“things get truly interesting when art goes beyond a reflection of the rejected choices of the dominant culture and attempts to address the actual processes that shape our contemporary environment.”
In a less fine moment, he coins the phrase “content heavy baroque post-conceptualism,” which i have deduced to mean “lots of content, mix it up, don’t really say anything specific, make sure it is complex.”
Bishop’s response seems mostly meant to specifically not fight back with Gillick’s dirty tricks (digging up old skeletons the form of baaaaaaaaaad writing that have nothing to do with the article under question) and instead bury him under a pile of long and treacherous words. But she also said some good stuff:“Rather than suggesting in that the only good art is political art, the essay
In other words, it is not for the reference to Georges Bataille that I am interested in Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument, but for the way in which this work constructs a set of positions for the viewer whose presence activates both the work’s ostensible references and addresses the conventions of experiencing socially interactive art (e.g., by foregrounding the inevitability of a disjunction between initial participants and subsequent viewers). ”
was moving toward what I understand Rosalind Krauss to mean by “recursivity” (i.e., a structure in which some of the elements of a work produce the rules that generate the structure itself).
By the way, this is the article (pdf) that started the whole kerfuffle. A good introduction to relational aesthetics, though I can’t say I agree with her reasons for not approving of the movement (it does not give us a way to criticize it, therefore it is not valid?!?). Or maybe I am missing something…
Back to Gillick, but unrelated, here is his muddled list of phrases taken from Columbia grad students as keynote speech at Frieze Art Fair. There are some good ones in the long list, and mostly it showed me that holy crap, some grad schools actually talk about actual art practice and market, rather than 30 year old books.- gap between rhetoric and practice
- rhetoric that contradicts practice
- what is perceived as idiosycratic and what is pan-culturally recognizable
- the degree to which artists mask their trajectory
- extent to which not knowing is an asset to practice
- leap of faith into a relativistic mire
- nuanced in the contemporary relativist super specific context
- the i know that you know that i know quality of work
- recognition of cultural contradictions as a starting point