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Attempt to be alive 

What happens to the art of a time without permanence, where everyone is left to a floating, infinite space? 




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

Boris Groys: In the flow
Verso, 2016

 

«Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands. »
Don DeLillo, White Noise

3B083F7E-EF97-4821-8CF9-5619C382901FUntil recently, we have looked at art as a place that allows us to see ourselves as part of a larger story. Through the storage of works of art, the museum has seen it as its task to document our past and present. The artwork was the gateway to immortality. But today, the individual work subscribes to a stream of objects that provoke its own synergies: documentation, blogs, web pages, ongoing conversations, events. From being a sacred temple of preservation, the museum today is a kind of theater or a stage for meetings that prolongs, dissolves and redirects the contours of the work in a flow of events, lectures, conferences, screenings, concerts, guided tours et cetera. The work no longer seems to live as a work, but mainly as documentation. That life can only be documented and not experienced directly is not a new discovery, however. We have always replaced the living with the documentation. The question is how our productions (the documentation) bring new life through new artificial narratives, new ways of describing and telling. All of this is pushing itself in many places. For many people, for example, everyday life has become part of a self-narrating, theatrical and designed life. The artwork is seen in many contexts as a result of a special way of selecting, placing, changing, transforming and combining already existing images and objects. We are moving into a new era where we «do not primarily identify the work of art with the object through the individual work of an individual artist». Contemporary art gradually resembles the usual mass cultural practice – one shares thoughts, photos, texts, video clips. We leave the opposition between the artist as producer and the mass as consumer. The artist works in a vibrant social field that is self-producing rather than consuming. Several have said this before Groys, but it opens up completely different, more intrusive perspectives for him: The interesting thing about online culture is neither software nor the number of links and blogs, but that we have now moved closer to everyday life and life throughout our work. . The artist's search for the authentic and original has today been replaced by a playful, free use with everything available. The way of life as a kind of profane illumination. The artist stroller does not demand of things that they come to him; he gets to things. He finds a use. The artist's life today is a biopolitics, an art of living, where one's own life has incessantly come into play, with new opportunities but also new dangers.

To be alive. What can art do? It can take on this flow of events and try to transcend a contemporary where everything is reduced to one here and now. With the internet we have reached a new situation where, with the other person's eyes, we discover not only that we are thinking and feeling, but also that we are alive and want to die. What this new age has brought about is that we no longer know what it means to be alive. "To live is to be seen as living before the eyes of others." The proud Enlightenment philosophy is dead, Groys writes. "The Age of Enlightenment is trying to change the world through a release of reason, but after Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze and many others, we want to change the world by freeing life." Today I am left to my body, my mortality, my material organs. Groys calls it a state of emergency that puts us in an urgent time of need and which forces us to abandon the contemplative passivity of traditional philosophy. The emergency calls for action: It is not enough to be alive, you must also perform this being-alive. So experiment with yourself, his life. Groys sees art as the practice in our culture that embodies the knowledge of being alive. You show your knowledge by changing yourself, you transform the world by exploring without knowing what you are looking for. You are an artist, but also an activist. You might write poems, but also move in the countryside in a common ecological collective with other forms of work and living. Maybe you publish books at a publishing house, but you do it to establish alternative learning communities. You make works that make us feel on our own body that the big ice melts. One does not exclude the other. For more and more so-called artists, it is not about the final product (the work), but about a way of being alive. Life itself is at stake, something you cannot design.

The artist tries to stop the linear progress, see life from the side of death.

Stop the progress. Design seeks to create an attraction and seduction and ensure a better use of things. The purpose of design is to change reality, improve it. Art accepts reality as it is, that is, as dysfunctional, as already failed, distorted. Poems, prose, installations, videos do not intend to create a stable narrative of our time or, for that matter, improve it. Art is at war, a new global war. The aesthetic field is not serene, but a battlefield. And the activist artist who makes his own life a part of a practice uses the artistic experiment as part of a political struggle. Not like real politics, but life politics, a signal of a way of being alive. As a life practice, he wants to counterbalance human capital's way of life, the notion of being successful, "being competent", being endowed with a special gift, a talent to be used in the service of progress and production. About producing one's own satisfaction and watching one's own human capital grow. "Modern art came into being as an opposition to the belief in the natural gift or ability." The futurists (Marinetti) aesthetized the art, but primarily to criticize the unilateral progress. Faced with the social-Darwinian belief in natural talent, creativity and the unique "I", the artist integrates the failed (experiment) into his work, that which creates reduction rather than production, contradictions rather than oppositions, condensed images rather than improvements, non- linear motions rather than linear ones. The flow of materialism becomes, for Groys, the name of a practice that must share destiny with things, objects, that is, their futility, mortality, destruction, disintegrating contours. Realism is about showing things as they are, in their degrading, changeable and peculiar forms.

The Internet makes it possible to regard art as a life of aura, but without objects – as a biopolitics exploring ways of being alive.

To disappear in the crowd. Internet time promotes the social dimension of art. Here we have to keep our tongue straight, for social is not for Groys the amount of communication, networking and the constant hysteria of project work, which makes it difficult for many artists to create art (see Bojana Art: Artist at work). You do not create art through dialogue and conversation. It is the discovery, a way of life, that allows one to connect with other forces and be tainted by and keep alive the aesthetic bacilli. Being social goes beyond consensus democracy which includes only the "normal", sensible citizen, not the children and the mad. Neither did the animals and the birds, although Frans Assisi sang to the birds, or the stones, although according to Freud we have an operation that wants to be stones. Or the machines, though many artists have wanted to be machines (Andy Warhol). The artist is not just social, but super social in the meaning of the French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, in which the imitation of various organisms, figures and objects is made part of an artistic life practice, a way of life. The task is not to portray his contemporary tastes, but to be involved in the world, in the cosmos, to show why things are as they are, vanishing, deadly, during decomposition, including himself. The artist himself wants to disappear in the crowd (in the flow). The artist of the future is him as Wagner mentioned in his Total artworkHe who does not seek to exalt himself to a chosen crowd, but who joins in with his object – the song, the voice, the power of love. Not to seek harmony, but to dissolve the ego and modify the sensibility. The artist is accused of being elitist or not sufficiently social, but he is the opposite, supersocial, and to be this, to live this way, he must retire from society. He must seek out other zones, other forces, not because he sees himself as something special, but to avoid the aesthetic bacilli becoming extinct.

Alexander Carnera
Alexander Carnera
Carnera is a freelance writer living in Copenhagen.

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