“Its properties include its length, weight, and sharpness. Manuel DeLanda, from whom I borrow these terms, uses a knife as an example. What is a virtual capacity? It must be defined in relation to actual properties. Art, as a valorization of the virtual, is therefore potentially oriented against the negentropic flow of capital. In advance of the following, let me allude that capitalism is deeply closed, orienting all meaning toward the singular outcome of profit. It seems generative to think of art-work as the production of virtualities, or situations where potential outcomes are closer to “anything” rather than “one thing,” “nothing,” or even “everything.” As such, artworks necessitate a particular play of closed and open forms in order to tactically expand the field of virtual possibilities. Subsequently, we will come to rely upon the terms virtual and actual in order to grasp the coding (degree of openness or closedness) present within all social relations. I will elaborate below, but for now let us simply note that life as a metabolic process necessitates the pursuit of order and predictability (negative entropy, or negentropy) whereas death gives itself to disorder in the form of decomposition and unbecoming (entropy). The primary flows undergirding these orientations are entropy and negentropy. This deceptively simple state of affairs necessitates the deployment of some technical terms in order to substantiate the significance of art to politics. We begin with the binaries of our historical moment: life and death possess a specific arrangement under capitalism. If art is open, if it is available to a multiplicity of meanings and purposes that extend beyond usefulness or value, then our question becomes: how do we properly grasp its openness given that we live within a highly-regulated society? Accordingly, the operative question of this writing is as follows: When is art’s openness-its rejection of familiar or articulable meanings, its non-didactic tendencies, its abstract alienness-a radical openness? We might also ask, when is the blurriness 2 of art regressive, when does it behave as a holding space subsumed by our unspoken forces, all non-explicative aspects inscribed by reigning ideologies and codes of value? 3 If it is not highlighted or brought to the fore, what keeps it from being neglected, or otherwise assumed to run with the grain of ongoing politics? Is there an antagonistic incoherence that does not immediately surrender to the operations of interpellative logic? Every commodity and media is marked by the forces of its production-and yet the persistence of these forces denies any self-evidency.
It is precisely this duality of openness and closure in art that gives it both affirmative and critical political capacity. 1 While their trajectories of meaning are dependent upon the codes and regularities of a given site, meaning is not limited to these conjunctions, as the artwork is equally open to interpretive frameworks beyond those within which it was conceived.Īny convention or framing structure plays the dual role of enabling openness-availing new potential meanings and uses against the noise of infinite possibility-while also closing otherwise contiguous relationships, such as the indeterminate web of context, reference, necessity, and intuition that precede the work of art. It is already well-argued that artworks open fields of conceptual possibility, becoming closed only through conventions of authorial intent and social context. The only thing more arbitrary than an ending is a beginning.
0 kommentar(er)
