alexei shulgin on Sat, 28 Nov 1998 17:55:42 +0300 |
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Syndicate: Re: congress revisited |
Uwe Lewitzky wrote: > > dear alexei ... > dr. zeller is planning to publish a small publication about the > congress and i would like to ask you to contribute the text of your > lecture with your remarks / thoughts about the discussions / the > problems and the whole event at the ifa. ... dear uwe, i really enjoyed the conference. here is my contribution to the forthcoming publication. please neglect all possible associations with concrete people that might come to your mind. best, a ------------------------------------------- Hi dear, our farewell hug doesnâ??t come out of my mind. These conferences are always too short to establish communication, and this particular one was even shorter. So we probably should look for another one to continue. Also - I might be around your city soon so letâ??s hope we could spend more time together. What would you think about my next art project - to get married with some Swiss woman and start to earn DM 2,500 a month as Swiss unemployed? But speaking seriously - I am more and more ashamed to identify myself as an artist - sometimes I have to do it when I am filling visa forms in German Embassy. And this shame has become stronger after this conference. And itâ??s even more sad because all artists that were presenting their works are actually very nice and smart people. They understand a lot of things but are so tied to this "white box" discourse of the art system and in most cases (with few exceptions - like the cheese and cigar projects) donâ??t think about not even creating new contexts but looking for some other contexts. I have also found some works secondary, repeating old projects of 70-s. Is it that artists are so busy with production that they donâ??t have time to learn about near past? And what about curators - donâ??t they have time as well? And all this arty self-reference ... Another problem for me is that it all about fun again. Art as part of fun culture... But - despite of all this I found the conference very interesting because it brought together people with energy, (ex-)marginal (ex-)Eastern European artists who fight for their international recognition. And what has become more clear to me that some people from the institutionalized art world who feel bankruptcy of the system are ready for changes. And itâ??s good - art cannot exist without context and just antagonism of artists and institutions can only be fruitful for the short period - than it has to develop in some dialogue and cooperation. Another thing is that artists are not ready - of course they are not satisfied with current state of things (remember, one of them includes written stories about his work in the body of the work itself. Very smart - to make it once and not to explain again and again to stupid curators) but they have to survive, feed their families, etc. Itâ??s understandable but I think that art canâ??t be a profession like for example engineering because then you have to regularly supply marketable product and all excitement is lost. Well I am writing these words and realise that it must be clear to many people regardless to who they are and what they are - artists, critics, professors or curators. So what we can do now is to expand an unformal network - using existing infrastructures like kunsthalles, bars, railroads and the internet - just in order to remain sane. Hope to see you very soon - Alexei