a small recap

July 10th, 2010
By: Paris Ionescu
Topics: Art in General, Non Art

I’m a 23 year old art writer, though presently the process, even resulting text, of writing to me is perfunctory; I will not go so far as to say not necessary or incidental since what can we do but make marks. But, in the way Zizek somewhat comically describes his method of extensive rambling note-taking followed by severe editing, eliminating writing in the process, I’m on board with that. My oft heckled at main area of research has been relational aesthetics, and I’m committed to a prolonged investigation of it’s possibilities and implications (I think it deserves more than the short-shrift people give it). But if I call it merely a jumping off point, it’s because I’m attempting to keep my eye on the future of art, the popular current blogospheric discourse about which seems to me completely blinkered by market concerns. There’s still a hell of a lot of ideas out there that deserve sincere focus, and which have zilch to do with this market conversation. And I’m especially interested in the history and future of exhibition making, both in art and non-art contexts, both in recognizable and yet-to-be-recognized forms. Yes, I’m reading Rethinking Curating, What Makes A Great Exhibition, Obrist’s book, Velthius’s book, etcetera.

BUT…

After my first research semester at the European Graduate School (a brilliant, semi-sadistic, experimental pedagogical interface in the Saastal mountains near Visp, Switzerland, where Avital Ronell is considered the most daring American philosopher, DeLanda the guy to clarify things, and Deleuze/Heidegger/Jean-Luc Nancy the entree at every communal meal, and Schopenhauerian suicide conversations happen daily – although it should be clear that Schopenhauer did not endorse suicide if only for the fact that one would be resigning to the hostility of the universe) I tend these days, perhaps predictably, (cliche?) towards more broadly and obliquely related areas that new art should/must confront. By new art I choose to toggle off the browser tab containing chronology and historical trajectory, but rather refer to an amorphous body of art practices and involved in a fractured but immediately recognizable conversastion. And if I dare to be precociously/prematurely prescriptive I think more artists and ‘art people’ ought to engage to a greater and more coherent extent this decade’s developments in continental and non-Western theory, salvageable fringe or radical impulses (a term now vague, sclerotic, bupkis), and especially ‘high science’. I use CERN’s LHC as a synecdoche for that neat stuff which is problematic since it really takes effort to get past pop quantum physics as cargo cult, even for dedicated artist/theorists (and my own technopositivist faiths). Although Bruce Sterling recently informed me in a seminar that CERN is basically a 50-year old hodgepodge of existent alongside abandoned projects with temporal shear and obsolete apparatuses held together by duct-tape at every turn, the perfect setting for a future fiction novel on media theory, maybe media punk.

Anyway just some thoughts, but here’s a link to an article I wrote on Triple Candie in NYC, which I was pleased and surprised to see they’ve kept in their press archives. http://www.triplecandie.org/About%20Press%20Calais%20antARTica%20112909.html

Some arguably relevant images I’m currently thinking about: