Re: <nettime> Just as rabid as the Unabomber, but safely on the winning side ...

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

On 02/22/2018 02:06 AM, Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

> I feel we need a redefinition of practice: one that transcends both creative personality and business organisation, to explore the practice as a place.

This is a great short essay. Definitely many artists have taken the 
place-based approach to practice, for example the Prison Neighborhood 
Art Project, a teaching-art-behind-bars initiative that measures its 
successes or failures by the content and qualities of interaction 
between two places: Stateville Prison and the Chicago neighborhoods from 
which so many of its inhabitants come (p-nap.org). Work like this 
receives prizes and grants, and the artists get some professional 
rewards (ie, advancement in the university) However, what you don't have 
are professional organizations that can make socially engaged, or if you 
prefer, eco-socially engaged art into an ethical standard. There is a 
large conference that attempts to do so (Open Engagement), but they have 
to struggle against the standards, not only of the international gallery 
business that promotes extravagant superstars, but also of the mostly 
national disciplinary context of universities where pathetically 
antiquted modernist conceptions of creative individuality still count 
for a lot.

Of course the example I bring is a minor one: a field that moves nowhere 
near the amount of money and exerts nowhere near the influence on daily 
life that architecture does, let alone computer engineering that creates 
integrated global systems. If one is to believe history books, 
deontology was an issue in such fields in the early 20th century. Today, 
a lot less.

My sense is that practices responsive to place, and the educational 
resources that come out of such practices, only stand a chance of being 
incorporated into the mainstream *after* the predictable breakdowns and 
disasters of social and ecological balances that we now see in their 
nascent phases. The position that puts you in today is a complicated 
one: you have to make your experiments happen in the current prosperous 
and jaded environment, while at the same time realizing they could only 
have their real meaning and value in a much more violent and desperate 
world whose contours are hard to imagine, and whose very existence as a 
viable context depends on upsurges and social-justice struggles that may 
never come to pass. What are your thoughts on this Prem?

all the best, Brian

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