[-empyre-] Restart

[Christiane Robbins <cpr@mindspring.com>]

again …. Greetings  to everyone on empyre,


I thought that I might simply press RESTART on this discussion as  
it’s launch seems to have been somewhat dispersed – almost before it  
began!  I also recognize that a number of us are also participating  
in a concurrent list – the IDC – whose discussion somewhat mirrors  
our own – as much as we’d like we can’t be all places at all times!

I had sent out a preliminary statement a day or two ago that I had  
hoped would generate some commentary on the statement “what is to be  
done…”.  I am pasting it below and will then reply to a couple of  
responses of the past day or so.

Thanks for your patience with this –

Chris


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 us 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?”












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