[-empyre-] Process as Paradigm - response to Baruch

[susanne jaschko]

I would like to respond to Baruch's post in which he tries to shake 
things a bit up - an attempt that I appreciate a lot. Baruch poses a 
number of questions that the art world struggles with these days. The 
main questions are, if I understand him right: Can art do other than 
aestheticise the shit that's going on? And are those other projects, 
that go beyond aesthetisation,  art or simply activist projects that 
have an arty touch/intellectual audience and contribute to the 
'disturbance theatre' of the world with some kind of impact that is 
hardly graspable?
I would like to add the question: What is worse: Pseudo-activism 
disguised as art, or pseudo-art disguised as activism? My own 
perspective on this can maybe called traditional: I believe in the only 
very limited power of art to solve our big shit, but in generating 
awareness, being a device of communication between different groups of 
people and improving and enriching life through -yes- aesthetisation and 
critical, creative thinking and diversity of standpoints. You might yawn 
at this point, but for me this still holds true.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying, art should not be political. But it 
if is, it should still work as a piece/process of art, see eg. the Yes 
Men or Graham Harwood's Tantalum Memorial....Unfortunately those 
projects which work on both levels are rare.
At last year's conference Positions in Flux that I curated for NIMk, 
Hans Bernhard (ubermorgen,com) provokingly said on the panel 'Art goes 
Politics' that he does not see his work as political art and that he is 
basically not interested in the political  impact of his projects. ( I 
hope I remember this correctly). As arrogant as this sounds at first, 
but what he supposedly meant was:
Solving the global shit takes place somewhere else with different means.

Baruch sounds a bit frustrated about the fact that we still discuss 
things like formalism and aesthetics. And yes, sitting in my well heated 
Berlin office, writing these lines, makes me think again, who cares 
about all this? What indeed is its relevance in comparison to the shit 
that surrounds us and we are effected by - a question which regularly 
finds its way to the conscious part of my brain.
I have no real answer, but one fact calms me down, when this question 
knocks at the cortex: That this field of artistic experimentation we're 
dealing with, call it media art, high tech art, bio art, processual art 
or whatever - basically the art which is happening outside the art 
market to a great deal - that this at least poses some of the important 
and relevant questions - that hardly can be found in the rest of 
contemporary art that is still so exhaustingly dealing with humanities.

Link to Positions in Flux:
http://nimk.nl/eng/search/positions-in-flux

-- 
susanne jaschko
www.sujaschko.de