Author: Maryam Foroozanfar  
Posted: 21.12.2001; 15:31:29
Topic: Another pt.2
Msg #: 468 (top msg in thread)
Enclosure:
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Another Look at Social Dimension ( 2 of 8 )

In either case, Conceptual art risks being transformed from a field of heterogenous practices into a style or attitude capable of an impressive cultural reach and possessing something of its own logic of development. What I am trying to sketch here is the place of culture in relation to the shift in the global reach of a world-system of capitalism. One in which the commodity status of culture is immeasurably more entrenched, so that it may no longer be a question of "center" versus "margin" as though those two polar opposites were somehow equivalent in scope and purpose and power, but a situation where the commodification of culture has become so intensified as to pose real problems of resistance and denial through the work of art itself. It is perhaps symptomatic of this darker notion that art, no matter what form it may take, is already too infected with a viral system that seeks "sheltered environments" (this is Fredric Jameson's figure) which somehow turn the entire project on its head. At the moment when claims about the political and critical potential of Conceptual Art were least convincing to younger artists, and the entire period of the 1960s - 1970s was on the verge of becoming unrecoverable as an historical or imaginative resource for artistic practice, Ian Burn noted the interrelatedness of that art in terms of "aesthetic questions" colliding with social and political ones. ("The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath," Art+Text 1, 1981.)

This issue was theorized and discussed in Marxist terms by the Conceptual art group Art & Language. But even so, for those living and working in New York, Marxism entered the discussion fairly late and in rather eccentric circumstances and eclectic formulations. (Perhaps that is a good definition of the marginal in this context: the triumph of the slightly strange. Art & Language in New York drew upon an ongoing discourse of "cultural imperialism" which emerged amongst artists during the decade of the 1970s. It is a discourse that was bounded, on the one hand, by the arguments of Max Kozloff and the late Eva Cockcroft on the presumed use of US avant-garde art in support of Cold War aims, and, on the other hand, by Ian Burn's notion of regionalism. It was also strongly informed by various contemporary analyses of economic underdevelopment, which were then mobilized as a model for un derstanding cultural underdevelopment. Lastly, the numerous studies on the use of US mass-media to propagate the consumer culture throughout Latin America were seen to be useful methodological and ideology models. This last category has been somewhat overlooked, but its importance is unquestionable: here we find the work of the late-Herbert I. Schiller on resistance to what he called the asymmetrical "free flow" of information and values from the North to the South; the fruits of empirical research undertaken by study groups of Latin American intellectuals - principally located in Chile during the early-1970s - and attempts by left intellectuals like Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart to expose the ideological purpose of that most widespread of mass cultural forms, the Disney comic and cartoon film.

In a recent review of a survey of work and texts produced by Art & Language between 1972 and 1981, the group was described as a "Marxist collective." It was not meant to be a compliment. Despite its inaccuracy, one can appreciate how such a remark would seem entirely credible in the face of Art & Language 's artistic practices of the 1970s. These works stand as a virtual catalogue of the ways and means of formidably sectarian leftist confrontational politics that emerged from the ruins of 1968. Here one finds images excoriating bourgeois values of culture, founded upon class analysis and dialectical materialism, yet appropriating political forms (the poster, the polemic) which were marginal even by the confrontational standards of the mid-1970s. >From thinkers as diverse as Fredric Jameson and Terry Eagleton one senses that Marxism used as an intellectual resource means the possibility of a type of intellectual analysis that constantly supplies us with moments of interruption in the smooth flow of dialectical mediation.


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