File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1997/avant-garde.9704, message 68


Date: Thu, 15 May 1997 21:33:22 -0400 (EDT)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: one


I said:

> I would
> perhaps like art to aspire simply to the possible -- that possible which
> can nourish it and permit it to be itself. 

and Saul said:

> aspiring to the possible seeming leads either to the known or to license.

and then Dick said:

> But doesn't this mean you are advocating an art which functions by a sort
> of Brownian movement, following its momentary whim or possibilities and not
> following any sort of overall vision or intention? 

Well, I guess it depends on how one conceives of that which "nourishes art
and permits it to be itself".  What I am trying to say is something like this:
that the social and political circumstances under which we produce art need
to be worked upon with the same discipline, devotion, attention, cunning,
inventiveness, and the same kind of vision, with which we approach the 
other media and materials we work with.  Dick in his "Horizons"
book talks about the "underpiece" and the "overpiece" of an artpiece. 
The "underpiece" notion captures the aspect of working the materials.  
But when I read artists' expostulations about their role in society,
it is frequently as if there was, in this area, no need for an underpiece.  
Creations like Something Else Press or The Filmmaker's Cooperative are
examples of what I mean by "aspiring to the possible".  

Why do artists spend so much time articulating their own supposed importance,
assuring themselves and others that they are "researchers" or "visionaries" 
and indispensible to -- at one and the same time -- business, the state, 
those oppressed by business and the state, the tourist trade, those who
need a secular religion, children who would otherwise lapse into
criminality, and all who want to consider themselves "cultured"?  
Undoubtedly this, too, is part of a strategy of "aspiring to the possible", 
but it seems to me relatively ineffectual and also spiritually corroding.  
It seems simply to be bad art.  


-m 


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