Reweaving Community
Excerpt from "Reweaving Community," in Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito, At the Edge of Art (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006)
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The functions of art discussed in previous chapters--perversity, arrest, revelation, and, to some extent, even executability--are primarily functions of an artwork itself, requiring only the presence of a single creator and a single viewer to spark the collective unconscious. Yet no matter how successfully a work may function as art for this pair of agents, it can never perform a meaningful role in society unless its recognition expands beyond this private circle. While the function examined in this chapter, recognition, is not a characteristic of a work but of the context in which it is embedded, it is nevertheless essential to art. This is obvious for the executable works of political design examined in the preceding chapter, but it is also true for hypernovels and game environments that aim to stretch imaginations one viewer at a time. For art to wield power, it must function within a community that recognizes it.
A lymphocyte whose antibody matches a foreign agent sounds a chemical alarm to the immune system. That signal must travel throughout the entire bloodstream, triggering a cascading set of responses from summoning macrophages to attracting other lymphocytes, in order for the invader to be effectively neutralized and incorporated. That mechanism of recognition has a parallel in the social body. When an artwork latches onto a technological meme, that work's influence can be measured by how thoroughly it alerts mechanisms of cultural and social recognition--and, as we'll see in this chapter, the Internet can be just as effective as the bloodstream for spreading such influence.
Nevertheless, in a biological body, the optimum consequence of recognition is assimilation: not only is the virus disabled, but millions of antibodies bearing templates of its shape--effectively neutralized copies of the original--float around the bloodstream as ammunition against future infection. While art aims for recognition, however, it loses its power if it is similarly assimilated. Unlike its immunological equivalent, the best art never fails to ignite a fever of some kind; the recognition it seeks from the social body is not assimilation but re-cognition: the re-examination of tacit beliefs or conventional perceptions. To remain effective, art must balance on this razor's edge, inviting attention, encouraging new understanding, but resisting full co-optation, lest it lest its 'neutralized copies' turn into cultural clichees or diluted banalities.
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