Communication can be a dangerous thing, if it breaks down barriers and
allows people who have previously been denied a voice to speak and
articulate a vision.
That seems to have been the revolutionary aspect of the internet so far
(e.g., amongst the "civil society" protesters in Seattle). It has been
seized upon by those who previously didn't have access to the media and
allows for the creation of new public forums and spaces that are not
controlled by the existing authorities (in whatever field of power).
Its all a matter of making connections or networks--and technology is
helping people do that.
Craig wrote:
>How to respond to the current situation in Austria!
>For Fluxlist Artists
>Collaborationists:
>Socio-Poetics since the 1950s
>
> The specter of artists and intellectuals as Nazi or Stalinist
>collaborationists has made collaborations-as-experimental art both more
>difficult and more interesting, especially during the 1950s and 60s. We
>see a similar struggle with a tainted language in the work of Heinrich
>Böll, who "trained in the Catholic Rhine tradition" was disheartened to
>acknowledge that the Nazis had transformed his language into "a stinking
>quagmire." Böll, and his generation of writers, "had their work cut out
>for them. In order to realize their dreams as artists, they would have to
>do nothing less than reinvent the German language." We see a similar
>reinvention of a tainted language in the work of Kurt Vonnegut, who
>"pointed the way to another approach for a writer to deal with his
>language. While Boll worked with a German language contaminated by the Nazi
>gang, Vonnegut wrote in the sandy terrain of the mass media in which the
>English language had been transformed. During the sixties, he was the
>author most read by young people; they realized that he had taken their
>tame English and turned it inside out, that Puritan English, smelling of
>the sixteenth century, full of pious interjections. He set about equipping
>it with the language of the millions of voiceless people. And he did it
>with an ingenious alchemy, becoming at the same time a highly intelligent
>and concise writer." In the arts, collaboration itself became a way to
>transform the tainted languages of mass bureaucratic organizations. This
>was no easy task, and often presented enormous risks for artists involved
>in reinventing collaborative organization that would neither serve the
>nationalist state nor the corporate soviets. My term "sociopoetic"
>describes artistic practices that seek to use social situations or social
>networks as a canvas. It does not define my methodology, then, but rather
>the subjects of my study.
> The visual poets and artists involved in many of the
>collaborations-as-artworks during the 1950s and 60s used many of the
>techniques of modernist poetics. Instead of the moral authority of the
>tainted High Modernism, favored by the authoritarian state powers, these
>artists work was defined by a tone of smirking seriousness. Their dry wit
>made fun of authoritative terms, official-sounding institutional names, and
>the trappings of academic research. The Neoists, for example, invented a
>name that both spoofed and bettered any effort at riding the wave of the
>next new thing or neo-old thing. In reaction to this threat, authoritarian
>governments did target artists interested in collaboration-as-art. The
>examples of the oppression of these experimental artists and poets are
>unfortunately and surprisingly numerous. As a particularly apt example,
>the Uruguayan dictatorship jailed Clemente Padin, the visual poet and
>mail-artist, for "hurting the morale and reputation of the army." This was
>not a trivial offense, and the court sentenced him to four years in jail;
>he served two years and three months of this absurdly harsh sentence. His
>work in assemblings and among artists' networks often spoke against the
>brutality of the dictatorship in his country from 1973 till 1985. The
>government's fantasy, that Padin posed a threat to the national security
>and moral of the army, reached a high point after Padin staged a "Counter
>Biennial" in front of the Latin-American Section of the 10th Biennial in
>Paris in 1977. Soon after he staged this event, the police arrested him.
>Under intense pressure from an international group of mail-artists
>including Dick Higgins and Klaus Groh, the dictatorship released Padin
>early. There are other examples just from Latin American governments
>reacting to mail-artists as if they posed some serious threat. The
>Brazilian military closed the "II International Exhibition of Mail Art"
>organized by Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago in Recife in 1976.
>Oppressive governments in Latin America imprisoned, exiled, tortured, and
>put under house arrest many other mail-artists and editors of assemblings.
>Of course, governments' paranoid fantasies about, and corollary oppression
>of, these poets and artists are not limited to Latin America.
> The Gauck Behoide Archive in Berlin now contains the Stasi
>documents from the former East Germany. Stasi was the internal secret
>police similar in the scope of their surveillance of their own citizens to
>the Soviet Union's KGB. The Stasi was particularly worried about mail-art
>subversion, this archive now also contains one of the largest collections
>of mail-art in the world. Klaus Groh notes that in his own 250 page file
>(not even one of the largest files on mail-artists), the archive has
>blacked-out names of other mail-artists; these missing names protect the
>former Stasi agents. Unfortunately, many East German mail-artists
>co-operated with, and sometimes worked for, the intelligence agency. For
>artists in the West, the government's concern about something apparently so
>marginal seems misplaced. The Stasi fantasy about the threat from
>underground art and poetry networks became the justification for spying,
>oppression, and censorship.
> The authority's fantasies are often the raw materials for the mail
>artists' sociopoetic performances - and that is the crucial aspect of the
>collaborative work during the 1950s and 60s. For example, Dick Higgins
>recounts how he participated in an international intervention into an East
>German bureaucrat's authority. Robert Rehfeldt, a prominent East German
>artist, had organized a mail-art conference in Poland in 1989. He needed
>to obtain permission for this meeting, but a bureaucrat fearing a big
>network of artists and poets decided to deny permission for the event.
>Rehfeldt gave Higgins a copy of the official letter including the
>bureaucrat's authenticating stamp. When he rejected a proposal, that
>particular bureaucrat stamped the request with this identifying mark of
>official authority. On instructions from Rehfeldt, when Higgins returned
>to the States, he made a rubber-stamp based on the stamp print on the
>bureaucrat's rejection letter. He then sent this stamp to the Polish
>mail-artists. Higgins also obtained the bureaucrat's address, and bought
>subscriptions in the bureaucrat's name and address for a number of gay porn
>magazines, as well as Trotskyist newspapers. He heard nothing for a few
>months perhaps because it was difficult to get information from behind the
>Iron Curtain. Then he received an uncharacteristically typewritten letter
>from Rehfeldt. The letter said that Higgins had done a bad deed by using
>the rubber-stamp to make it appear that the bureaucrat supported and
>approved of art events and projects that he did not actually approve or
>condone. Later Higgins received an unsigned hand-written note from
>Rehfeldt that said, "Keep it up." The network had used the trappings of
>bureaucratic authority to reverse the authorities' surveillance system and
>set in motion a disruption of the normal process. This reversal of
>perspective is a key element in what I call "intimate bureaucracies" as
>well as Situationist strategies.
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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