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I’ve wanted to comment to comment on the last few postings for weeks but been too busy. However the mini debate on TAL has prompted me to pull my finger out. Reader, I’m not in any way opposed to theory in the broader sense i.e. thinking and writing about what you are doing and your understanding of what you are doing. But I think the most pertinent quote was Raymond Williams in which he expresses the complexity of the interaction between theory and practice. Nonetheless it boils down to the realization that changing the world or changing your understanding of the world is a false dichotomy because there is an interaction and I’m always amazed at the ability of academics to dress up a truism like that as some sort of profound and original insight. As reader says, the guys gotta make a living.

The problem I have with the great god “POMO Theory” as it has developed in the art world over recent decades is that it is both narrow and shallow. I have a passable knowledge of a whole range of other type of theories (pattern languages, for instance) that can be applied to art with equal relevance and I’ve never come across anything in pomo theory that I hadn’t already found in some types of Buddhist theory written over two thousand years ago - that makes you realize how ethnocentric and fashion driven most of this discussion is.

In the end it all boils down to power relationships. There are more stakeholders in the art world than artists who are merely the worst paid stakeholders, and powerless because they are constantly competing against each other. No matter what artists think they are doing, and no matter how good they are at doing it, their conventional success is entirely in the hands of the other stakeholders and they are almost powerless to influence that except by signing up with one of those other groups of stakeholders. Each group then promotes and supports the art and artists that support them. Academics support artists who illustrate theory (e.g. the lovably incompetent Sunday philosophers of Art & Language) because that makes academics look important, commercial galleries support artists who manufacture easily handled saleable objects (the art equivalent to the glowing red but flavorless supermarket tomato or perhaps the fifty different varieties of water that are all just, errrrr… water, with fifty different labels), collectors love fashionable art because first you look cool then it can be turned over for a quick profit (you know whose work I mean), institutional galleries support BIG ART because that justifies BIG GALLERIES and run by directors on BIG SALARIES, curators and artists both love installation and performance art designed for events like biennales because it can justify and pay for lots of free travel to install/perform it, and so it goes on and on.

So what is to be done? Well, you just try and survive and swap your art works for Italian villas if you can (actually it was just a very small farmhouse of a few rooms in very bad condition) and enjoy life, as Kosuth does. Important as Kosuth was, he had pretty much used up his only idea by the mid 70s. The Art & Language group in general had the same problem, their theory did not allow much room to manoeuvre and the interest since then has been in seeing how they could play it out once the group collapsed in the mid 70s. Burn made a smart move in latching onto the more lively and radical Sydney activist political art scene and Mel Ramsden did equally well in developing a viciously witty line in art world self satire. Kosuth has been left slowly foundering with a product line of over produced neon light quotes, an over blown rehash of his early work that adds nothing to it although the installations are usually beautiful and impressive.

So when I say theory is just another word for doing nothing I mean that it is very easy to theorise change but extremely difficult to bring it about. Can it be done? Yes, but it means giving up, permanently, any expectation of conventional art world success, in fact it means giving up most conventional ideas of being an artist. How many people who enter the art world are really prepared to then risk their entire identity as an artist by operating in the multiple complex, demanding and unglamorous roles necessary to create real change? Very few as far as I have ever been able to see although there is a thinly spread community of them across the whole world.

The last couple of posts have involved quotes taken from Art After Philosophy and After. There’s a couple of things that are worth mentioning in terms of the subjectivity of the position that I find myself reading from. Firstly, as I’ve realised through the process of re-reading this book it was pretty important to my development as an artist when I first read it in the second year of my undergraduate studies, and it was important because many of the imperatives that Kosuth identifies are as relivant today as when I first read them, ( re-reading has made me conscious of the fact that I have, up until this point unconsciously incorporated many of the positions Kosuth articulates into the way i think and talk about art). The other aspect of the lens through which I am re-reading Kosuth’s writing is that of having seen one of his more recent installations at Sean Kelly Gallery.

Trying to reconcile this work with his more radical writings is a difficult task. If you click on and scroll through the photos in the link above you’ll get an impression of the the minimal/conceptual slickness which dominated my experience of this installation. This work is immaculate. From the stainless steel fittings holding up the sheets of glass, to the text and the mounting for the fluros behind, the whole show oozes the very aesthetisization of conceptual practice that Kosuth so eloquently attacks in some of the pieces he wrote soon after conceptual art gained widespread institutional acceptance. So I guess I’ve been asking myself, what weight does radical theoretical writing hold if it isn’t being reflected in practice? Maybe this is a case of what Ian Milliss describes as theory just being another word for (or perhaps worse an excuse for) doing nothing.

But then I can’t totally dismiss Kosuth’s writing on the basis of how he makes a buck. Sean Kelly is a commercial gallery and the dude has to make a living, (in unsubstantiated rumor i heard that Kosuth once swapped one of his works for a villa in Italy). I guess for me selling work through a commercial gallery or swapping it for prime real estate is perhaps where a more radical work can begin with the art market simply providing the financial resources to pursue other less profitable avenues. However in Kosuth’s case I have yet to come across any evidence that this is what he is doing and given his emphasis on the artist fighting for the meaning of their work it seems like either his ideology or his practice has gone astray.