Re: [-empyre-] new questions-Abu Ghraib and the image

[Aliette <aliette@criticalsecret.org>]

I agree with SMS.

On 22/07/06 14:28, "Susana Mendes Silva" <arslonga@netcabo.pt> probably
wrote:

> Hi empyre
> 
> the reply of G.H. raises new questions! and also the contribution of
> Christina.
> 
> On Jul 21, 2006, at 3:25 PM, G.H.Hovagimyan wrote:
> 
>> Hi SMS,
>> 
>> There's a TV show and web site called, "how art made the world that
>> talks about the power of the image and how it has been used
>> throughout history by sovereigns to assert their power. Going back
>> to Agamben, it is the sovereign that creates both the polis and
>> through the ban or excommunication the bare life.
> 
> "The political and existential position of ?the refugee¹, and
> progressively of entire populations as the link between ?State¹ and
> ?Nation¹ dissolves, is that of what Agamben calls ?bare life¹ (vita
> nuda). Ancient Greek distinguished bios, ?political¹ life, from zoé,
> the same animal or ?bare¹ life to which Nazi law required that the
> individual be reduced by cancelling her national citizenship before
> she could be sent to die in the camps. ?Bare life¹ refers to body¹s
> mere ?vegetative¹ being, separated from the particular qualities, the
> social and historical attributes that constitute individual
> subjectivity". (in  Matthew Hyland, http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/log/
> archive/13/refugeesubjectivity/#10)
> 
>> Art is always wrapped up with those in power. It is used to
>> represent power.
> 
> I disagree with the "always"...

Yes mostly modern artists of the beginning of the century were not linked to
power; as well in Vienna as well in Berlin as well in France as well in
UK... Of course Kokoshka is not Klimt.

But traditionally architects: mostly yes; it is easy to understand why
architecture itself as work to the city is linked to power and a part of the
critical composers through their traditional masters in studies.

What happened of the power in the modernity of Arts it is after Van de
Velde, creating furniture, have passed the direction of Bauhaus to Walter
Gropius as architect, to create a new Bauhaus at Weimar in 1919: in the
intention having an hegemonic project of major and minor arts to tribute
globally the industrial society: an esthetic to production as project of
democracy to the West.

Same way: Art as emergent activity to communicate the line of the party
through USSR revolution to the East.

But at the beginning all modern avant-gardes were not linked with the power,
they were absolutely opposite and radically critics of the power in all its
places before the first war in EU!  Even they could receive commands from
the part of princes or capitalist bourgeois.

Later' they were called by Hitler: degenerated arts.

What to say of dada and of surrealism till the second war in EU... When
Futurists but a very little part of modern artists joining Mussolini as the
architect Libera following Malaparte.. It was really singular.

It is impossible to affirm the contrary as dominant rule.

> that means that you too are wrapped
> with those in power. are you?
> 
>> The Abu Ghraib images are aesthetic, composed presentations of
>> power images.
> 
> I see them as a document of revenge and of subjugation. the images by
> themselves are not art. they were made as a trophy like the
> photographs of all tortures related to camps, to dictatorships and to
> wars.
> 
> 
>> The debate in art is who decides what is art? The answer is that
>> the artist defines what is art.  Trying to work through the 21st
>> century media-scape and produce art is an interesting endeavor.
>> Artists are slippery characters. They may need the support and
>> patronage of the powerful elite but they are not on anybodies side
>> but the side of art and creativity.
> 
> what is art is defined by us, artists, by curators and by critics too.
> maybe artists are not all slippery characters as you depicted them,
> maybe they are free thinkers.
> 
I am absolutely convinced that it is the bare problem of an emergent
bureaucracy managing and mastering arts that kill the critical vitality of
Artists and produce a conventional contemporary art to conformist power.
That is exactly the problem of the governments in post democracy to be
irresponsible as elected front a community of supra experts as bureaucracy
at the power but not they being elected:)

By this way they do not remember that freedom cannot be completely
eradicated. At the worst it can be conversed in perverse deletions by a
critical mass effect but never reduced.

Of course the question of Islam in the global united world without agreeing
otherness or other selves. But the question of the thought and of Artists:
free thinkers and artists is: will they become something as "the Islam"
(metaphor) from the dominant culture as power against creation and
innovation (all that escapes in the plans) ? just wanting comfort more and
more and in any price their power of bureaucracy ??

Do you think really that Frantz Hals painting The regent men and women
having the leadership of the hospital where he was closed did not give the
proof of his freedom whatever happened at them at the moment he can painted
such as he shows them to us in a critical vision?

The difference between a situation of a prisoner body in the civil society
and a prisoner body in a camp: it is exactly here, where art or writing can
create the critical social act (hospital even prison?remember Gramsci or
Jean Genet or other famous examples) , or when they cannot run more: the
camp as realizing global power destroying humanity as critical existence.

It happens that psychiatrist hospital may have the same role for example
Camille Claudel. But never they would be successful to radically destroy
Antonin Arthaud (that was exactly the sense in freedom, revolt, and
creativity, from Derrida's homage to Antonin Arthaud entering the MOMA by a
misunderstanding of the transcendental destiny of critical Artists from a
society to the next one).

For there I disagree with the hegemonic interpretation by Michel Foucault
under the global attribution of the society to the Panopticon (even yes it
is a project of the power, it does not answer on the question of the
inalienable conceptual freedom). But as Structuralism disposition to the
whole society it is reducing it in the system.
> 
>> Richard Serra took the most iconic image of Abu Ghraib, the hooded
>> man in chains standing on a box with his hands out stretched like a
>> Christ figure and made a paint stick drawing and billboard. He
>> immediately recognized the aesthetics of the situation.
> 
> like you said he "took", he used the image as a reference to use in
> his work.
> the image by itself - in the document context - is not art. the
> reference or the appropriation of this image or parts of it had
> became art because artists used it.
> 
I agree with this remark
> 
>> The larger debate for all of us is how artists can live and expand
>> creativity while critiquing the power structures that support the
>> activity of art. One can be excommunicated from the art world.
> 
> if an artist would/could be excommunicated from the art world...that
> would mean that as an artist she/he had started to live a "bare life"?

Anyway there would be very interesting to explore this remark
> 
> Christina described the Drawing Center incident.
> I wonder in what situation, as an artist, is now Amy Wilson? Is she a
> persona not grata or is she seen as an artist with a critical
> approach by the artistic community?

The answer on this question can give the very solution of the critical sense
at last. 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> susana mendes silva
> www.susanamendessilva.com
> arslonga@netcabo.pt
> 
> 
> 
> 
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