[-empyre-] The diffculty of creation and Audience

[G.H. Hovagimyan]

gh comments:

I make art  all the time like Patrick Lichty.  Some of it is quick  
notes, ideas, avenue of exploration. Alot of it is never made public.  
Going back to Mallarmé dictum; all an artists needs is a poet and a  
patron,  you might call access to galleries, festival, and  
technology, patrons insofar as they support an artists endeavors.   
Grants are obviously government patronage.  When you look at all  
these patrons you'll see that each has a particular agenda. You see  
it all the time in new media festivals where there's a call for a  
particular type of work that uses a particular type of technology.  
That's OK but what happens in new media is that the programming and  
the tools are often thought to be the main event. What an artists  
does with the tools is besides the point.

I've personally spent my entire artistic career challenging all those  
systems and definitions.  I've found that the highest creative  
periods are the most anarchic. During those periods everyone is  
exploring the nature of something new before the business/curatorial  
model can be established and take control. I was involved in the New  
York underground art scene in Soho in the 1970's. This was when  
people were doing performance and installation and creating radical  
commune style alternative groups. When that became established the  
east village Punk Art Scene arose in the 1980's. I was a part of that  
scene making performances, playing in punk bands and also opening a  
small art gallery as a performance work. The main thrust of the  
1980's was that the modernist intellectual project was dead, that all  
styles were viable. The second part to that idea was that the market  
was a conceptual art piece and that art objects were simply chits to  
be used in the market. They had no other meaning other than a sort of  
localized fetish.  In the 1990's  I became involved with internet art  
and new media which I think is a large shift and is still going on.   
The position of a challenge is a discourse on the majority culture.  
This includes the art world and now the networked world. It's a funny  
position. I often take a counter position when I see the business/  
curatorial model congeal.
At the moment I am involved in an artist group taking some of the  
ideas of group dynamic that I was involved in in the 1970's.  This is  
a way out of the market pressures that tend to strip all meaning from  
an artwork.

On May 7, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Jacky Sawatzky wrote:

> How is the relationship negotiated between the need to create and  
> the possibility to create?   How does  access to galleries ,  
> grants, festivals, or the internet and technology influence  
> possibilities to create in conjunction or in conflict with the need  
> to create?

G.H. Hovagimyan
http://nujus.net/gh/
http://post.thing.net/blog/gh/