[-empyre-] Tacticality: 4 Anna
sdv at krokodile.co.uk
sdv at krokodile.co.uk
Thu Apr 30 03:58:19 EST 2009
or possibly merely thinking she knows what is scary and stupid..
Michael Angelo Tata, PhD wrote:
> Or maybe what Anna is calling for is not strategy, which is primarily
> totalizaing and singular, but tactics, which are fragmented, dspersed,
> plural and framed in the absence of the God's-eye-view perspective
> without which there are no totals, only partial sums? I am thinking
> again of Michel de Certeau.
>
> *******************************************
> *Michael Angelo Tata, PhD 347.776.1931-USA*
> *http://www.MichaelAngeloTata.com/* <http://www.michaelangelotata.com/>
>
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Tue, 28 Apr 2009 11:09:05 -0700
> From: editor at intertheory.org
> To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>
> dear anna...interesting comments, though I wonder if your
> representation of the non-representable is not a bit too theological
> for my taste? And transformation is such a magical enterprise...
> alchemically speaking, I do not suspect that attribution of a quality
> such as 'non-representabililty' adds or subtracts to the strategic
> authenticity or legitimacy of politics, responses or art, for that
> matter. Strategies, in other words, are always fatal...to their
> object, or to themselves. We all try to catch the falling the knife
> with each attempt at becoming, no?
>
> Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
> Editor, Kritikos
> http://intertheory.org <http://intertheory.org/>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *From:* Anna Munster <A.Munster at unsw.edu.au>
> *To:* soft_skinned_space <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> *Sent:* Saturday, April 25, 2009 3:48:56 AM
> *Subject:* Re: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>
> Sorry Nikos but as to your rhetorical 'no' below, I resoundingly reply
> NO WAY!!. There is a world of difference between responding (rather
> than reacting which is really what Joseph is talking about) to a
> social, economic and political crisis using aesthetic strategies and
> techniques vs. the 'arts' of finance, government or whatever other
> institution you want to aestheticise.
> (a la Benjamin et al).
>
> The examples that Nik and Marc are talking about (and also what Brian
> Holmes has been involved with) are emphatically not abut knee jerk
> response or reaction but are about using nonrepresentational aesthetic
> strategies - among a multitude of strategies which also include
> activist, semiotic, political, social and affective ones – to
> /transform/ subjective and collective situations. These are immanent,
> critical, positive and productive relationships with crisis ie they do
> not respond /to / crisis but rather work amid, through and via crisis
> to work with what might be transformative about crises. And these
> aesthetic strategies are absolutely everywhere both in and out of the
> 'art world' eg Critical Art Ensemble, Harwood and Mongrel,16Beaver,
> rebublicart project, The Senselab, eipcp, Make World, edu factory, The
> Thing, Serial Space (sydney -based for all you North Americans who
> need to get out more ;-) etc etc etc. And these are just the
> artists/collectives/projects - there's also a wealth of brilliant art
> theory around this - try Hito Steyerl, Gerald Raunig, Brian Holmes,
> Matthew Fuller, Florian Schneider, Brian Massumi all the FLOSS+art etc
> etc etc
>
> There is NO relation between these kind of politics, responses and
> aesthetics and the 'art' of finance - except a relation of revulsion.
> On the other hand, if you want to find out about a really fantastic
> installation that engaged directly with the stock market and in fact
> used a gambling syndicate's money to trade stocks as part of the
> actual art work - have a look at Micheal Goldberg's documentation of
> his 2002 work 'Catch a Falling Knife'
> (http://www.michael-goldberg.com/main.html - go into Projects and
> select the title of the piece).
>
> Just another point I'd like to make about this month's discussion - I
> have found some of the posts scary and stupid in their absolute lack
> of knowledge about anything that is going on about contemporary art,
> aesthetic strategies and politics. I really think some people need to
> do a bit of preliminary research and investigation before they start
> sounding off about how boring or naive the concept of aesthetically
> responding to crisis is,
>
> Best Anna
>
> On 24/04/2009, at 10:36 PM, Nicholas Ruiz III wrote:
>
>
> nk...another aspect of interest is the way in which the financial
> realm in itself is a creative act, and artful...with all of the
> discussion revolving around the perception/reading parallax, I
> wonder how people in the artistic/academic community may not
> perceive/read financial creativity as art at all...I suspect such
> financial activity is a form of art, which contains all of the
> aspirations, triumphs and failures that any art project may
> enable, no?
