Re: [-empyre-] translation--it's a class thing

Thanks to Ricardo, Diana and Ryan for a very interesting discussion that's been difficult for me to contribute to for a bunch of boring non-content reasons.

I don't disagree with Angel's reading of Diana's comments but I'd like to maybe use them to open a different angle on the class question. While the question of class is prominent in the works, as it is in the history of the avant-garde and the dematerialisation of the art object, I'm wary of how easy it is to reify class distinctions when this discussion comes up. "Is it art or not?" "Well, it's art if you can read it as art and it is positioned as art". So the question shifts to an expansion of the range of what can be considered art, the cultural capital required to engage with something as "art", and avant-garde strategy becomes focussed on scandalising that limit situation, which paradoxically requires disciplinary education to fully appreciate the scandal/"expansion of the field", at the expense perhaps of other kinds of knowledge. A certain aestheticisation of the political takes place, and I think many of us would be familiar with this in the history of European aesthetic modernism, but I'm still surprised at how many of these discussions seem to get worked over again within a new media scene which uses technological novelty as an excuse to revive these somewhat autistic discourses (I am not talking about this particular conversation of course!)

The net.art community (in particular compared to a more general contemporary art scene), through various accidents of history and communities of practices, seems to have strong links with classic European political economic analysis (for better and worse), and is much more happy talking about globalisation, class, and capital in very general terms rather than the specific gaps and untranslatables around projects like those at inSite (that usually get shoehorned into questions about ethnicity or identitarianism). From an art perspective, what seems important about the projects Ricardo discusses is that they seem to signal experience-centred rather than system-centred claims to truth and aesthetic value. These seem to fit within the idea of "countercultures of modernity" that Gilroy emphasised in The Black Atlantic:

"...Du Bois, Douglass, Wright, and the rest shared a sense that the modern world was fragmented along axes constituted by racial conflict and could accommodate non-synchronous, heterocultural modes of social life in close proximity. Their conceptions of modernity were periodised differently. They were founded on the catastrophic rupture of the middle passage [the journey of slave ships from West Africa across the Atlantic - DB] rather than the dream of revolutionary transformation. They were punctuated by the process of acculturation and terror that followed that catastrophe and by the countercultural aspirations toward freedom, citizenship and autonomy that developed after it among slaves and their descendants." (p197)

Paradoxically (for me anyway), the political-aesthetic histories in these countercultures (I think Chela Sandoval's grouping of the work of anti-racist, anti-colonial and feminist movements as "methodologies of the oppressed" seems useful) seem to open up valuable ways of reading the class dynamic within captialist new media art, i.e.in Ricardo's question "Is it possible for new media artists to activate the net for the staging of projects responsible and responsive to communities that fall between legitimized power sectors, and if so how?" It strikes me that the lineage of the inSite projects is about manifesting this rupture and these alternative, experiential periodisations - producing this difference rather than seeking to resolve it. It feels to me that they treat the communities of bourgeois aesthetic practice and those outside legitimised power sectors as quite radically separate experientially, yet linked through various capital/media/aesthetic flows. So it is not supposing that the typically bourgeois new media curator can necessarily have a conversation with the typically working-class modified car enthusiast, but that by bringing the very different consciousnesses together the outline of the gaps between them can be traced, and the aesthetic question in this kind of "gap" is also, somehow, what contemporary art is all about.

Not sure if that makes any sense or if I've just tried to write too much before breakfast.

if i can be excused a plug, I'd love anyone interested in the works under discussion to consider contributing to a book we're currently putting together that relates very strongly to these themes: <http:// culturalfutures.place.net.nz/publications.html>

best,

Danny

--
http://www.dannybutt.net
Cultural Futures - December 1-5, 2005 - http:// culturalfutures.place.net.nz

On 20/09/2005, at 8:26 AM, angel nevarez wrote:

In closing I’d like to add that Diana brings up many
interesting points? The consumption of art works is
part of the bourgeois experience and that goes double
for net art. Given that the digital divide cuts across
class lines makes one wonder who is consuming net
culture and at what price? This is a very basic
extension to what Diana had mentioned already but I
look forward to the ongoing discussion. More later.


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