Tim mate

there is a straight line of mud being slung at easy figures such as those
i,listed. I wasn't suggesting their work bore relation, just their
promotion (even self-promotion) and subsequent villification as
personalities.

I'm not at all suggesting that you are responsible for tabloid responses to
arts practice. But all too often opinions ape or get their fire from such
tabloid responses, as you yourself admit. So we must all perhaps be more
careful in jumping to conclusions and leaping into mock frays. Often the
work has not been personally experienced. This may not be so in your case,
probably not. But the point still stands. When we were touring car boots a
couple of years back we were getting all sorts of 'this is much more
interesting that that bed' comments. None of the people making such
comments had actually seen it. We asked and got responses like I won't go
to London or what go to see that load of shit. You see the problem.

>All that sort of cheap polemic can do is prevent proper criticism and
>movement forward, locking the artist into a loop - the very thing that you
>seem to be denying.

I can only agree. erm

You want to talk about money and the big city slickers now and how somehow
John Cage has influenced national arts funding strategies to the extent
that the avant-garde (whoever that is) is somehow pulling the funding
strings. Maybe someone else can help, because it really doesn't look that
way to me. Maybe you can be more explicit about whom your are referring to
-  please.

I've not been aware of separating form from content. I'm sorry if you read
it that way. Neither word has been raised here so far, but they walk hand
in hand for me. I've been 1. suggesting that your attempt to deny Alison's
experience was pointless and 2. you are simply wrong in your denial that a
well-funded reading circuit exists. We might not be part of it but it
exists.

3. I have been suggesting that this easy formulation of a national picture
is poorly judged. Again perhaps we talk specifics, otherwise we'll both end
up in general spots;) If we are to talk directly about those poetries with
which we are broadly interactive there would be little or no funding to
speak of and little or nothing by way of money to impact in any way upon
the work.

So we are left with conditions of life. Your critique of, Cage aside, an
otherwise unspecified avant-garde (no writers nor poets in that as yet
here, hence my scattershot of practitopners to see who you might and might
not be alluding to) is that art was seen as separate from life in post-war
USAmerica. But Cage was a prime mover in trying to bring perceptions from
both camps into dynamic conversation. I didn't start on Cage, but he keeps
coming up like the ghost in Hamlet.

'Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look'

At least some of the work he made, although I am by no means an advocate
nor an expert, sought to suggest that life and art are not separate and
that art could well turn away from its separate status and embrace life.
That art was life and life already included art  -  throw open the windows
and listen.

So he is an exemplar of what you are advocating, not the opposition to it.
His work was explicitly political in just this respect and fed directly in
Fluxus and that whole life into art - at into life 1960s meltdown,
critiques of the spectacle and onwards.

YES we can critique Fluxus and Situationism but first let's be aware what
their critique was of.

I think you're beating a dog of your own preference with a broken stick.

But this could be to do with terms and readings. It might be that what you
are setting out to critique is Cage's embrace of the anarchistic individual
distancing himself from all forms of the rhetoric of power. You might
pursue this point. Although i still don't understand where all of this in
respect of that reading for svp at cpt by Alison and myself. Maybe you can
make that loop?

I still find the use of this event to beat some distancing drums that seem
to exhibit just attack attack tendencies  based on a secondary report that
has since been ameliorated very fascinating.

love and love
cris