Following up from a subject raised in last Friday's seminar.
I do believe that art is inherently political, for reasons I think I have already stated in this blog. But does political equal critical?
A non-critical practice seems impossible to me. An artist working totally intuitively is still making decisions about what is good and bad, is this not a form of criticality?...
But, then again, this is about an artists criticality and not art's. Is art/should art be critical of the world? Is it a default position?... How can it not be. As Neil pointed out, this seems to be fairly recent way of thinking, after modernism... (but then the dadaist were pretty critical weren't they?)... but even if it is a recent thing, to go back on it seems a bit like trying to take the milk back out of coffee, (to borrow another Neilism... not to be confused with nihilism...) isn't that what Ranciere describes as the difference between the representational regime and the aesthetic regime?
Art is made up of contradictory ways of seeing and doing and thinking etc. can we just accept that they are all equally valid?...
What is criticality proper?...
It is certainly a baffling truth that if we take the idea that arts job is to challenge known truths, then this is in itself a known truth which art must challenge... i.e. there is no outside of anything. no external position from which to be objectively critical. We cannot judge the wall street protesters hypocrites for drinking coke, they have no choice but to criticize capitalism from within it...
I think the question of whether art should be intentionally critical and the question of whether art is inherently critical are two different things... in the same way that taking a party political position is different from the fact that art is inherently political. Art is there - it's uses are different from its modes of productions or reasons for being...
It just feels odd to be arguing for anything other than criticality from the position of being on an MFA...
No comments:
Post a Comment