[-empyre-] What is to be done .... continued

[Christiane Robbins <cpr@mindspring.com>]

Greetings to everyone from sunny and frigid California!



In the continuance of this discussion I offer the following comments  
in hopes of generating further commentary -

It could be suggested that Roger Buergel's laudable utterance of  
“what is to be done?” is being imagined within a seeming consensual  
utopian dream for global salvation through the exhibition of various  
cultural practices.   My reading of the subtext of his statement is  
as a collective consciousness or understanding of art practices as  
inhabiting the realm of an almost secular spiritualism and, as such,  
a wish for artists to engage in a somewhat evangelical aesthetic  
response.

 The implicit assumption of a narrative trajectory for art practices  
- for education practices - assumes a collective set of purposes and  
necessities and, yes,  impossibilities.  It requires that we think  
and evaluate education practices and directives through the gelled  
lens of globalism which offers a branded patina of regionalized  
specificity and individuated experience.   Any understanding of what  
constitutes education and artistic practices needs to be based upon  
what it is that artists do, where they do it, how they do it ... and  
why they do it.  As we understand, artists do different things in  
diverse cultures and are accompanied by a dissimilar range of  
relational dynamics and understanding.  Where they are "educated, "  
how they are "educated" or 'trained" and what they ultimately produce  
speak to the complexities and inherent ambiguities that exist within  
these varied contextualized and often, institutionalized and  
commodified  platforms.  A relevant query here is whether or not the  
construct of an exhibition such as Documenta is effective in  
adequately providing a context for various art practices to function  
as modes of transferable knowledge within the “global complex of  
cultural translation?”




All best,



Chris






Christiane Robbins

J e t z t z e i t
Los Angeles  l  San Francisco
CA  l USA

... the space between zero and one ...
Walter Benjamin





The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to  
the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in  
these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane.

Ludwig Feuerbach, 1804-1872,
German Philosopher