Sorry not to return to the month's official thread, but Josie's email has engendered some more thoughts about new media art and mainstream art
In Human, all too Human Nietzsche writes that
'Art raises its head where religions relax their hold. It takes over many feelings and moods engendered by religion, lays them to its heart, and itself becomes deeper, more full of soul, so that it is capable of transmitting exultation and enthusiasm, which it previously was not able to do. The abundance of religious feelings which have grown into a stream are always breaking forth again and desire to conquer new kingdoms, but the growth of the Enlightenment undermined the dogmas of religion and inspired a fundamental mistrust of them—so that the feelings, thrust by the Enlightenment out of the religious sphere, throw themselves into art.'
As I suggested in my last email this religiosity is what I perceived in Josie's response to Twombly. Nothing wrong with that. In a godless universe art becomes the last refuge of transcendent feeling, even in a negative sense (much contemporary art operates as a kind of 'negative theology', invoking transcendence through negation). At another level our engagement with contemporary art is often a matter of faith, a need to believe that a pile of bricks, a grey canvas or some graffiti squiggles are meaningful beyond what they appear to be. Duchamp knew this well and even described his art in terms of transubstantiation. In a brilliant recent essay Bernard Stiegler describes what he calls the 'mystagogy' of contemporary art. In lacanian terms Art is the locus of the big Other, whether that is God or History. I think this can be seen very clearly in relational aesthetics. In his book The Inoperative Community Jean-Luc Nancy remarks that ‘… the true consciousness of the loss of community is Christian: the community desired or pined for by Rousseau, Schlegel, Hegel, Bahktin, Marx, Wagner, or Mallarmé [or Bourriaud, Kester, and all the relational aestheticians: CG] is understood as communion, and communion takes place, in its principle as in its ends, at the heart of the mystical body of Christ’. (This gives me an opportunity to slip in a plug for a little book by myself and Michael Corris critiquing relational aesthetics - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Non-relational-Aesthetics-Transmission-Rules-Engagement/dp/1906441049.)
Institutions such as the ICA or Tate are absolutely invested in the quasi-religious mystagogy of contemporary art (though it could also be argued that the real God they serve is money, which as Philip Goodchild points out in his recent book The Theology of Money, has taken the place of the Judaeo-Christian God as a supreme, transcendent value). This is I think the source of their resistance to New Media Art, which for me is like Toto in the Wizard of Oz, pulling back the curtain to reveal that the great Oz, the big Other, is nothing but a funny little man manipulating some levers and shouting into a microphone, or in other words art is nothing but a manipulation of material means and techniques. This is perhaps why NMA does not invoke the kind of emotional reactions that other Art does. That is perhaps both its strength and its weakness. It repudiates the mystagogical claims to transcendence that Art still needs to be believed in. No wonder Eshun and Bourriaud and all the others don't want to have anything to do with it. It is not in their interests to have the curtain drawn back, which NMA arguably does by engaging in the fundamental technicity of all art through its own practice, which is otherwise disavowed. They'd rather have the big green shouty head.
>> Bourriaud took the microphone and said something like: "Well, the
>> problem is there is no good media art. Can you name one good media
>> art work? No? That is the reason."
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