Author: Thomas Dreher  
Posted: 04.11.2002; 19:03:05
Topic: Question 3
Msg #: 594 (in response to 420)
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Response to Michael Corris´ answer 3/4:
Two basic misunderstandings:
First: You use the term art in your answer in a way which subverts my intention.
Second: You exaggerate the value of the term transgression which you can´t find in my german version of 3/3.
Ad 1: I conceptualize art as an activity in a net of relations (which are usually based on systems with higher differentiations). I avoid conceptualizations of art as a fixed context with professional artists. I conceptualize the term art in relation to concepts, events, activism and net.art (artivism), not in relations to art academies, universities, museums and galleries.
Art as an expert culture for art observation finds its alternative in activities which try to create interactions between different fields/cultures/systems whose experts are normally more engaged in careers, fund raising and other internal power relations.
The effects of activities of experts to other contexts are usually not part of the self description or observation of these expert cultures. These cultures within closed systems have to be corrected (re-related to their surroundings) by engaged citizens which constitute a public interested in their own rights without regard of (or in conflict with) economic interests: Political solutions are necessary.
Engaged citizens can articulate some public interests without commercial or other private background in a way that there utterances/performances will be registered by more and more people as socially/politically relevant. If you call engaged persons besides professional and commercial interests part-time (for the time of their engagement) activists or artivists: it doesn´t matter.
Some kinds of Intermedia art are able to reconceptualize established ways of world observation and to correct public opinions of problems which are either not instutionalized as art or science or are institutionalized in these departments in ways which demand external corrections.
I don´t conceptualize an engaged art as a profession which one chooses as a limited field of activity for a life-time. I try to sketch out fields/kinds of activities which are open for everyone´s engagement including all experts who want to observe the actual interpenetrations between their professional contexts and other contexts and to find problems, problem solutions and concepts for their realization.
An art collector who first wants to buy works of f. e. Hans Haacke or Stephen Willats and second is really interested in their critical view of the world should draw the consequences of point two for his own political engagement and should forget point one (He can use his money for social relevant things). Thomas Dreher (TDreher@onlinehome.de)

 



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