I would like to start with a quote from Coco Fusco one of the artists conversations we had to read for the week, "I like to think of a productive relationship to society and to creating culture as being a back-and-forth kind of movement between going out into the world and learning about people, places and situations, and then going back and reflecting on them in the work that I do" (333).  Fusco talks about an interactive performance art piece most of the conversation and it was not until the end (till after reading that sentence) that I connected him with everyone else.  Suzi asks him if art is a waste of time because "the world is ending" and he responds the same way I think all the artists we've read and heard would, by simply saying art is the solution, art is the productive conversation we must all become and remain a part of in order to fix this world of chaos.

Over and over I say again, art lies within the rediscovery of what is and what comes out of that rediscovery, Fusco obviously feels the same way.  He looked to history to create a cage performance project that was show cased all over the world with radically different responses.  I loved the response from  the person on the Chicago ABC news that said, "I've been interested in Native Americans for a long time, but I've never seen this kind of tribe before.  This is really weird" (328).  That made me laugh.  Fusco relates to identity politics and advocated for native american minorities in his cage performance very much and wants to disassemble levels of culture just as I think our speaker this week Ron Graff does too.

Graff talked about his brutel hate for almost everything and his disspaointment of life, he was a crack up I really enjoyed what he had to say although it was hard to know what his heart was trying to say.  He said he began to despise realist paintings and drawings because he was no longer himself doing what his mind told him to do he became a commodity and began only serving people of high culture, who only wanted the art to enhance their wealthy apperance (not that he wanted to just give it away to people who didn't care about it but he no longer wanted to work for and support the higher status quo).  So he turned to abstract and illusionism and what he had once hated he now loved.  He spoke a quote that I think you can apply to all aspects of culture not just art, "I saw something I hated so I went home and tried to paint it myself and I didn't hate it anymore."  I think its about 'try it before you knock it' type deal.  Like when his friends told him his abstraction of art was destroying himself and everything he had worked to become, it was almost like they needed to get off their high horse of high culture and try something new, be apart of it, become active in the conversation and see what happens.


CONVERSATION.  Philosopher Arthur Danto was the over conversation we had to read, "I don't think anybody in the art world is able to function without other people being involved" (286).  Imitation, reproduction, rediscovery... both Graff and Danto talked about human connection needing to be a necessity in order to create art.  Graff simply came out and said that he would go to galleries then go home and copy it if he liked it, then alter it if need be and call it his own.  He become part of a productive process which could metaphorically be called a conversation.  I like Danto's idea of what it means to be a part of a community and he is totally right.  I come from a small town where teachers and parents would always talk all this bullshit about our responsibility as a member of this community, give me an effin break lets step back and talk about our responsibility to this world.  I hated everyone in that town we were not the same, I didn't want to be responsible for what they wanted to be responsible for.  I like the idea of us all just being interconnected between relationships we all individually have, which if we connect each relationship we would have this amazing web of interconnectivity = one big conversation!  Its all one in the same, language = art.  So get in where you fit in and start the conversation.