Radicant Aesthetics

1. "By means of these new modes of spatializing time, contemporary art produces forms that are able to capture this experience of the world through practices that could be described as 'time-specific'--analogous to the 'site-specific' art of the 1960s--and by introducing figures from the realm of spatial displacement into the composition of its works" (79). Last week, we discussed art that needed "explanation." For example, Tsuyoshi Ozawa's Vegetable Weapon series are illuminated by the knowledge that after the photographs were taken, the "guns" were dismantled and the vegetables made into traditional dishes. Is the artwork the act of creating and then dismantling the weapon, rather than the photographs themselves? Are the photographs just remnants or artifacts of the work, a translation of time? Are these types of works the natural result of time-specificity?

2. "Until well into the 1980s, a fashion in clothing or music had time to develop before giving way to another that was equally distinct. By contrast, today's trends constitute a kind of continuous, low-amplitude motion, whose content no longer corresponds to behavioral or existential choices, as it did for the great pop culture movements of the last fifty years of the twentieth century" (80). How does the internet and the new accessibility of information play into this argument? Is this perspective distorted? Is this statement myopic, a natural result of looking at the past from the present? Or is the internet and its connective possibilities causing the acceleration and shifting of trends?

3. "But the emergence of this iconography also reflects the character of an era in which multiplication has become the dominant mental operation. After the radical subtraction of early modernism, after the analytical divisions of a Conceptual art in search of the artwork's foundations, after a postmodern eclecticism whose central figure was addition, our era finds itself haunted by the multiple" (117-18). Modernism was concerned with subtraction, of reducing the form to its essence. It is concerned with inserting objects into emptiness. In the radicant world, artists are doing the opposite. They are inserting a pause, a spot of silence into a world of chaos and endless proliferation. If the question for modernism is perhaps "what's left?" then the radicant world might counter with "what's gone?"

4. Bourriaud provides an interesting description: "At the end of the 1970s, when the modernist engine stopped, there were many who proclaimed the end of the movement itself. Thus, the postmodernists walked around the vehicle, deconstructed its mechanics, broke it down to spare parts, and formed theories regarding the nature of the breakdown before strolling off into the surrounding area and announcing that everyone was now free to walk however they liked, in whatever direction they chose. The artists under discussion here intend to remain the car, in the same direction as modernity, but while operating their vehicle according to the reliefs they encounter and with the aid of a different fuel. The erre would then be what remains of the forward motion initiated by modernism, the field that is open to our own modernity, our altermodernity" (93). What happens when this erre dissipates, when both fuel and momentum is gone? Do we remain stationary? Do we turn back? Do we get out and continue the journey by foot? Or do we hitchhike the rest?

5. ". . . Krauss sees in Broothaers's generic eagle an emblem that 'announces not the end of art but the termination of the individual arts as medium-specific. . . . Twenty-five years later, all over the world, in every biennale and at every art fair, the eagle principle functions as the new academy. Whether it calls itself installation of institutional critique, the international spread of mixed media installation has become ubiquitous'" (136-37). What is the "post-medium condition"? There seems to be more and more artists that are painters, sculptors, and photographers, artists that move fluidly between disciplines rather than identifying with one. Is this the result of a shift away from medium-specific art? Will medium-specific art be relegated to craft?

6. "While some artists seem to distance themselves from this precarious aesthetic, often they are only separated from it by their works' degree of material solidity" (90). Koons increases the material density of luxury items, Hirst highlights the fragility of life within luxurious frames, and Cattelan sets luxury against poverty. "In the context of luxury, vanity acquires new meaning. When social cynicism reaches heights like these, the artist becomes a kind of pre-Socratic philosopher, the only one who can say to the emperor, 'get out of the way, you're standing in my sun'" (91). How does Bourriaud's idea of luxury, vanity and kitsch (especially in reference to Koons, Hirst and Cattelan) compare to Heartney's Art & Popular Culture: The Warhol Effect? Are these artists semionauts navigating through a new precariousness or simply master publicists/agent provocateurs?