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Re: Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in
Contemporary Art
Dr Charles Green
Dec 07, 2003 20:06 PST
From: Tom Nicholson <tomjnic-*at*hotmail.com>; Subject: RE: [freecooperation] Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art Dear Charles Feel like I have come in in the middle of a conversation, and as a result feel reluctant to weigh in on the list without knowing where the conversation came from. However, a couple of thoughts on your reply (to an unseen email)... There is an obvious necessity to reject the idea that art is a tool for achieving political goals. Although I can think of a handful of art works that have produced tangible and significant changes in consciousness (Guernica, or perhaps Christo and Jean-Claude's Reichstag wrapping), these are highly exceptional and what they caused in a broader political sense is in some ways incidental to their structure. (At least it's not what is really interesting about these art works). The desire to cause political change through an art work almost inevitably needs to uninteresting art, and implicitly authoritarian tropes. This is not to advocate art's withdrawal from the political. Far from it. In any powerful art work, I would say that a large part of the richness of the experience of that work is that it makes present the possibility of another reality. By that I don't mean a Sci-Fi novel about a future in which cars run on cabbage juice, but that this procedure of making present an alternative order is largely at the level of language. The language of the work manifests, in that short experience, possibilities of being that the daily forms under capitalism, in work and through capitalism's symbolic order, foreclose. The work is not a tool to make something happen in a (deferred future). It IS its political content, and it is immensely powerful in generating this procedure. This is a necessary distinction to the logic of Stalinist art (as indeed advertising). It is also a distinction to the normal understanding an effective political action: that is causes a change to take place, a means to an end. I would also argue that not only should art not be instrumentalised, nor should action. A revolutionary action is one that shares art's quality of being its political content, of enacting (on however minute a scale) its political proposition. For me a powerful example of such an ontology is the action last year at Woomera in which refugee activists (working outside the camp) and refugee prisoners (working inside) together broke down the fences at the camps and the prisoners ran free (several were later recaptured, but many others remain 'at large'). The action was accompanied by a week-long radio broadcast into the camps on a temporary radio station organised by a group of activists. In both cases, the action incarnated the reality it proposed (the end of borders, a freedom of movement and information exchange). The actions also had instrumental value (media coverage, bringing the issue to attention of the public), but, like Guernica, I would argue that this was peripheral to its main power, which lay in the way it made real and present. This character of action is for me a significant thread within the most interesting parts of the anti-globalisation movement, and is both fed by Negri's recent writing but also links up with the most interesting and secular parts of Beuys' thinking. It is liberating in thinking about art and politics' relationship because it jumps the argument out of the quandary about why make political art when it has little or no affect. More importantly, it provides a different model about how revolution might now occur, one which is more plausible than an October style storming of parliament, one which avoids the tendency towards dangerous centralisation of power which has accompanied almost every revolution in history, and one which avoids the deferral of the moment of truth (which Leninism and Christianity share in common). Finally, I should add, in case it sounds like I am poo-poohing the heritages of communism, that it is capitalism which remains the system against which these actions need to occur, and, not unlike Negri, I think of these revolutionary actions as continuous with many of the traditions within the library of Marxism, as much as they are (necessarily) opposed to the understanding of action and symbols in Stalinism. So in some ways I am not sure I agree that your letter writing is more powerful than your art work in political terms. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that the former is more pragmatically engaged with the current order, but also more resigned to its limitations. It is also why the German/Berlin squat scene is interesting to me because I think it involves precisely this making present of an alternative order, but not like Nimbin (Australia's alternative commune rainforest hideaway area), as a retreat from the dominant order, but rubbing up against it in a daily and spatial sense. And of course, many of them emerged through Beuys' understanding of the relationship between action and art, and as such they provide a nexus between him and the anti-globalisation movement, and are, significantly, set against (physically) the failure of Soviet Communism and the rampage of capital initiated by the end of the cold war. Hope all goes well with you. Tom -- Dr Charles Green Senior Lecturer in Contemporary International and Australian Art School of Art History, Cinema, Classics and Archaeology University of Melbourne Victoria 3010 Australia tel 61 3 8344 4429 fax 61 3 8344 5563 email c.green*at*unimelb edu.au Adjunct Senior Curator 20th-21st Century Art, National Gallery of Victoria http://www.sfca.unimelb.edu.au/profiles/charles-green/ This email is confidential information for the attention of the named addressee only and may contain information which is protected by legal professional privilege and the law of confidentiality. If you have received this email and you are not the addressee you are requested to advise us immediately, delete the email from your system and destroy any hard copies thereof. You are advised that the distribution or copying of the email is unlawful and prohibited. -- [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] |
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