Email from Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, director of this year's Documenta 13, in the 'logbook' that tracks the her thinking around the idea of Documenta... so many mushed and tangled ideas together you wonder there is any syntax here at all.
"To contact a self-help group in NYC that tries to help people get out of the addiction of making art. Getting out of the 'high' of creative ideas all the time in cognitive capitalism. Like a rehab centre."
Are the worlds of contemporary music and contemporary literature filled with this kind of disingenuous gobbledygook, uttered in such bad faith?
Here's another of her emails, see if you can get the hang of this one:
"Yesterday Bifo agreed to do the notebook, as an essay with notes, on the question of how a sense of failure of political activism is pushing more and more people into becoming artists, or entering the artworld, because there they can feel part of a 'community' without needing to be successful in terms of direct political agency [nail on the head there]. Furthermore, there is in the artworld a basic paradox: on the one hand we are the essence and prototypes of the future cognitive precarious labourer (typical of the alienated labour forces of the 21st century) and on the other we are also the space of a potential of resistance to the atomized, singularized, and disconnected and non-collective subjectivity of the 21st century due to the intense aggregation of our rituals.
Nice, eh?"
Nice??? Somebody get me out of here! Does this mean anything?
Fortunately, the exhibition has some fabulous works that don't bear any relation to this nonsense, and its 'heart', a small exhibition in the rotunda of the Fridericianum in Kassel, is terrifically interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment