The Unradicality of Art
Self-centring Artists, Mediarised Crackpots & Alchemical Conductors
published
in the Column No.2 - 2008 Biennale of Sydney Critical Response, Artspace, Sydney, 2008
Upfront disclaimer: I have no interest in any claims that art can be subversive, radical or revolutionary under any terms whatsoever. Nor am I attracted to any re-cloaking of the political through the guise of the theatrical jokester, the social fool or the maverick outsider. And if you're shopping around the idea of the personal being re-invented as the political, than pass me by. So if those things matter to you - in art, in life, wherever - what follows may not.
For
this essay, only two works will be discussed from the
2008 Biennale of Sydney - arguably in more detail than
either the original works or their curatorial posture
enables. Here, very little care will be shown for the
authorial dribbling (and scribbling) which artists cough
up as signs of either their social commitment or their
professional practice. This critical posting runs far
away from (to cite a couple of the surveyor's posts from
the Biennale) the delusional self-mythologizing babble
of Joseph Beuys and his supremacist envisioning of faux-liberating
societal reconstructions, and even further from the spiteful
bluntness of Guy Debord's affected allergy to spectacularism
and his critique of consumerist entropy. Ignoring that
terrain, this slight and slippery essay will dive into
two canonical avant-garde works and follow the lateral
transcultural arcs released not by their creation but
by their production.
Specifically,
the two works to be discussed are not the products of
artists per se. The first is the David
Brinkley's Journal television segment from 1963 which documented the on-site
making and site-specific presentation of Jean Tinguely's
Study For An End Of The World No.2 (1962). The second
is the BBC televised recording of the BBC Symphony Orchestra's
2004 performance of John Cage's 4' 33" (1952). It is
in the interlocution of these works' textual sanctity
through their mediarization that their 'production of
cultural meaning' (to invoke the classical political
lexicon) is generated and dispersed with far greater
force and momentum than via the vaporous smokescreen
of artistic intent which has buffeted these artworks
across the currents of modern art history. Furthermore,
these works grant denser receptivity through their distortion
and corruption by ulterior (and in some ways, superior)
media channels than by their self-centred and self-centring
placement in something like a contemporary art biennale.
(Excerpt only currently availale online)
