Re: join this concept

Hi Jason,

I like this from that project:
"What we should be talking about with WAPO is not artist's ideas per se, but rather the concrete, or material, manifestations of these ideas. This is the only site where originality and ownership can be effectively contested. Outright copying or forgery. Because, given the same idea, no two people will materialize a concept in exactly the same manner."
- kerry james marshall

One of the cool things about teaching is that you can give the same concept as an assignment and get back 12 different implementations of that concept. In a way it's like a lab experiment where the concept is the control and the implementation is the variable. What it reveals is that slipshod, unintentional implementation can mute or muddle a concept, whereas inspired implementation can imbue a concept with further nunances and take it to the next level. All this is true if the concept is robust enough to support such variance.

A concept that allows for (yea, even invites) variance and invention in the implementation phase is, to me, a more interesting concept than one that discourages and circumvents variance and invention in the implementation phase. The former type of concept is necessarily more dependent on invention in the implementation phase, and as such it invites all the chaos and back-and-forth media dialogue that happens in the implementation phase into itself. (Here I'm using "media" not in the McLuhan-esque sense, but in the classic sense of "artistic medium," the "stuff" with which an artist works.) To reference Milkos' spirit/matter analogy, such a concept can lead to a more integrated, holistic work. It's more risky (if the implementation sucks, the concept greatly suffers), but potentially more incarnational. The latter type of concept (what we've called "hardcore conceptualism") bypasses such risks. In so doing, It always leads to the creation of a more "gnostic" work (in that gnosticism makes a hard split between spirit and matter).

Here I mean "matter" only by analogy. I'm not talking about a physical art object (the classic new media red herring bunny trail). "New media" (immaterial bits, pixels, networks) are still analagous to "matter" in this sense because all of it is still "stuff" that pushes back during the implementation phase of the artistic process, stuff with which to be wrestled. The artist is forced to wrestle with more than simply instructional prose (the artist statement), and this forced dialogue with media results in a work that somehow "'takes into account" a world beyond the artist's own mind. It acknowledges the physical senses rather than gnostically trying to rise above them. It's not that the artist's mind is necessarily "imposed" onto the world (such post-colonial rhetorical propaganda!), but that her mind changes the world, the world changes her mind, there is a less than simply hermetic dialogue, and the resulting work of art is something more relevant to everyone else who lives in the world.

It is very easy to deem the "real world" a relativistic social construct of our own devising. Such a world view provides a ready and convenient rationalization for the artist to avoid dialoguing with media in her implementation phase. But making art that avoids wrestling with media doesn't prove one's world view any more than always staying in your house and never going outside proves that the outside world doesn't exist. Other people are still walking around outside, just as other people are still making art in dialogue with what Francis Schaeffer might have called "the world that is there." All you've proved is that you can make mind-wanking, hermetically sealed, self-referential, conceptual art.

peace,
curt

_

Jason Van Anden wrote:

> Curt,
>
> You ought to consider registering your project project with the
> "World Artistic Property Organization":
>
> http://salon-digital.zkm.de/~wapo/ep.html
>
> Jason Van Anden
> <www.smileproject.com>