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Theory of the Avant-garde
Peter Bürger
Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1984. Print.
The work the avant-gardists were doing to reconcile art and life is encouraging in that it contextualizes my personal struggles with defining the role/value of art in life today. While it's heartening to know that I'm certainly (and historically) not alone in this struggle. While encouraging to have the efforts of the avant-gardists to look to, this article points to their failures, and specifically to the fact that capitalism co-opted their efforts and made them their own. As for the protest of the neo-avant-garde? The institutions acceptance of protest into the canon has rendered any new protest inauthentic.
Does this lead to confinement or liberation? Will “anything goes” manifest in defeat or inspiration?
“Rather, it directs itself to the way art functions in society, a process that does as much to determine the effect that works have as does the particular content.”
“Avante-gardists counter functionlessness not by an art that would have consequences within the existing society, but rather by the principle of the sublation of art in the praxis of life.”
“Art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work.”
The Open Work
Uberto Eco
Eco, Umberto. The Open Work. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1989. Print.
With the search to define function and value in my work, this essay delves into the value/role of openness in work. Eco here also outlines the interplay between society and art in the trajectory of cultural (scientific, social, political) progress. He posits that art investigations lead cultural progress and perspectives. As this is the case, where do we stand now, and what foresight do we as artists possess? Interactive? Participation? People strive to be more connected, yet technology is pedaling a false connection, and isolating more and more. If my work can feed into the trajectory of society... what trajectory would I like it to be? In the future, will we all pour condiments on ourselves in the shower? I hope so.
“In every century, the way that artistic forms are structured reflects the way in which science or contemporary culture views reality.”
“Multi-value logics are now gaining currency, and these are quite capable of incorporating indeterminacy as a valid stepping-stone in the cognitive process. In this general intellectual atmosphere, the poetics of the open work is peculiarly relevant: it posits the work of art stripped of necessary and foreseeable conclusions, works in which the performer's freedom functions as part of the discontinuity which contemporary physics recognize, not as an element of disorientation, but as an essential stage in all scientific verification procedure and also as the verifiable patern of evens in the subatomic world.”
Laura Steward Heon with John Ackerman
Heon, Laura Steward., and John Ackerman. Unnatural Science: an Exhibition, Spring 2000 - Spring 2001, MASS MoCA. North Adams, MA: MASS MoCA Publications, 2000. Print.
Although dated - the Unnatural Science exhibition closed at Mass MOCA over ten years ago - the show catalogue and essays cover the interplay between arts and science, and the social space the two occupy. In the time of religious myth, an accurate, measured scientific approach gave the arts freedom to inquire about the world away from the "answers" that were in place at the time. With the development of "Big Science", the arts worked toward a greater whimsy, away from the need to have specific measurable data be part of the work. Now, as technology democratizes data, and science is breaking into smaller and deeper niches, the arts is engaging society in similar terms. Or perhaps it is art that is leading the charge, and society is allowing science to respond to art's movement?
“By framing certain phenomena - such as tree growth or suicides- as a data set, Jerekijenko illustrates the ability of scientific presentation to transform information. These phenomena are accessible without the artist's intervention, but her presentation of them allows the viewer to examine and question them in new ways.”
“Both artists open our eyes to forces so all-emcompassing - the sun in Jeremijenko's case, the wind in Levy's - that they remain suppressed in our unconscious unexamined.”
Qin Yufen
Hou Hanru
Qin, Yufen, and Hanru Hou. Qin Yufen. Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2001. Print.
Qin Yufen's sculptural considerations are important for me to consider. Some of her pieces utilize technology, a DIY aesthetic, and found materials - elements that i'm interfacing with, and serves as a good sounding board to see how another artist deals with the structural/sculptural difficulties i'm encountering. Additionally, Yufen's work revolves around cultural identity, personal identity, and the choice of participating in those cultures. This identifying of culture as a participatorial element, choosing to take on culture, or to establish a new reality, resonates with the work i'm assembling lately. She uses everyday objects in any of her sculptures, but arranges them usually in large number, and also in physical situations that they're not usually in- stacked up coming out of a pond, hung and stacked in giant groups.
“To overcome the schizophrenia of being a permanent stranger, one should make oneself a veritable Self in the society in which one lives. In other words, to intervene in the social, political and economic reality by contributing one's unique voice is also indispensable.”
“Artistic activity, like other domains in culture and in life at large, now has to face the ultimate fate of deconstruction, transformation and fusion with other fields. To search for harmony in art implies the least probable chance for success. However, it is because of such a difficulty, and even impossibility that the decision to search for the paradisiacal harmony can be turned into a veritable challenge, a defiance that can be canalised to become the very power and dynamism in an artist's work Art is by nature a utopian act.”
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