The recurrent phylogenetic and phylocultural structure, on which the artist-public interaction was built in the pragmatic framework fostering literacy, is questioned from within artistic practice. Art is only indirectly affected by the new scale of humankind, as it tries to acknowledge this scale. But the efficiency that this scale requires is reflected in the means available to support experiences of human self-constitution as artist. Related to scale are the notions of survival and well being. People do not need art to survive, and the majority of people on Earth are living proof of this assertion. But in a broader sense, life that does not have an artistic dimension is not human. That is what we have learned or what we want to believe.
To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is part of self- constitution as a human being, distinct from the rest of the natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness of other expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements, metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense of belonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in the civilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of the aesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuously submitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggest dynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominant literacy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like any other form of human experience, emancipated from the obsession of universality and eternity (embodied in museums and art collections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as the vanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architectural keystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to the forefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sake of breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule the object of artistic interest. In transcending old media boundaries, production and appropriation come closer together. The person making the artwork already integrates the appropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and above language is established in defiance of time, space, and the universal. Nevertheless, artists still want to be eternal!
Art establishes itself on a plurality of levels of interaction. This is its main characteristic, since the cultural level supported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic, pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate at various levels. The language of art history addresses professionals at one level, and laymen at another, through an array of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to experts and, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judge or produce artworks. The language of materials and techniques delves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, and rhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would not readily comprehend.
The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocesses previous artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modern movement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art and appropriated their themes and structural components. In this experience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (such as the recurrent linear perspective, illusory space, or color symbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account for the tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or the mythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. The experience, which language inadequately reported, but could not substitute, is the subject of artistic investigation. African and Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabic decorative motifs, and Japanese syllabaries are invoked with the intention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmatic context, which in turn will influence new artistic practical experiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russian avant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all the other isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiences alien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between art and literacy in conscious preparation for relative emancipation from language. This phase has its own, new, recurring interactions. The post-modern is probably the closest we have come to the expression of awareness and values about art in art, a generic hall of mirrors.
Artistic practice led to a change in the structure of the domain: art assumes a self-referential function and submits the results to the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modern art and architecture as only illustrative of cultural quotes, and possible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of the experience projected in making the new artifacts. It is an undoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (from norm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept of art, resulting from the theoretic practice focused on accumulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, is subjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practical experience of artists constitute a domain congruent to the aesthetic dimension of human interaction in the social environment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refuses previous norms and values, comments upon them from within, and projects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, and a vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in the post-modern, the condition and function of drawing change. Drawing no longer serves as an underlying element of painting, architecture, or sculpture. Rather, drawing ascertains its own aesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though art continuously generates its definition and redefinition, and allows those involved in artistic practice to constitute themselves as entities of change more than as manufacturers of aesthetically relevant objects. In a similar way, harmony is re- evaluated in the experience of music.
The specializations within artistic practice (e.g., drawing, harmony, composition) correspond to an incredible diversification of skills and techniques, to the creation and adoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awareness of the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or of a series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarily those who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In this age, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of information processing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of the aesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images and sounds are derived from various experiences (photographic, mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented by elaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity is only the most evident-are reified and framed in new settings together with the interpretation. They are also reified in artistic expression as the gesture of making the work and the act of submitting it to the public with the aim of pleasing, provoking, criticizing, ridiculing, confounding, challenging, uplifting, or degrading (intentionally or not).
Post-modern artistic practice results from the display of broken conventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimes antagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how the private (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art of proportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical or architectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTV series, is the personal drama of five young people trying to make it in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence, the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in the elegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in love with one of the characters, he was brought in front of the camera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer, sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of his experience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. The artifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism, even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work has become valueless. The making of art made public is at the same time its unmaking.
Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the art experience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or cultural complicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions. The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absence of a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one can count on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practiced parallel to the quote around which the work establishes its own identity.
Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or at least no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warhol prophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feeling of ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is lured into the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting with live characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reaching for pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naive ways (through mirrors, interactive dialogue on computer screens, live installations in a zoo, live keyboards in a music hall). Art is delivered unfinished, as a point of entry, and as an open challenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is as absurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of music to serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimedia event.
The copy is better than the original