Ole Bouman - "and Justice For All...

ISBN
   

Soort boek
Paperback

This book takes its title from a symposium held at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, from 22 to 24 April 1993. It examines the relationships between art, design, theoretical reflection and public sphere. The essays, correspondence, pictorial contributions and editorial material centre around contemporary developments in visual culture, understood as an aspect of the public domain, and the specific part played by art and design within this culture. The authors were selected on account o not only their professional activities but their readiness to think deeply about their specialisms in a broad intellectual context. Together, they offer a variegated repertoire of styles of thought and modes of operation within visual culture as a whole. This book aims to present their views and to bring out the relationships and contrasts between them. The choice of this structure represents a radical enlargement of the common ground shared by the visual disciplines and philosophy. The artist's studio, the design office and the academic's study are typically locales where disciplinary demarcations are nurtured and reproduced. However important these places may be as laboratories of culture, they are also in a certain sense protected environments. Looking out of the studio window, we perceive a wildly proliferating culture of images. It is important to recognise the ideological agendas and the economic mechanisms that operate within this visual culture, precisely because a major item on those agendas is to preserve the concept of the individual who flourishes in his personal cultural niche. At the same time, artists, designers and aestheticians are cardinal specialists of the image, and as such prime candidates to take part in the public debate on this visual culture. This debate, at least in as far as it figures in the pages of this book, is characterised by a very clear critical stance: it is not our visual culture, that welter of fascinating images as such, but its public nature, that is so intriguing. Now that the word, long regarded as the medium of public interchange pur sang (and literally privileged y statutory embodiment, or example in a right to freedom of speech), is losing out to the image, the concept of publicity of communication will have to reexamined. Words are at least to some extent open to the test of tenability; and two and a half millennia of rhetoric tradition have provided us with the means of challenging that tenability. But how can you disagree with an image? For the present, images are intrinsically far less open to verification, For an open society, an intensive discussion about the public sphere and even about the future of democracy in a visual culture, remains a constant desideratum. The examination of art, design and theory within the broader context of visual culture is not simple matter. There is a natural tension between, on the one hand, the individual need to deveiop a distinct artistic profile and a personal visual idiom, and, on the other, social developments that seern to have undermined the value of both authorship and personal originaiity. The need to operate on an international, unpredictabie and hectic stage, and the pressure of corporate interests, take some getting used to - certainly while the peace and quiet of the studio are still so inviting.