I like where Nathaniel Katz might be headed right now. Specifically, the title “new natives” is intriguing, as is the idea of exploring “intentional communities.”
Now: Nathaniel, of course I can never say anything nice about you without dogging you a bit, and this is really important, because you are fucking up a good idea by saying things like:
- “separation between a position taken aesthetically and a position of the person taking the aesthetic position.”
- “paradigm”
Also, you need to have a damn fine reason to inflict that skinny hairy chest on us, and you have not yet expressed a reason good enough.
So, lose the fancy inward looking talk : no-one should care about an artist’s position that is about “a position taken by an artist.” Also, make these “new natives” and “intentional communities” experiential or at least vestigial. And be daring, not abstract.
OK?
Finally, feel free to dog back, my friend! (And tell me if you’d rather I not do these public doggings on ye)
4 Comments
you know. the more i think about it, the more i like the hairy chest bit.
it makes it more real and less abstract, and lets people know for certain than you are NOT just being smart and cool.
also see nathaniel not yet responding: http://nkatz.org/blog/?p=330
well you know i should probably make a better distinction between how i use my blog platform to talk about my work and how i expect my work to be seen, but of course it doesn’t really matter that i talk about the aesthetic position taken by the artist and blah blah, because whether i was thinking about it or not, wrote about it in my blog or not, your response to the work is more to do with the work. and that is good, because i’m trying to be better at that… at recognizing when a work need not be talked about and theorized half to death (and when to use that aesthetically also…). and these intentional community projects are actually meant to be art in the art sense, which also means that i don’t have an intention to talk them to death and am really enjoying the exploration and experimentation that goes along with that. the show i put up in cali wasn’t theoretical at all, i was trying for a show… however, the ideas, well they were things i was thinking about and have been thinking about, and i do think they are interesting and relevant ideas whether or not they need to be coupled with the actual work. so i apologize if they are souring your experience of the work for the time being… aside from that though i should say that it is important as it pertains to you because a lot of what has been occupying me recently has a lot to do with a few conversations leading toward a possible collaboration from this past summer. namely about divisions and seperations and how/whether an artistic act is/need be seperated/differentiated from any other act in everyday life. as the bulk of my time in colombia was spent working in a community on a project that could easily be classified as social work, but that we chose as artists to call social practice, those thoughts were quite often in my mind. and it was important and fascinating to be in this process in collaboration with other artists who didn’t necesarily share the same position as i. and to reconcile some of that i went back to the studio to work it out on my own, which is where the intentional community projects are coming from and the questions about sincerity. more directly about new natives… i FEEL the language of desire for community.
so… i post this on your blog. i like keeping these going on publicly…
stop thinking about art.
just think about what you’re doing.
or:
just do what you are doing.
stop thinking about art.
just, stop.