[-empyre-] finishing up (again)

This will be the last post from me this month. really, i promise :)

blakkbyrd wrote:

I have been careful not to state an ideological position. The work was offered for critique, so I critiqued it. I found it offensive for a number of reasons, which I have stated. There are innumerable shops in amsterdam that retail pornographic or misogynistic material, t-shirts, postcards etc, I am trying to identify how this work is any different, and most importantly, whether the audience can depict the difference..

perhaps more "concrete" examples that would make that comparison more clear would make your questions seem less rhetorical? how does their work "look like" or otherwise participate in the things you mention?

The first month that I was in Europe, I saw a contemporary art exhibition in Copenhagen. There was a text based conceptual work on the wall. In Danish, no English translation. The only access I had to the work was to assess its calligraphic form. It raised a lot of issues for me about the gap between the artist's intent and the reception of the work and has revised the way I look at {assess} an artwork. There was a major retrospective of conceptual art in Belgium, same problem.

You can't assume that the audience is informed about the artist, the theory or how the piece fits in to the rest of their work. That is a good reason to examine any art 'object' in isolation. If you have to read a fifty page artist's statement to access a work, you are not looking at a work of art, you are reading a book. I saw a show at de appel on the weekend that illustrates this beautifully. There are some instances where this is appropriate.

but the notion of "isolation" is equally problematic, and as you indicate in the first paragraph above, you're already "reading" the project against a specific context (misogynistic material sold in amsterdam). in your example of the Danish text based work, if you had no access to the "language" but want to develop a critical relationship to it, i would say that at some point you have a responsibility to engage with the language being used. the "gap" you mention is there whether you know the language or not, but in the example you give that gap is not one of simple intent vs reception, but is the same gap that happens when someone on empyre writes in french and i can't read it. i think it's a mistake to reduce all communication to an aesthetic situation.
sometime a "book" is the work. this is where a critical engagement with notions of "audience" comes in for artists. i think it's important to resist simplified notions of "general audiences" and populist interpretations of a public. The critic Rosalyn Deutshe and before that Martha Rosler, have written about the problematics of "common sense" notions of the public sphere.

All art is a marketable commodity. This point tends to be overlooked in an atmosphere of adequate funding. If you apply commercial methods of assessment, it soon becomes apparent why some artists are more 'successful' than others irrespective of artistic talent.

I'm sorry that you find my questions non productive, I have a commercial background and find these methods of analysis a useful augmentation to critical analysis of art. I'm surprised that you dont consider them as a matter of course.

i don't have a problem with understanding art as a commodity. but, like any commodity, i don't think it's "marketability" is reducible to the tools and frameworks of the marketing and PR industry. if that were the case, we could solve a lot of problems just by reading their stats. is it a useful data set? no doubt it's useful to understand how capital CONSCIOUSLY views subject-object relations. but while they may tap into affect, it doesn't mean that there is a formula for their success. this is partly why i'm interested in the sub-rational. and also why i think operating on the line of affect is interesting and potentially productive. if there are problems with the project in question, i have a hard time believing that the quantifiable data you're after would really "prove" it. could you numerically link it to instances of domestic violence, or other forms of violent oppression against women? i would really doubt it. so, my point is, that if you're going to find a "problem" with the work, it is precisely an ideological problem. i.e. how it connects to and lends cultural power to, other, concrete forms of oppression that utilize the same languages, affects, etc.

How is retailing a product and selling site advertising not marketing? I think an analysis of the site's traffic would be fascinating

site stats might be interesting... but i think your question conflates cultural and financial capital a bit too seamlessly by relying on the meaning of "retailing." is deGeuzen actively and aggressively marketing and retailing? not in any traditional business sense from what i can see. are they engaging with the appearance and cultural mechanisms of the retail fashion industry on a small scale? sure.
and selling site advertising... did i miss something?
but that's beside the point... how would you go about collecting the gender and age identity of those buying the shirts, much less the ideological use of them? if x number of xenophobic misogynists bought/ viewed the shirts that may "prove" your point... but i don't know of any web stats that can give you that info.

Would it's effectiveness as a
marketing exercise validate or invalidate it for our purposes here?
perhaps this gets me to the questions i initially began with... we've
been arguing over "facts" but what is our "concern"?


To ensure that we take responsibility for the consequences of our actions? ie

the responsibility that comes
from producing scrutinizable "objects" is on all of us


I dont claim to have the answers to these questions, I just raise them to provoke thought, if not discussion.

certainly, questions are crucial, and i don't claim to have any answers either... we're debating over the questions :)
but to get to your "concern" for taking "responsibility for consequences of our actions" we first have to agree on what consequences we deem positive and ones we deem negative to even begin to ask someone/ourselves to take responsibility for them. recognizing and accepting a position becomes necessary at some point, as i tried to get at in my "last" post.
and obviously the questions are provoking discussion, at least from me. so you've succeeded there.
best,
ryan

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