There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing… reading group day 10, photo by caleb waldorf
The thing to remember while crossing the threshold is that the process of world-making does demand the maintenance of suspended spaces of inquiry, even as it presses toward effective changes in the way that you sustain your material existence:
With whom do I create a world? What will it be made of? How will we maintain it? Where will we find the gazes that we humans need to keep doing whatever it is that we do? How to raise our own gazes past personal satisfactions to an activity that can attain the bracing and tragic dimensions of a real world? Can we or should we bring along any symbolic or material supplies from the richly appointed illusions we’ve just left? Is a politics necessary: do we somehere have to stand and fight? Is a counter-institution necessary: do we have to set up objective structures to start sharing whatever we have learned with people we don’t know? And how to keep this whole quixotic enterprise from failing, or drifting by inertial necessity back to the established and symbolically stingy formats of what you are calling the artworld?
–Brian Holmes, responding to Quitting: a conversation with Alexander Koch on the paradoxes of dropping out
时间 posted on: 14 July 2010 | 
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July 14th, 2010 - 08:15
“Can we or should we bring along any symbolic or material supplies from the richly appointed illusions we’ve just left?”
would games work? yes, let us bring games along.
“Is a politics necessary: do we somehere have to stand and fight?”
yes, of course a politics is necessary, but standing and fighting is not the political act in itself. politics (in this revolutionary sense) constitutes of dictating the terms under which the fight will take place, and then standing up thereafter. it is not the only form of politics that effects change.
“Is a counter-institution necessary: do we have to set up objective structures to start sharing whatever we have learned with people we don’t know?”
i think we agree on this basic premise, though our collective projects are often radically different. given this, the question that ought to follow from holmes seems to me: to what pedagogy does (en)countering belong? pedagogies are abstract machines that can be reprogrammed and refashioned in a modular sense. let us all keep building abstract machines and let them flow through the network!
(by the way, coziness with the “establishment” is certainly not the exclusive domain of the “artworld.” rather, i would suggest that the best hope for abstract machines and the buoyancy of said quixotic enterprise is precisely said artworld and its potential to embed radical critique in its affective tonality.)
July 15th, 2010 - 16:27
@sportsbabel, i disagree with you about the artworld! (“art” being taken very differently than “artworld”, note…)
July 17th, 2010 - 22:09
fair enough!! so maybe we can call it an utterance towards a (art)world-making? ;)
July 21st, 2010 - 02:11
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