The High Nihilism of Bricolage...or just Lane Relyea at CSULB

Lane Relyea at CSULB 032608 Part 6 of 7

Thanks to Dennis Hollingsworth for posting.
At 3:18: "Today the Artworld overly Romanticizes, I think, the notion of the Everyday"

I couldn't agree more. If there is no difference between production and consumption, if the network is the primary currency of meaning, then there is no real value in the practice of art. If the individual is subsumed and assimilated by a network- ostensibly experiencing the simulation/illusion of agency as a cultural node co-tangential to a supposedly reflexive exchange of ideas and meaning, then he/she is being sold a bill of shoddy goods. This model, far from expressing a democracy of exchange made manifest by it's pre-supposed horizontality, is in fact always contained within a larger arena, the quintessence of which is a pyramidal structure of exclusivity and verticality. This blunt failure to acknowledge the aporia embedded within the disjunctive antinomies that are being offered as co-present and symbiotic models of understanding seems to me to be a most heinous insult and indicative of the type of denial that is common in the Dominator Culture of modern civilization. There is a High Nihilism embedded in the impulse of bricolage...it is the symptom of the infantilization that current culture seeks to foster within both creators and consumers. The sine qua non for the production of meaning is to remove oneself from the leveling forces of cultural boundaries and networks, however democratic they are promised to be. Matter must be transmuted into Spirit-alchemically concretized by the unique and authentic experiences of the individual, not as he/she exists as a sort of Frankenstein of cultural detritus, but as a the accretion of the direct immediacy of experience and the concrescence of a life lived, slowly and methodically reclaimed from the dross of the everyday in a meditative practice of formal invention and authorship.