If I come to Sculpture as a means of expression, as a ‘career move’, as an inevitability given that it is unlikely that my life could succeed by any other means, or to improve my socio-economic conditions, opportunities etc. the first thing on my mind is not, perhaps ‘politics’.
In fact, politics, with its dualisms, well-known economy with the truth, corruption and rather dull and un-stylish associations may be anathema to the trajectory of any would-be artist.
But this Speculecture will nevertheless suggest that art conducts politics by other means and in fact has much to contribute to stimulating and rejuvenating long-held political positions and well-worn debates.
Here are some quotes you might want to read, think about, discuss and follow-up in preparation for or following the Speculecture.
(N.B we will also use this session for an Essay briefing.)
No culture can develop without a social basis, without a source of stable income. And in the case of the avant garde, this was provided by an elite among the ruling class of that society from which it assumed itself to have been cut off, but to which it has always remained attached by an umbilical cord of gold. The paradox is real.
Clement Greenberg from Avant Garde and Kitsch 1939 [Harrison & Wood Art In Theory p. 542]
The pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences –criminals and kept women- which drift about in the underworld of a great city, the Gazette des Tribuneaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our true heroism.
Charles Baudelaire, from On The Heroism of Modern Life 1846 [Harrison & wood Art in Theory p. 303]
“The altermodern is to culture what altermondialisation is to geopolitics, an archipelago of local insurrections against the official representations of the world.”
Nicolas Bourriaud from The Radicant p.185-6
Art presents a counter-power. Not that the task of artists consists in denouncing, mobilizing, or protesting: all art is engaged, whatever its nature and its goals. Today there is a quarrel over representation that sets art and the official image of reality against each other; it is propagated by advertising discourse, relayed by the media, organized by an ultralight ideology of consumption and social competition. In our daily lives, we come across fictions, representations, and forms that sustain this collective imagery whose contents are dictated by power. Art puts us in the presence of counterimages, forms that question social forms. In the face of the economic abstraction that makes daily life unreal, or an absolute weapon of techno-market power, artists reactivate forms by inhabiting them …”
Nicolas Bourriaud from Postproduction p.93-94
Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicising art.
Walter Benjamin, from The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 1936 [Harrison & Wood Art in Theory pp/ 520-527]
“Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervations, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.”
Walter Benjamin Surrealism. 1929
“I must insist that search here is … aimed at making each person find within themselves, through accessibility, through improvisation, their internal liberty. The path for a creative state …”
Helio Oiticica from Appearance of the supra-Sensorial 1967 [Art in Theory Harrison & Wood p. 913]
“Just as simulation painting often treated abstraction as a readymade, commodity sculpture often treated the readymade as abstraction, and just as simulation painting tended to reduce art to design and kitsch, commodity sculpture tended to substitute design and kitsch for art …”
Hal Foster The Art of Cynical Reason from The Return of the Real p. 107
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