Notes on Negation

This is a response to a note from Kristen:

"The market obliterates the possibility of work within it to deal with the problems of people." Or at least makes it very, very difficult! I agree with you and your description of your feelings and decisions related to your practice are similar to mine. The question for me, and which I think your concerns implicitly raise, is what to do and more particularly why to do it within the site of art.

I suppose my interest in art lies at the intersection of my hope at what I imagine the social space of art could be and my disappointment at what it is and seems to have great difficulty of escaping; expressive cliché, grotesque commodification, hermetic professionalism. But then why should it be different from any other institution?

Regardless, I am interested in taking up the problems of art because I think the social site of art has been and can be a unique (but not privileged) site of (ethical) social engagement. In order to do so it must operate on different terms than those fashion production and market exchange and hermetic historicism. The way I am choosing to do this is through what I suppose I would call utopian negation. Negation because I am increasingly looking to make art by not making it and utopian because hope is the only justifiable motive to engage this space; and hope seems to me utopian, romantic and naive.

I think about how someone like Richter engages art. His practice is paradoxical by design in that it is based on a negation of painting through the physical act of painting. Richter proclaims a profound commitment to the "idiotic" practice of painting (putting paint on a surface) while simultaneously demonstrating and articulating a rejection of what painting is capable of. In a sense I guess I would say that Richter simultaneously makes and unmakes painting by being a painter.

For a long time I was concerned with attacking art and sought to define my practice in negative terms, "its photography that is not... Its not this or that.." I am no longer interested in making things whose energy lies in what it is not but rather in conceiving ways to make my practice, whether it is understood as art or not, something useful.

The metaphor I often use of moving the velvet rope further and further away from the institution may ultimately result in me deciding the site of art is not the site where I want my work to register. I hope not, but maybe....