Re: [-empyre-] conceptuopoly

Ryan, guests and list,

Apologies for relentless posting, as the moderator 'shouldn't' (bad girl!), still, the flux of conversation arrives with Ryan's 'conceptuopology' to the intuitive confluence of our two streams, the psychoanalytic constructs that Kate has shown us with the Matrixial, and the in-the-world cultural production that Raul deals with as artist/curador. Why I asked these guests and not others, with Eduardo acting as a kind of in between person (a good debater). I knew it (our core theme) was here somewhere, and thanks to all of you who have faithfully kept at it, trying to find connections and disjunctions. This has been the most engaged and complex conversation I 've ever had on -empyre- and probably anywhere else ( ;-) ). Thanks especially to Ryan for musing on what practices help "the continuation of a political economy' within and through the complex structures of power, silencing, and control we all live in.

Yes, I want the tradition of Luis Camnitzer , believing in drawing as a metamorphosis of/ in the material, even as it is through a supposedly de materialized medium, the digital, by creating formal syntaxes that are unexpected, in fact, outside the conventional semantics of documentary work, and using supposedly 'contaminated' materials such as commercial software. This strategy can then expose fissures and contradictions... it subverts the auteur position of the artist, indeed even sublimates the identity of the artist, and in the place of the author, creates an inscription that may be read matrixially, that is, in terms of its border or edge, or relational extremes, its syntax, rather than a (didactic) semantics. Adrian Piper seeks to teach us: yet text trumps as much it activates image, and the word dominates, which suits her polemic. More subtly, Allan Sekula relies on visuality to show us a truth alongside or outside the photograph, but, we still revert to thinking about who is doing the showing: the subject is not erased, rather, is still, in some ways, a discourse, if not a polemic, on identity, 'Sekula". Dialectically a third way, neither teaching or showing, discloses itself in Oiticica, Clark et al. The Brazilian artists work as it were from within the work, as a performance action from within the materials themselves, in a pathway that opens up kinds of knowing, or cognition, as Ryan puts it, through a simultaneously critical and generative manner (not either-or). This is the place of generative fictions, as Raul has hoped for, and perhaps Kate also, in our work Fuorange. Augusto Boal whom Jim recently mentioned did this too (and there's an interesting section on his performance theatre in New Media Reader, by Noah Wardrip Fruin and Nick Montfort, featured on -empyre- in January 2004). The works themselves tend to disappear (are 'anti-art) as we immerse ourselves into their questions, and as we emerge from this, we find ourselves asking new questions about culture and meaning, and in this way our consciousness changes the political condition. For the Brazilian artists of Tropicalia, the oppression of free speech by the government in those days (60s, 70s) forced them to create alternative syntactical strategies that could not be direct and overt (as with Piper) or they would be 'disappeared' or even killed. Martyrdom was less useful than exile. Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso in England deployed their pop music idiom to describe the daily feel of life on the streets so powerfully because by the very act of celebrating that life, they gave the people of that place a voice against the oppression of the regime. In this regard, their art functions as a witness to trauma and even does so through beauty in multisensorial deliveries. Moreover dichotomies that Eduardo is arguing against / with Raul about identity, memory, ancestry and future are not denied in this kind of art practice. As one observer writes, "Ettinger understands this ethical moment to mean that 'as a human being, you recognize your debt for my past and in terms of the feminine, as a human being, I recognize my debt for your future.' (Lone Bertelsen, Matrixial Refrains, in Theory , Culture and Society, 2004, vol 21 (1) p 138 (London: Sage Publications ) . The artist moves indebted to all pasts knowing that her moves create a future, for which she is in debt to all who participate in her moves. Reflexive syntax that moves forwards, as Raul says, in contrapunto.

christina

"

On Thursday, April 28, 2005, at 09:35 PM, ryan griffis wrote:


Oiticica claimed, contrary to the dematerialization of art, that the work of avant garde Brazilian artists was "a move towards the object" while being equally oriented toward a "concept of anti-art."
http://mitpress2.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/isast/spec.projects/ osthoff/osthoff.html
http://ca80.lehman.cuny.edu/gallery/luis_camnitzer/mosquera_essay.htm
http://www.brazilnetwork.org/statics/media/visualarts/works/cildo.htm
i think the discussion of new media's relationship to capital C conceptual art is a moot point in terms of style, as eduardo suggests, even though there are some connections to be found in the context of a continuum of political economy - Alberro's analysis of publicity in relation to certain conceptual art practices and the growth of data production/replication/distribution systems can point to a relationship beyond the allegorical. but i'm interested in the continuation of a political economy, not the intention of a critique or lack thereof.


http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_41/ai_98123121/ pg_1
i'm wondering if the work of Oiticica, Clark and the others mentioned above provide a space to discuss both the geocultural fissures that have come up as well as the notion of matrixial space - as their work (in my crude understanding of it) functions through a simultaneously critical and generative manner (not either-or).
maybe... maybe not.
best,
ryan

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