Jan Świdziński

Contextual Art (2)

Motto:
Art is alienated when it falls under the general law of capitalist production, that is when the work of art is regarded as merchandise
Lawrence Alloway, book review in Art in America, Sept. – Oct., 1974

1.
We live in a civilization of quicker and quicker changes. Reality is for us a never-ending stochastic process. We cannot separate the subject which acts (that which is subjective) from that which becomes the objective result of action. We cannot separate ourselves from reality.
We are subjects related to dependencies and in turn creating new dependencies. We live among subjects whose meaning we do not know and among meanings which no longer have subjects relating to them.

2.
The artist is involved in the culture of his time because he is a part of reality. He cannot be separated from reality or from art without the process itself being immobilized. Objectivization as it occurs in science means a skeletonizing of the subject as the object of testing. Art is a social act performed within the process of reality. It is subjective and objective at the same time. Being subject to action it is also an action itself.

Art does not complete anything because it is not the final product of the artist’s creative effort. It does not give others the picture of the changing reality which is caught by observation. Art is not consumption culturally enriching the recipient. It is neither entertainment nor reflection nor admiration. Art is a social act which changes reality through the perpetual process of breaking down old meanings and constructing new ones.

3.
We thus propose art not as the syntactic proposition of conventional art or as the analytic proposition of conceptualism, but as the indexical proposition (the occasional sentence) of naturally contextual meanings:
Art “a” in time “t”, in the place “p”, in the situation “s”, in relation to the person/persons “o”.

4.
The logic which rules art is epistemic logic. We are equally interested in what we know, what we believe, what we are convinced of, what we accept, what we reject, what we understand, and what we suppose. Thus art acts in the sphere of ideology through placing live ideology in opposition to dead – the true ideology being that which is verified by the practice of its time “t” in the place “p”, where we at present live.
We are not the prolongation of conventional art such as painting, sculpture, etc, which for us is history.
We do not belong to the Art World and we are not under the pressures of the Art Business. We live elsewhere. We are not interested in a civilization which is no longer ours. We look at the world from a different point of view. We are interested in the present time.