Art keeps running, who's chasing it?

Our guest speaker today Tannaz was super interesting the way she wanted to take everyday objects and arrange them together in studio space to give deeper meaning to them was really innovative.  She would reference to pedestrian objects in a hope that it would trigger a movement inside her audience that would cause them to reorder their existence in the world.  She wanted her audience to objectify themselves and figure out how to see themselves in the world, in society and in history.  I really enjoyed the one about the holocaust I think it said IFORGOT and it was all about not forgetting horrific events of the past that may of happened to your culture or a culture you’ve learned from.  She talked a lot about culture identity and how one meaning from a culture could translate so differently to another but she emphasized the importance of looking for that translation, looking for the meaning, and then using it to reposition your views of worlds culture.  Like the art world her visions and pieces had many layers in different directions with different relationships with different viewers.  Her work is open ended and allows for conversation to take place after viewing it which is what art is all about like I have said… conversation.  She has a fascination with future and her simplistic pieces had a way of constructing multiple narratives (when maybe she was only thinking of one).  She says she negotiated with form to create value and meaning by taking ordinary objects and having them stand for something bigger than herself or her audience; culture.

The conversation we read this week was with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and I found her connection with Tannaz late it her conversation, actually on the last page to be precise.  Barbara states, “Post-disciplinary says, ‘Forget them.’  Who needs them?  Take a problem and go anywhere you need for the material.  Tannaz took problems from history in different cultures and literally looked to the streets to find materials to solve the problem for herself in the hope that she could create remembrance within her audience to feel what a culture feels when on that topic or to think about what once happened and how it affected people of its culture.  I liked Tannaz latest piece with the cinder blocks and roses and different lights with colors, it was really aesthetically interesting and chaotic but at the same time simplistic and peaceful.  The roses balanced the cold stark image of the cinder blocks so well it really made for a beautiful composition. 

Barbara talks about the art world’s resistance to move but I think of it as more of a resistance to learn or accept new ideas.  I think right now the art world is confused a reason it could be confused is because of Barbara’s idea that contemporary or avant-garde is contemporaneous with all other sorts of art like Whitney Biennial.  Also there is this struggle within the art world, this sort of tug and pull between new age innovation and traditionalist institutions… artists are struggling trying to attack certain issues in a certain way but it is hard to survive against artist getting the commercial benefit—making the big bucks—because their line of work falls within the bourgeois and the institutions.  A connection between this conversation and all the others is this war between western civilization and the world and the different ways in which the cultures born out of each place is different yet the western civilization has seemed to contaminate all other perceptions.  Barbara ends the conversation by saying, “It’s the West and the rest—it’s not a solution,” (433).  The end of the conversation scares me, it frightens me that we can’t shake this politically and economically deep definition of art that surfaced through western cultures birth.  I wonder if things will ever change, art keeps running but is the institution even chasing it?