Monday, April 14, 2008

Response to Clayton Eshleman's question

What might a responsible avant-garde in visual art today include?

1. Radical, investigational image making that is raw, often wayward, in process: art as an intervention within culture against static forms of knowledge, schooled conceptions, cliched formulations (both inside and outside of art itself).

2. Art that evinces a thoughtful awareness of racism, imperialism, ecological issues, disasters, and wars and wants to do something about it.

3. Multiple levels of language--the arcane, the idiomatic, the absurd, the erudite, the vulgar, the scientific; relentless probing; say anything once, but say it a second time only if you believe it; not just "free speech" but freed speech, taking the consequences of its freed-om.

4. Transgression, opening up of the sealed sexual strong rooms; inspection of occult systems for psychic networks; the archaic and the tribal viewed as part of everyone's fate.

5. Treating boundaries like stage scenery, necessary but illusionary and not permanent.

6. Exploring what it means to be fully and deeply human.

7. Seeking out mystery and its rewards.

8. Living the consequences and responsibilities of the avant-garde.

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