“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, December 12, 2015

The 2015 Turner Prize Is Kinda OOO

Making built space for people to inhabit, human and nonhuman people. A collective (Assemble), a whole that is composed of parts. A blurring of boundaries between the causal and the aesthetic realm: building and art, architecture and decoration. Ignoring the rules and getting sort of stuck in. Like a sort of weird, slightly anarchist upgrade of the William Morris type project, belittled as kitsch and culinary art by the avant garde (see Ingrid Luquet-Gad's excellent article on it). Beyond shock. The uncool idea of being nice and helpful. With wooden things, which smell nice.

Making living spaces that might disappear and dissolve as you use them, as they become zuhanden, part of the world you are into.

Doing politics without the upper safety net of a vision of total change. Or the lower safety net of no vision whatsoever. Only cynical reason can accuse this practice of incrementalism. Doing politics by making toys that contain and connect other toys: building, street, dog, tree, children. The building as toy, not simply machine for living. A curiosity and a playfulness in the usefulness.

Making objects that go beyond objectification. Art outside the white cube. Not reducible to its parts or to some correlator or Decider that makes it real (human economic relations, Geist, history, Dasein, the subject...). Moving outside commodified gallery space, but not into a “real world,” but into a playground.

Overall, a friendly, smiling, physical practicality. And, let's not forget, quite irritating to some of the existing art establishment, with its coordinates of entertainment and critique.

This all seems quite OOO to me. An OOO sensibility.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow mitsein (in)action with H and H+. Maybe should have a few lions strolling around the old cement machine for being. Finally aletheia as to my William Morris pillows (Stawberry thief pattern/red)! I'm seeing it.