Dennis Hollingsworth

Relyea in X-Tra

I found Lane Relyea's "All over and At Once" at X-Tra magazine online. Here, an exerpt from an exerpt:

The pervasive sense that artworks rely on chains of explanation residing outside themselves, that they are a sub-species of theory, that they depend for their legibility and legitimacy on discourse, that they are most fully revealed in books and magazines, in the dual-slide-projector lectures of classrooms and artist talks, in informed discussions among artworld insiders, did much to erode conviction in the single, framed, all-there-at-once image. The readymade was made to exemplify this: that meaning in art is contingent, it comes after the fact and from outside in the form of a caption, a framing language, or a framing institution and ideology. But what happens to such meanings, and to discourse itself, when contextual determinants are in turn exploded, when every context reveals itself to be just another text, when framing institutions merge, diversify, cross-merchandize, when all disciplines feather into one another, when every caption is constructed from an information glut that can be endlessly edited, reorganized, manipulated, spun? Captions and contexts have lost all credibility, and the dissolution of these and every other frame has given rise to an infinitely landscaped situation, an awareness of only pure flow. Hence perhaps the popularity of landscaped, interior-décor art, big installations and video projections and other types of spread-out work.

I'll look for the rest of the piece.

This is what I meant in the last post:"...where we are in history (a hyperextended postmodernity with no idea at large-anywhere, in how to turn the corner)..."

...or when I refer to shoveling upon the grave of theory...

...or when I refer to Oedipus...

Or what I will mean when I write about:

...the dialtion of scale in modernity (I lost the location of this great article on the ever expanding scale of artwork and museums today, still looking)...

...or my view of the turns of art history from the fiftties to today...

...or of "Parallel Cities", the scale of a Human City versus the Car City (here tangentially)...

...or more.

I've looked for Lane's essay since the fall of the Berlin Wall back when I left grad school. Twelve years later, and Lane is but touching on what has to be ripped open so we can turn art into the 21st century (think of it, we are operating on a PostModern paradigm, one that is now forty three years old! If you are generous and date Modernity to the mid 1800's, this PostModern period has lasted a third of that time!), to reconcile the things we are making with the times we are living... a spreading bifurcation.

Posted by Dennis at December 27, 2003 10:16 PM