Streams of Messages, Streams of Consciousness
Jan de Vree
(Translated by Tom Hibbard, 3/06)
From an historical viewpoint, twentieth
century art and more particularly contemporary art has suffered from
the problem of communication.
This problem is one of dialogue, in the sense that a society
based on mass culture can no longer be addressed by those that are absorbed
in the arts. Moreover, attempts to force the matter
can short-circuit communication via one creative impulse or another,
upsetting the balance of understanding between investor, producer and
consumer.
In other words, there
exists no natural or friendly relation between he or she that produces
art and he or she that consumes it.
Plus, for personal satisfaction the least prince or prelate may
display his or her works of art in the grand caverns of his private
palace or prison in order to forge a sign of prestige and social success
that brings admiration. The patron is nothing but an onlooker.
At the present time,
the work of art has become a product that, following the example of
everything else, is destined to be exhibited as window-dressing, to
be consumed in an environment that strives to be completely impersonal,
homogonous and quantitatively large.
How can such works communicate at all?
How can works exhibited in this way teach and especially stimulate
the public in a society governed by globalization of thought and acts
of terrorism, at the breast of which fear and deception pervert human
values, at the breast of which the individual is a consumer of illusions
that free him from worry by a proliferation of signs and codes that
condemn him to a lethargic passivity?
Any door to belief will do; any work of art has the same value
in this situation...O how pernicious!
From an historical perspective,
the art of the twentieth century, especially avant-garde art, has torn
down all respected and established categories and genres. And as a corollary to this destructive
approach, it follows that other parameters have been brought into question
also, notably the concepts of authenticity, unity, originality, context
and many others. Commonly
it is precisely problems concerning the notions of interactivity, of
participation and of communication that are of interest to avant-garde
artists.
From a general point
of view, the avant-garde has unlocked the work of art to make of it
an 'open work' (Umberto Eco), emancipated from the static ‘art
object’ to become a dynamic model of processes, of quiet contemplation
that becomes active participation.
This makes the object a truly new creation, a fundamental interdisciplinary
journey and birth, exploring the quality of author, from 'the author
as producer' (W. Benjamin) all the way to the 'death of the author'
(R. Barthes), to successfully arrive at a multiplicity of authors or
a collective paternity. The romantic conception of individual
artistic genius has worked to establish the role of prosaic 'processeur',
one who attempts to gather social contacts from the rhizome of the channels
of communication. The strong
force of this phenomenon is tied to a media-ization larger than society
and also larger than art, and the obstruction of the 'open work' is
effected in large part by the numerativeness of the market, the sitcom-ization
of the ethic in the way that art is generally perceived.
Following
the blow of unfulfilled conceptualization, only a small number of options
seem to have importance: the
negation of the avant-garde by the restoration of tradition or else
the injection of a new energy into the image in plastic arts drawn from
low-brow art and from various other artistic disciplines.
It is interesting to note that following a successful revival
of expressionism (Transvanguardism, New Wilderness, Neo-Expressionism)
and a rage for recycled postmodernism around the year 1980, one is able
to point to a sparking of development supported by avant-garde offspring:
performance and Body-Art, Mail-Art and Video Art, multi-media and new
media. In other words, this art was conceived
from a model of processual communication.
This
communication, likewise, forms the basis of the creative artistry of
Luc Fierens. He expresses
his mode of functioning in life through a series of projects and visual
poems that do precisely what he wants them to do:
communicate and exchange his reflections with others, in order
to penetrate the banality of daily life and to search for a meaning
to this life, rather than fall into the sloganesque or a socio-political
partitioning of reality. He
does this without writing, without drawing and without painting. He makes his art from cutting up, from pasting, from mounting
and from compiling. Luc
Fierens selects from vastness and registers the signs and codes of his
epoch as a median that attempts to be easily accessible and identifiable. He utilizes the technique of accumulation
and (de)constructs the fragments that form a new plastic unity in a
way that the work becomes an analysis of representation, as much in
regard to form as content, yet still subject to free association in
its entirety. It is 'open', transcendent, interdisciplinary,
processual, conceptual and tied to a context and from then on always
oriented toward intersection with the recipient. Seen from this vantage, through the eyes
of Luc Fierens, it is no longer the materialization of art from the
artifact that is important but the establishment of contacts, the putting
in place of actions that provide social opportunities. Consequently, the artistic labor of Fierens consists of a critical
intervention in the epochal image defined as it is by mass media; it
consists of opening up an ironic commentary on the structure, the function
and the manipulation of these mass media, if need be to unmask them. In the final analysis, behind this idea
is hidden the hope that art will be able to change society. Drawn from Dadaism and Surrealism by means
of formal and relevant realizations, containing them, drawn also from
visual poetry, ideologically near to Fluxus, punk and underground, Fierens
has inscribed himself entirely in the tradition of the international
avant-garde.