Judith Rodenbeck
Of many possibilities here is one which seems already to have come to pass: that art, ever more successfully reified, has finally become inextricable from fashion and the public confessional - this, perversely, is the last victory of Maoism. And even as academia rails against commodification and issues dire warnings about the protean nature of the commodity form it produces more and more unreadable theory and more and more uninteresting art. The contradictions, that is to say, have been successfully deepened by our own "Shining Path" of experts. Which is worse, then, the spectacularized production of spectacle theory, or the "artification" of "lifestyle" and "nesting", of personalized mobile phones and designer DNA? The word "art" only took on the sense in which we (nostalgically) use it at the beginning of the Enlightenment; in this short history it describes an autonomous, self-critical, essentially cognitive object or activity. An as yet unknown art, then, could easily be conceived in these terms as an inversive, negative or recursive possibility: an object or activity already produced for which there is either no critical language, even no definition as "art", with which to approach, process, categorize, and embalm the work. A new understanding of reflective cognitive practices inflected by, say, communal music-making - hocketing, listening, corporeal resonance - might require that we pass from one to the next the activating "art coefficient". An art that reconsiders consumption the way cooking reconsiders eating; a revitalized tongue. An art that doesn't sell itself - or anything else. An art that gives up the bloody prose of faux analytic purity, that opens its veins. An art of mayflies and locusts. An art that reinvents itself in the hands of each individual who encounters it. An art of gracious dialogue. An art of knots and air. A friend, a photographer, tells me about the tiny island nation of Tuvalu, in the South Pacific. Tuvalu, he says, is sinking into the ocean. Tuvalu is being abandoned by its citizens to the rising waters of the Pacific. The seas are swelling, and we, with our terminator neoprimitive accessories and our optimized, globalized theoretical ascesis, are implicated. He was going to go there to take damning pictures of it, of the island and its disappearance, an environmental catastrophe inextricably linked to melts and exhaust, to bitstreams and tanning booths entire oceans away. Tuvalu has two primary sources of income: since its net address ends in ".TV", selling usage of this address to entertainment conglomerates has proven enormously lucrative; and since the nation has one of the last and least-used telephone codes it licenses use of this code to multinational corporations. "Oh", I said, "It's like registering your boat in Panama. Only there's no boat. And soon there'll be no geographic Panama". The photographer cancelled his trip; there's nothing there, he said. But I'm waiting to see what - or who - gets smuggled off with the cargo. Judith Rodenbeck New York |
