Re: [-empyre-] quickies for the panelists

["Stasisfield.com" <john@stasisfield.com>]

> John K, not necessarily a question, but I really liked the following 
> passage from your curator's statement for the audible still life 
> project: "For as current art genres themselves seem to continually 
> fracture and blur boundaries as time goes on, many artists working 
> today have difficulty categorizing their works and methods within 
> parameters relevant as recently as twenty years ago. Painters are 
> now also sculptors, musicians are now also video artists, graphic 
> designers are now also sound artists, computer programmers are now 
> also animators. As art seeks to function within a society obsessed 
> with the rapid dispersal of information, so artists must seek 
> multiple methods with which to make their messages heard."


Thanks for bringing this up, Glenn!

This is a concept which is very important to me...when I went to art 
school in the mid-late '80s (at least in the program I was in), 
although it was a wonderfully eye-opening experience for me as a 
whole, the boundaries were very much fixed. If you entered the 
program as a painter like I did, your supported options for 
alternative modes of expression were basically the other plastic 
arts, and even those sometimes were "streichlich verboten": my 
attempt to merely smudge the boundaries by writing and drawing a 
graphic novel was met with almost universal derision, except for two 
open-minded instructors. God forbid I want to do something with 
sound...it would have been "Well, go do a presence track for the film 
department" or "Change your major to music, then."

It wasn't until much later that I finally realized it was "ok" for me 
to pursue sound as an artistic medium, even though I had an interest 
in it from early childhood. It took meeting two other artists who 
weren't afraid of it -- Scott Kane, who I worked with in the duo 
Wireshock, and Jim Schoenecker, who runs Topscore records [ 
http://www.topscoreusa.com ] -- that made me realize sound was a 
viable mode of expression, and could (and *should*) be combined with 
my other artistic interests.

It's very interesting (and comforting) for me to see, now that I'm 
once again investigating graduate schools, that the academic art 
world appears much more open to blurring boundaries--leaps and bounds 
beyond what I experienced long ago as an undergraduate.


> >

john kannenberg

[ http://www.stasisfield.com/empyre ]

[ http://www.whistlingpariah.com ]

[ http://www.stasisfield.com ]