Re: [-empyre-] politics of critical fusion, forward from N. Neumark

[Timothy Murray <tcm1@cornell.edu>, rtf9@cornell.edu]

 Hello Maurice and Alice,
Thank you for your engaged posts and work-- all very stimulating.

Maurice,
I participated in World Skin and it was indeed a disturbing 
experience and still a vivid memory. I remember
first watching other participants and coolly enjoying the 
photographic look of the space and then how it shifted when I became 
one myself and the ideas moved so suddenly from abstract to all too 
concrete.

>   creating some indiscernible Brownian motion coming from doubt
>  and revolt.

  -- if praxis would disallow this, i agree, it's too limiting for 
art.  Work that makes me laugh and wonder
at the same time is hard to resist and I find that in the dump. Your 
questions about whether god is flat and the devil curved -- where 
better than art to interrogate such important matters!
Art dump -- what  a great idea for a contaminative collaborative 
blog ...



Alice,
I would like to say that I very much agree with Maurice. I also think 
that there are always risks in falling into a trap, especially if 
artists sometimes end up in stiff and controlled places previously 
assigned for them by the "economy of power they seek to either 
address, expose or intervene".  So, of course, for me at least, works 
should always be self-reflexive on that question, and so many others 
as well. Being self-reflexive meaning to be inquisitive and curious 
about the very own way a work itself is created: by the way an image 
is generated, by the way a work comes to being financially, by the 
way and where it is exhibited. Something that strikes me as very 
essential in my practice is that in making art, one directly 
addresses perception, how things in life are perceived - modes of 
really looking at things. But what it means to really look? What it 
is that you see beyond what is deceivably shown to you by an "economy 
of power", or merely beyond common sense? That, for me, even if in a 
very small scale, can be a subversive act.

These are important points and I agree that though it seems 
impossible to ever be outside economies of power, the ways we 
negotiate them are still worth thinking about. For me, working in new 
media, the issue of funding, which you raise, has always been 
troubling --feeling often like a beta tester for industry with the 
latest technology or a representative of the national interest with 
government funding (Australian). Sometimes this has been ok for me 
and I recognise that it is for many others, but I have to say that 
recently, having a break from bigger tech works and these particular 
funding issues has been exhilarating and opened new ways of working. 
But as Brad may be suggesting, there are also downsides of being 
outside such Big institutional Art validators. Caught between a flat 
god and a curved devil...
Best
Norie

Norie Neumark
Media Arts
Humanities
University of Technology, Sydney
www.out-of-sync.com
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