Forward from Lucio Agra: Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity: Introducing DIrk Vekemans

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

hi all, be sure to hit the plain text format conversion before  
sending to our mailman who is quite hapless.  thanks, cm


From: "Lucio Agra" <lucioagra@gmail.com>
Date: March 1, 2006 5:27:42 PM PST
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Is Modernity our Antiquity: Introducing DIrk  
Vekemans



I think Dirk has got to a point here that matches what I would like  
to comment about previous posts concerning the difference between  
Modernity and contemporaneity. I've been sustaining - as a rather  
personal point o view - that what separates modernity to  
contemporaneity has to do with a kind of gap, established 'round the  
80's when something great was expected but never happened (most of  
people inisted in the punk slogan "no future"). In fact it happened,  
I mean, the novelty, the things to change came with computers which  
really exploded, globally after Reagan/Thatcher era, in the early  
90s. >From then on, I would say my personal history - and, may I say,  
I believe the history of many, many colleagues - begin to seem quite  
similar to what Dirk described about himself. Including the aspect of  
performance acts, the opinions about avant-garde of the 20s, what led  
us to see in the work of artists like Schwitters, the chance to  
stablish bridges between old and new times. Someone could remember  
the allusions to Bauhaus and Russian Constructivism in the 80s (some  
graphic designers had studied it in the College). The simple and - I  
think - naive idea, that the avant-gardes were finished, was not  
understood the same way by everybody. I feel myself more near to the  
ideas of guys like Andreas Huyssen, that felt himself distant from  
the idea of a total rupture represented by "post-modernism" and, at  
the same time, did not invested in Habermas conception of a Modern  
project still functioning. The facts concerning Berlin Wall and more  
recent seven eleven made us all understand that 21st century has  
begun. But some of the procedures of 20th century art, are still  
fundamental and, I would say,  one the main is collage/montage. From  
this, comes the interest in artists as Schwitters, Schlemmer,  
thinkers like Benjamin, and so on, people who did not appeared in the  
foreground scenery of the modern period but were insofar very, very  
important. But, it is worth to observe, once again, it is not their  
work, but their procedure what is essential for us today to  
understand what are the steps we are are making into a new idea of  
future...
best
Lucio BR

On 3/1/06, Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net> wrote:
Hi -empyre-

another guest is artist/poet Dirk Vekemans  Dirk writes:

"In 1979 I  very much wanted to be a writer/ poet. I noticed i didn't
have much to write about that made any sense, so i quit. I had a
great time working in bars and kitchens, enjoying an unlikely
personal dérive that lasted some ten years.

From 1989 onward i did have (or at least presumed to have) something
to write about that made sense, so i started to learn how to write
decently, following Horatius' adagio 'nonum prematur in anno' rather
strictly. The birth of my eldest daughter in 1993 and my other two
darlings later on  marked and ensured my re-entry into society as a
'responsible' worker unit.
When i got to a stage that i thought my literary work had reached
some maturity (let's say 1996, the same year that i organised a
poetic manifestation in my hometown Louvain – "Leuven per Vers",
featuring poetic performances on several locations in the city, it
was quite a success), i discovered that (trying to) publish(ing) it
would render it meaningless in the fastest way possible. Moreover I
didn't feel very related to the current literary scene engaged in
publishing collections of verse.  Instead i chose to make everything
i wrote so far available on the internet, and started investing my
spare time in researching ways to make text 'work' on screen.
Gradually, partly because i thought the available techniques weren't
up to it yet but mostly out of economic necessity my interest in
making IT work the artistic way faded and i endulged myself in the
day to day practice of producing commercial websites and multimedia
products.

Nowadays i'm still active as a professional web-designer/programmer,
but i have to admit i'm basically and inevitably a poet/writer trying
to find ways to contribute to establishing a transvergent, meaningful
form of digital writing.
Basicly I recently (end 2004) decided that I do want to tune down the
importance of my commercial work and spend more time on my
'artistic'  exploits by re-initiating and trying to update Kurt
Schwitters' Merzbau to my personal and present views. The Neue
Kathedrale des erotischen Elends is conceived as a highly personal
'Gesamstkunstwerk', a procedural form of art whose primary form of
expression at this moment may be located most visbly in the virtual
plane of its digital existence at http://www.vilt.net/nkdee , but the
process incorporating these networked events also lead to material
expressions outside the digital grid and unfoldings in time through
performance. These days it appears to be predominantly a rather
monstrous growth on the www."