May 24 2009
Yves in the morning
Yves-Alain Bois: What I’m criticizing in a lot of cultural studies is the lack
of mediation. It’s a model that says ‘go from here to there’! It doesn’t work like
that for any of us, why should it be sufficient for an artwork? We don’t start doing
something bizarre because of what we have just read in the newspaper. No, there
are mediations. Things are filtered in a very strange way. An artist is never a
polygraph test.
I’ll probably be thinking about this quote for a while. It is always difficult for me to decide my tack and framework when making a claim and this made me laugh out loud. It also makes me feel better about disliking Hamilton’s dissertation on postwar assemblage. Sometime I should think about this more, especially in relation to Ed Ruscha’s comments about his own work. “‘Boss’ is just a word that we all used back then. It used to mean ‘cool’.” What to do with that? These things are all clustered in my head right now, even though Ruscha has very little to do with Burri or Arman or Rauschenberg. Never mind, Ruscha has everything to do with Rauschenberg. Fuck. I need a proto-blog where I work some of these things out before they reach the public. Maybe this is it.
