the political

hello again-

I have been thinking about some of the stuff that came up from the residency- esspeccially about the political in art and making statements. It brought me back to a really good interview i read with felix gonzalez-torres. This section in particualr came to maind:

"Do you think there's a way to break the intellectual habits that result from generations of moralizing protest art. Such work is based on the idea that the artist is there to enlighten a socially benighted world, along with that comes the expectation that the artist personally be a beacon of virtue so that if, at any point, they are shown to be less than pure, then everything they say is subsequently dismissed as bogus. This has happened over and over, as if the social content of art were limited to individual ethical exercises rather than thinking of art as political and cultural probe?

Let's go to the political arena, I'll say, the real political arena, and say that some politicians that have not been "good," yet they have done some very wonderful things for everyone, improving the quality of life for a lot of us in a very tangible way and at the most intimate personal levels. Like some of the programs John F. Kennedy started. I'm a product of that. I went to school because of what that man started. Womanizers and drunks and all that stuff, guys with mob connections made all these changes possible so that someone like me could the get loans and go to school. That's just one simple example of from life. Let's move forward to a certain degree, in terms of the kind of protest art that says all Capital is bad, Bennetton is bad. We know that! We really do know that. We don't need a gallery space to find out something we read in the news."

you can read the whole interview at: http://www.queerculturalcenter.org/Pages/FelixGT/FelixInterv.html


I don't know if this is interesting to anyone?