Methodology

In a previous post, I mentioned the connection between Walter Benjamin's Passagen-Work (aka The Arcades Project) and something I am calling "blogstyle". I have been looking for an opportunity to put into practice a methodology similar to the one Benjamin employed for his Passagen-Work, and the chance to do that has finally arrived. The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is about to launch an exhibition this summer called "Decades of Influence" - and since I supposedly influenced the emerging digital/net art scene here in Colorado, I am making a new work for the show.

Lately, I have been looking at blogging as theory-performance. Not as an academic space for the theory of performance (though that's OK too - go for it) - but a place to play out my own theoretical performances as blogstyle poetics. I now want to filter that impulse through an "imaginary plug-in" I will call Passagen-Work, which is the name of the art work too. It will officially start going live on June 16th - that's tomorrow - at this blog address - but the first post (a remix of this one) is already up there.

Speaking of methodology, here is what Benjmain wrote in his file on methodology for Passagen-Work:

Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse - these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.

Of course, he contradicted himself in the best of possible ways and actually said a lot - and so one can imagine that I will attempt to do this too, whether I want to or not.

But I do like the idea of Benjamin's methodology being remixed with my own remixological blogstyle - and some kind of theoretical performance art project emerging out of it. The subtitle of my Passagen-Work is Theory As Remixology As Performance As Art?

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Metadata: art, blogging, blog, remix, Walter Benjamin, Denver