ITS OVER THERE, IN A BOX*

"Uncle" Hilty hits the mark on the reinterpretation of Cornell. Rephrasing: trying to reform someone else's visually dense object into simple symbolism (blue stands for this, nails stand for that) erases the objects' real language, its real complexity.

I don't even dislike conceptual art as such, except for a common weakness: the event, installation, object, performance has no being except the idea that it illustrates; the art is not intelligently executed, only intelligently described, relying instead on the sophistication of the "language idea" that engendered it.

For example, if I see another video of people doing mildly transgressive social acts, blankly filmed, and "recontextualized" by the fact it's in a museum, I'm going to smack the nearest elderly museum guard, as the curatorial representative at hand.

My point: kittens falling into laundry baskets are adorable. My other point: excellent art requires mastery of the grammar of the form of the art in question.

*Note: This joke title of mine is superlative, as it calls back to an earlier comedy discussion, apparantly completes the tag line on the page, and smartly refers to Cornell's famous box constructions. You may laugh now.

[This will go into the "Best of Iron Spirits Anthology", due out from Workman in the fall. - Dr. X]