Re: [-empyre-] Exposure

[M White <mwhite@michelewhite.org>]

GH, I am sorry that you have decided to try and
textually shout me down with insults more than an
argument. You can label my arguments in any way you
want and express your opinion but in the process you
are articulating the sorts of categories that you
claim do not affect you and that you eschew. Every
time that you note your artist's status, you create
categories and articulate yourself as a type.
Distinguishing between artists and social workers,
which you have done quite vehemently, is to create a
value and hierarchy structure where you dismiss
certain behaviors. Artists do not always receive
economic rewards for their work but their status and
the value of their work is often articulated in
society through such governmentally and privately
supported institutions as museums, alternative spaces,
art books, these forums? Not all production receives
even this acknowledgment. In insistently articulating
your place outside of the system, which I don't
believe exists, you are still talking about and
producing the system/government/? as center. I would
really prefer to engage in a thoughtful exchange of
texts and thus will not be answering your future
insults.

m.


--- "G.H. Hovagimyan" <ghh@thing.net> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jul 9, 2006, at 12:47 PM, M White wrote:
> 
> > Individuals that are described as CEO, tenured
> > faculty member, citizen, adult, artist, or married
> are
> > likely to associate exposure with different
> pleasures
> > and risks than those felt by the undocumented
> worker,
> > adjunct, "alien," juvenile, fan producer, and sex
> > worker.
> 
> gh comments:
> 
> Your categories are points of view created by a
> corporate society in  
> which everyone has a role. Your underclass functions
> as the chaotic  
> miasmic countervalence or "other." You play right
> into the major  
> discourse of Western Techno-culture. You re-inforce
> it.  In another  
> culture people might be categorized as, sinners,
> knights, peasants,  
> nobleman, etc.. This is the reason why people riot
> in the Banlieu's  
> of France. It 's the reason why the Arab world
> claims that the  West  
> does not respect them. The same age-of-enlightenment
> supposedly  
> dispassionate observer is in reality creating the
> conditions for an  
> oppressive corporate mono-culture. This dialectic
> presumes that the  
> underclass  wants nothing more than to be part of
> the ruling  
> technocrats. It assumes that the Arab world wants a
> Western style  
> capitalist democracy. What if that's not true? 
> Indeed from my point  
> of view people live their lives in spite of the
> ruling hegemony.
> What if one does not have a "will to power?"
> You put artists in the successful category that's
> even more of a  
> problem for me. That's perhaps the most interesting
> of your mistakes  
> and exposes the corporate classes point of view.
> Artist's who play  
> the mercantile game of the art market are accepted
> by the  
> technocrats. Those who don't are ignored or perhaps
> they must pick  
> another category such as faculty member or maybe
> adjunct.
> I have a colleague who is an artist and runs a major
> artists'  
> alternative web site here in New York. Since this is
> America, there  
> is little or no funding for experimental art
> endeavors no matter how  
> beneficial they might be to the society at large. He
> is totally  
> without money and has been sleeping on my couch for
> a year.  He is  
> living the life of an anarchist nomad. He is not
> young. This is not a  
> romantic choice.  He doesn't fit into one of your
> categories. He is  
> in a non-category perhaps akin to Hakim Bey's
> temporary autonomous  
> zone. Your analysis of exposure is so incredibly
> trite it's  
> laughable. It's a position born of privilege. It has
> the same sense  
> as Marie Antoinette dressing up as a peasant and
> playing as a milk  
> maid. Another romantic choice from a different era.
> The "bare life" of the 21st century is a life that
> is lived in spite  
> of the military-entertainment complex. It is a life
> that is not  
> incorporated or crushed by the the supposed benefits
> of corporate  
> global culture.  As an artist I insist that I live
> my life without  
> categories. That is freedom. My colleague who sleeps
> on my couch  
> lives in a zone of bare life. I make art that defies
> categories. My  
> ongoing digital performance piece RANTAPOD <http:// 
> spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod> is a stripping away to
> bare life. The  
> corporate art market an the military-entertainment
> complex don't have  
> a mechanism to include this work. It is significant
> and exists in  
> spite of it being outside the realm of corporate
> categories. It is  
> only by a lucky circumstance that I am not the one
> who is sleeping on  
> the couch in someone else's home.
> 
> 
> G.H. Hovagimyan
> http://nujus.net/gh/
> http://post.thing.net/gh/
> 
> 
> 
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