I heard on the radio that what makes people most happy is to socialize with other people. This topic was discussed over the kitchen table with some dear friends visiting for the weekend. In America there is no third space between home and work. Or rather the third space of America is the shopping mall. This is hardly a neutral or undifferentiated space. It's not the commons or the town square. It's concentrated shopping. The structure is advertising-automobile-shopping. Perhaps that's why so many artist are trying to create relational groups and social installations. Perhaps they sense that the triumph of consumerism means the end of any free time or free place. The problem is that most artists struggle to be individuals and are different from their social group even if their group is essentially a consumer focus group.
"...and this is true of art as well: the grand utopia of art, the great illusion, the great transcendence of art materialized everywhere. Art has thoroughly entered reality.Some say that art is dematerialized. The exact opposite is true: art today has thoroughly entered reality. It is in museums and galleries, but also in trash, on walls,in the street, in the banality of everything that has been made sacred today without any further debate. The aesthetization of the world is complete. Just as we now have a bureaucratic materialization of the social,a technological materialization of sexuality, a media and advertizing materialization of politics, we have semiotic materialization of art. " Jean Baudrillard - The Conspiracy of Art
Some people are touting the death of the artist. This is where everyone is creative. No more need for exceptional individuals. Only organizers, only curators. We can all work together. No one is special. That’s because we’re all special because we're all the same.
Yeah right.
I bumped into a friend of mine, he's a painter but he does high end cabinets to make a living. He lives in a tiny apartment in the Lower East Side. He gave up painting because he couldn't afford the rent on a studio. Now he makes his images on computer. They’re the same but not in paint. I guess he didn't hear about the death of the artist yet.
George Bush and his gangstas. This country is under a dark cloud. It's because of that neo-fascist.
This rant was one of many early peformances I did. This was for a video "group show" by Davidson Gigliotti called Chant Acapella. It's in the collection of the MoMA. Among the other participants in the tape were Julia Heyward, Laurie Anderson and Charlemagne Palestine. I also did some situationists disruptions in a fake Marxist discussion group called The Fox hosted by Joseph Kosuth. One performance was called code C Subworker a sort of sci-fi prose piece about a blind elevator operator.