[spectre] ref. article about art in the Arab Spring

[Andreas Broeckmann]

(cross-posted from nettime, responding to a thread there...)

Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:15:59 -0500
From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift at gmail.com>
To: nettime-l at kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> The Death of the Avant-garde in the Attention Economy

(...)

There is currently a rare and excellent article about art in the Arab 
Spring on the opinion pages of Al Jazeera. The author, Daanish 
Faruqi, comments on what appears to be a quite spectacular exhibition 
by Cai Guo-Quiang at the Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. With the 
"biggest ever" daylight fireworks show composing the central artistic 
statement, this seems to have exactly those characteristics of scale 
and innovation you are talking about, Prem. Surely we will all forget 
this almost instantly!

Faruqi picks up on Hamid Dabashi's critique of this exhibition for 
its lack of relevance to the present, and though he doesn't bother 
with Walter Benjamin he does offer an insight into where the 
intensities of the present currently gather:

"Art's role, as Dabashi correctly describes, is to imagine the 
emancipatory politics of our impossibilities. To imagine is not to 
chronicle in minute detail. The artists of the Arab Spring are tasked 
with simply igniting a spark, of reinjecting the radical imagination 
into Arab society, through envisioning the utopian possibility of 
hope and a better life, undergirded by the basic dignity of the Arab 
people as non-negotiable and sacrosanct."

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/20121612493122450.html

I think the text is really good, check it out. Maybe an actual 
building full of now-time is currently imnpossible. Maybe this is a 
moment for architects who do not build? Who work instead with the 
grassroots transformation of spaces that have been frozen by capital?

warmly, Brian


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