Have a look at www.revolution10.uk for a glimpse at how art and politics can co-exist.
I am happy to see the conversation make its way here: âto defend such a move, if it is to work, as the need for artists to disappear into practice and struggleâ - @HodgeYousefi
A few more:
Allan Kaprow:
ââŠthe idea of art cannot easily be gotten rid of (even if one wisely never utter the word). But it is possible to slyly shift the whole un-artistic operation away from where the arts customarily congregate, to become, for instance, an account executive, an ecologist, a stunt rider, a politician, a beach bum. In these different capacitiesâŠ[art] would operate indirectly as a stored code that, instead of programming a specific course of behavior, would facilitate an attitude of deliberate playfulness toward all professionalizing activities well beyond art.â
Alexander Koch:
âWhy would an ex-artist potentially bring more creativity, more imagination or more self-responsibility to natural sciences and medicine than anybody else? I think Richard Rorty (whom we both admire) would actually support me here. If artists merely become social scientists or long-distance runners, or if they do become social scientists or long-distance runners âas artistsâ, would sound for him a) as really hard to distinguish, b) unclear what this distinction is good for, and c) sound like an attempt to find something essential about what artists are, exactly in the very moment of their disappearance, whereas my theoretic proposals of the artistic dropout try to contribute to an anti-essentialist perspective on that disappearance.â
âFor some time now, my work has been circling the question: What if, as an artist, you decide to give up your artistic practice, disappear from the art scene, and leave the field of art altogether? Does this simply mean you have given up, that you have failed? Or would you merely be switching to a new line of work, changing your job? Or could there be, potentially, more to it than this? Could leaving art be, perhaps, a gesture of critique and (artistic) sovereignty? It will, indeed, come as no surprise if we say that today there are far more former artists in the Western world, than there are practicing artists. Given the large number of artists who graduate from our academies and the very few who eventually succeed in a professional career, the »ex-artist« is a very common phenomenon in our social environment â mind you, without being a particularly seductive subject for art critics or art historians.â
Jerry Saltz:
âThe best parts of Documenta 13 bring us into close contact with this illusive [might he have meant âelusive?â] entity of Post Artâthings that arenât artworks so much as they are about the drive to make things that, like art, embed imagination in material and grasp that creativity is a cosmic force. Itâs an idea I love. (As Iâve written before, everything thatâs made, if you look at it in certain ways, already is or can be art.) Things that couldnât be fitted into old categories embody powerfully creative forms, capable of carrying meaning and making change. Post Art doesnât see art as medicine, relief, or religion; Post Art doesnât even see art as separate from living. A chemist or a general may be making Post Art every day at the office.â
Stephen Wright:
âI am referring to an art without artwork, without authorship (not signed by an artist) and above all without a spectator or audience. It is visible, public, and indeed, it is seenâbut not as art. In this way, it cannot be placed between invisible parenthesesâto be written off as âjust art,â that is, as a mere symbolic transgression, the likes of which we have seen so often, whose principal effect is to promote the artistâs position within the reputational economy.â
âThere are more stealth practices going on than the artworld ever acknowledges, or even knows about. This is for the self-evident reason that they are, by definition and by design, hard to see let alone recognize, but also because they subvert mainstream artworld values, for there is nothing to exhibit and thus, nothing to sell. Stealth practices tend to be written off as non-art, if not quite nonexistent. The art-critical challenge is to draw attention to them in an appropriately elusive way, both for their intrinsic worth and because they obey a certain art-historical logic. Stealth and spy art practices have become a viable way of pursuing art at a historical moment when art has withdrawn from the worldâthough that may appear grossly counterintuitive to anyone whose only sources are the official organs of the artworld like Flash Art or Art Forum. In the face of the omnipresence of the cultural and consciousness industries, art has withdrawn from the world and has hidden before our very eyesâthe only place it is safe from artworld recuperation, the only place left where the artworld is not looking for it.â
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