Re: [rumori] mcdonalds


Bob Boster (bosterATpobox.com)
Fri, 29 Oct 1999 08:42:41 -0500


Andrew wrote:
>How shall we fight now that the enemy has appropriated (There's that word
>again!) our weapons and tactics? Perhaps the time has come for artists to
>shift focus from form back onto content. And what goes on outside a work of
>art.

This to me is a huge question, and one that pushed me away from continually
reinforcing the "political" aspect of the collage process into something
where I'm now just more interested in it as a populist trope: for the same
reason that both I AND ad agencies like to cut up sounds, people who feel
like they are not "artists" can approach these tools and use them to make
their own cultural expression. That actually undercuts the capitalist
mission: getting people to use stuff they've bought or collected for one
use and turn it into a new, ex-economy expressive statement.

Again, hopefully to clarify. It's not about the inherent criticism of
appropriation (which I agree has been dampned by the omnivorous processes
of postmodern consumer culture), it's about the fact that appropriation is
a good, easy, _natural_, tool for everyone to use under this state of
culture. See: Michel de Certeau _The Practive of Everyday Life_ or
_Textual Poachers_ (forget the author, maybe Henry Jenkins?) for more
technical stuff on this.

>
>Here's an interesting idea for Negativland (or whoever else): instead of a
>work on advertising boosterism, how about one on advertising pessimism and
>nihilism, and how an �sthetic of dissent can be emptied of real meaning and
>actually used to support what it claims to be against. Maybe even
>criticizing certain uses of appropriation.

I'm with you. Alternatively, if a decent portion of the "educated
population" took a Pauline Oliveros-syle deep listening class and started
to make intense "original" expression with the husk of an old toaster and a
broken trumpet in their living room for fun, it would be just as radical
and challenging of the status quo as anything Negativland can muster on a
record at this point. This speaks back to your point on making "content".

Bob

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