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So you say that the possibilities of representation of art are totally exhausted, that they have become as tight and narrow as a white box “I don’t know, I mean, I’m not sure”
Come on! Look at what’s going on. All spaces have been occupied by the mass-media; every vacant place is taken by advertising. Even worse: this occupation is not only physical but semantic. Whereever you turn, whatever you might want to use in the process of creating a piece (with the goal of an art-work in mind of course), you will always trip and stumble over the fact that every notion has already been appropriated by the mass-media and by advertising. Everything that surrounds us only serves one insidious goal, namely to increase stock turnover and to expand the volume of sales. Except now, the world has become even tougher: (don’t you see?) -Reebok is dealing out FREEDOM; Samsung is peddling CONFIDENCE, cutting unfuckinbelievable dough! And all that the artists really have as the space of artistic representation is the white box. Reduced to its denominator in the sterile space of notions, art refines itself alone. And upon visiting a museum, gallery or other exhibition space, the spectator will finally understand that he is being addressed in the language of art, not advertising.
But this path invariably leads to the glazing and icing over of art. It directly contradicts the hot, dynamic idea of struggle and clearly seems that all of the positions have been abandoned, and what’s more, without any battle at all. It seems like they let us know that our territory was occupied while we were watching a movie, notifying us of their victory aposteriori, as it were. To accept the conditions of surrender without resistance means to admit defeat without having even entered the game. This seems humiliating.
I suppose that it makes sense to use exactly those fields to the end of representation that the adversarys forces have already occupied and fortified. But in order to be taken seriously in this field, we will need the same equiptment as our rivals. By this, I mean the material side of things.
Try to understand, my friend, we are waging war on what is primarily an ideological battlefield. And that is the zone of our autonomy! And by stepping out into the public sphere, we gain what they call a target group. For us, this group consists of people who might come together to form a critical, revolutionary mass. People who don’t see the contradictions in the new world order only because they weren’t notified in time. We could let them know. But this will be impossible if we stay sequestered in our museums and galleries.
So is time to go out into the occupied territories, behind enemy lines? Are we to infiltrate television- and radio-broadcast, the newspapers, the supermarkets, boutiques and restaurants? Of course! And on these territories, which are subject to the laws of the industry’s trends, we need to construct new, social attitudes, using the only means available to us, namely our creative and intellectual force, our power to be critical of the contemporary arrangement.
I need to think it over, but for now, turn on the TV. The Agents Feat already started 5 minutes ago. Relax, we’ll make it. They’re probably showing a block of advertising spots for blasting-caps or fuses. Where the fuck is the remote?…