[NetBehaviour] State of new media from strawberry fields forever -

[Ken Turner]

Alan,
What you're saying is, shall we say partly true and well said.
What anyone says is normally partly true.
but is truth the question?
Nietzsche was perhaps only partly true concerning nihilism and the 
abyss.
But what is there after the abyss?
My understanding is that art is not what appears on the surface, its 
physical optical form  is not a representation of art.
It is more than that. That sounds like a cliche, but read on.
And of course both philosophy and art do not, in themselves, move on.
—they only repeat the impossibility of being able to express what it is 
to be human.
But in trying there is some achievement 'in depth' whether in Rembrandt 
or Cezanne, Kandinsky or Brecht or Beckett, to name a few.
Something in this relates to our indentity and place.
To paraphrase Merleau Ponty,  three dimensions only make sense when all 
three are rolled into the one of 'depth'.
Hermes Trismegistus said it is the "inarticulate cry".
ken




On 18 Jul 2005, at 04:18, Alan Sondheim wrote:




>
>
> State of new media from strawberry fields forever -
>
> The work I'm doing isn't much different from the work you're doing.
> It will disappear when the net goes down or when it's no longer tended.
> Nobody tends things forever.
> It's amazingly ephemeral; there's nothing to it; it's stillborn, passed
> in email or on a website, that's all.
> It's not as if we're contributing to the well-being of humanity; the
> idea that art makes any sort of social or political difference is long
> outmoded, repeatedly proven wrong.
> We're not even making paintings which have a modicum of a chance of
> survival, 'being as how' they're concrete, inert, almost idiotic things
> (in the sense of Rosset or Sartre).
> Certainly we haven't made any contribution to physical theory or the
> sciences in general, and our work is rarely entertaining.
> At our performances and readings, only the rest of us show up.
> The 'culture' such as it is, follows mass media, corporate distribution
> systems, subtended radicalities; the best one hopes for is museum
> sponsorship.
> We've saved no one's lives through our art - turn the machine off, and
> we're pretty much done for.
> We engage in outmoded theories, bouncing one theorist off another, as 
> if
> any of it mattered in the universe at large.
> We work through fast-forward intellectual fashions, situations in which
> phenomenology, existentialism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and so 
> forth
> - name your 'movement,' name your theorist - are considered outmoded, 
> as
> if philosophy had advanced since Heraclitus.
> We ignore scientific theory, or borrow from it, on a simplistic or 
> meta-
> phoric level, as a form of legitimation, as if we're somehow connected
> with scientific 'advances.'
> We confuse science with technology, substituting cleverness for any 
> real
> disciplinary understanding, in fields ranging from psychoanalysis 
> through
> physics.
> Our theoretical work is written as if it somehow matters, somehow says
> something about the world, which we hardly understand.
> We substitute cultural politics for political action and depth; we 
> ignore
> war or illustrate it.
> We entertain ourselves endlessly, as if our work had nothing to do with
> entertainment (some might call us failed comedians, novelists, what 
> have
> you, substituting surface transformations for that hypothetical depth 
> that
> seems to infest the canon).
> I am guilty of all of the above.
> We go on and on and on...
>
>
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