Re: <documenta X><blast> home

Alan Jen Sondheim (sondheim@panix.com)
Fri, 15 Aug 1997 15:19:32 -0400 (EDT)

On Fri, 15 Aug 1997, Morgan Garwood wrote:

> art too is a mapping problem... "good" art is good because it maps
> something, perhaps that something is extremely hard to articulate in
> ordinary language (another class of maps, language) but when we recognize
> that it has doon a good job of mapping, we like it. Bad art is bad mapping.
>
This I don't agree with; the rest I do. I don't see art, first of all, as
a "problem" that then has or doesn't have an equitable solution. I wonder
also about the "job" of mapping.

In fact, I see art, if at all, as a family of usages in the Wittgenstein-
ian sense - I don't feel there is any particular attractor one can assign
to the field in its entirety. Mapping holds up in some cases, not in
others. I'm not even sure that there's a signified at work here, in spite
of, for example, the attempts made to locate one even for abstract paint-
ing within the ikonic.

Alan

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-------------------------------------------------------------
a forum on spatial articulations, perspectives, and procedures
texts are the property of individual authors
for information, email majordomo@forum.documenta.de with
the following line in the message body: info blast
archive at http://www.documenta.de/english/blasta.htm
or http://www.documenta.de/deutsch/blasta.htm
documenta X Kassel and http://www.documenta.de 1997
-------------------------------------------------------------