art as change
8 Feb
A shot from work in progress. Click for larger view.
Plus, excerpts from a couple of interviews we’ve been reading:
Time-Space-Existence: A Conversation with Wolfgang Laib (PDF)
WL: I know that some people think I am an apolitical nature romantic who sits in the meadows and takes no interest at all in social relationships. But a politician has influence today, at most he influences tomorrow, but culture and art exert influence over centuries. This sounds very naive to some people because they claim that matters are decided on entirely different levels – in politics, in economics – and art plays absolutely no role. But this is not hte case if you look at matters over longer periods of time. You can see it from the past: ultimately art and culture, not wars and confrontations, have stimulated change in people. Wars may have shoved this or that boundary or shifted the balance of power back and forth, but art and culture have carried mankind further, brought them somewhere else, and it has always been this way. I am still of the opinion that – and this may sound insanely naive – art changes the world.
When I see the best and most beautiful figures at the Metropolitan Museum, they have been scrubbed, and everything important about them has been polished away. This is what art historians consider good, the purely material form – but what is really important is gone. By contrast, there is the way that people in India treat these figures every day, how all kinds of things are poured over them, like milk and honey, and how the figures turn black from the votive lights and incense.
Dirty Toys: Mike Kelley Interviewed
MK: One of the big lies of Modernism is that certain changes in aesthetics would change culture completely, forever. Instead, I think it’s a continuous process – art may not effect lasting changes, but by changing certain representations, art changes ideas about things. If you make certain notions of behavior hip enough so that enough people want them, then the culture has to accommodate those behaviors. Things might flip back, but at least it shows that the possibility of change is there.
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