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regarding survival : questions 4-6
Is your art functioning in your community or beyond?
I guess my answer to this question hinges upon how one defines "community." Does it strictly mean "local community"? Or is it accurate to speak of "literary communities" or "experimental music communities" or "Internet communities?"
It's hard, actually, to say whether I feel like my art is "functioning" effectively in any of these—sometimes I feel like I am working very much in isolation. For instance, although Chris and I fairly frequently distribute some of our sonic output to other people making / circulating / reviewing experimental music, we rarely get even a perfunctory response. This leads me to feel that the work barely "functions" at all in that community. Regardless of whether it circulates in / is recognized by the community, the process of working on music remains incredibly rewarding, both personally and artistically—I do think, however, that it would be easier to "survive" if the work received more response. I'd enjoy being able to participate more fully in the community as an artist, rather than just as a spectator.
What happens when grassroots art spreads to large venues?
The arguments about "selling out" have been amply discussed to death elsewhere. The argument about, say, the grassroots art of Language poetry moving into the "large venue" of the academy is marginally more interesting in that the exact specifics are relatively fresh, but really it's a rehash of the same sets of pros and cons. These don't need to be reiterated here.
How do we respond to the continual rip-off of our research and our art by commercial interests?
I'm not sure precisely what Oliveros means here, as most art produced today ends up serving the interest of some commercial enterprise, even if that commercial enterprise is an indie record label being run out of someone's bedroom. As Ron Silliman points out, all books of poems are commodities (although not all poems or all PDFs) and the same goes for all audio CDs (although not all music or all MP3s). I'm going to guess that she means things more like corporations appropriating and watering down an art movement (say Surrealism) in order to make interesting advertisements for shoes.
One possible response is to focus on producing art in forms that are resistant to easy appropriation. A preliminary list might include works that utilize duration, process, or context as key components: a long-form drone will never properly "fit" within a 30-second commercial; an artwork that decays through time is difficult to treat as an ordinary commodity. Much contemporary poetry might also be found on that list, as it resists meaning effectively enough to be essentially useless to those who would "rip it off." And let's not forget the Dada gesture, which has survived for nearly a century largely without having been appropriated by commercial interests.
Another way of looking at it, though, might be to realize that commercial interests are currently paying many people to "research" new visual and cultural strategies, in the hope of finding ways to stand out in a field crowded with information: who among us can't think of a music video or a magazine ad that hasn't contained "avant-garde" elements more striking than those in, say, a more "grassroots" piece of culture such as a student film? Why not counter-appropriate: rip off the "artistic" research funded by the corporate dollars? (Adbusters embodies only the most straightforward realization of the many striking effects possible here; the more recent work of Ryan McGuinness presents a perhaps more "artistic" direction that these sorts of explorations could take.)
Coming up on the final three. |
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
10:19 AM
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