Friday, March 10, 2006

Aesthetic Potential

Obviously there's no progress in art. Progress toward what? The avant-garde is a convenient propaganda device, but when it wins the war everything is avant-garde, which leaves us just about where we were before. The only sure thing is that we move, and as we move we leave things behind - the way we felt yesterday, the way we talked about it. Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back. Art consists of the forms we leave behind in our effort to keep up with ourselves, define ourselves, create ourselves as we move along.
- Ron Sukenick, from "The New Tradition"
Nothing has been said.
- Isidore Ducasse, from "Poesies"
Given the above, where to start?

The blank white screen, of course.

As always.

Forget those who say it has all been done before. They have already given up on their aesthetic potential, and yours too.

This blank white space I woke up to this morning is brand new and anxiously awaits my aesthetic hacktivism. It's a shared space of networked creation that we can collaboratively generate in asynchronous realtime.

The nomadic net artist, whose journey is full of detours, eternal returns, cyberpsychogeographical drifting, and sudden shifts of movement that blaze an unintentional path toward the formal manifestation of their artist presence as a hyperimprovisational work-in-process, is far from haphazard in his crablike movement across the sands of Time. In fact, there is a rigorous logic to the nomadic net artist's journey as endless movement.

To endure. To suffer patiently without yielding. To lucidly wander while accumulating stylistic strength. To continually build your aesthetic fitness so that you can enhance the probabilities of your staying power!


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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In the spirit of fostering discussion about how to apply critical standards to 'net artists, I need to ask:

Is memory -- of our own past(s), of others' pasts, of creative efforts that have gone before us -- a liability? Or just problematic? Or a way to allow us the knowledge of just how traveled our potential path may be/have been? (Am I just begging this question? Is it THAT obvious?)

Are all aesthetics equal? (yours, mine, Cory Arcangel, Ann Coulter, Raggedy Andy, Jay Bennish, Leni Reifenstahl?) And if all aesthetics are equal, is there any need to differentiate value of one from the next? Should we just spend our days searching for random Web pages and grooving on what comes up? Explain.

3:16 PM  
Blogger Professor VJ said...

See my new post "Memories Are More Source Material" for a response...

10:58 AM  

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