On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 17:15 -0600, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> The crowd ones are really neat; the rest seem to 'copy' the  
> surrealists (with the first few 'Doubt's also tensely there); is that  
> the artist's concept of poetry, too? One of many, then.

Misha, as I understand has a background in European avant gardes,
Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism. He left the USSR in 1974 and began
working in conceptual photography in the USA.

I had forgotten that I ran into his work in the late 70s in Sydney but
this is another point of contact that helps to fill in my own contact
with photography and poetry, and if it happened to me then others also
have had some sort of similar contact. (I would like to read other
stories, very much.) One of the keys to these avant-gardes in visual art
along with photo-montage is, of course, poetry. Conceptual art, as an
avant garde practice, in Sydney, was also attached to photography and in
often obscured ways to current poetry writing in small journals emerging
from the traditional universities, eg John Tranter and all. Conceptual
art was also a dispute with the painting model of art with the other
alternative being abstract expressionism understood as only the simple
application of paint to a flat surface and difficult as it may be to
believe, this mechanical model of painting devoid of thought was
official government policy on what is art. Failure to comply meant no
grants. Conceptual art challenged this idea saying that art is also
thinking and critique which is a continuation of modernist avant gardes
mentioned above. So, from my own sympathies with conceptual art against
abstract expressionism, my involvement as a militant gay activist and
one of the organisers of the 1978 gay and lesbian riots in Sydney, I
considered to be conceptual art practice. This involved designing
posters and photographing the events as best I could, since
photographers were usually the first arrested.

After this, to avoid having my cameras stolen or harassment from the CIA
and political police I found myself being published several times a week
nationally under a false name. It is a strange experience to be known
under my real name as an arty homosexual who read obscure books and
articles by writers such as Barthes, Foucault and Deleuze and yet
appeared to produce no art works even if more often then not having a
camera in his hands (usually expensive Nikons and a Mamiya TLR) which he
was seen to actually use and was kept busy six days a week doing. Later,
after sending my acrylic on canvas paintings to the landfill, I was
lucky enough to get a part time place in one of the world's leading art
schools in Sydney to finish my degree and thanks to a stroppy lesbian
feminist poet, Dorothy Porter, a guest editor for a poetry journal who
fought to have me published, I was published under my real name for the
first time in ten years. (or was it nine...)

Media arts, as it developed in Sydney, like conceptual art from which in
part it emerged, was very theory savvy and had to be to survive. It is
not that this is making art to fit the theory but the inverse, theory as
a tool to make art, just as much as holding a camera or paint brush is a
tool to make art. This needs to be stressed, since it was through gay
liberationist agendas that writers such as Foucault and Deleuze were
translated and introduced to Australian art and academic institutions
and later this spread to New York. Deleuze, it seems now it is
forgotten, was one of the first academics to put his job on the line and
faced criminal prosecution for his support of gay rights. 

To attack theory in art and poetry, more often under the banner of clear
writing, is homophobia. This needs to be recognised and engagements in
this paranoid discursive formation need to be destroyed, if poetry and
art are to survive. It has been demonstrated already several times that
the flight into abstract expressionist painting actively funded and
supported by the CIA and along with this a flight away from thought, is
a willed ignorance which with it's homophobic agenda is also a flight
into an ignorance where there can be no poetry and no art. This
universal tendency affects most of the population, not just a very small
minority of gay artists.  It is here, also, that Hal Foster finds
himself in fundamental disagreement with my thinking and practice as an
artist. (I won't repeat the insults Foster pours onto my art practice.)

I also find it disturbing by the way that Minor White's metaphysical
aesthetics is being excluded from the zone system and straight
photography. I am not into that sort of metaphysical thing, I just need
the zone system testing. Once Minor White, meaning here theory, is
bracketed out of straight photography what is left is a series of
mechanical formal steps, zone system testing, which becomes confused
with technique and also reduces form to an empty mechanism. (Luce
Irrigaray, jam this mechanism.) That is the problem with the zone system
closing in on itself, it confuses form and technique and replaces it
with clear mechanical steps, perhaps Marshall McCluran's mechanical
bride, the mechanical exchange of women as the homophobic replacement
for real technique and real form. This is clear writing at its most
homophobic ugliness. 

(to be continued...)

(PS, surely it is only fair as one of the first to be recognised as a
media artist that I do have a right to say what that practice is rather
then be spoken over by some dead-brain wannabe hegelian critic which is
by his very discourse an insult to Hegel.)