Boris Belay
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art? ("Please keep in mind that the ANTHOLOGY OF ART is collecting franc, singular and radical positions")
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art? ("Please keep in mind that the ANTHOLOGY OF ART is collecting franc, singular and radical positions")
In the context of contemporary art - in that context -, can one have a vision of a yet unknown art? And can this characterization "in the context ..." allow for the unknown of an unknown art form? Why this characterization? You ask for frank, singular and radical positions, you ask them from practitioners of art on one side and theorists on the other - and then you ask that they remain within the context of contemporary art ... or do you? I certainly won't. I don't have a vision of a yet unknown art, perhaps because I am not a visionary, my insights do not come as illuminations, yet I have a critical sense, and it's very critical of characterizations and disciplines in general. I'll accept art as a discipline, but only if it's able to invest its furthest reaches. I'll take art as an ethos, as a guiding principle for one's life, over art as a discipline, any day. In fact, I try to take art as an ethos everyday of my life. It sounds good and fine, but it isn't like that everyday - as life, it can be downright painful, depressing, revolting, useless ... . But of course, it is exhilarating and liberating - liberating in a sense that also means demanding. These two sides may explain the drive toward characterization, sectorization and discipline, but if there is one thing I can see in the future of art - if there has to be any - it's the need to trash, plain and simple, characterization, sectorization, disciplines and consorts. A yet unknown art? Of course! YES! We need it - we need THEM, badly. We need an art that breathes as art: not as new or old, not as practitioner or theorist, not as envisionable. Sorry to insist on phraseology - our shared phraseology, here - but we need to begin struggling against our shared impulse to limit ourselves. A yet unknown art ridicules the notion of context - particularly the notion of a contemporary art that we still pretend we can grasp. Let's begin with this simple question - are we talking only about the visual arts? How far out are we willing to go? A yet unknown art - and now I will start answering the question in a way that is essentially personal, singular, and engages only me - means first and foremost not knowing where I'm going. It means least of all calling myself an artist as if I had shat art yesterday. Is Manzoni's canned shit art? I don't know, and the label doesn't help us. But it's stuck with us because it stepped right into the question, with both feet, and remains wide open as the question: "But, is it art?" Duchamp's urinal was just that - a urinal that revealed the idiotic pretense that art needed no jury to be art. The intent was a good one: let's not judge the quality of art, it'll speak for itself. Yet the result remains: the urinal has become a moment in the history of art because it forced good intentions to face the difficulty of judgement and engagement. Is that urinal art? Any immediate response has understood nothing about Duchamp, and why Duchamp is - perhaps - the context of contemporary art. Eighty five years later. In the context of Duchamp's moment - a response to Modern Art, itself only understandable as a development of Occidental Modernity, beginning some five hundred years ago -, I find myself suffocated by minuscule categories. Do I want to do "video art"? No. I'm interested in video because it is less expensive than film, and that gives me a little more financial independence. But video is also limited by this cheapness, insofar as cheap video equipment comes out of the consumerist market. This does not only determine the features, usability, ergonomics, and image quality, it also utterly confuses the line between art and consumerist digital by-product. BUT THIS CONFUSION IS A REAL OPPORTUNITY TO SEIZE, IT IS WHAT LIBERATES ART BY PROVIDING NEW LIMITS TO DEFINE ITSELF BY. A yet unknown art lies in this confusion, in this pushing around characterizations, in this kicking in categories so they FORM differently. For, despite what the book market says, the novel form is exhausted - as is its filmic extension in ninety-five percent of what is actually distributed in cinemas: as dead as circulating capital, as stimulating to the human mind, as creative as a bank note. But categories won't disappear, they're the necessary stuff of commerce, i.e., logical and rationalized interaction between entities. It's just that categories have little to do with art, except to limit it, except for the accountants and managers of the art-world - and they're numerous, beginning with those who, this way or that, manage their art-careers. A yet unknown art is, I believe, something one worries about in particular circumstances, ours for instance - a reactionary period in a culture that worries about its own exhaustion but doesn't dare even to speak of that possibility, preferring to puff itself up outrageously to hide it. Some people do dare to ask a synonymous question - what would be a yet unknown art? But this courage points to anguish: will there be a yet unknown art? Will we be able to have one, or rather, will we allow ourselves to have one - precisely as we try to define it, which may just be the worst thing to obtain it, and, at least, shows how insecure we are about that prospect? ... Will there be a yet unknown art? Certainly. Will we be able to enjoy it - even to recognize it? Hopefully not without a tremendous hesitation. This yet unknown art, I will not seek it in the video I shoot, I will not seek it in texts I write, nor in the esthetic criticism I offer, nor in the stage experimentations I participate in, nor in the political activism I engage in ... . All these activities could categorize me as this or that in the art-world ... thereby keeping me from the yet-unknown that I seek. It may or may not come - and would I even know? This response - from a theorist - probably sounds frustrated, but tomorrow or rather as soon as I have finished a job meant to insure decent living conditions, I will go out and get back to doing all of the things I think may help me add something to a still unknown art. Boris Belay Paris |
