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spencer selby >- - - |
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/->/ visuelle kunst - mail art -
experimentelle poesie // berkeley ca |
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>> avant garde has constructed its own coding
>> / interview /
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I would hope that my art does disrupt "the surface
of coding." But this is neither a singular nor an
easy goal to attain. I believe most of the avant
garde has at this point become just another genre
of art, whose radical characteristics often cancel
themselves out by being predictable. In effect the
avant garde has constructed its own coding which
its audience takes for granted. The theoretical
terminology and discourse which was originally
developed to support art's challenge to society
has by now become so heavy with assumptions (many
of which were never proved) that only those who
are not challenged pay much attention to it.
Visual poetry is important to me because it is by
definition a provocation to the viewer. My work
amplifies this provocation by using old images to
make new statements. Different orders of meaning
combine in ways that force the viewer to confront
her own complicity and participation in the art
experience. Images of popular culture are
recontextualized as questions whose answers only
the end-user of art can supply. We are all
voyeurs, like the cipher woman in my piece "You
Must Face the World You Have Created." Either we
are turning from one direction to another or we
are looking in several directions at once and
can't tell what is real. We don't admit this
because it would be confusing or upsetting.
Instead we put things in compartments, each with
its own comfortable explanations. Art is one of
our favorite compartments, but who really knows
why. I can tell you what I think and what I am
trying to accomplish with my own art, but I don't
believe in telling anyone how to view or read it.
Theory and the work are two different things, and
always have been. My art may in fact have
aesthetic underpinnings that I don't entirely
believe in. That would be OK and actually better
than equating art with the artist's intentions, as
many of my contemporaries like to do.
Certainly there a number of ways to interpret what
I'm doing. Some are consistent with prevailing
postmodern ideas, while others stretch back to
roots in modernism and dada/surrealism, if not
further into the past. I value these roots, which
are as alive in my work as anything else. To me
that is in the best spirit of postmodern
aesthetics, the branch which understands that the
past never dies in art that is constantly in the
process of revising its relationship to history.
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