[-empyre-] Art As Liberation

["G.H. Hovagimyan" <ghh@thing.net>]

I engage the world as an artist.  What I do has meaning and value. I  
am not a social worker. I am not a government.

Here's the DOCUMENTA question;

July:  "What is bare life?"
This second question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete  
exposure of being. Bare life deals with that part of our existence  
from which no measure of security will ever protect us. But as in  
sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite  
pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension  
to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp).  
There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to it –  
a freedom for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as  
well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, the world  
in which we live). Here and there, art dissolves the radical  
separation between painful subjection and joyous liberation. But what  
does that mean for its audiences?

 Here's  my opening response;

July: “What is bare life?”

“The only thing an artist has is themselves. What’s in their hand,  
what’s in their mind, how they move about in the world, is all they  
have.  You make art to clarify your mind, to clarify your thoughts,  
to see what the world is about, to find the truth... and this now, in  
the 21st century, using media, using digital media, is all about  
finding the truth, the truth within the circle of language.”–  
RANTAPOD  .023
< http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod/archives/2006_05.html>

Art is about stripping bare the psyche.  It is a process of some sort  
ref.(see the bride stripped bare by her bachelors’ even..)

I wrote this in my blog a while back;
 “Punk was a consequence of the poverty and recession of the  
1970’s.  We all felt there was no future for us because the previous  
generation of rich hippies controlled everything.  The only thing to  
do was to negate their philosophy in every way possible. This  
included challenging feminism by acting outrageous.  The other side  
was a sort of capitalist S & M position. We couldn’t be mainstream  
because the hippies controlled everything. This was our fault. We  
couldn’t succeed because we were no good and needed to be punished.   
That was the way out of the dilemma, freedom through punishment;  
destruction and self-destruction, extreme nihilism. They didn’t want  
us therefore we didn’t want them, not only that but we didn’t want  
each other. We didn’t want anything. Richard Hell expressed the  
emotion best in his song lyrics, “I’m part of the blank generation, I  
can take it or leave it alone.””
< http://post.thing.net/blog/9/feed>

I’m working on three projects right now. Each one is about stripping  
bare reality.  The processes are different. Let me describe the  
procedures without telling you which belongs to which.
1)    I walk around with a 1 gig flash memory audio recorder and  
sample the sounds and conversations I hear and engage in. I do this  
in 3 minute samples. I put the samples into an editing program and  
then overlap them.  What is produced is an immersive sound event that  
is closer to the way we actually remember things.
2)    I decide to go back to the origins of video art which is  
essentially an artists doing something in front of a camera.  When I  
edit the footage, I am using myself to create a media object. I am  
becoming a digital object that can be duplicated, sampled, cut apart,  
endlessly multiplied and put back together.
3)    You walk into a room and a film/video is projected on a wall.   
The scenes played are not in any particular order yet they make  
sense. What occurs is that a computer is picking sequences in a  
random order and playing them. Your mind and your imagination fill in  
the story.
http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt
http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod
http://nujus.net/gh_04/gallery11.html