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: Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Max,

I don't read Heidegger as being against communication or social relationships. He's suspicious of passing down received world views and language without trying to get at what was originally revelatory about them. I'm not a Heidegger disciple or anything. I'm just finding a lot of his observations useful in terms of the practice I'm pursuing.

As far as world peace, that would be nice. I doubt the problem is that we are too passionate and committed. My guess is that the opposite is true. I have my doubts that a dispassionate relativism is going to lead to peace. The problem is not that I believe something passionately with which you disagree. The problem arises when I treat you discourteously, regardless of what we believe. I don't have to stop believing passionately in order to treat you courteously. Indeed, the power and humility to treat you courteously may well come from my passionate belief.

As far as making art that leads to world peace, I can't see that far down the road. I can try to make art that awakens someone to the wonder of their being in the world, or I can try to make art that tricks out a heretofore unrealized way of being in the world, or I can try to make art that plays in the world and in so doing thanks God for his gift of being, but there's no gaurantee that any of those results will lead to world peace.

Hope you are doing well up there.

Curt

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Max wrote:

..Thus there's the problem of Heidegger not liking communication and social
relationships, but other postmodernists were also against these things as
being naive or shallow. Barthes for example was against the idea of
communication between people. I on the other hand view the main part of
human history as the history of broken communication as per
www.geocities.com/genius-2000/OedipusAndHamlet.html, which I wrote in 1993
before reading Habermas in 1994 incidentally.

Yet sometimes breaking communication is the only way to prevent the horde
from burning the city to the ground, as you might say China has to do in
sanitizing the web there. Breaking communication is also the only way to
overcome false confidence in the power of communication to do everything.
Some things require internal individual contemplation and transformation, or
just prolonged effort, or even war (the essence of which is deception as Sun
Tzu states).

The utopian vision that I would like to see is one where a new
art-historical period (inclusive of literature, as Romanticism and Modernism
were) reduces conflict levels based on expendable ethnic hatred and "men
acting as wolves to one another" (Benjamin Franklin) and simultaneously
enhances security against a global total war while maintaining "a balance of
power that favors freedom" (Condoleeza Rice).

Yet it is far from easy or likely that such a thing is possible when you
look at the dissension among people based on religion, pride, money, being
high on themselves, pretentious hogwash, desparing rage caused by poverty or
other trauma, etc. Still, that's the goal, modulated of course by due
caution and prudence etc. Plus a day job. :)

Best regards,

Max Herman
The Genius 2000 Network
DVDs available now
www.geocities.com/genius-2000

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: is art useless?


Hi Geert,

Here is a paper I wrote this year for my MFA program. It is in explicit or implicit dialogue with Heidegger throughout. Don't feel obliged to read or respond (it's 25 pages), but maybe you'll find it useful:
http://lab404.com/articles/studio_research.pdf

Currently, "What is art good for?" is leading me to answer: "Art is good for freeing things up to be good at what they are good for." Which leads to the question, "What are things good for?" Which begs the question, "What are things for at all?" Which begs the question, "What are things?" I appreciate Heidegger's understanding that things gather the fourfold (earth, sky, mortals, and divinities), because it opens things up to God and humans and the world instead of simply reducing humans to mere things (or quasi-objects perpetuated by sub-networks of mere things). Jean-Luc Marion sees things as gifts that are given out of God's goodness. These gifts act as invitations to return thanks to God. So things become vehicles of a relationship between humans and God.

Breifly stated, art can be a way of using things (light and sound included) to return thanks to God (less in a symbolic, mimetic, Michelangelo way and more in a phenomenological La Monte Young way), and letting things use me to release them to return thanks to God. Meister Eckhart says, “[Every creature] reach[es] up to my understanding as if to get understanding through me. I alone prepare creatures to return to God.”

cf: Heidegger's "Building Dwelling Thinking" and "The Thing." Also Peter Schwenger's book, "The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects."

Hope you are doing well.

Curt

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Geert Dekkers wrote:

Art isn't useless, we just don't know what its for :)

Incidentally, I'm reading Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art at
the moment. I'd be interested in knowing what the list members use as
a reference for a wider and deeper understanding of art and its context.

For me its a short list:

- Francois Lyotard, Le Different (been reading and rereading this for
years)
- Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting (see above)
- the essay "Resitutions..." on the Shapiro Heidegger controversy
lead me to reading Heidegger's original text

Geert

DISCUSSION

Re: is art useless?


Hi Jim,

I won't argue that art is *necessarily* useless, but I'll argue that an art practice necessarily needs to be willing and open to lead to the production of art that is "useless." Of course, uselessness or usefulness are in the use of the user. One assumes that an artist's art is at least useful to her. But it seems like the most game-advancing art is made by people who are willing to let their practice lead to a place where (at least for a season of indefinite length) it produces art that is useless even to them. There is something culturally invaluable ("useful" is too weak an adjective) about a form of inquiry that proceeds without the burden of having to arrive at anything the least bit useful, or the least bit useless for that matter. To say that art is *necessarily* useless constrains the artist to arrive at a specific place that excludes usefulness. The most intriguing art practices are not obliged to answer to any kind of predicative dichotomy (useful/useless, beautiful/not beautiful, political/not political, art/not art, commercial/not commercial, conceptual/not conceptual, digital/not digital, object-centric/ephemeral, curatable/not curatable). They're not even obliged to subvert such dichotomies. If they are under any ethical obligation at all, it is simply to keep making and see where it leads.

"Work leads to work." (John Cage)

"When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty... but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong." (R.B. Fuller)

"Na na na na na-nia, na na na, na na na na, na na na." (Merredith Monk)

peace,
curt

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jim andrews wrote:

the notion that art is necessarily useless seems to me an exclusionary
tactic rather than a compelling argument.

what are some arguments for the position that art is necessarily useless?

ja?
http://vispo.com

DISCUSSION

"st. frank and the wolf" at flood gallery


Hi everybody,

I'm performing next week here in Asheville, North Carolina, at Flood
Gallery -- 6 miles down the French Broad River from the Moog factory
where they built my theremin, and 15 miles up the road from Black
Mountain College where John Cage developed his theater of mixed-means.

http://www.themap.org/content/view/98/

curt

DISCUSSION

Re: 2007 Chelsea International Fine Art Competition


We've got your new media hanging (literally).

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from http://www.agora-gallery.com/Events/ChelseaFineArtCompetition2007.aspx

"Digital artwork will be accepted on the condition that if selected for the exhibition the artwork must be printed on high quality paper and framed."

"All participating artwork must be available for sale."

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