Author: John Abbate  
Posted: 19.12.2002; 06:34:18
Topic: Question 6
Msg #: 629 (in response to 624)
Enclosure:
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Reads: 92524

Response to answer 6/19:
Dear Michael, we might say that "dematerialization" functioned rather like cement poured into the gap opened up at the inception of conceptual art, preventing a full-blown rupture and final collapse of the avant-garde into life, politics and the everyday (I think it was Peter Burger who identified this "death drive" at the heart of avant-gardism). As such it (the rhetoric of dematerialization) gave the impression that the Modernist juggernaut had made another bold step forward, all the while both obscuring and signaling either its actual exhaustion, or its ultimate status as a (patriarchal) fiction, depending on your point of view. In the later Seventies, didn’t Rosalind Krauss try a similar trick with her "Notes on the Index", where she attempted to dispel the idea that contemporary art had entered a period characterizable only by a pluralism of styles and strategies, by mapping everything onto the terrain of the indexical sign?

 



Last update: Thursday, December 26, 2002 at 4:13:22 AM.
 

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