>
> nikos
>
> Nicholas Ruiz III, Ph.D
> Editor, Kritikos
> http://intertheory.org <http://intertheory.org/>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: nick knouf <nak44 at cornell.edu>
> To: -empyre- <empyre at gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
> Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2009 1:07:11 PM
> Subject: [-empyre-] Artists' responses to the so-called "crisis"
>
> Dear empyre,
>
> It's strange that it's the 16th of the month (at least where I
> am), yet
> there has been little sustained discussion of present-day artistic
> responses to this so-called financial "crisis"--one that exists in a
> mythical realm of numbers-that-we-cannot-perceive, but that sadly has
> very real impacts on people. Responses by students, academics, and
> activists have not been limited to the resignation of acceptance, nor
> abstract theorizing in and of itself, but rather have taken, at times,
> forms of protest and occupation throughout the world, as well as
> direct
> actions against banking institutions. (See, in particular the
> story of
> Enric Duran:
> http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090319182858556 and
> http://17-s.info/en .) How then might we understand these actions
> within the context of our own theorizing activities?
>
> This should reflect a special concern as to the impact of this
> "crisis"
> on academic and cultural institutions. Indeed, the occupations and
> protests at schools---NYU, the New School, University of Rochester,
> institutions in Italy and France and Spain and...---suggest the deep
> worry that many have regarding how the "crisis" might ultimately
> move to
> transform culture and learning into more and more reified situations
> governed by numbers and the market. (The Bologna process is coming to
> the states: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/education/09educ.html .)
> In response there have been discussions and interviews about how
> we can
> use this time of "crisis" to develop new models that exist in parallel
> to concurrent struggles to force governments to provide for the basic
> needs of people. (See in particular "Interviewing the Crisis":
> http://www.interviewingthecrisis.org/ .) How might we then reconsider
> actions and activities of the past and present and future---TAZs,
> tactical media, pirate radio, and many, many, more---in light of calls
> for more standardization and more "accountability"?
>
> And whither the academic institution? Corporations have fairly free
> reign in many departments at colleges and universities in the United
> States. Are we to expect even more of these so-called "public-private
> partnerships" in the future? What is the role of the institution in
> producing the people who created the "crisis" in the first place? Who
> will follow the links between the powerful actors in order to map
> their
> impact?
>
> I present here a recent project of mine that is my own attempt to face
> some of these issues. MAICgregator (http://maicgregator.org
> <http://maicgregator.org/>) is a
> Firefox extension that aggregates information about colleges and
> universities embedded in the military-academic-industrial (MAIC)
> complex. It searches government funding databases, private news
> sources,
> private press releases, and public information about trustees to
> try and
> produce a radical cartography of the modern university via the
> replacement or overlay of this information on academic websites.
> MAICgregator is available for download right now:
> http://maicgregator.org/download . If you want to see what
> MAICgregator
> does to a website without downloading it, you can look at some
> screenshots: http://maicgregator.org/docs/screenshots . This is its
> first public release, so expect that things might not work properly.
>
> I have written an extensive statement about MAICgregator that tries to
> contextualize it within discourses of net.art, the
> military-academic-industrial complex, "data mining", and activist
> artistic practices. As the statement is rife with embedded links,
> please read it online:
>
> http://maicgregator.org/statement
>
> I welcome any feedback or discussion that this might provoke; if you
> want to e-mail the project authors directly, please e-mail info --at--
> maicgregator ---dot--- org.
>
> http://maicgregator.org/
>
> nick knouf
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>
> A/Prof. Anna Munster
> Assistant Dean, Grant Support
> Acting Director Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics
> School of Art History and Art Education
> College of Fine Arts
> UNSW
> P.O. Box 259
> Paddington
> NSW 2021
> 612 9385 0741 (tel)
> 612 9385 0615(fax)
> a.munster at unsw.edu.au <mailto:a.munster at unsw.edu.au>
>
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