Avoiding Ida worked out pretty well - got lashed a bit on my way to Columbia, but nothing too bad. Any chance to visit Ross is a good idea, anyway, especially when it involves not driving into a tropical storm, picking up a new trumpet (new to me, been sitting in Ross's house for 5 years - easily the best instrument I've ever played), eating some kim chee stew, etc. Good show. Unfortunately made for an 11-hour trip to New Orleans yesterday, including a brief stop in La Grange to make sure my tire wasn't about to explode. Why am I in New Orleans? To REPRESENT:
Spent the whole day listening to people talk with varying interest. There was, for instance, a particularly interesting panel with two lobbyists who work at the federal and state level advocating for the arts, as well as a woman who has done a lot of work here in New Orleans advocating for the arts, where the speakers rightly pointed out that advocates don't do enough for artists and artists don't advocate enough...distressingly, nobody in the crowd for the next talk - about ecology in art, or "place-based art-making," which was a pretty thin veil for talking about pseudo-eco-art - was at the advocacy talk. Perhaps the point where I wanted to throttle somebody the most was when art was discussed as a forum where the "general public," of course referred to in a "good old dumb regular folks" kind of way, which is totally obsolete in an age where anybody with a computer can know anything (speaking of which, Zizek just made a Twitter post that mentions that if anybody wants to know the future he refers them to Google, where they can search for the future), can "play" with the idea of the ecology. And that that - "playing," frolicking in fields of green, whatever - is somehow helpful to the environment. If art is going to be helpful for environmental causes it must advocate for the environment, it must be political, it cannot just be nice to look at or interesting or whatever. It must have clout. Playing does not have clout. Decorating does not have clout. Good grief. It's like what Barney Frank said about the gay rights march a few weeks ago (which Maine unfortunately just proved right): "the only thing they're putting pressure on is the grass."
goldsworthy
where does andrew goldsworthy fit into all this? is he just aesthetic play? is it political? it does focus our awareness of the environment's beauty--is that political? does it help the environment? hmmm.
re: goldsworthy
not sure really. i'd say that no, andy goldsworthy is not helping the environment, at least not in any direct or political way. and i wouldn't necessarily say that his work focuses our awareness of the environment's beauty; rather, he creates intricate objects interwoven with (and often made from) the environment, which generally decay or are outright destroyed by natural processes (esp time). if anything, i'd say his work generally points out the rather old thing of the futility of human action in the face of Nature (which may or may not be a double for the even more general Something Bigger), albeit beautifully. the political efficacy of this, though, is questionable - i think goldsworthy avoids the nature as "out there" tack by working (generally) in the environment...hmm.
i mean, essentially goldsworthy is meddling with the environment, in a typically human way - as in, i'll take this branch over here and put it here and it will be pretty. eventually the results of his action, his meddling, are destroyed. so i guess if i were to make a really half-assed political reading of goldsworthy, i would say something about how his work points out that concern over human meddling in the environment are farsical because time will absolve all. or something.
eh?
jacob wick
jacobwick.info
jacob.wick@gmail.com