“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, April 22, 2011

Michael Nitsche on Art and Non-Art


Michael Nitsche asked me a very pertinent question last week: to what extent does seeing causality as aesthetic erase boundaries between art and non-art? How, for example, would one even be able to define art if it happened within a wider configuration space that was just as aesthetic as art itself?

I'm not sure how to answer these questions at present so I thought I'd throw it open. I became interested in Professor Nitsche's praxis, which you can see in the game Kitsune, for instance, a location-based game intended to foster awareness of Japanese culture, played in Piedmont Park in Atlanta.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

To throw in another reference (testing the waters as I am not entirely sure how applicable they really are): Schechner talks about Kaprow using "actuals:" "art as event." And the borderlines of reading (social) action as art blur in other formats such as rituals. One reason why I like Kitsune (Andrew Roberts MS project) is that it plays with that as it combines an artistic otherworld that is based on myth and rituals itself with a large "real" urban park. We often come down to the question of space in this.