Wednesday, August 30, 2006
re: Piccinini & the Policy of Containment
This is interesting, because I took the Piccinini quote as a comment on the social aspect of sharing an artistic act, and not a statement regarding control of its materiality. Containment of the creative material is considerably easier than attempts to harness the exchange of creativities that form and unform ideas that may in some future take a destructive and/or glorious form.
The idea of a necessary permanence for art, with its trappings of transgenerational institutionalized afterlife beyond the creative experience, flirts with a kind of commodity fetishism in which the work’s permanent materiality takes precedence over the artist’s relation to the energies of everyday life. Neoists, Lettrists, Situationists & so on have all raged for a re-appearance of the creative social and against centering the creative impulse around the endurance of the material in art. These movements too have been commodified by default, a result of the material creative evidence that has since become product.
I’m not one to prescribe other artists to be archivists or arsonists. However, the idea can at least be entertained that the destruction of one’s own work can fuel the next creative act, or it can be the next creative act itself.
- Frank Sherlock
The idea of a necessary permanence for art, with its trappings of transgenerational institutionalized afterlife beyond the creative experience, flirts with a kind of commodity fetishism in which the work’s permanent materiality takes precedence over the artist’s relation to the energies of everyday life. Neoists, Lettrists, Situationists & so on have all raged for a re-appearance of the creative social and against centering the creative impulse around the endurance of the material in art. These movements too have been commodified by default, a result of the material creative evidence that has since become product.
I’m not one to prescribe other artists to be archivists or arsonists. However, the idea can at least be entertained that the destruction of one’s own work can fuel the next creative act, or it can be the next creative act itself.
- Frank Sherlock
