someone asked this on the forum i think.. if art was illegal .. what then would happen to authorship ,, to audience, to the whole responsability thing .. although property is does not necessarily develop in relation to responsability... so if art was illegal, would it be owned by an author . and would it address an audience$$, sorry, still on romanian keyboard, eerily, creepily appropriate. please read, my keyboard has $$ for question mark. sorry
whats the relationship between ownership, power and responsability$$ and if structures of ownership are unavoidable in art, in culture, in our world, then the next question to ask is, who becomes invested with the control over what is owned, who weilds the power generated through it, who distributes what is owned and regulates its value, who controls the flows of consumption, what are the conditions under which we make something, claim it, send it to to others who .. do what$$ partake of it is old fashioned, but maybe more realistically with art nowdays, are AMUSED by it$$. because it is ultimately those conditions that are possibly infinitely more interesting that any individual articulation..
i cant help thinking this topic is ancient history, but in the peculiar logic of our world it is the hot topic of the moment .. achille mbember, referring to the conditions of experiencing the present in south africa, spoke of a dialectics of change and inertia... everything has changed and nothing has changed, everything is changing at the rate of crisis and everything stays the same. i cant help extending this to the experience of my life, to discussions in the artworld no$$ to our topic here, oh my god someone asked, are we still//again//on this one$$. if i were to make a reading list for this topic, how come most anything relevant would be at least 20 yrs old$$ and how come we are still talking//not talking// about it$$
illegalities
Actualy, I bumped into http://neoism.trick.ca/Opening_20Speech the other day.. The guy, forgot his name at the moment, claims that "true revolutionary" art is - or should be - illegal acts.
Ilegalities, or rather, the illegality of certain activities is a variable. Ilegal Vs the law?
Ilegal Vs customs/"morals"?
Ilegal Vs one's own rules?
Ilegal Vs an artsworld's game?
Ilegal Vs one's work? (e.g., say you made a work, and then destroyed it.. a crass example..)
What if you get to HAVE to do an ilegal *thing* required by the authorities who enforced the law in 1st place? e.g. Ask the police to buy a criminal record from them. You get a reply that its not for sale. Then you can produce a practice in which the police requires you to commit a crime - so you can get that criminal record..
illegalities and violence
I do think the $ for ? substitution is pretty funny - what does this mean? ?=$ - so many different layers of meaning there...
Anyway, as for illegalities... It seems illegalities are distributed along a somewhat, but not entirely, different vector of possession and authorship than those of cultural production or general civic life (whatever that means and whatever illegalities that implies!). In terms of legal discourse, it seems western/capitalist/etc. forms of jurisprudence have traditionally tended to fiercly assign authorship to various so-called illegalities in order to make a punitive economy at all viable. See normal crimial law, but also, for instance, the initial discussions and difficulties around collective responsibility in relation to militant practices - the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades, the IRA, etc. - a huge aspect of the 'struggle' of these groups took place in courtrooms and related specifically to the question of discursive systems of legality in relation to collective formations of responsibility.
One question, though, that springs to mind, has to do with the somewhat different character of the more recent, and it seems rather perpetual, state of exception or emergency (different to that of the 1970s, that is) - are we not facing a shift in the distribution of illegalities where collective responsibility is now used to strike against the so-called 'root' of evil; that is, anyone or any organization, or any group supporting militant activity? Perhaps this change go back precisely to the legislation and strategies introduced in the late 1970s in the trials against Antonio Negri, for instance, or any of the above mentioned organizations, in order to resolve the emerging difficulties around collectivity and illegality...
Anyway, it just seemed like a significant point to make in terms of the distribution of illegalities.
As for art, what would happen if art was illegal (which it sometimes and somehere is/has been/will be), does it take on more collective forms of organization? I suppose it depends on what kind of illegality we are talking about...
So, here's a question: Is there an ethics - in the sense of life-style, organization of 'modes of life' - of illegalities that allow us to distinguish different praxes situated within the wider discursive field of illegality as such? (The same question could be asked for the generic notion of 'terrorism' of course.)
Following Benjamin’s assertion, in his 'Critique of Violence' (and I know I'm jumping between illagality and violence here as if it were unproblematic which of course it is not...), it seems what we're confronting is a kind of binary system of violences - what he calls the violence of the law being enforced, and a kind of counter-violence directed against the law when it's violence appear as explicitly repressive, etc. However, to Benjamin there is a third kind of violence, a kind of original violence, prior to and conditional of the binary of violence/counter-violence, legality/illegality. Or in other words (and now I'm reading stuff in to Benjamin with very little respect for his original text), beyond the binary economies of law (legal/illegal) there is a kind of original illegality, a kind of ethical violence in that it betrays the given or existant and opens up a kind of becoming-other that is not dialectical nor locked in a binary but that, as it fundamentally displaces established system of reality, will always appear as a kind of violence.
Now, this is perhaps one way of looking at aesthetics (in the expanded sense of 'experiments in experience', not just in terms of artistic practice) in relation to illegality. It will always be inexorably linked to a sense of violence, a sense of illegality, not necessarily or only the kind illegality we find in legal discourse (which restates and reiterates existing conditions), but in a kind of illegality that betrays the existent and opens up to its excess, its unknown potentials and capacities to become more, become other, become different. That, to me, would to introduce an ethico-political parameter into what is presented to us as a homogenous, undifferentiated field of illegality. Not sure how useful these extremely sketchy, patchy, scatty comments are, but it seems some how tangentially linked to the discussion.
For the text reference, see Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’ in 'One Way Street'. Jacques Derrida did a reading of Benjamin's text in a paper called ‘Force of Law’ published in 'Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice'. Just fyi.
/o
"... in a kind of illegality
"... in a kind of illegality that betrays the existent and opens up to its excess, its unknown potentials and capacities to become more, become other, become different. That, to me, would be to introduce an ethico-political parameter into what is presented to us as a homogenous, undifferentiated field of illegality..." precisely, perhaps this is the BEST articulation of what i would see as the fundamental question in imagining other "worlds" (with the art thing as a category of world and not the other way around), it is about betraying what is known , what already exists. it is so for the specific topic of audience as well (are we still on this one??). thanks for calling for more precision in the language of the discussion, not something i would be likely to do.
working with a machine that offers ?=$ or $=?
as a symbolic equation and a material substitution is for me one of those rare moments of insight.
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