s3685049
The Annotation

Unfocused. Incoherent. Vague. Those could be valid impressions of my blog, since I am mixing genres, media, themes etc quite wildly. Yet, rather conspicuous tags like “conceptual”, “experimental” and “interdisciplinary” might signal to a discerning reader that all of that is deliberate. In fact, to invoke chaos theory, it only looks chaotic on this particular level of abstraction, where categories are fixed and mutually exclusive. My artistic agenda currently is heavily relying on attempts to bypass these restrictive verbal categories in search for novel ways to make sense of the world.

McEvilly (2005) described it as “the quest for the unaccountable” (p. 207), I – after an assist from Dr Rendall – phrase it as “making sense of the stuff that doesn’t” (see http://jusles.art). And that’s the reason and the source of my commitment to conceptual art – art for me is primarily a mode of exploration. I am not very interested in perfecting crafty skills, replicating a canon, gaining recognition or generating ‘beauty’ for their own sake, unless they become instrumental in my larger quest. Thus, I cannot express enough gratitude to Duchamp who brought cognition back to art (McEvilly, 2005, p.25), effectively enabling me to pursue my interests through artistic means. That explains also presence of numerous conceptual classics (e.g. Baldessari, Asher) in my list along with some experimentalists (e.g. McRae, Cardoso) exploring interfaces between art and science.

However, focus on cognitive faculty does not exclude aesthetical or ethical or any others. It only helps me to organise it all into something that makes the effort worthwhile. If it can be distinguished at all, that is, since Aristotelian division of the human into the cognitive, the ethical and the aesthetic faculties seems very arbitrary. I do assume that “beauty” (aesthetics) has some kind of logics to it (cognition) that also involves occasional assessments of rights and wrongs (ethics). Thus, I can see meaning in beauty and that meaning does not always have to be articulated in words to make sense – we are equipped with variety of senses and there is no clear-cut distinction between sensing and cognition. Therefore, my list is also populated with works that are very strong in percepts, just because they happen to tingle my concepts in the right way (e.g. McQueen, Between Music, Mulga, Christo).   

While trying deliberately to bypass and blur those unproductive categories, I cannot remain oblivious to the fact that some world leaders have embraced the very same technique, making them arguably the most prominent conceptual artists of the day (I also have a work in progress on this theme) and raising a number of ethical issues. Thus, I have some works on the list provoking ethical considerations (e.g. Sierra, Raila, Rogalska). 

All listed works have some element that is relevant or inspiring for my own endeavours regardless of the genre, media or even my arbitrary tags. The wilder the mix – the more unaccountable the concept. The next step is to find a vantage point from where all of this no longer will appear chaotic.

References

McEvilley, T. (2005). The Triumph of Anti-Art. Kingston, NY: McPherson & Co.