Dear all
interesting discussion, and hope I’ll be able to add some of my devil’s
advocaat perspective.
Yesterday I found myself conducting studio visit at an MFA program in some
American university. One of the students, who spent the best part of the last
two decades painting water and reflections using pastels was seeking my
advice if she should move to oil, acrylic or water colours. This highlighted to
me the issue if generic sameness, as an artist I should know what to advise
her…but I could not connect to her subject matter nor to her media. It would
have been the same to me if some net artist would seek my advice concerning
the best software to use for some type of self obsessed exploration. The
reason I raise it is that in the context of this discussion, and more generally in
the discourse of new media, we might be falling down the same trap of
samenessness of new media or emerging art or whatever the term we choose
to use.
My experience of presenting my work in the context of new media or
electronic art was in many cases a painful one, because the curators felt that
by engaging with one form of technologically or “scientifically” based art they
can deal with all. However, the materiality of manipulated life in an art context
was not something that fit comfortably with their idea of art or media.
Plugging a projector and turning on computers in not the same as maintaining
a fragile life form that needs care and appropriate conditions. Many so called
new media curators cannot even deal with dead materials – see the case of
the Canadian artist Tagny Duff in ISEA couple of months back. The reminder
of the flash seems to really disturb some fantasy of dematerialise uploading.
Gavin and melinda are right in asking thier questions, however, I might add
that one of the fundamental questions was omitted, and the lack of this
question was apparent also in some of the other posts. Let me pose it quite
bluntly; in the service of WHAT art operates? I am always suspicious of art in
the service on anything beyond story telling. In the context of global worming,
for example, is our role as artists to engage in didactic propaganda that would
elicit some behavioural change on a global scale? Aren’t there other people
better suited to do it? I am concern that art would lose one of the last
remaining privileges of being human – that of non-utilitarian explorations, many
sciences are loosing it already. Do we want to make art totally applied? In
particular when art deals with new knowledge, it should strive to be a non-
applied questioning force, not resolve anything, be in the service of none, be
ambiguous, Problematise. This, I believe, have a stronger impact on human
thought, it opens up rather then shut down possibilities. If the artist’s agenda
is too obvious, she looses this very unique privileged place – the discourse
become about opinions rather then issues.
I am currently immersed in an ecological project and one thing that is become
more and more apparent to me is the immense complexity of dealing with the
issue, any action I postulate raises possibilities of good and harm to different
aspects of that ecology, and this is without even considering the unknown
unknowns (to quote Rumsfeld). My challenge as an artist is to tell the stories
of these complexities but not to solve them.
As for Roger plea for more scientists; this is understandable – but what
scientist would you like to join, who is this generic scientist you talk about?
Would a climate change denier scientist do?
To be continued
Best
oron
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