"There’s a word I really like: “art-washing”. It describes the way contemporary art – because it’s perceived as an innovative force, the bearer of a critical spirit and, in fact, “freedom” – is being used by autocratic regimes to accumulate symbolic power and show some degree of openness. In the Gulf States there are enclaves with unrestricted freedom of expression – galleries and museums – surrounded by cities where it is banned. Then there are transnational corporations that practice soft-power: think of George Soros and his Open Society foundation that uses art in Eastern Europe to promote democracy and a cosmopolitan and progressive society, but by cultivating consumerist values. It’s impossible to make clear-cut judgments: Soros is doing important work, but bundling it together with a specific capitalist structure has some questionable features. The real difference from the CCF is not ideological, but transparent: people know where the money comes from. The whole of bourgeois culture, from a Marxist perspective, is art-washing: it constructs an idea of “humanity” and “progress” to conceal the dark sides of the system of production. The modernist idea of history – and probably this discussion would be even more fruitful in architecture than painting – was to find new roles for art, to change the world. Today, critical art is a way of producing cultural literacy. This is why institutions are fundamental. Artists produce their work in the history of which they’re a part. Because they’re not agents of amnesia but promoters of a knowledge that translates indirectly into political awareness. And we know how greatly this awareness is essential today to everyone, and not just to identifiable and classifiable minorities or identities." Anselm Franke @Domus Web.
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"Every exhibition is one possibility surrounded by many other possibilities which are worth being explored." - Marcel Broodthaers.
“Here is what we have to offer you… confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.” "It was Duchamp who taught him the cardinal curatorial rule: in the organization of exhibitions, the works must not stand in the way." "I want to create a language, I don't care with what means or how [...] I feel a fantastic inner freedom, an absolute lack of formal compromise: the concern to create something that evolves in a line from here to there doesn't exist any more: I think that the greatest ambition is still to search for a way for knowledge, or ways of knowledge, through spontaneous acts of creation [...]
the process of diluting questions proposed by creative artists is escalating, especially in Brazil, where there is always connivance, the 'adjustment' of ideas and concepts, in the most surrealistic way: and everything is reduced to that idea of dilution and, in short, to toal ignorance of the obstacles overcome: intellectual 'seriousness' is, in truth, superficial, and it is used in defence of ideas that are no longer valid, pure speculations: they are vain; there are cool people making things, others planning things, others miding their own business: there are lots of people diluting and mythologizing everything, and they don't fool me: in my opinion there is one kind of creative activity: in this world it would be considered 'underground': the marginality of creative activities is given and used as a foregrounding element: I would like to call my current activity, altogether, 'underground': it won't be displayed, but done; its place in time is open." extract of The London Experience: Underground Hélio Oiticica, 1970 |