A Response to the Old Debate on Personal Mythologies

I am interested in the mention you make of the avant-garde coming out of historical materialism. Where does this reading come from? Presumably, the idea is that the historical Modernist avant-garde is understood as a critical response to the internal contradictions of the Industrialized 19^th century coming into conflict with the old artisanal, labour intensive traditional arts.  In parallel to this, Modernism as a critique or response to mechanization and societies transformed by the rhythm of the assembly line is interesting, not just from a historical lens through which to read those movements but for reading contemporary art as the only extant space for a critique of global capitalism as suggested by Gillick.

I argue for a particular approach to artistic practice and questions of 'contemporaneity' which can be seen as an analogue for being 'new' or 'original' (as an aside, I realize that I don't pay too much attention to contemporary mainstream graphic design, media or visual culture, because I find it so 'readable' and that I am looking for images which are 'unreadable' that I am unable to assimilate into any specific visual gestalt. This is rare and perhaps impossible, that, as in your comment about historicizing, after Borges, history is but a list of a couple of broken metaphors and perhaps it is the case that, substituting and shifting the meanings behind very common images is the real aim [thus taking an office job unpaid in the name of radical critique when your entire raison d'etre for entering alternative models of production was to avoid the tyranny of the office job itself or, to be a trained and certified lawyer who chooses not to work and step into something which could easily have been got without the hassle of a law degree] thus, praxis for me is to be understood as, rather than a simple process of actualizing theory should be more properly read as living for the sake and right to call oneself contemporary. In other words, I think it is only possible to insert new 'unreadable' images into the history of art by orchestrating a lifestyle which is so dense and radically opposed to that which one was trained to live, that everything you do is intrinsically the document of another world.

 

One ferry ride later…

 

Thinking about this further, I can think of no better model for my own understanding of artistic practice than Menard's Quixote. So, if images are indeed exhausted, or universal history is a collection of a few metaphors then, the problem for the visual artist becomes one of production.  How to produce new images, how to reconfigure existing images to produce new effects or how to rearrange, substitute or reconfigure the subjectivities and histories which those images are cyphers for. I figure that perhaps praxis is about, in a semiotic sense, attacking the signified rather than signifier. That one goes through the same, or a completely different experience to produce the same image, and though formally identical, the latter is, if not superior-then enriched by the praxis, hence why Menard operates as a way for understanding this process. And again, why playing the song, or showing the image at the start of the film, then at the end, with the experience in between which shifts or charges it with meaning, is such a fruitful strategy.

So in these terms, are we to understand social practice as the reification or institutionalization of this strategy? Perhaps, now that all images have been exhausted it becomes a matter of engaging in a systematic project of focusing on the experiences which produced those images and imagines the individual as collectively constituted which is another way of saying that experience is necessarily outside of the body and collective rather than, subjectively constituted as Western Romanticism and Neo-Liberalism would have it.

 

Another way to travel is down the Garden of Forking Path's, or to regard the Asiatic experience in the context of this configuration we have devised. One must acknowledge that, in the act of maneuvering a collectively constituted individual you are conceiving of it as an oppositional, retaliatory act against a Western consensus which privileges the individual and subjective experience. So, how does one account for Asian culture where the collective is the primary unit of social organization, where turning inward is the revolutionary act. This was properly encountered by the Russians (Kabakov et al) and artists in the Soviet Block as well as late 1980's Beijing Apartment Artists, where the only way to resist the authoritarian will to impose collectivity upon the individual left the artist to withdraw into radical, contemplative subjectivity as the only private space not occupied by the state. This has been thoroughly documented by Bishop in the European context but, I believe has yet to be acknowledged as an issue in the contemporary Asian art scene. All this is a way of saying, perhaps what the world needs most is self-mythologizing, individualist Asian artists to impose a alternative, normative cultural subjectivity upon the art world and the world in general like Ai Wei Wei (and myself, ha!)