opening salvo
I just have to say that blogging totally rules. It is helping me process enormously. I have been tracking the Palestine hotel situation. The BBC images of weeping journalists were heartbreaking. They know that it is open season on the truth. Today was just an opening salvo. The ‘new normal’ is extending its pervasive logic and what would have been unthinkable a few weeks ago, is now banal. ‘Shock and awe’ affects intellectuals disproportionately. It is too easy to give up. By coincidence, Ruth (with a streaming cold) was at the BBC nyc office giving an interview today. She said all hell was breaking loose re; the journalists who’d been killed etc.
Which brings me to my point, which is the kind of conundrum of the present historical moment and the ‘imagined unimaginable.’ I suppose the secret to successful sanity is to find a balance between critiquing the ongoing atrocity image stream and finding meaningful engagement in the local ‘real’ without retreating from the very necessary role of ‘witness.’ I have always had an on again/off again love affair with virtuality. It is at once beguiling as well as alienating. The map is not the territory and we do an awful lot of critiquing of maps. Television is the ultimate map. You probably remember the Herman Hesse novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’ which was all the rage when we were in high school. In it, the best minds were engaged in pushing beads around a board while the rest went to hell in a handbasket. (At least that is how I remember the text which is really all that matters) This hunger for the real is what took me away from the rarified milieu of conceptual art (which is basically a kind of ‘secret handshake’) into the realm of activism and urban agriculture. Growing food and bioremediating land provided me with the opportunity to act directly on my critique of contemporary (Late) Capitalism, which had previously threatened to disable me. Having this outlet makes the virtual less oppressive because I realize that I can ameliorate the local in a direct and real way. Oddly, this has brought me back into conceptual art by going kind of full circle. Passivity is a very destructive force.
