Re: <documenta X><blast> fields
Keller Ann Easterling (kae3@columbia.edu)
Thu, 19 Jun 1997 09:24:22 -0400 (EDT)
It is interesting to me that these conversations sometimes have
utopic/distopic overtones. Why is this, I wonder? Is it some left-over
attitude of the 20th century? Is it some left-over from the now tired
idea
of the avant-garde, which having created it disdain for everything but
itself, must now be sentenced according to its own rules as the old
fashioned avant-garde? The distopic stance is cliche, but the
utopian overtones are more subtley woven into the way we speak about art.
It is a sort of oxymoronic concept, utopian art. a couple of years ago
architects were talking about the digital versus the analogic as if the
analogic was old-fashioned and the digital was hot and new.
I think that the habit of mind which is prompted by computational tools
has always been present, but has used different tools to model itself and
different terms to express itself. Geological, mechanical,
psychological,
mathematical. I want to be allowed to use all of those terms in a culture
with enough depth to recognize themany ways in which they
are, not rarified and part of the discussions of intellectual elit, but
present and even normal. When the ambitions of te avant-garde mix
with the ambitions of cybernetics, this tendency towards
positivism becomes extreme. I agree with John Beckman about the
sadness which surrounds this hard work on the "Chromed" object.
It is active and time-based only in the narrow world ofsoftware. But then
the active organization within which many architects are most accomplished
is--celebrity.