Art Is Shit

If you want to see an artist who is completely committed to his working methods, and can back it with a ‘true’ statement, then this is your guy. On display here is a work entitled ‘Crystal of Resistance’ which was featured in the Swiss Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale. The work combines, basically, everything one could image – yet is not one of those random, throw it together, everything is connected type assemblages.

A website has been created specifically for the project and will only be available for browsing until the end of January, 2012. So check it out and read all about it.

http://www.crystalofresistance.com

From the website:

”With Crystal of Resistance I want to produce a work that is irresistible. This can only happen if I succeed in creating a work out of my innermost self, without confusing - as it is usually done - the inner self and ‘the personal’. I can only reach the universal if I risk conflict with my inner self. ‘The personal’ doesn’t interest me because it’s not resistant in itself, it is always an explanation - if not an excuse. My work can only have effect if it has the capacity of transgressing the boundaries of the ‘personal’, of the academic, of the imaginary, of the circumstantial, of the context and of the contemplation. With Crystal of Resistance I want to cut a window, a door, an opening or simply a hole, into reality. That is the breakthrough that leads and carries everything along.”

In browsing through the website, I came across the ‘Related Texts’ section, which is a page full of interviews, statements, and articles from the artist. One that I found most intriguing was entitled ‘Doing Art Politically: What does this mean?’ Below is a sample of key points from the article. Be sure and read the whole statement if you get the chance.

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Today, the concepts, ‘political art’, ‘committed art’, ‘political artist’ and ‘committed artist’ are used very often. These simplifications and abbreviations have long since been superseded. They are cheap and cognitively lazy classifications. Not for a second do I think that I am more ‘committed’ than any other artist. As an artist, one must be totally committed to one’s art. There is no other possibility if one wants to achieve something with one’s art than to commit oneself totally. That holds for any art. Today there is great confusion about the question concerning what ‘Political’ and ‘political’ are. I am only interested in what is really political, the ‘Political’ with a capital P, the political that implicates: Where do I stand? Where does the other stand? What do I want? What does the other want? The ‘political’ with a small p, the opinions and forging of majorities, does not interest, and has never interested me. For I am concerned with making my art politically. I am not concerned with, and have never been concerned with making political art.

Doing Art politically: This means creating something

I can only create something if I behave positively toward reality, even toward the hard core of reality. But it is a matter of never allowing the pleasure, the choice, the fun of work, the positive in creation, the fair, to be asphyxiated by critique. It is a matter of not reacting; it is a matter of always being proactive. To create something means to risk oneself. I can only do that if I make a work without at the same time analyzing what I am making. To take the risk, to have joy in working, to be positive is a precondition for making art, for only in being positive can I create something from out of myself.

Doing Art politically: This means loving the material with which one is working

To love does not mean to be in love with one’s material or to lose oneself in it. Rather, loving one’s material means placing it above everything else, working with it with awareness, and it means insisting through it.

I love the material because I have decided in favour of it, and therefore I do not want to replace it. For, because I have decided in favour of it and love it, I cannot and do not want to change it. The decision in favour of the material is a prodigiously important one; that is the political. And because I have made this decision, I cannot give way to the wishes or demands for ‘something else’ and ‘something new’.

Doing Art politically: This means giving oneself the means to do so

It is a matter of inventing one’s means for working oneself, or of appropriating them. My means are headlessness; energy = yes quality = no; weakening oneself but wanting to make a strong work; not being economical with oneself; expending oneself; panic is the solution!; being precise and simultaneously exaggerating; undermining oneself; being cruel vis-à-vis one’s own work, being tenacious, less is less! more is more!; it is never won, but it is also never totally lost!; to have the ambition to coin a new concept with my work; to assume responsibility for everything concerning my work; to bear looking stupid in view of my own work; better is always less good!; refusing all hierarchies; believing in the friendship between art and philosophy; being prepared to pay the price for my work as the first to do so.

Doing Art politically: This means using art as a tool or weapon

I understand art as a tool to get to know the world. I understand art as a tool to confront myself with reality. And I understand art as a tool to live in the times in which I am. I always ask myself, Does my work have the ability to generate an event? Can I encounter someone with my work? And with my work, do I manage to get to know something? Or, through my work, can someone get to know something?

To make art politically means to understand the work which I am making today, in my milieu, in my history, as a work which wants to go beyond this, my milieu, beyond this, my history. I want to achieve in and through my life that I confront myself with universal problems. Therefore I must work with what surrounds me, with what I know and with what affects me, not in such a way as to succumb to the temptation of the particular, but rather, on the contrary, to touch universality. The particular, which always excludes, must be resisted. For me this means that I want to make my work which I make here and today a universal work. That is the political.

Doing Art politically: This means being a warrior