[-empyre-] el Bano de cultura

[Cara Baldwin]

------ Forwarded Message
From: sesshu foster <sesshu at earthlink.net>
Reply-To: sesshu foster <sesshu at earthlink.net>
Date: Thu, 4 Oct 2007 07:53:04 -0700 (GMT-07:00)
To: Cara Baldwin <feralysis at earthlink.net>
Subject: then what?

we wrote sixteen pamphlets about iron oxide using match sticks.
the surf ouched, the big hawk flew off the top of the tree.
everybody who was somebody went to work, cows eaten alive.
according to SF, space shit flies on milky galaxies every day.
imagination contends with illusion and barks, disconsolate squeak.
body parts, you name it, they invented tags and codes: states.
sneeze all you want to, pointed verbs sticking out of every pore.
agriculture in california exacerbates a green edge on water-use.
i saw something the other day, it was a woman on her cellphone.

sesshu
l.a.

This message is dedicated to the small group of creators, simulators,
critics and promoters. That is to say, those whose talent, intelligence,
economic interest, prestige or stupidity commit them to what is called
avant-garde art. To those that come to the Di Tella for their regular
culture bath, to the general public. The avant-garde is the intellectual
movement that permanently repudiates art and permanently affirms history. In
this trajectory of simultaneous affirmation and repudiation, art and life
have become so confused as to become inseparable. All of the phenomena of
social life have been converted into aesthetic material: fashion,
manufacturing, and technology, the media of mass communication, etc.
³Aesthetic contemplation came to an end because the aesthetic got dissolved
in social life.² The work of art has also ended because life and the planet
itself are becoming art. That is why everywhere there is a necessary,
bloody, and beautiful struggle for creation of a new world. And the
avant-garde cannot stop affirming history, affirming the just, heroic
violence of this struggle. The future of art is not connected to the
creation of works, but to the definition of new concepts of life, with the
artist as propagandist for these concepts. ³Art² has no importance; it is
life that counts. Art is the history of the years to come. It is the
creation of the most gigantic collective work in history: the conquest of
the earth, the conquest of freedom by and for all men.

1963 Mensaje en el Di Tella, Roberto Jacoby

"To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the
morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a
culture, to support the weight of a civilization" (17-18). Frantz Fanon,
Black Skin, White Masks Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove
Press, 1967. 
 

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