breeze /br 210_06-10-04 realexperiment

Breeze Olsson: Notes on The Real Experiment (1983) – 10/04/2006

The article compares (mostly by contrast) ARTlike and LIFElike avant-garde art arguing that they are contrasting philosophies of reality.

• ARTlike: Art is separate from life and everything else; majority of artists and public; associated with tradition and history; a professional dialogue from one piece of art to another; separates the genres; the message passed from artist to audience (one way st.) -- ARTlike is externally driven, geared to a specific audience or space.
• LIFElike: Art is connected to life and everything else; the dialogue is not with art, but everything else (artistic submersion is crucial); mixes up genres; inseparable from real life; the message loops from artist to audience and back to artist; “art emptied of everything but ourselves” – LIFElike is a form of personal growth.

In early days, certain characteristics of emerging LIFElike art were common (albeit not necessarily recognized or labeled as such at the time (how different would it have been if ‘we knew’?):

• Recognition or the secularization of the entire art situation (genre, frame, public, and purpose)
• Shift art away from its familiar contexts
• Various performative modes; simply doing something
• Uses real structural models
• Breaking down boundaries of art and life (physical location)
• Diversified public
• Art is continuous with life
• Purpose of LIFElike art is therapeutic
  

At the time: Non-art was transformed simply by framing it in accordance to ARTlike standards (junkyard transported to gallery); thus limited by physical space.

Although the more ‘fresh’ genre still tried displaying in ARTlike setting, successfully moving away from traditional community of arts broke the loop. This meant going away from the underlying traditional/historical nature of art itself, bringing its purpose closer to individual -- self-centering the intention as a meditative and therapeutic technique; self improvement.

• Rosendale, NY (Raivo Puusemp and Mark Phelan – “Beyond Art: Dissolution or Rosendale, N.Y.”): political art not trying to make a statement per se, rather a continuation of life and applying artistic principles to life itself (reduce long-standing factionalism).
• Trying to stop change: “she went to bed qualitatively changed” with “experienced meaning.”

IF LIFELIKE ART DOESN’T RESEMBLE ART AS WE’VE KNOWN IT, BUT RESEMBLES REAL LIFE, WHAT THEN MAKES IT ART?

“Purposive and interpretive acts instead of mere routine behavior,”… a way “of sharing responsibility for what may be the world’s most pressing problem.”

“Suppose you telephone your own answering device and leave a message that you called – you might learn something about yourself.
Suppose you offer to sweep a friend’s house, andd then spread the gathered dust through your own place – you might learn something about friendship.
Suppose you watch a clear sky and wait for a cloud to form – you might learn something about nature. Suppose you wait longer, for the sky to clear – you might learn something else about yourself.”