étant donné what is given?
"Applied culture" is a term I like use as an alternative to the more unwieldy "appropriation" and in reference Duchamp's punning use of applied science in his artistic experiments. Applied culture describes current modes of art and creativity dedicated to seizing "what is given." When art directly engages in the actual phenomenon of our cultural existence — the images, things, rules, and behaviors that sustain our assumptions about the sanctity and authority of "culture," social and power relations, and even humanness itself — it re-applies the conditions and objects of culture toward the spirit of play, new fictional and philosophical spaces, the absurd, paradox, symbolic resonance and dissensus.
I see applied culture as a particular and steadily growing segment of contemporary art practice. It is not so interested in traditional media and formal concerns (but it doesn't foreclose the use its techniques either). It often worries avant-gardist notions of critique, critical distance, and righteous moral authority. Applied culture embraces the contextual, and entangled conditions of contemporary life and its most obvious and concrete materials. It is not afraid of trial and error tactics as it works to make the "theoretical," ethereal, and often idealistic aspects of aesthetics and politics more applicable to everyday life and lived situations. How does it do this? In messy and contradictory ways, often usefully embracing art as both a highly cultivated commodity, a privileged cultural space, and as one of the most interesting philosophical forms of our hyper-visual existence. In the end what is fascinating about contemporary forms of "applied culture" is that they pointedly do not invent new and handy devices; they often do not "work," at all. But rather, they use aesthetic space strategically to invent new ways to ask the unresolvable questions about human culture itself.
"Applied culture" is a term I like use as an alternative to the more unwieldy "appropriation" and in reference Duchamp's punning use of applied science in his artistic experiments. Applied culture describes current modes of art and creativity dedicated to seizing "what is given." When art directly engages in the actual phenomenon of our cultural existence — the images, things, rules, and behaviors that sustain our assumptions about the sanctity and authority of "culture," social and power relations, and even humanness itself — it re-applies the conditions and objects of culture toward the spirit of play, new fictional and philosophical spaces, the absurd, paradox, symbolic resonance and dissensus.
I see applied culture as a particular and steadily growing segment of contemporary art practice. It is not so interested in traditional media and formal concerns (but it doesn't foreclose the use its techniques either). It often worries avant-gardist notions of critique, critical distance, and righteous moral authority. Applied culture embraces the contextual, and entangled conditions of contemporary life and its most obvious and concrete materials. It is not afraid of trial and error tactics as it works to make the "theoretical," ethereal, and often idealistic aspects of aesthetics and politics more applicable to everyday life and lived situations. How does it do this? In messy and contradictory ways, often usefully embracing art as both a highly cultivated commodity, a privileged cultural space, and as one of the most interesting philosophical forms of our hyper-visual existence. In the end what is fascinating about contemporary forms of "applied culture" is that they pointedly do not invent new and handy devices; they often do not "work," at all. But rather, they use aesthetic space strategically to invent new ways to ask the unresolvable questions about human culture itself.