Harm Lux
Today's art is too much a part of modern, euro-centric society, too involved in the system of everyday values controlling our lives. The pressure of the market, with its permanent stress and demand for output doesn't leave artists time to rethink their positions and radically question society's terms of existence from a "distant point of non-integration". Yet art needs that distance from generic trade to retain its significance in the future. Harm Lux pleads for conditions, in which, without the pressure of immediate output, artists have time to develop completely new forms of art. Artists, he says, have to reflect human behaviour for long periods, carefully and patiently, until a new "script" is born. To play their role of questioning society's norms, artists need space where they can work without being subject to public opinion and prevailing norms like efficiency, speed or profit. If future artists want their art to have an effect on us, they ought to work slowly and in a concentrated manner, disregarding accepted positions and norms of efficiency, striving for sensitivity and tenderness, respecting the incomprehensible in those whose culture one cannot understand. Harm Lux pleads for a change in the system of art funding. A much greater part of available ressources should be given to young artists' long-term projects who are not supported by galleries and other art institutions. Such a program would be one of the essential means of gaining ground for art which proceeds slowly as well as being attentive to slow processes, open for the cross-over of cultures and behaviour, art that moves us and inscribes itself on our long-term memory. |
