Viewing page 24 of 38

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

[[image]]
Stripe, 1967, 96" x 48" x 13".  
Collection Stephen Antonakos. Photo by Peter Moore.

The main obstacle to the elimination of history from art is art itself. Conventionality in art resides in the convention of art. This sounds like proclaiming democracy in art by applying to each of its practitioners, without fear or favor, the same coat of tar and feathers. Once this stricture has been tentatively accepted it can be eased somewhat by issuing a like set of stigmata to practitioners of some of the other conventions: inventors of social and economic systems, revealers of metaphysical truths, etc.

I am arguing the subjectivity and consequent self-conscious posture of all world views and their practitioners. The conception-practice of horizon making is, moreover, not just a fact of human life but is altogether appropriate human posture and behavior.

The seekers of coherence inside the human et have this ultra-conservative view-of-views in sight; those who seek it outside the human set are pointed blindly in the same direction. The schism is therefore an incidental one which strikes a few sparks but does not affect the ultimate result.

The cleavage itself adds to the dignity of the former because it is an extension of individual internal duality. For the last word in the previous sentence substitute duality-ambiguity-dilemma.

The confusion began after the middle ages with the (creeping) breakdown of the putative after-life clearly separated in time and substance from 'this' life and the growing morbid preoccupation with This Life. A forerunner of this was the anguish of Greek humanism, but this shrivelled [[shriveled]] in the stony soil of the Peninsula (it is idle nonsense to argue that this happened outside Greece) and did not begin to strike root again until Abelard. The Greek gods and demi-gods were Mafiosi, and a naive but pungent sense of irony kept them out of the human viscera.

Luther's outburst was a manifestation of inchoate nostalgia for this direct confrontation (and its smell of blood). But it was consequential because catalytic. Anyone who mentions Savonarola is going to get it right in the teeth.

The first herald of conceptual metastasis was Leibnitz. In 1666 he published the Dissertatio de Arte Combinatoria, a "project of constructing a universal exact system of notation, a symbolic language, in which all concepts would be so analyzed into their ultimate constituents, by the notation itself, that it would be them means for a fundamental knowledge of all things." Almost exactly three hundred years ago, and I still like the taste.  There he sits with the knife clutched in his right hand, the fork in his left, napkin tucked under his chin, ready to eat all that cardboard.

His (Leibnitz') foremost critic was not Immanuel Kant as is commonly supposed (Kant himself believed this) but Will Rogers who said in 1923, "All I know is what I read in the papers."  The vessel of ambience for this remark is given us ten years later by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his first Fireside Chat, in which he said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself."

Richard Artschwager will have a one-man show at the Castelli Gallery opening on December 30, and a projected show is being arranged at the Gallery Zwirner in Cologne, Germany, later this winter.

43

Transcription Notes:
This was a bunch of gibberish to me !! :)