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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Candian copyright law is getting scary..."Close observers of the file say all signs point to a new regime that will improve safeguards for major music, film and media companies and artists for unpaid use of their material, but neglect to make exemptions for personal use of copyrighted content." (more at cbc.ca) (thanks Jeff!)
The current issue of Canadian Art has an excerpt of a talk by Ken Lum (click the "learn more" link for a nice interview), originally delivered as the keynote address at the 2006 Sydney Biennale. I found it very grounding and clarifying. I've transcribed a bit below:
Political economy is a constant yet largely unspoken referent in many of the contemporary-art biennials that take place around the world. In Dakar [attending Dak'Art, "the largest art biennial in West Africa'], I heard complaints from several visiting European and American critics and curators about how shoddy Dak'Art looked. Exhibition walls were not always properly painted and the technical equipment was older and more modestly scaled that in the richer biennials of the West. Leading critics and curators failed to recognize the degree of lack in a place such as Senegal. Even immersed in the hard realities of West Africa, the myth that all artists start from the same place continued to be perpetuated.
We like to believe that art operates in a space separate from political economy. We even like to believe that this separation is necessary in order to maintain a critical distance from the social order. There is some validity to this separation, in that critical distance from one's own presuppositions can allow for different epistemic perspectives. But I am also wary of the ways in which this separation can be used in the service of a neo-colonialist logic in the context of places like Senegal, where, historically, cultural production has often been measured in imposed-from-afar formalist or anthropological terms, but seldom regarded in terms that recognize indigenously derived criteria.
There have been several occasions in my life when I contemplated withdrawing from art in order to find out what I did not know about art. But my withdrawal was in the manner of a Heideggerian withdrawal of the withdrawal. The trip I made to Dakar in 1998 was undertaken on my own initiative as a means of breaking out of the art system as I then knew it, and effort to deepen my understanding of how art could be defined differently. This was a time when I felt great disillusionment about art and great disappointment in myself, a crisis of being that I believe afflicts all artists from time to time. I had a choice: I could either stop being an artist or I could enlarge my frame of understanding of art by looking away from what I was accustomed to.
I began to embrace an increasingly philosophical view of artistic purpose, one inscribed more in terms of the artist's life and less in terms of the art world's idea of the artist. I saw the necessity of letting go of the art world as I knew it in order to be more free, to rediscover the true purpose of art and to become re-enchanted with it by giving myself over to the world.