<nettime> statement

[artclay <artclay@netsurfer.ch>]

artiststatment:


---------eat.wholewheat.bread----------------->>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

any artistic statement written for the 21st century would have to
consist of a conglomerate of ‘copy and paste’ texts taken
mostly from the internet and in part from a few books which survived the
information age of the internet. this,  by
being kept safely tucked up in a blanket of dust on what was known in
the 20th century as the books shelf. continuing further, the texts
excerpts would be combined by being channeled into a quadraphonic mix
consisting solely of the below listed sources, be non grammatic and (of
course) be ordered in marchovian chain proportions:

channel one:    something from cyberspace: 60%possibility
channel two:      anything from a technical manuel: 25%possibility
channel three:    an uplifting excerpt from any pop-psychology     book,
good or bad: 10%possibility
channel four:     an incomplete sentence, paragraph or even symbol
from an esoteric source written in any of the     many dead languages
and/or just name-dropping in     english: 5%possibility

the results, able to be understood by anyone under the age of 25 or any
x-member of the hippy generation including any person living/or having
lived in california and/or having overdosed on: lsd/ zap cola/ internet/
bazooka bubble gum/ technical handbooks (the overdose being for the sake
of recycling),  might read something like this:

--

"greetz $:-]

ekzlent. [you must be a high testosterone male da]
in any case i like you. $:-@ = may be low in testosterone + az a rezult
he doez uat $:-L !z told by society. [njet] %-> read that life forms in
north amerika + north europa = typically low in testosterone - which is
why north amerika + north europa appear so very organized [ie.
predisposed to `humanitarian assistance`]  %-< is still researching the
data mais __.... based on observation americans [-neuyorkrz] are lowest
in testosterone [phpz koca.kola is an excellent source of estrogen +?]
and readily [not] follow the herd++. shame on $:-].

vr!endl!. %->

p.s.maybe %->&$:-L like eating snails [ie @]. anyway it == animal
abuse... slow animal abuse, but still == abuse!"


--

the above text would of course not be the expected artists statement,
due to the fact that the stetment is an artistic one and although it
concerns the artist. if we question authority now, as it was expected
from us in the 1960s, then we should perhaps ask ourselves even today:
are we expecting the artist to make a clear academic statement or are we
allowing the artist to take the freedom to express themself artistically
within a statement designated for an institution?  in most cases the
answer would be: we are expecting a clear statement. the institution is
therefore expecting the impossible,  but i ask ‘it’ now compassionately:
is that institution also accepting the inevitable: an artistic statement
and not an artists statement? all might answer: hopefully.

joseph beuys stated that everyone is an artist and if we interpret this
as meaning that all individuals should find their artistic centers,
increase the energy-efficiency level of their lives in order to better
society, then we must conclude that mr. beuys was asking for much too
much. finally, life is not art anyway. and again life is not art and one
can prove this by clearly exercising the following: if we we hit our
heads on the proverbial 'windowpane' from the wizard of oz and take an
alice-in-wonderland type of trip back circa 1000 years b.c. in order
read, in urtext,  a short excerpt from the i ching, a book so beloved by
john cage that he turned it into an agnostic religion, we can  conclude
that creativity is the bond between heaven and earth and that only
family can be a true foundation on earth. alice: if is art is life than
art is purely earthly is which it can not ever was is be life.


<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<---------wie.ins.grass.beissen----------------


to conclude, after more than twenty years of activity in  many genre of
the arts in many parts of the world, i rest anchored in the lap of a new
family, realizing that the cheesier cat laughter of my five month old
daughter truly surpasses any possible creative endeavor encountered in a
long and turbulent artistic journey. a bumper to bumper journey in which
personal freedom used to express the importance of the individual and
the necessity to find oneself through personal expression was clearly
never abandoned, but hardly ever welcomed by any institutional traffic.
somewhere in a pop-psychology book, it was stated that "life begins with
forty" and i once read on a poster board in switzerland that "success is
the last thing which one is given in life ". regardless of success or of
age, one must fight relentlessly not only to continuing creating, as the
i ching esoterically expresses it as uniting the spiritual with the
physical, but also simply to live, continually. ||:real(ly) two
embrace(d) life!:||

sincerely + $;-],


art clay, switzerland

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