Yep!


On 24/10/08 10:20, "Gere, Charlie" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> 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 OS 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 Christ¹. (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-Engagemen
> t/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."



Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
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