square white world

Let’s be frank with each other, in the cultural food chain, “direct producers” have become completely irrelevant. What’s important is that cultural stuff happens, and that it is managed: Publishers are important, not writers; galleries and curators are important, not artists; literary festivals are important (events that prove something is happening), not the writers who participate [; academic conferences, symposia and colloquia are important, not the researchers, academics and critics who attend].

– Dubravka Ugresic, Europe in Sepia, op. cit., p. 224

the vacuous repetition

of an incomprehensible text

only increases

its magical power

writes

Dubravka Ugresic

and what your cellphone,

tablet, notebook, laptop,

desktop, TV – every screen

in itself a vacuous repetition – what

every screen repeats

(out of what used to be a

vacuum tube)

in its vacuity,

what every media device, recording apparatus

repeats

and what every video, moving image, clip, film and movie

repeats

in every medium, codec and code

on every media platform

is the mad spectacle,

the crazy mess,

the incomprehensible

:

every repetition

only increases its

magical power

–

its power

to capture

and control

.

but what does it mean?

and what does the meaning

mean?

here’s an article asking

and here’s a video

from

HERE

The artist is convinced that her artistic project is both feministically and artistically provocative, even though (or perhaps because) it is – “invisible.” For those with slightly longer cultural memories and experience, hers is simply a dull recycling project. Over the past fifty years female artists have staged similar performances in many places, Croatian artists among them. The artist’s project reveals not only her naivety, arrogance, and unwillingness to bone up on her predecessors, but also an absence of context and continuity, the absence of a will to build continuity. The episode speaks to a humiliating artistic and intellectual apathy. And in this sense, it is indeed a very “female narrative.” Because without a women’s canon (now why wouldn’t that be a word for continuity?), ambitious and lazy little girls will go around in circles repeating the same thing over, determinedly claiming that they’re doing something new. The absence of a canon, that is, the presence of discontinuity, leaves an empty space that enables the inevitable reinscription of the female, the production of an exhausted art that resorts to the same stammering vocabulary, self-convinced that it is declaring revolution. In any case, a canon exists to be destroyed – and so that there is an awareness of what is being destroyed.

– Dubravka Ugresic, “A Women’s Canon”, in Europe in Sepia, pp. 177-8

… the same can of course be said for the what is euphemistically called “the reinvention of the wheel” in New Zealand cultural and artistic spheres, behind which the usual explanation is lack of resources to provide institutional (canon-like) continuity: however, as Dubravka Ugresic has it, the lazy little girls ought also be called to account.

“A woman’s identity is inseparable from questions of class; for the age of patriarchy, one that is unhealthily obstinate and enduring, this is what it is constructed on – not gender.”

• Dubravka Ugresic, Europe in Sepia, p. 174

“I’m an artist and I’m a New Yorker before I’m a woman.”

• Laurie Anderson