I’m back from my fantastic conference experience in Dublin, full of new insights and fresh questions about cultural policy — over there and over here. And spinning with possibilities to advance the hopes and goals of the Irish arts ecology, even in the devastating economy to come.
But in the meanwhile, I wanted to share my main session presentation at the conference for others to see. It’s the audio recording from the session itself, synchronized with the slide deck and posted to BLIP.TV. You might hear that I’m a bit glazed from jet-lag, and breathless from too much coffee, but you can get the general gist of the session through the video below (or, jump to this link).
I had to edit out the question and answer portion of the session (regrettably), since the audio wasn’t captured sufficiently to hear the great questions and conversations that followed the initial framing of the challenge. As ever, I welcome comments, questions, and criticisms on-line through this post.
[ Can’t see the video above? Try this link. ]
Andrew – it was a pleasure to meet you in person after reading you for all this time – I hope it won’t be the last time either! (and you really must tell me how you did that audio/video sync…how very impressive!)
I wish we lived closer together – I’d like to meet you for coffee. I’ve read some of the greatest stuff on this blog.
That being said, I’m going to call you on co-creation. It’s a bit tricky, though.
Premise 1: not just art, but all of experience is co-created (Zen-like). There is no experience but that it is made by the moment and everything in it, combined with all moments before and everything in them. What is the Big Bang with no physicists, trees falling in the forest, and all that?
Premise 2: there is nothing of meaning, but that someone decides it is so.
Conclusion: the experience of what we call “meaning” (in art, say) is co-created, but in any particular case, not all participants are equal. The participant evoking meaning in a time and place has a primacy in the relationship (from an immediate point of view).
To proffer the concept of co-creation as an abstract organizing principle of what we set out to do each day is to resign culture to entropy. The avant-garde (in its truest sense) ceases to exist. Art and culture lose the ability to move and create, and retain only the ability to comment in an ever tightening, self-reflexive spiral – something like a snake eating its tail.
All metaphors and models are wrong. Some are useful. But ones that endanger authorship have the potential to do great harm to the desire of individuals to make art. Deconstruction has its uses, but they’re political – not creative ones.
Not long after I posted the above comment, I came across some concepts in an article by Helene Furjan in the November issue of Artforum that put a finer point on my crude attempts to unravel the chicken-and-egg problem above. The concepts arise from a few sources: Buckminster Fuller’s “omni-integration;” Felix Guattari’s “ecosophy” – which is “an ethico-political interrelation of three ecologies” – namely the environment, social relations, and human subjectivity; and the resultant concept “eco-logic.”
Furjan describes eco-logic as a “generalized ecology that does not strive for resolution and that moves between collective action and individual creativity.”
The part I’m trying to elucidate in relation to Andrew’s comments about co-creation is the specific roles of various unique parties in the formation of a “co-creation” – and the heart of the sentiment lies in that idea of movement between individual creativity and collective action. The holy ghost of this trinity seems to be Guattari’s ecology of human subjectivity: collective action and individual creativity both require some individual or group of individuals to act based on their own unique perceptions of value.
We can talk about co-creation conceptually, and we can participate in it and watch it unfold before us, but our individual participation in co-creation will always be necessarily unique and subjective.
The only way out of the conundrum creates another conundrum – if we transcend our unique, subjective “me/them” state, we also also eliminate the whole idea of “co-” anything.