``The concept of capitalism for these artworks is like a machine that doesn't quite work: why it doesn't work and how it came to be is not of concern. Furthermore, these artworks apparently need not be reflexive, for their elevated position guarantees that really they're not that involved at all - that they're just social commentary (the old doctrine of l'art pour l'art comes in handy like the final defiant cry of the old aristocrat Don Juan that he is not responsible before being sucked into hell.) These artworks refuse to recognise the labour congealed in them...''
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Maybe there are better quotes, but I had trouble even reading the criticism. I had to click the thumbnails to look at the work and it displayed the required competency for an MFA so there is that for what it's worth, which is less than a couple of years at a union construction job... like I got.
I really wouldn't want to be an art student today or have much to do with whatever amounts to the `art world.' That world's own ability to perform a critical role of the bourgeoisie order evaporated so long ago I can only barely remember it, and I am not even sure about that. Maybe it was earlier, and I never knew or maybe it's a perennial problem.
``through to the modernist rejection of semblance in artworks as a resistance to appearing as the commodity world is significant here: those strategies of the modernists - fragmentation and the refusal of completion, tension without resolution, eruptions of explicit and arbitrary violence, the regression to the childish or animalistic - all of these intended towards the abolition of the way things are. Those artworks never did abolish the world, that is, their promises never fulfilled, but that they could have[,] is felt in [the] complacency with which Kafka or Tzara is read today ...''
About my last organically derived (not from books) thought about the whole problem of creating an art of critique was pretty simple. That impulse had been usurped by a well crafted but still ragged document---something that left the trace of both the made and the real. Many of the ideas just filled up my notebooks.
A kind of exhaustion set in. Nobody really gave a shit about Vietnam by then (1971). The moment had passed and I had escaped through bad government paperwork. Ah, the great battle of resistance turned on a fouled up legal bureaucracy? I mean the comedy of it was appalling.
And that means? Something I could never figure out.
``...for those of us who care about art, for those of us who think that art's critical capacities have not been exhausted and extinguished, for those of us for whom the abolition of capitalism is not a choice but a necessity, you are the enemy.''
Well, that's a bit overripe. The critical capacities have simply come from among people who sought no credentials and obviously didn't need them. All you need are the essentials of the human condition and a moment to record it. A document of somesort between the made and the real.
It's one of those things you know when you see it, because of another tautology, when it works, it works.
The stuff in this show doesn't work. So I wouldn't get too upset about it. I mean there is some very stiff competition between the Nike of Samothrace to the walls of Cairo.
CG