Laurie Rojas
We will once again depart with the idea that Joseph Beuys’s work appears unfathomable.
Looking at images of Joseph Beuys’s work is like looking at photographs of the Museum of the Apocalypse. It appears as his arrangements and objects are the collected items of the sole survivor of the Apocalypse– It is of no surprise [...]
All of which is to say that, as with every other form of labor under the New Economy, so too has value production in the consumer marketplace become relational, dialogical, networked. The commodity, like the postmodern artwork, has relaxed its former pretenses to autonomy. The bricoleur, or what Bourriaud fancies the “programmer,” encounters a landscape of ever more responsive, yielding, programmable commodities.
by Laurie Rojas
German artist Joseph Beuys’s work appears unfathomable: his entire oeuvre engaged drawing, sculpture, performance, pedagogy, and political activism. Art critics and art historians have admitted the difficulty of placing this enigmatic artist within the modern or postmodern lineages of significant postwar artists. In the foreword to Joseph Beuys: The Reader, Arthur Danto argues [...]
“Today artists reside in communities – static, insular, and cut off from the world around them. These communities offer a glimpse into an ahistorical, often narcissistic, paranoid vision, that is all too real for its participants … “
“Everybody who walks into the room is transformed into an element in the piece, and their actions, non-actions, whether they are aware of it or not become part of the artwork. The work’s success or failure lies not only in the eyes of the beholder, but in the actions, interaction, engagement of those in the space. The meaning of the work is so loose, so open in fact, that it becomes meaningless…”
“Ideology here manifests as a forced sympathy for an ‘everyday people’, and as such, is entirely congruent with the concerns of Pissarro’s field women, for example, though the tone of sympathy is very different. More dire and distressed now. More literal…”
“the attitude remains the same: an idealization and abstraction of an everyday mass erased and retained as an artificial blank slate…”
“Perhaps there is a reason imagined images of post-apocalyptic worlds echo the post-industrial urban landscape. The reality of the decay of industry made fantasy allows us to actively indulge our masochistic desire to experience complete negation of constructive social stimulation. With this negation comes the romantic potential for a benevolent, heroic reconstruction – a fantasy echoed in expressions of constructing Detroit into an artistic and cultural utopia…”
“Taken as a whole, it appears that Temporary Services is attempting to do something far more ambitious than a common artist collective of our day: they are trying to build a movement.”
“In recent social art practices the targeted goals become articulated very definitively, and show their tumid culmination of early modernism’s crude dream of a public life. The naive, well-meaning goals of an art for the people: fallible, straining, and compromised…”