Re: artists as outsiders

[mjnoble <not8ohm@iinet.net.au>]

Richard Zvonar wrote:

> At 2:37 PM -0800 11/22/04, scott hansen wrote:
>
>> the debate of artists as outsiders was tackled back when i was in 
>> grad school,
>> the debate is: are artists outside of society or are they a part of 
>> society?
>> and the debate continues w/ are artists influenced by the goings on 
>> in the world (influence from outside/external)
>> or are they the beacons from which change comes (somewhat internal, 
>> and from this comes the debate of the avant garde, the forerunners 
>> who change all, and from which most take 10 yrs to catch up to)
>> there's not really an answer, it's a bit of both, stuff comes in, 
>> then goes out and becomes a cycle,
>
>
> All of the above.

here's my take on the inside outside binary as it relates to artists and 
society.

firstly, all human beings are engaged in their society in a series of 
couplings between our internal capacity, as manifest in external and 
material action, and our external environment, as manifest in 
internalised response imperatives.  the one drives the other, and so 
forth, and hence the loop is embodied.

now the inside and ouside binary in relation to our social position for 
me is identifiable by our tendency, as artists, to locate out capacity 
for action at the edges of our internal knowledge, such that our 
exchanges with society are always in rarified commodities, the products 
of manipulating our environment during the loop between our extended 
capacity and the limited materiality offered up the populace for the 
strict purposes of aesthetic production.  not content with this limited 
and overdefined palette, art has expanded into all facets of the human 
being in order to conciliate the felt internal capacity with a material 
circumstance we can call "our place".  we want the world to match our 
imaginations.  the general populace, I would say, are less driven by 
their imaginings of place than they are by the navigation with the place 
they are given.  their coupled loops with society are based on the 
simpler set of exchanges within the realm of survival.

not to be too facetious, but if we are as artists are in a coupled loop 
with our society in momentary system exchanges at the edges of our 
capacity, we are neither inside nor outside, but somewhere fair in the 
middle in of the loop called being...

:)

hungover, and probably shouldn't be speculating...
-michael