[Reader-list] response to Shuddha

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Dear Jagan, and reader-list,

Than you Jagan for your thoughtful response to my text on the future of art
Heres my two pice worth,  in response to the response.

I hope that this will be more than a two way dialogue, and that other voices, 
delighted or concerned at the abolition of art and other such matters, 
will join the joust.

Cheers

Shuddha
_____________________________________________________________
Jagan  : 
> If in the future, there is such a world as Shuddhabrata Sengupta
> envisions, then please make out a gate-pass for me. I want in.


Shuddha: 
Such a world, or whatever shadow of it as might be in existence in the 
present,  since it does or would locate itself in the public domain, would 
require no gate pass. So do consider yourself welcome at all times. We need 
more people in the future that waits embedded in the present.

Jagan : 
> I am not so sure, however, if I will be traveling to another place,
> another space or an other world, that I have been promised, that still
> needs to be imagined. Perhaps I will remain where I am, in the current
> world, as it becomes forever contemporary.


Shuddha : 
Precisely, the point is to act and exist always in a way that anticipates the 
future in the present, rather to act as if the future were always already 
present. This is because, as I suggested in the posting, I feel that we 
should treat the imagined as being real. Not because we ought to be enacting 
some fantasy, but because, the fact that we desire something automatically 
creates the necessary, but not sufficient conditions for their realization in 
the world. It remains to be acted upon , but the verey acknowledgement of the 
desire is the first possible action. For instance, I desire a borderless, 
stateless world. Each instance of my articulating such a desire in a public 
way, (through speech, writing or artwork) communicates my desire to other 
people, perhaps to people I dont even know. They in turn might communicate 
and amplify the same desire - so articulation, at least articulation, can 
always take us inches towards the realization of the imagined in the realm of 
the real.

Sometimes articulation, expression and the forms of expression also add up to 
more. For instance, a work (visual, aural, textual, hypertextual, whatever) 
that also carries with it a tag that encourages people to treat it not as a 
commodity but as a gift is also immediately a subversion of the prevailing 
relations of commodity in cultural production. One might argue that each 
article of 'fee culture' always changes the configuration of cultural 
production slightly. If through accumulation of free cultural goods, the 
quality and quantity of free goods were to outweigh the quality and quantity 
of no free goods then the future that Jagan says I am pointing towards would 
be immediately realized. I am not the only one who takes this seriously (nor 
are others who are active within the free culture/free software movement). If 
oyu see how rigorously the music industry battled the somewhat weak free 
culture model of napster then you will realize that the threat of the 
realization of the future is felt most strongly not by us "airhead radical 
types" but by men in suits in corporate offices. They take the reality of our 
desires very very seriously.

Jagan : 
> If the artist's life is to be the material that the artist will work 
> into > the products of his/her art, if the 'content' of their art is 
> existence itself, and even if the 'form' is completely subject to their 
> desires and realities, if that art will be self-expression itself, a 
> perpetual > work-in-progress, then we will have to let the word 'art' make a
> discreet exit from our lexicon. But we know how once admitted, the word
> has no exit. 'Art' is always already a trace of things and words from 
> another time. Other desires, other realities.


Shuddha :
I have no hesitation in endorsing any move that takes the word "art" out of 
our lexicon, nor do i have any hesitation in endorsing the abolition of the 
artist, simply because I see it as part of the general movement for the 
abolition of work, by workers (including art and culture workers like my 
self) This is a very old goal of the international working class movement 
which leftists the world over have forgotten. 

What this means is an ushering in of ways of doing things that blur the 
distinction between labour, play, learning and leisure that can only happen 
if we either abolish or ignore the domination of capital in our lives. if 
more and more people acted at least for part of each working day as if 
capital had no existence, then I think the accumulation of these dispersed 
moments of the boycott of capital would force it into a terminal crisis.

If more people (for the moment let us continue to call them artists) acted at 
least for a part of their working time as if they were not producing for the 
art market, for galleries and commissions, for curators and catalogues, but 
merely creating objects of beauty and un commodifiable value for themselves, 
for their friends and for the public domain, then the market in art and 
culture and intellectual property relations in art and culture would be 
seriously threatened. This too would anticipate a different future.

Jagan
> Mr. Sengupta's desires are the stuff of revolution...


I never said that they were otherwise. Also, since I am more interested in 
revolutionaries becoming (provisionally) artists rather than in convincing 
artists to be revolutionaries - the desire needs to be seen in perspective. 
It is as much a cll to art as it si to revolution. 

But the revolution that I foresee is not a spectacular commandeering of the 
barricades, but the formation of a critical mass of events, and everyday 
practices, that render capitalism, and the state, irrelevant, and boring.

For those interested in following up further on the previous discussion on 
this list along this line of thinking - I would refer them to two postings in 
June and July this year.
 
1. [Reader-list] <nettime> new rules for the new actonomy 
by Florian Schneider & Geert Lovink 
forwarded on to the Reader List from Nettime 
by Jeebesh Bagchi  on  Thu, 28 Jun 2001 12:46:08 +0530 
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2001-June/000189.html

and 

2. [Reader-list] Re: New Rules for the New Actonomy, 
response to the Schneider and Lovink text , posted by Shuddhabrata Sengupta 
on  Tue, 3 Jul 2001 00:28:46 -0700 (PDT) 
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/2001-July/000193.html

both are available from the Reader List online archive at 
http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/

As for the rest of Jagan's posting. I could not but agree with his 
sentiments, although, I have to say the role of the artist-manager, or the 
manager-artist does leave me with serious doubts.

And finally, on a somewhat different note, 

Jagan : 
> What uplifts us, what makes us more human, is changing. As we come to
> love, consume and preserve our bodies in new ways, we also do the mind.
> Consumption, reflection, maybe even theoria, will occupy us more in the
> future, as we are more able to guarantee physical wellbeing. Will art
> engage our minds equally well as  it is does today? Or will it tend towards 
> music and dance, and a Cubist descent down a staircase will be an actual
> experience, not just a strange thing for a nude to do and for a painter to 
> paint.


Shuddha: 
There is no reason for music and dance not to engage our minds, and following 
from this there is no reason for that which engages our minds not to be stuff 
that can be danced to. As an anarchist thinker I respect greatly, once said 
when asked to join a party that advocated, ahem, revolution "if there ain't 
no dancing, its not my kinda party"

Or, to contradict what that great grave digger of revolution, and artist of 
contradictions, the venerable Mao Xe Dong (Peace Be Upon Him) said, let us 
insist that - 

"A revolutions is, first and foremost, a dinner party"

and so, may the little arts of cooking, entertaining, enlightening and 
subversion, blossom and mingle in our anticipations of the future, artfully 
and artlessly, as the case may be.

Cheers

Shuddha