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: David Crosby, a necessary evil


t:
my problem with curt's crit of art is simple. it's based only on his personal taste. 'is it good'... compared to what?

c:
that's the function of critical dialogue, work by work. whereby i explain what's good about a piece and what misses about a piece, and back and forth we go. we won't land on THE right answer, but we'll land more or less near something, and we'll have learned a bit in the process. you and i have had just such a critical dialogue previously about mr. peppermint's work. of all the text that gets posted around here, i'm always surprised at how little of it involves actual piece-specific critical dialogue.

art crit needn't be as "absolutely reletavistic" as David Crosby = Michelangelo's David. it's dicey but do-able.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: ART, Inc. necessary evil


I agree Tim. Clarity and complexity don't exclude each other any
more than simple = minimalistic. My comment below was meant
specifically for philosophers. I might not even apply that criterion
to artists. I haven't really thought about it. So in that sense, i
am granting artists more license.

In the person of McLuhan, I even find an idea man who most clearly
conveys his ideas by NOT being overt. But his probes (pithy
abstractions) actually make him more "clear" in the end, that is if
you can "dig" his method.

McLuhan on the McLuhan dialectic mojo: "You have not studied Joyce or
Baudelaire yet, or you would have no problems in understanding my
procedure. I have no theories whatever about anything. I make
observations by way of discovering contours, lines of force, and
pressures. I satirize at all times, and my hyperboles are as nothing
compared to the events to which they refer."

But he's the rare excetion. More often than not, to be misunderstood
is not be great; it's simply to be misunderstood.

peace,
curt

At 3:33 PM -0800 11/20/02, Michael Szpakowski wrote:
>of course the notion that artists should be 'as
>complex as necessary but no more so' or ' they should
>make their texts as easy to read as
> possible without
> sacrificing the meaning they are trying to convey.'
>or however one chooses to put it, begs a lot of very
>interesting questions about what exactly constitutes
>artistic 'clarity'. I don't think a definition of this
>would exclude complexity , depth or richness all of
>which qualities seem to me to be pretty well
>*defining* in terms of art.
>I just got home from a performance of Heiner Goebbel's
>'Hashirigaki' ( Brits out there -it's at the Barbican
>till Saturday -buy or steal a ticket - it's
>stunning!)and both of us who went agreed that we felt
>the the piece achieved an enormous level of clarity
>but without having a clear narrative & with a real
>depth of light and shade and very wide and complex
>cultural references from Brian Wilson to kabuki ( and
>which tellingly in this context never came over as
>clever-clever or showing off)
>I'd have to do a lot of thinking to articulate why I
>can justify that feeling of clarity but I'm convinced
>I could. I'm convinced thee are hard won but
>relatively clear words that would explain this
>feeling.
>As for philosophers Curt - don't let them off the
>hook! -actually they and politicians and cultural
>commentators and sociologists &c&c should be granted
>*less* licence than artists in my view.
>best
>michael
>
>
>--- "t.whid" <twhid@mteww.com> wrote:
> >
> > On Tuesday, November 19, 2002, at 05:22 PM, curt
> > cloninger wrote:
> >
> > > t:
> > > should philosophers make their texts easy to read
> > so that the general
> > > public can understand it?
> > >
> > > c:
> >
> > >
> >
> > hah! can't argue with that. of course a writer
> > should attempt to be
> > clear. artists have the privilege of being ambiguous
> > tho.
> >
> > + pre.live.life.net.post.real.social.sensitive.art.?
> > -> post: list@rhizome.org
> > -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> > -> subscribe/unsubscribe:
> > http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> > -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> > +
> > Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set
> > out in the
> > Membership Agreement available online at
>http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>
>=====
>http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/
>
>__________________________________________________
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DISCUSSION

The lyfe so short, The crafte so long to lerne


a word on flaming:

In a letter to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, with whom he
had a long friendship, McLuhan argued that in the modern electronic
environment, it is inadvisable to be coherent. "Any moment of arrest
or stasis permits the public to shoot you down." McLuhan preferred to
make his rebuttals in the form of a quip. As he explained to Trudeau:
"I have yet to find a situation in which there is not great help in
the phrase: 'You think my fallacy is all wrong?' It is literally
disarming, pulling the ground out from under every situation! It can
be said with a certain amount of poignancy and mock deliberation."
(Wired, Jan. 1996)

also (don't try this at home):
http://www.museotamayo.org/inmerso/infomera/batallas/superbadVSredsmoke.htm

