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Re: Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art
Grant Kester
Dec 07, 2003 22:08 PST
| Yes,
that pesky thing called "history" is often complicated. Perhaps,
rather than seeing this complexity as something to avoid (for fear of being "bogged down"), it might make sense to exercise some restraint in making blanket statements like "Stalinism = Avant-Garde Art". I'm still not clear what sort of hermeneutic work this claim was meant to accomplish (and we can now add to the lack of clarity by collapsing Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism into some sort of paranoid fantasy out of an Ayn Rand novel). One might just as easily say "Art in Galleries = Capitalist propaganda". Of course this is precisely the sort of gross generalization that Messrs. Wark (and I'm assuming Green) would find repellant. Are we to understand, then, that the entire tradition of art practice associated with Dadism, Constructivism, Surrealism, Situationism and Conceptualism is irrelvant to any further discussion of collaboration because each of these movements were populated by communist dupes? I'm all for moving on with the discussion but I'd feel better about doing so if we could drop the gratuitous and historically inept bashing of the "political art" shibboleth. Cordially, Grant Kester On Sunday, December 7, 2003, at 09:42 PM, McKenzie Wark wrote:
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