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i apparently had a bee in my bonnet when i wrote the "fuck entertainment" statement...can't remember what it would have been though.
here's more like my attitude about this---there's lots of folk who make stuff. there's probably as many understandings of what the idea behind that making is as there are people who do it. so there's plenty of work out there in the world to fit with the aesthetic of almost anyone.
i like work that pulls you away from where you are, makes you think about where you are differently---this can happen from any number of avenues, and can involve a range of types of work. so the evaluative criteria i have is not unitary. but it rests on a couple assumptions--one is that art (whatever that is, really) can be confrontational and the other is that it does not have to tell the audience what it is doing, but can demand some attention or work. and because there is so much work out there in the world, it is entirely fine that some of it be confrontational--ugly, discomfiting---because making stuff is reprocessing the world (fragments of the world, arranged) --and the world is not in all ways a lovely place.
that a piece is completed by a viewer or listener has any number of meanings. i happen to prefer open forms because they give an audience maxmimum leeway in creating (rather than receiving) an experience. i like pieces that are radically multiple, that generate as many pieces as there are people to experience them. other folk don't find that kind of openness to be freeing--they find it confusing or disorienting---and i have no problem with people being confused or disoriented.
when you make stuff, in my view, you take on an obligation to be clear---but that means any number of things---what you do is oriented by the clarity you bring to the process, which is what enables the process to have a shape and direction, which is what results in a piece or an object. you do not take on any particular obligation to an audience beyond that. when i do projects (not that this means much, but it's my frame of reference, so i necessarily talk through it) i'm much more interested in the ways in which an audience's experiences diverge from mine than i am in the ways they resemble mine---in the divergences are often commonalities and those commonalities seem to me to reflect back the direct communicative dimension of a performance---but it's the stuff that's other that's interesting.
of course, you have to catch folk so they'll come along for the ride with you. people say the soundstuff i am part of is pretty---i am ambivalent about pretty--i think pretty's what you get when you want something more than that but don't get there. i used to be more militant about this---now i'm fine with it because being militant--which was functional for a while---became a limit over time. everything changes. making stuff is about changing. it's not about staying in one place, to my mind: it's not about repetition, it's not about either doing or not doing what is expected--such criteria are irrelevant, because in the end, no matter what folk say, they do what they do for themselves because it makes them happy to do it and so there it is.
the idea that art is entertainment seems to me to place extreme limits on what you can do. that is *can be* entertainment is not problematic--that an experience *Can* entertain is obviously not an issue--but that it *is* entertainment is another type of claim. to be entertained is not to be put out. to be entertained is not to work---it comes with an expectation that one should not have to work, that the experience should be handed to you. it seems to me to be a reverse side of passivity, when the claim becomes that art *is* entertainment.
much of little tippler's op can be recoded around this question---it's another aspect or way of looking at the question how far is too far---which boundaries can one not violate without undercutting the status of a piece as "art".
this because underneath it is the question of what would prompt someone to go the route of total confrontation?
you could say that television viewers become numb to violence because the medium enables them to distance themselves from it. it's one thing to say as much. it is another to make a piece that confronts people with this---whether every piece that tries to do this succeeds or not is another matter--but the space for trying seems to me wiped away if you assume that art is entertainment.
maybe that was the bee.
maybe it was a different bee, and the above is the bee that's in by bonnet now.
maybe i should have fewer bonnets.
maybe i should no go near bees.
so many questions.
so many.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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