From ART PAPERS
"I don't have many new works to show you, since we were having a
revolution and were out on the streets," explains an Egyptian artist
friend of mine,
Ahmed El Shaer, when we finally meet in his studio at Art Omi
International Artists Residency. As I watch him play his video game, Nekh,
I think about
all the artists I know animating the crowds in Istanbul, Cairo,
Damascus, Tehran. ...
I picture them leaving their studios—with would-be
spectators
following them, streaming out of exhibition halls like workers leaving a
factory—until everyone assembles in the square in a mass action that
swells
up and subsides. Then it repeats in a different square, in another
country, splashing unexpectedly onto the screens of political analysts
and curators
who follow the action around the world.
"No more art!" declared Henry Flynt in 1963, in a proto-conceptualist
Fluxus lecture at Walter De Maria's loft in New York, standing slightly
stooped
under the authoritarian gaze of Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Did
Flynt include his art and his revolutionary (or even reformist) artist
pals in this
rebuttal? The search for an exit continues, and it has been recently
demarcated by Suhail Malik in his Artists Space lectures "On the
Necessity of Art's
Exit from Contemporary Art. "Where is art to go?
No comments:
Post a Comment