Friday, September 01, 2006
re: Piccinini & the Smell of Smoke
CA-The preoccupation with the material brings us to this example. Comparison of the 18th Street buildings destroyed and the destruction of a painting shown to you in the privacy of the artist’s home is a stretch.
Building construction is an obvious, tangible collaboration. Giving the architect (and more likely a team of architects) the credit for construction or the yay or nay on preservation is an interesting window into your position, but a disputable one.
In this case, people living (literally) inside the artistic creation is one in which the output of the artist is not a fetish object separated from everyday life, but integrated & shaped by hundreds or thousands of participants in its continuing life- changed from day to day in small and sometimes large ways that are material and artistic. The fact is the destruction of 18th Street was motivated by unmitigated greed, bringing into this argument the economy of creation/destruction/creation, which may be a tributary to this argument, but certainly not the source.
My question to you is, what if the architect for the new condominium-to-be burned the blueprints, or in a more dramatic fashion, waited for the high-rise to be built and burned it to the ground while it was still vacant? Would you support that artistic act?
- Frank Sherlock
