[-empyre-] Game Art as an art subculture?

[Julian Oliver]

..on Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 01:14:11PM -0500, davin heckman wrote:
> In some ways, I think the question of games as art can be enriched by
> looking back to poiesis and techne.

I must admit to finding this entire thread largely redundant. Surely the very
attempt at discerning whether or not videogame and art can find peace is
indication that they already do.

When friends and I established the game-art collective Select Parks back in
1998, in the interests of documenting and 'archiving' game-based artistic
experiments, we certainly did not need the canonical annointment of the fine
arts to steer our judgement. Rather, we were interested in work that was merely
interested in the /possibility/ that they might be considered as such. This is
an important distinction, one that falls wide of the need for authenticity as
such.

My own early mods have themselves been exhibited in museums since 1999/2000 and
at no point was the question as to whether they were or not artistically valid
itself /intrincally/ important. Once they're there -once the question has
opened- it's already too late for qualifying discourse. 

Many of my peers share the same disinterest in this debate; 'Art' is merely the
name we give to discourse after cultural transformation, a muffled echo at best.

All the best for the new year,

-- 
Julian Oliver
home: New Zealand
based: Berlin, Germany 
currently: Berlin, Germany 
about: http://julianoliver.com
follow: http://twitter.com/julian0liver

> 
> 
> On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 5:05 AM, Rafael Trindade <trirrafael at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello, folks,
> >
> >
> > Not a few times I've prepared myself to post something and got to stop just
> > because your messages did my job better :) I just regret missing this latest
> > topic, for I was afraid that kind of contention would happen. I find it a
> > pity, and I'll try to show you why:
> >
> > The Picasso instance is not - OK, is not to me - as silly as might seem to
> > some of you. I didn't reply it before for the reason cited above, and - I
> > believe the main motive amongst us all - vacations!
> >
> > Back to Picasso-gate, what Daniel meant to me is the most pretty obvious
> > thing: the same thing Duchamp and the conceptual artists and lots of people
> > didactically showed us - that there is no such thing as an essentially,
> > trouble-free, object of art. This is not only a contemporary feat; more
> > rigid systems of yore demanded - as today - lots of training, education,
> > sensibility and adequation to norms, institutions, artes poeticae, and
> > dialogue with past canons and coetaneous artistic circles. What is to say,
> > even believing so, there was not a pure, isolated, intrinsic aesthetic value
> > in any object in any era. The example can make you cringe, but carries lots
> > of elementary truth. The de-corporification of art, the stress on its
> > relational, institutional, ecological nature does not imply art is valueless
> > or an ethereal fiction. This is a sense a whole century have striven to
> > build; not only about art, but about [social] reality itself.
> >
> > So Gabriel Menotti's response is not in conflict with Danc's sayings. We can
> > find in videogames dependence on circuits, on a whole material ecology, on
> > some modes of reception (recognition of genres), and a will of tradition
> > (like I said weeks ago). Most human experiences are bound to some sort of
> > will-to-canonise (gaming, being part of a gang, any nostalgia), not only the
> > highbrow stuff. So you can relate games and art. BUT they are realities
> > crested on very different social and technological complexes.
> >
> > One cannot fail to notice the enormously difference of weight canons have in
> > arts. As someone - I forgot, sorry! - have told us here, art is, generally,
> > about to associate, to enrich, to open more and more possibilities
> > (according to old prescriptions, as synthetically as possible). This depends
> > on the intrinsic properties of the object, triggered by a set of apparatuses
> > linking it to synchronic circuits and diachronical traditions. There's
> > nothing alike in videogames, even the most complex and beatiful; even the
> > most distant from the childishly-irrational, fascinatingly-creative,
> > absolutely freak and impatient mobs that makes, among other reasons, artists
> > interested in 4chan-ness and gaming cultures.
> >
> > Everybody who happen to be into so-called "literary" fiction is familiar to
> > the formula (which I believe only in some degree): books have to do with
> > books, not with "real" stuff to which their tales could point at.
> > Heretofore, people had learnt that Romeo and Juliet are not about some
> > Italian couple more than they are about, say, Pyramus and Thisbe; that you
> > cannot (would say some rigid and enthusiastic Victorian teacher) understand
> > Molière without reading Bocaccio (and Scachetti, and Terence, and
> > Menander...). The same has gone to arts. One can say that contemporary
> > painting is not the same activity the pre-Raphaelites have practised, and
> > one is right. But the pre-Raphaelites did not understood art the same way
> > Raphael did, and his Greco-Roman models even happened to know they were real
> > artists themselves. Every tradition is a will of tradition; every
> > transmission is really, really impure. But this constitutes art; those
> > "baggages" are the very elements which compose Culture with capital letters.
> > By the way, I don't see why refrain from call Deleuze - or any other
> > philosopher - "baggage"; it sounds very the-great-conversation-ish, and
> > strikingly sounds a bit deleuzian, too (creation of concepts, instead of
> > search for truth etc).
> >
> > I could say it simpler and faster:
> >
> >> Art doesn't come with "baggage". The history of art, as I understand it,
> >> is a very long theoretical exchange. Saying a painting comes with baggage is
> >> like saying philosophy comes with baggage. Art has to be in dialog with
> >> pervious art that has come before it, just as contemporary theory has to
> >> respond to earlier thinkers. What you're saying is like saying that
> >> Deleuze's writing about Spinoza is "baggage".
> >
> > What's the big deal? Isn't it just what Danc said? Can you say that the
> > history of videogames, as art's, is a long theoretical exchange? So why
> > "shallow" and "ridiculous"?
> >
> > I believe games and art are very different realities, which can be compared
> > if we formulate the right questions, and then we can find lots of common
> > traits. This would be desirable depending more on our interests and projects
> > than the inner truth lying within these realities. What really inspires me
> > in discussions like this one in -empyre- is the confluence of these
> > projects, and the possible exchange between them. There's no need to a
> > subversive, inter- trans- or cross-disciplinary agenda to do that. And no
> > need to protect theory from our theoretical exchange. All of us have been
> > pretty theoretical up to then.
> >
> > I'm so sorry I have to post and run; I have a trip which would make me
> > unable to read e-mails. Well, thank you all for the marvelous time \o\
> >
> > Happy New Year,
> > Rafael.
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > empyre forum
> > empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> > http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> >
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