Re: <nettime> This artwork degrades women.

["dan s wang" <danwang@mindspring.com>]

> On nettime, all over the world, Simon Penny presented his email 'This
> artwork degrades women', in which a work of art by Alexander Brandt
> lying face down is projected (life size) into a crumpled heap in the
> waste basket. The only way to interact with this email is to stomp on
> the work of art, and the only reward is that you can feel smug and
> self-satisfied about having made a judgement about something you have
> not seen. If you read it a lot, Alexander Brandt himself fades away. The
> work of art never objects or defends itself, but neither does it request
> this treatment.

Brandt "fades away?" By ignoring the fact of the artist's institutionally
valorized statement (ie an installation presented in a prestigious venue for
the occasion of an international conference), this rhetoric signals the
predictable, inevitable, indeed overdetermined reasoning of a so-called free
speech partisan.

> consciousness-raising? Is it not an excellent case study of the
> potentiality of electonic representations to encourage or reinforce
> prejudice and/or censorship of artistic expression in the real world?

There it is, the spectre of censorship trotted out as promised and as
required. Here's the next step for you Mr. Myers: label Penny a "fascist."
We all know how this goes.

> is it OK to stomp on the faces of artists who presumably are ideally
> suited lying naked, prone and passive on a rag on the cold floor, just
> crying out for Professors of Art Design and Media to stomp on them?

Hm, does the earnestness of the critique embarrass you that much? As a
student I hung out with Simon Penny for an afternoon once. I can assure you
he can be every bit as cool, detached, and ironic in person as any other
artist doing the contemporary thing--judging by your e-mail, that's what
counts. For the rest of us, cool or not, its the principled and rigorously
considered stance that we welcome.
>
> Note 1.
> pinyin has about as much to do with this email as it did with the one of
> which this is a parody. if you don't know what it is, you can look it up
> on the internet, if that kind of thing bothers you.

If you don't consider this bothersome, well, you should:
you ren xiang fa tai yi ban. . .


Dan S. Wang

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