art can actually DO things?
” “The first sentence of the first wall text in the Cindy Sherman retrospective reads, “Masquerading as a myriad of characters, Cindy Sherman invents personas and tableaus that examine the construction of identity, the nature of representation, and the artifice of photography.’ The images do no such thing, of course. They hang on walls. The pathetic fallacy of attributing conscious actions to art works is a standard dodge, which strategically de-peoples the pursuit of meaning.” – from Peter Schjeldahl in last week’s New Yorker. Schjeldahl says this because he thinks writing is doing too much of the work, but what if art is not doing enough? I recognize beauty or humor create affective responses in the bodies and minds of viewers, but I’m increasingly drawn to art that actually DOES things, that intervenes in the world in some way, that breaks the memetic barrier, that makes attributions of conscious action true rather than a fallacy. For that reason, this Benjamin quote kills me: “Rather than asking, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I would ask, ‘What is its position in them?” ” - Brad Troemel
