visit........www.artnotgallery.co.uk   ¶ 12:52 PM 1 comments

  I want to come back to Guy Debord; because more than any other figure I have talked about I think he is important to my interests.

The idea of 'the suppression of art', that like the Dadaists', the Situationists were concerned with, is important to an understanding of the relationship of politics and art. The Situationists were against the categorization of art and culture as separate activities from society, preferring instead to include them in everyday life. They saw this categorization as another expression of capitalism and the market. The Artist and The Audience can be seen as The Producer and The Consumer. Fundamentally the Situationists were against work - they saw work as a barrier restricting the natural and instinctive creativity of people. Everybody should be creative, everyone can create art.

There are elements to the Situationists aims that ring true and others that do not. I agree that the categorization of art and culture as separate to society is an expression of capitalism - art and culture can exist happily within society. Taking the same forms and being created from the same means of production as any other 'thing'. An art work is political simply because it exists within society, no attempt should be made to avoid this. The concept of the 'original' is to keep it separate from society. With the concept of the 'original' there is the baggage of the spiritual, religious object of divine importance.

I am unsure about the Situationists claim that everyone is instinctively creative and that work inhibits creativity. But haven't yet come to my own conclusion about this.  ¶ 3:37 AM 2 comments

  I am thinking too simplistically about a mass produced work of art.

I am falling into the capitalist trap of a concept of the 'original'. It is possible to not have an original. Mass production becomes the mode in which the art is made, it becomes the medium, it is not separate from the medium or additional to it, it is the medium.  ¶ 1:49 AM 0 comments

  There is a sense that a mass produced object has an ideology. In essence it is an ideal, it has an original which is chosen and then replicated.

If the object is an ideal - possesses an ideology. It cannot as a material (in a sculptural sense) represent a dystopia.  ¶ 1:46 AM 0 comments

  So this brings me back to my idea that only works of art mass produced can be truly revolutionary.

Does something mass produced in essence become a utopian object?

Or can it remain questioning, a dystopia. If art is viewing, responding, making - is it possible to include mass production within making, or does the reproduction add an additional, entirely separate element to the production of art?  ¶ 1:34 AM 1 comments

  Art and Utility cannot be married.

I believe that art should present dystopias and respond to the world. The only way in which a work of art can become useful rather than functional is for it to be some kind of blueprint or manifesto - art cannot do this because it is visual and has to respond to what exists. Art is fundamentally about viewing and responding and making.

Tatlin's Tower attempts to marry art and utility in an obvious sense but fails because once a piece of art, a monument in this case has a definite utility the thing produced is governed by it's utility - there is no system that can exist that ensures that the use does not compromise the function (the art).  ¶ 1:21 AM 0 comments

  Maybe art with a political motive is art and utility married - but that doesn't sound quite right, let's define utility:

- The quality or condition of being useful; usefulness: “I have always doubted the utility of these conferences on disarmament” (Winston S. Churchill).

- A useful article or device.

Perhaps art with a political motive has a function, it moves people, it communicates - this differs from a utility - a utility has a practical application. Is Marx completely ignorant to say that nothing without utility can have value? He wrote a book that does not have a utility, only a function. Although in fact a manifesto differs from a book in that it has a practical application and so has a definite utility.  ¶ 1:11 AM 0 comments

 
The Monument to the Third International -

'It was the idea and not the mechanistic realities which were his prime concern: as engineering, the tower is utopian. It is significant that when the model was exhibited in Moscow it was operated by a small boy concealed in the base to turn a crank handle.'

Tatlin attempts to marry art and utility with his tower, but instead produces a ridiculous mess which is neither art nor utility. Is it possible to marry art and utility?  ¶ 12:39 AM 0 comments

  I have come to some conclusions about politics and art.

- Artists should not align themselves officially with any political entity.

- Artists should allow they're work to be the propaganda of any political entity, even if they see it as the 'wrong' political entity, they should see this as part of the life of the work.

- If an artist wants to be truly revolutionary he/she should understand that the art establishment is fundamentally and irrevocably entangled in the current political status quo, however much it protests otherwise. Art is fundamentally materialism and as Marx points out, culture has evolved out of and is an expression of the capitalist world:

'Nothing can have value without being an object of utility.' - Karl Marx  ¶ 2:29 PM 0 comments