[iDC] (no subject)

[Luis Camnitzer]

I would like to start a new stream here, a little less technical than usual,
but that I feel should be vented so that technical matters don't run away
with us. There is not much to moderate on this, just to talk and listen.
Merry Superstition Days to all.

At the end of Second World War, Fred Sander was imprisoned by the Soviets
and interrogated. Sander had been an engineer for the Topf Works, a company
that specialized in incinerators. In his work he had developed a high
efficiency system for the furnaces in Auschwitz by introducing conveyor
belts and using the corpses as added fuel. At the time of his imprisonment
Sander was bitter. He had tried to register his system with the Patent
Office in Berlin, but his application had been rejected with the argument
that his creation was considered a secret of the state. The decision did not
by any means imply a value judgment, and that wasn't Sanders problem. What
embittered him was being denied the deserved credit for his creation and
individual intellectual effort.

I don't know how precisely the words author and authority are etymologically
connected, but it might be interesting to look at them in one ideological
continuum. I always was suspicious of authority, and increasingly am
becoming suspicious of authorship. While as artists we don't fit anymore
into the romantic image of the individual chosen and damned, based on
authorship we are still pursuing individual recognition by higher
authorities and expecting the appropriate rewards. This is specially so in
the U.S professional artist model (a model that is taking over the world),
where artists are trained to be producers of articles for consumption and to
use their name as a trade brand. We therefore become open to have our
production shaped by the market rather than by collective cultural needs. Of
course, the market can be considered as a collective cultural marker that
identifies our society, but it is here were the parallel with Sander becomes
rather threatening (at least to me). Sander felt that with his invention he
was helping Germany win the war--that he was a good citizen--and he saw no
difference between himself and a combat airplane designer. Somewhere the
ethical component seems to have gotten lost.

Some questions worth discussing, or at least to possibly contextualize our
work: Are being rejected by the Patent Office in Berlin or by MoMA in New
York on the same ideological plane, with a difference in degree but not in
quality?  Is our primary mission as artists to produce commerce fitting
monuments to ourselves, or is it to use art to help bring ethics into the
picture. Is there good unethical art? (Which is different to good art made
by unethical people). Are we to be producers of objects or shapers of
culture?

Luis Camnitzer (camnitzer1 at gmail.com)
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