[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 62, Issue 4

[Johanna Drucker]

All,

These comments, and Cynthia's statement "What do we want art to DO?"  
seem really to the point.

John Haber:
>  However, these approaches, like indeed good old
> irony, describe how art by its nature slips out from its apparent or
> intended closed structures.  That describes what went wrong, but also
> offers grounds for admiration and hope.

David Heckman:
To fold this back into a discussion of art, I think art can help us  
introduce the interval back into daily life.  It doesn't necessarily  
tell us what to do with that interval, but it reminds us that there  
can and should be interruptions in what otherwise might be a  
monotonous, automatic flow of life.  Even the various "movements" are  
primarily concerned thinking about the various aspects of work (the  
concept, the process, the materials, the product, the thinking about  
art, etc).   As "art" (artifice), art implies a tension with those  
things that aren't art (the What-would-have-happened-if-you-hadn't- 
made-art-or-hadn't-made-it-in-this-way).

I have a question for John, re the nice succinct and useful summary of  
the history of the 1970s and postmodern critical turns. I share your  
sense that the 1970s were a crucial turning point, they even self- 
identified that way with the adoption of postmodern as the rubric (I  
date postmodern art criticism pretty much from the Pictures  
Exhibition, the writings of Douglas Crimp, Craig Owens, and others).  
But the term in play in that era was "contingency" -- a way to  
resituate artworks within their various networks of signs, power  
relations, politics, meanings, poststructuralist "play" etc. This was  
all extremely useful -- especially realizing that in my experience, at  
least, art theory in the 1970s was still being taught as a version of  
Greenberg (!) unquestioned, at least in art school (I was at CCAC from  
1970-73). But I don't think the word complicit was ever used in those  
contexts -- the theoretical discussion arose so much from the  
poststructuralist reworking of signs through the Derridian différance  
and so on -- and of course the really important feminist theory, queer  
studies, post-colonial discourses -- all of which thoroughly  
dismantled autonomy (and "purity" -- though these are not synonymous).  
So I'm curious to know if anyone can cite a use of the term complicit  
in 1970s or 1980s literature? I'd really like to know.

Thanks, again, for all these rich and fascinating and wonderfully  
varied posts.

Johanna
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