Dr Charles Green on Sun, 16 Dec 2001 02:52:02 +0100 (CET) |
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David Garcia's response to the fibreculture interview by Geert Lovinck with me regarding my book on artist collaborations, The Third Hand, is thoughtful and wise. He asks "whether it is possible to understand any of the significant work of this time outside of the political. . . . This period was saturated in utopian optimism of an intensity that is difficult to imagine today. The freedoms won when large numbers of artists threw off Greenburg's formalist constraints and began making works unmediated by the conventions of specific mediums was widely perceived as part of a wider emancipatory movement." He is right, and these are exactly the points I make all through my book, which takes great care to name and explain the wider psycho-social context, and the different way that artists conceived of their activities, which was much more holistic and complex than the simple connection of art to politics as this had been imagined before. Mr Garcia notes that he has not read my book, and I think that when he does he will find that I have tried to home in on exactly the now-obscured motivations and distinctions he thinks should be remembered. This recovery, and the analysis of a foundational moment beyond the 1980s context of a transition into postmodernism, was one of my chief motivations in writing a revisionist history of art that has importance to contemporary visual culture beyond a narrow history. Charles Green _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://amsterdam.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold