File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1995/avant-garde_Apr.95, message 39


Date:         Tue, 18 Apr 95 15:29:15 CDT
From: David Westling <U55954-AT-UICVM.UIC.EDU>
Subject:      two avant gardes


  Leave it to Malgosia to ask the pertinent question.  How does an
avant-garde contribute to the disintegration of the social order
by questioning the nature of art?  As Joseph Kosuth might put it.
To cast doubt on the traditional mechanisms of art is to refuse to
allow the onlooker the hooks that create a sense of well-being, sometimes
experienced as superiority, that connect the spectator to the art
experience.  Of course, the progenitor of this whole thing is Marcel
Duchamp.  "The spectator calls the work a masterpiece as a last resort."
This formulation implies that the spectator wishes to defend a position
which is fundamentally unsupportable--the category 'masterpiece' being,
then, a sort of mold (like the malic molds?) that the spectator can
fill to reinforce his notions of what art should be.  The impetus
behind the readymade--not that anything can be art, but its reciprocation,
that the category art is a repository of obfuscatory and corrupt notions,
acts as a corrosive on the complacency of the intellectual power structures
in society.  Art can no longer possess the monolithic power to maintain
an essentially religious relationship with the onlooker.  Authority
has vested the artwork with the power to maintain certain boundaries.
To posit an art that does not do this and have it accepted, as has
happened in the case of Duchamp, effectively skews the delicate
mechanisms in the onlooker apparatus as a whole (what is this entity?)
by robbing the onlooker of the comfort of traditional artistic criteria.
If we can't project our own inadequacies onto the perfecting mirror of
Art, a crisis ensues, and the crushing disillusionment that this creates
gives birth to attitudes that take a place in the social relations,
beginning a long process toward the ultimate dissolution of the Ideas
which undergird our material structures.  (Yes, it's anti-Marxist.)
Isn't that where we are now?
                                      David Westling


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