Post-Art Manifesto And Eponymous Blog-Killer

This image of fungi was stolen from Pruned.

I don't know about you, but I am looking out on this crazy landscape of actual problems to solve, and then looking at what I learned in art school, and walking around Chelsea and the lower east side, and thinking to myself that man, this cultural work, this expression of creativity, just doesn't cut it.

I learned how to make modern art. Contemporary art is a modernist activity. And I honestly think that the only way to catapult over the problems we have--everything from the impending Climate Death to this Economic Catastrophe to Rampant Fundamentalism (from ecofundamentalism to jihad and the GOP)--is to find what lies beyond the modern world.

These problems of climate and economy and mind are systemic, and reframe what it means to be an individual in a profound way. We are figuring out the correct response to the climate problem, and sure it's got something to do with the individual's choices, but does that mean that it's not fundamentalist to go refrigeratorless and buy a composting toilet?

What does it mean that much of the cultural work we do about the climate consists of calculations related to consumption? Is this the only way we can express our interconnectedness? Through tedious quantification? Isn't there a more delightful way to express it?

And why don't we buy this idea of interconnectedness when it's about money? Why do we hate bailing out banks?

(I don't know the answer to this, I hate bailing out banks as much as you do. I am just throwing it out there, it feels related.)

The contemporary art that I learned how to practice depends on a profound sensation of contextlessness for its very existence--a perceived contextlessness that makes it possible for many artists to forget that the real context for contemporary art is a downright imperial market. You know all about the Cube Problem. You could be a shit and call it the Anything Looks Meaningful When It's The Only Thing In A White Cube Problem, and figure that this drive to total contextlessness doesn't just make art that is so frivolous that it must be about the money--it turns art as we learned it a kind of intellectual Short Bus, in which the bar is set so low that any smug little asswipe who goes to the right parties can saunter, or even stumble over it.

(Right now I am just spewing what I've been wanting to write for weeks, as I have been, instead, posting multiple promises not to whine.)

This is not entirely wrong, but it's profoundly limiting to be negative. If I am going to get anywhere outside this way of looking at art, then it's my responsibility not just to pull my chips off the table, but to actively re-invest in all the things art avoids right now.

A short list:

First, I am going to stop calling what I do art, if for no other reason than because one of the lamest things artists do is call everything they do art.

I am also giving up my name and my sense of authorship. This is the last content-ful post on this eponymous blog, which is going to be reconstituted in the coming week or two under a name that serves more as an umbrella and less as a way to put my own stamp of authorship on what I think and do. Modernism is a five-hundred-year long experiment in radical individuality that is either going to turn into something else or cause the extinction of the human race. The very least I can do to turn this cultural barge around is stop publicly indulging my own love affair with my own name.

And I am going to endeavor to do good things, without worrying about arriving at something treacly, without pushing for a little more edge, without searching, always, for a foil for every gesture. The world is edgy enough. I just want to make things better. For real. In real life.

And speaking of real life, from this day forward I am saying no to the Contextless Cube and pushing instead to contextualize every single thing I do. Yes to public sculptures, making gardens and hijinks, yes to insane dinner parties, yes to collaboration, yes to shouting loud and proud about other people's projects, yes to television and radio and books and the internet--yes to any project whose goal extends beyond the filling an empty white room.

It's a serious time and it calls for serious creative acts, and for some time I have been talking the talk without really taking the time to figure out the walk.

Comments

[Pretty Lady]

I'm strongly in favor of the gardening and the dinner parties--and really, of everything else. I've been thinking for awhile now that maybe I ought to put painting on the back burner for a decade or so and learn more about gardens. Of course, my hands will already be full with parenting and earning a living, but I'm planning on taking baby to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens for strolls and classes at the first opportunity.

Also, I've been thinking about how to engage in projects that are more about the communication than the medium. My partner founded a small theatre company, because there didn't seem to be any existing groups which were grappling with the ideas he wanted to work with, only to realize that his focus needed to be on communication and creating experience, more than theatre for theatre's sake. He's looking for a way to transcend the bounds of the authority paradigm, both as the content of his work and in the process of working itself. I find that people who are immersed in their own medium to the exclusion of all else interest me less than the people who think first, and write/paint/sculpt/make movies as an extension of their thought processes.

I still maintain, however, that the strongest communications retain the flavor of an author, regardless of whether they're collaboratively generated or not. This is not to say that moving away from 'putting your stamp of authorship on everything you do' is not a positive move. I suspect, though, that the very act of attempting to move beyond ego-motivated creativity may ultimately make your authorship even more distinctive and powerful. That's my current working theory, anyway.

[M]

I think what you are hinting at here is relational aesthetics and art concerned with reconstructing social connectedness.

[deborahfisher]

M, I'm most certainly not.

Relational aesthetics is lame art because it's overly concerned with doing good, and ineffective social work because it can't refrain from calling itself art. It's neither fish nor fowl.

I don't make art anymore. I do creative things with lots of different kinds of people.

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The Art manifesto has been a recurrent feature associated with the avant-garde in Modernism. Art manifestos are mostly extreme in their rhetoric and intended for shock value to achieve a revolutionary effect. They often address wider issues, such as the political system. Typical themes are the need for revolution, freedom (of expression) and the implied or overtly stated superiority of the writers over the status quo. The manifesto gives a means of expressing, publicising and recording ideas for the artist or art group—even if only one or two people write the words, it is mostly still attributed to the group name.

[Kmeelah]

I love this post. You have pretty much described the problem I've been having with contemporary art and how useless and context-less it has generally become. I've been searching for better solutions as a painter. I find myself drawn to aspects of nature, gardening, and farming, and I have a strong urge to make useful objects like clothing and housewares (but not industrial design). This is what art should really be about. And no, it doesn't really have to be called "art". It's just being aware while you're alive and interacting with what and who you live with in a non-destructive way. I'm curious, did you end up deciding not to change your blog name? I didn't see what it was before.

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