Jon Ippolito
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Re:Art, design, and entertainment - 2006/05/25 13:41
Well, isn't that the point of an avant-garde--to lead us far afield? I think there is general interest in all three of our papers to look beyond the traditional confines of disciplines like art.
That said, I suspect that Steve and Ned are more sanguine than Joline and I about entanglement in systems like commerce. While we argue that today's art should and can be found in nontraditional settings--even commercial and military ones--that's not the same as saying they are primarily commercial or military applications. Art is a fragile thing; its functions are easily co-opted or eclipsed by other imperatives.
Critics wax philosophical about the way Peter Halley’s brightly colored compositions mirror prison architecture, silicon-chip design, and suburban tract-home planning; it’s possible that some collectors of his work even slog through the two-hundred-page book of his collected essays so they can spout the same deconstructionist vocabulary when describing the work to their friends. You can bet, however, that their friends just see the pleasing geometric abstraction hanging above the couch as a decorous financial investment. Likewise, the artist collective Big Room creates TV commercials with subliminal references to politics. But how subversive are such references if the average consumer reads them simply as marketing?
A rare artist who manages to dance with commerce is Oliviero Toscani, a photographer whose in-your-face political images have turned magazine ads and bus placards from advertising into agitprop. His ads for the "United Colors of Benetton" marketing campaign feature images of ten-story-high condoms to increase AIDS awareness and three beef hearts labeled ‘WHITE BLACK YELLOW’ to reveal the absurd dynamics of racism. I'm a bit hard pressed to think of an artwork that survives a military context, but maybe Anne-Marie Schleiner's CounterStrike intervention Velvet Strike qualifies.
The etymology of "transvergence" is "to bend across." The important question for transvergent culture seems to be how far you can cross before you break under the strain of someone else's agenda.
Cheers,
jon
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