I've always wanted to use this one:
"Your request is not unlike your lower intestine -- stinky, and
loaded with danger."
- ace ventura

In the heat of battle, instead of using words, try linking instead.
So for instance, if somebody thrusts: "you wouldn't know your
baudeliare from your rimbaud!" you might parry something like:
http://www.skumpy.com/eha/iron.html

"You misogynistic okz!dental pig!" might warrant:
http://www.neuralust.com/~curt/scott/baio.jpg

don't be afraid to resort to third grade classics like, "I know you
are, but what am I?" "Infinity! Infinity!" and the tried and true
favorite, "Your mother." Millions of petulant six year-olds can't be
wrong!

Finally, whatever you do, NEVER EVER let them have the last word!
Carreer, family, and personal hygeine be damned.

[This message has been brought to you in part by a generous grant
from the Pee Wee Herman vs. Francis Huxtable Foundation. "Shhh, I'm
listening to reason!!!"]

We now return you to your regularly scheduled program...
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DISCUSSION

Re: ART, Inc. necessary evil


>side A, "professionalism sucks the life out of art; it >should be done with passion"; side B,
>"without an audience (aka art world) art is functionally >meaningless."
>personally i don't see the two as exclusive.

So art can both require an audience and still have the life sucked out of it. I can't argue with that. Actually, I do agree that the "for profit" vs. "for passion" dichotomy is largely a bogey. Is the work good? That's the question I can't escape.

Some "for passion" work is bad and some "for profit" work is bad, but often for different reasons. The "for passion" work will tend to be bad because it's ill-considered, hastily made, and unwittingly exploring areas that have already been well-explored. The "for profit work" can tend to be bad because it is narrow, micro-scene-dependent, contrived to sell, relying on the punch of its context rather than the punch of its craft.

>if one is making work that
>has it's roots in the history and tradition of the 'art >world' (aka ART, Inc.) then one needs an educated >audience to appreciate the
>work. the average web surfer (esp an USAian one) >isn't going to have experiences necessary to >understand or appreciate some work; even something >as old hat as abstract expressionism!

This pretty much sticks right in my craw. The roots in art history you're talking about go back to Duchamp. Are you in dialogue with stuff back to Bosch? It seems you are rooted in a veneer.

I know plenty of people who are blown away by Arvo Part or Steve Reich who grew up on the Beatles and T.Rex. They don't have to read the liner notes or take a course in minimalism to be impacted by the actual work. Because it's good work. And Charlie Parker dug Bartok. If I have to be smart and schooled to be impacted by your work, how good is your work? Is the goal of art to speak to humanity, or to speak only to the relatively few people who have been filtered through the thin pipe of contemporary art education?

>go to the Met and stand next to the huge, awesome >"Autumn Rhythm (Number 30)" and count how many >assholes say, "I could do that." fuck that
>audience, i don't need 'em.)

so people either like what you like or they are uninformed redneck idiots. Might there be a third class of people who get it but still don't like it. Or does one's dislike of a piece of work defacto prove that they just don't get it?

Tim, I'm not dissing your personal decision to pursue the sale of your art. To do that would be to dis your chosen lifestyle, and one's lifestyle is a personal issue. Everybody's different, so the way you choose to make your money is up to you.

My take on it is this -- everybody needs a place to fail. My life would be poor indeed if there was nothing I did that was just for the pure pleasure of it. If when working on one of my sites I was always thinking in the back (or front) of my mind, "is this new enough? will this get press?" then I would have to find another hobby [to me, "hobby" is not a diminutive but rather a sacred term].

http://www.playdamage.org and http://www.neuralust.com/~curt/ are ongoing personal public experiments. What I learn there gets applied to future work. The advantage is, I can fail in public. It's open source. It doesn't matter. if my work isn't in dialogue with anything else out there, it doesn't matter. I don't have to push my work (or hire someone to push my work). I don't have to fit it into anything. There's no temptation for me to make my work anything other than what I want it to be.

Another advantage is that, on this list, I can lose face without losing financial worth. If someone influential disses you and your work, or C.P. and his work, or Valery and his work, y'all stand to lose future customers. Your brand value is decreased. If someone influential disses me and my work, oh well.

on the record, I like your printer tree.

peace,
curt
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