on 20/3/03 10:04 am, Eryk Salvaggio at
eryk@maine.rr.com wrote:
Eryk,
Thanks for the considered reply. Of course, my email wasn't aimed at you in
any specific way. I was just getting a bit peeved with the flow of 'war,
bad, bad, war, no, no' messages that are flooding Rhizome (though of course
this is not surprising considering the media blitz on it).
Actually, your postings are thoughtful and interesting and add a lot to the
discussion, so maybe I shouldn't have used you as a response trigger.
I can't accept that war is not interesting, merely useless. Useless things
can be interesting. I have a view that we are on the planet, sentient,
concious. We can't but absorb what goes on around us and regurgitate it one
way or another in our work.
I was thinking about this in the shower this morning. Picasso made an
anti-war work, Guernica. Guernica was where modern ariel city bombardment
was invented. But Guernica took place during the spanish civil war. So maybe
a parallel would be an artist who had made work about the gassing of the
Kurds in Iraq. Of course, there was no western 'crisis' about this, so no
media blitz, so no flood of artists proclaiming on the subject.
Where's the flood of artists emails about the war in Congo or Ivory Coast or
Chechnia? I don't see it. All us media artists are terribly susceptible to
the media, we are all in a tizzy about something that may not turn out to be
much at all. From that I extrapolate that artists should shut up about
specific events and get on with their job of making art.
War is interesting in that it makes us behave in strange ways, and by
examining this behaviour we can maybe learn something and maybe make good
art.
Cheers,
Ivan
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>
>> War is obviously bad, but it is also interesting.
>
> I've been thinking about this, and I think it really isn't. Like there's
> that stereolab song "Les Yper Sound," I don't know if you know it; "You Go
> On That Team, I'll Go On This Team, Stigmatization, Okay, Now We Can Fight!"
> It's not interesting as much as it is useless.
>
> Also, I think good/bad is an idea of an ego, but I can't say I have let go
> of that one yet. I mean I think that war is "bad," but I mostly think that I
> am supposed to think war is "bad". I can create the idea that war is bad
> deliberately out of a set of core values that I decide to take, but doing
> that means that I would need to take full responsibility for ending war, and
> I don't know if I am ready for that one yet. I would rather focus on a
> couple other things first, like my own prescence with the world.
>
>
>>
>> War is ongoing, nothing is really about to start.
>
>
> War is ongoing but only because everyone is always starting it. I mean I am
> always starting them. I started one today with someone I claim to love
> because she didn't love me in a way that I thought was the right way to love
> me. So I mean, there you go, that's where all war comes from.
>
>
>> Even worse is to get all introspective, 'oh god, I am so impotent in the
>> face of all this horribleness'. Yes we are, but so what, we always were.
>
> I think that line of thought is only 1/10th of my introspective process. I'm
> not really saying I am impotent, but that I am unwilling to actually act. In
> that sense you might say its an extrospective process in that I am looking
> at how I impact the world- I don't. But there is a huge difference between
> the two, I think. If I am unwilling to act, that means I could act, if I
> chose to. I don't know if I have that power *yet*- the power to choose to do
> anything and everything- but I have some power of choice, paradoxically, by
> realizing _why_ I am impotent in the face of all this _________.
>
>>
>> If you believe in art and in your art, you need to go on doing what you
> have
>> always done and not become an activist just because there is this
>> overwhelming media story about.
>
>
> Ha. Believing in my art gets me into all kinds of trouble. Because if I
> believe in my art I have to be kind of careful, or else I could just believe
> in whatever internal system I was using my art to perpetuate and recruit
> people into. I mean, I have always identified as an artist as an activist.
> Now I am starting to wonder about both. As an artist I am slightly less full
> of shit than I am with activism. I want to choose to be an artist again but
> I am wondering if I am ready really, because there is a lot of
> responsibility with what type of artist I would actually want to be.
>
> I think a major flaw with my past art has been that it has been largely
> reactive. The stuff people respond to the least I tend to like the most. So
> maybe I won't have a career per se. I mean I would like to make art that can
> generate. But wow, you know, like, who the hell can do that, seriously?
>
>
>
> + ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gniht ym tup
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