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We are, most of us, thrill seekers. Even if our desire for the sensation is relatively mild nearly all of us will indulge in and seek that inner feeling of pleasurable authority that we are in tune, abreast of the times, can spot the required or have the required. Whatever, in the arts, the motive force of fashionability perpetually declares the death of something or other. Of course the dying are always hurried on their way either by implying some profound level of stupidity on their part or some profound level of insight on the part of the newcomers. When I started art in the 1970s there was a strong current of avant-gardism that drew on trawling the abundant technological processes and theories of the previous hundred years and attempting a grand 'alignment'. “The
concept of ‘visual research’ associated with these groups seems to have
been a mixture of psycho-optics, experimental aesthetics and traditional
expression. Some good work in each of these categories has been done. But
the main contribution of these groups was in promoting the general idea of
art as ‘open research’ and devaluing the art-product as a source of
charisma. This was an important achievement for which we should all be
grateful. If art is thought of as primarily a process of enquiry rather than a process of production, we must consider the true meaning of the term ‘experiment’ in art. Curiously, few critics or artists have scrutinized the relationship between the uses of this term in science and in art.”
There was as I recall a romantic, heroic flavour to the pursuit of increasingly obscure and eclectic routes to art. In the 1980s there was a wave of conservatism and no doubt many of us were relegated to the land of the sad case, only to see in the 1990s a revisiting of technology. Only this time it was more hype and bark than intellectual romance “...or there may be those who have no formal art training, but who show exceptional conceptual or creative attitudes and talents and who are ready to take the plunge into an entirely new, shockingly, heart-stoppingly cold, but enticingly blue swimming pool...they will truly be able to work together with those collaborators in an integrated electronic environment - a shared artistic, technological, historical and theoretical framework that will produce work unhobbled by an out of date twentieth century ethos.” (Richard Povall writing in Interface 4(1), ACCAD, Ohio State University) The moral of the tale is, I suppose, that the Voice of Art, is a complete flirt. Put this together with its new journalistic culture and whatever Art once was seems to have dissappeared.
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