The Radicant- p79-140

On page 83, Bourraiud quotes the writer Hannah Arendt, "Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need." He then states, "...art must absolutely resist the process of consumption: 'An object is cultural to the extent that it can endure; its durability is the very opposite of functionality.'"

While I believe I understand the point that is trying to be made here, the craftsperson inside of me is yelling- hey! you forgot about us! somethings can be functional, durable, and, yes, art!


On page 120, Bourriaud drops is 126th new vocabulary word, geocustomizing. At this point I began to wonder if it is necessary for him to create all of these terms. Can he really not express himself in the language that exists? Are his discoveries so profound that they deserve to be added to Webster's? Or is this little habit of his simply there to inform us that he has a bit of an ego?


On page 130, Bourraiud states, "This formal mode reflects our civilization of overproduction, in which the degree of spatial (and imaginary) clutter is such that the slightest gap in its chain produces a visual effect..." I thought that this was a very interesting point. While we are inundated with audio and visual stimuli, sometimes the strangest, most noticeable thing is silence. It is not a unique idea- someone going to the country and being astonished by the uninhabited sky. I had not, however, thought of it as a method to use in creating visual art.


On page 131, Bourraiud is discussing the guerrilla warfare tactics induced by translation that he thinks is necessary for successful art, and states, " In the cultural field, such warfare is defined by the passage of signs through heterogeneous territories, and by the refusal to allow artistic practice to be assigned to a specific, identifiable, and definitive field." I wonder if the identification is the problem, or that he deems easily identifiable work as unworthy of art status. Is it actually less effective, or does appealing to a larger audience make it less effective?

On page 138, Bourriaud basically says that perhaps a good way to judge art is by how impossible it is to judge, "And what if true art were defined precisely by its capacity to evade the implicit determinisms of the medium it employs? In other words, today one must struggle, not- as Greenberg did- for the preservation of an avant-garde that is self-sufficient and focused on the specificities of its means, but rather for the indeterminacy of art's source code, its dispersion and dissemination, so that it remains impossible to pin down..." I am starting to get the feeling that despite Bourriaud's talk of equality through translation, he is really interested in creating an art movement that is secretly founded on elitist principles. I think he is trying to say that the more confusing/curious something is, the more effective it is as art. Is this the only way that we can engage viewers- confusion?