Art Lies, Volume 68, Spring/Summer 2011 Page: Front Inside
This periodical is part of the collection entitled: ArtLies and was provided to The Portal to Texas History by the UNT Libraries.
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identity-based work and identity politics, the
crisis in criticism, the enslavement to the market
and now the market's crash.
This sequence, seemingly endless, put me in mind
of the book currently on the floor next to my
girlfriend's bed, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi
Klein. I only read the introduction, but I've heard
Klein on the radio and read a few interviews and
profiles that detail her ideas, and my girlfriend
explained the rest. The book's thesis is that, to
denude the state and create new economic
opportunities, corporatist cabals will take
advantage of any opportunity to implement their
so-called reforms, and that the state of disorder
brought about by disaster offers rich and
explicitly sought-after ground for such societal
reengineering. Logically, then, a state of
permanent crisis, and the authoritarian measuresIn recent times-the last twenty or thirty years,
say-art has used crisis in a particularly well-
domesticated way; it harnesses it for the long
run. Fads prove briefly dominant but don't kill off
any single mode of expression, thanks in part to
the baffling maneuvers of irony and its mise-en-
abyme refractions-ironization, deironization and
reironization, to bastardize Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari's 1980 A Thousand Plateaus (or
bugger it, as Deleuze would have it). The wild
profusion of styles deemed legitimate working
modes in contemporary art-one can today find
masters and champions of monochromatic
painting and expressionistic painting, art engage
and comedic/scatological performance and
abstract philosophizing brunted in material,
textual or other form-ensures that new
epiphenomena are consistently available on the
basis of which new microrevolutions can always0
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C./3it justifies, would be the ideal expression of this occur.
particular harmony of state and business.
The "permanent crisis" of contemporary r is
Though The Shock Doctrine is only four years old, wholly logical, then, and its diagnosis ami "a
it paradoxically seems archaic because of its When one severs innovation fro e i a o
reactive and semijournalistic nature. Its ties to progress, a shimmering arrMo lstyl c es
"the real," the specific, the concrete are what into being, all of them eq ally eg ima ; it th
most date it-and are also what make it seem excruciatingly niche ont npo ryons me
practically immoral to adduce its discussions of marketplace. W are bac a the cyni I, c Ilag d
CIA electroshock experiments, torture in impasse of Lat ur' lo ed p tmo erism,
Argentina, etc., in a discussion of transitions in where art gutt rs i to pure fash:n, bj t to
aesthetics in the less-dire arena of the art world. se nal va ati n ad nothing mo e.
But what the fuck. A key notion of the Marxian art
theory that fed the last decade's boomlet in
institutional critique is that our microcosmic
society, art, holds within it all the traits and I sho Id b mba ssed admit this, but it had
pathologies of the macrocosm (rather like the ver cur o me rior to this writing to see
way interpersonal psychotherapy launched by "Sc tu in e panded Field" as propounding
Henry Stack Sullivan focuses on the interaction a kind s uralism; from a student's
hand, that of therapist and patient, as the site of pe ect e, its contribution seemed its reportage
modeling and changing behavior). Ultimately, f his ry, and on subsequent reads I admired its
Klein's book rests on the uncontroversial notion or and clarity. Today, to me it seems explicitly
that upheaval produces economic opportunity, a to be the imposition of yet another abstract
corollary of the familiar idea that capitalism and organizational device on yet another for ess
revolution are intertwined. Perhaps the perpetual body or span, with the ultimate goal, semi gl,
state of revolution that the modern era ushered being "understanding" or the pr u tio of
in, with its view of time and history as knowledge. Krauss' figure is the lein ia am;
progressive and innovation as the societal Latour's are triangulations and bif cat spaces.
metabolism, is an expression of its economic In a passage of this essay I have sin e cu my
substrate. Or perhaps the two exist independently imagination ran to Greek myth, Scylla d
to mutually reinforce. Regardless, art's segue Charybdis, to produce the image of artis
from one crisis and revolt into the next figures straiting today's impasse. This image runs er
the state of permanent crisis that represents similar to one of the machine age-the extrusion
capitalism's highest dream of itself. of matter from between two gears turned by a4E
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Mueller, Kurt. Art Lies, Volume 68, Spring/Summer 2011, periodical, 2011; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth228033/m1/2/?q=communication+theory: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; .