ArtThink: March 8

"Bust" 2009: Carol Bove

"Walt Disney Products": Bertrand Lavier

Is the discussion of the crisis and chaos of contemporary art even more about the struggles of how to interpret art history/general history in a multi-layered, heterochromatic, whole world of the multiple? As we are all experiencing having too much to choose from, so is the historian whose job now is even more complex and overwhelming and with no previous examples and tools for interpreting this new kind of river of information. He/she must invent or find a more encompassing way of discussing a barrage of historical points of view; a more difficult task than for the artist who, able to start from his/her own island, now exists in an archipelago environment, seeking out pathways and traveling through signs.

Pauline Fondevilla

a·le·a·to·ry adj.
1. Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome: an aleatory contract between an oil prospector and a landowner.
2. Of or characterized by gambling: aleatory contests.
3. also a·le·a·to·ric Music Using or consisting of sounds to be chosen by the performer or left to chance; indeterminate: An object placed inside the piano added an aleatory element to the piece.
[Latin letrius, from letor, gambler, from lea, game of chance, die.]

According to Etnologue there are 6 809 languages in the world, however near the half of them is on the way to disappear totally. There is a paradox in the trying to hold on to ones culture and language in a globalized world. NB : “Alterglobalization …expresses the struggle for diversity” while at the same time trying to find common pathways to understanding and communication. This paradox is at the crux of the crisis. Eventually something always gets lost in translation. In reference to English attempting to reach the world as a language of business something is happening like in the game of telephone.

Language Fail:

“Form encounters new unity in copying/sharing/appropriating…form with a new use in a new combination.” NB

There is a metaphor here for referencing theater and choreography. Just as a script is appropriated, read and performed or a dance combination is interpreted, or a score played for the hundredth time the notation is translated, shared and used. Is visual art becoming closer to performing art in its taking of and making combinations of previous forms and movements? If a Picasso painting is copied or a book written word for word over again is it not similar to reading the music or performing notated choreography in a new time and space?

Labanotation: Symbols for Choreographic Movement

Small Dance Combination:

"A work of art today appropriates from other works and has ceased to be an end in itself but rather a generator for other activities." NB

The world has, since the oil crisis in 1973, become more aware of the end of progressions and has been facing an insecure, unknown future in terms of renewable energy. This event with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the advent of the technological advances over the last ten years, has created an awareness and a drive for artists to not only negotiate these changes but to express them with a sense of conscience in regards to the excesses of the 20th century. Raw energy is scarce so why shouldn’t artists draw from what is already available and renewable instead of adding more to the clutter?