curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
Discussions (1122) Opportunities (4) Events (17) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

Re: Re: how to talk like a situationist


ryan:
What makes
> monosyllabic communication more valuable and direct?

curt:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lab404/28606.html

ryan:
The current
> administration seems pretty adept at using small words to mislead.

curt:
and Hitler was adept at using microphones and posters to mislead. Your logic here is faulty.

DISCUSSION

how to talk like a situationist


http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/274

this excerpt seems particularly applicable for RAW regulars:
Keep your group very small and exclusive -- but take it for granted
that every man, woman, and child in the Western Hemisphere is
intimately familiar with your work, even if no more than ten people
actually are.

regarding tip #2, cf:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lab404/14178.html

_

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: republican art


Rob:
> Conveying one's concerns is not a sufficient measure of work (I don't
> think you're saying it is, but some people do use this as a metric).
> It's possible to fail in that and still produce good work.

curt:
totally agreed (I love Black Sabbath's "Children of the Grave" not because I can hear Ozzy's concern coming through the lyrics, but because the song rocks). it's just a more germane metric than usual when critiquing political art that seeks to motivate some specific/didactic tactical viewer resonse. And (as you point out vis the Chapmans) it's always more germane than the biographical perspective of the artist. I assume Barthes would concur.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: republican art


hi tim,

how am i defending that dumb painting? i don't even reference it. it's obviously moronic pap. i'm responding to jim's question.

the relevant issue is never whether an artist cares about her work (by definition she at least cares enough to put something out there); but rather, how well is she able to convey her concern through her work? I think Doron's piece risks an earnestness that a lot of recent contemporary political artwork shies away from. It is a high-degree-of-difficulty dive in a pool full of low-degree-of-difficulty, pot-shot dives. It stands for something rather than merely standing against something.

"I hate to see your broken face
A lazy life of fade-aways
A fashionable cynicism
The poison they want you to drink
Oh no, man, that's so easy
Oh no, man, that's too easy."
- stereolab

peace,
curt

_

t.whid wrote:

> there is no defense for that painting. it's propaganda painted by an
> idiot. your insinuation that other artists -- ones you would probably
> categorize as post-modern -- don't care about their work is simply
> insulting.
>
>
>
> On Sep 6, 2004, at 12:16 AM, curt cloninger wrote:
>
> > This video by doron golan gets props from me simply because the
> > musician is so painfully earnest, and the director's approach to
> his
> > subject is equally open and earnest:
> > http://www.the9th.com/04/revolution/
> >
> > It's risky to unabashedly care. Very not post-modern. No nudge.
> No
> > wink. No reverse spin. Nothing to fall back on.
> >
> > "a smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
> > you said that irony was the shackles of youth"
> > - mr. stipe
> >
> > _
> >
> > Jim Andrews wrote:
> >
> >> such work indicates a failure of compassion and understanding and,
> >> instead,
> >> celebrates barbarism, is easily identifiable as political
> propaganda.
> >> so
> >> too, on the other hand, can (for instance) anti-republican art fall
> >> into a
> >> different but related category of political propaganda. how then to
> >> create
> >> work which escapes both categorizations but does not simply avoid
> the
> >> political?
> > +
> > -> post: list@rhizome.org
> > -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> > -> subscribe/unsubscribe:
> http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> > -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> > -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> > +
> > Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> > Membership Agreement available online at
> http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
> >
> >
> >
> --
> <t.whid>
> www.mteww.com
> </t.whid>
>

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: republican art


This video by doron golan gets props from me simply because the musician is so painfully earnest, and the director's approach to his subject is equally open and earnest:
http://www.the9th.com/04/revolution/

It's risky to unabashedly care. Very not post-modern. No nudge. No wink. No reverse spin. Nothing to fall back on.

"a smile like the cartoon, tooth for a tooth
you said that irony was the shackles of youth"
- mr. stipe

_

Jim Andrews wrote:

> such work indicates a failure of compassion and understanding and,
> instead,
> celebrates barbarism, is easily identifiable as political propaganda.
> so
> too, on the other hand, can (for instance) anti-republican art fall
> into a
> different but related category of political propaganda. how then to
> create
> work which escapes both categorizations but does not simply avoid the
> political?