our engagement with the rather less glamorous political processes and so then the interesting question seems to be how the discourse of real political engagements relates to the discourse of participation in the Art world. It strikes me that architecture has much more agency at the centre of these two debates than is currently being explored.
(See: relational aesthetics)
August 22nd, 2007 at 6:57 am
on this it could be interesting for you to look at brian o’doherty’s “inside the white cube” http://www.amazon.com/Inside-White-Cube-Ideology-Gallery/dp/0520220404 re: if art leaves the gallery to engage with “life” it can’t help but take the gallery (the frame) with it to preserve its identity.
August 22nd, 2007 at 9:27 am
Thanx…
I’ll check it out of the library… looks great…
I guess also that this is not new. It is exactly what the avant-garde’s of the 1920’s were trying to do in reaction against Art as an institution towards the end of the 18th Century. In Peter Burger’s Theory of the Avant-garde’s when he is speaking about Corb, Duchamp, Mies, Dada, Futurists, surrealists etc he says:
“When the Avant-gardistes demand that art become practical once again, they do not mean that the content of works of art should be socially significant. The demand is not raised at the level of contents of individual works. Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that works have as does the particular content.”
So Corbs early houses were as much an anticipation of a the society to come where the ‘five points’ were to effect structural change as they were a hermetic linguistic game. Of course thanks to the previous generation (Rowe/Eisenman) this radicality was under-emphasised and replaced by an emphasis on language games, proportions, geometries, and associations of mythic dimensions. This is where real political engagement gets sublimated into aetheticisations whilst trying, in their guilt, to address the political from within the aesthetic frame, i.e. Koolhaas.
August 22nd, 2007 at 8:30 pm
i’ve been looking for a reason to post this link to an article on olafur eliason and his call “for critical architecture.” it’s superficial and hyperbolic, but i thought his dismissal of architecture in favor of the slowness (relational) of art was an interesting, closeted expression of optimism for the possibilities of architecture. i’m only mentioning the article because eliason is talking about art’s engagement with reality and concludes that architecture is incapable of this (or actually, that a different kind of architecture is precisely where he sees his own practice going).
eliason of course is known for his extremely formal, phenomenological work, which he describes as a kind of institutional critique — not just that we see ourselves seeing, but we see the social context in which that seeing takes place. isn’t his whole point that reality, or everyday life, is already aestheticized? i think it’s the obverse of the way that the new economy commodifies our “latent creativity” in myspace pages, youtube videos, ipod playlists, and any number of other ways we can customize our consumption. it’s kind of frightening the way that the old great wall between art & life has come crumbling down and somehow things don’t feel that much better.
this is all a little off from your original topic, but i’m wondering about the basic question of art’s artificiality versus real political engagement (is this a real distinctiion?)… (i suppose the line is drawn between a hermeneutic or a pragmatic art, is it more important what it means or what it’s usefulness is, is it art isn’t that interesting a question versus wshat does it do, etc.) i think it’s interesting when art colonizes “real” space in terms of how it’s dealt with by the public as well as how its integrated into the art canon (if at all - i understand this is something grant kester writes about); but its also interesting when non-art is brought into the gallery for similar reasons… not to aestheticize it, so much as to see how it already functions aesthetically?
anyway, how do you see architecture having more agency in these debates? i only brought up eliasson maybe as a prosthetic couter-example.
also, i wanted t post this, which i originally spotted on leisurearts:
IC-98 (”Iconoclast 1998”) was founded in 1998 as a reaction to the
restrictions of academic writing. From the beginning, the group has tried to
act as freely as possible, always putting the context and the idea before
the medium, and the group-subject before the individual, never minding the
barriers between different disciplines (academic, artistic or activist). In
practice, the world of contemporary art has proved to be the most flexible
environment for diverse projects, being a free zone of experimentation within
the society at large. Though the label ART has an enormous power to neutralise
any message, and regardless of the fact that art world increasingly resembles
the high fashion industry, it nonetheless offers possibilities to put forward ideas
without the preconditions of academic work (rules, objectivity), the market
(surplus value, capitalist modes of distribution), or activism (the threat of
dogmatism). In fact, in IC-98’s idealist-pragmatic programme the projects are
labeled art only for strategic reasons – the strategy works as long as the
concepts of art do not come to dominate the discourse. The same applies to
the individuals working in the group: you call yourself artist, just because it is
institutionally convenient, because the very concept of ARTIST is obscure.
i wonder if it fits in to this discussion — or helps relate it to your other thoughtful response in the post-critical discussion (regarding academicizzzation).