This is just a test. Do you remember watching public television in the 80’s when they would broadcast that very annoying signal in order to alert people (who just happened to be watching public television at that moment) that something of imminent danger was in the process of happening? [Remember that iconic multi-colored test pattern?] I never really understood why they did that or what use it would really have in the event of an emergency, but I surmise that it must have been a leftover from the McCarthy days… when nuclear fallout could occur at any moment. Do they still do this on public television? Does public television even still exist? I don’t even have a TV, so I suppose it doesn’t even matter. [Is there a ‘public’ website that functions in the same way that public television and radio once did?] I have to admit that I enjoy listening to Terry Gross and “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, “Car Talk”, and others. I especially miss Reading Rainbow. But, I digress.
This is just a test. For you, to see if an audience is out there. Don’t worry, there is no imminent danger. Well maybe. But at least I don’t think it is nuclear fallout. Well, then again, maybe not. Argh. This is going to be more difficult than I thought. I am going to have to spell correctly and use punctuation. Or do I? David Foster Wallace abandoned punctuation… but I think he loved words too much to abandon spelling though I think he abandoned spelling for the sake of creating voice. His footnotes were often longer than his prose which completely upended the notion of formal literature. Along with many other Avant-garde writers and thinkers, he ushered in a new era of approaching the written word. He had a special talent for getting inside the reader’s head.
Which brings me to another point of contemporary life and another way in which this is a test. I am not too fond of terms such as premodern, modern, post modern, hypermodern, altermodern, avant-garde, contemporary… I always have trouble coming up with a working definition of them, but I feel like I use (and others) use them freely, though we don’t really know concretely what they mean. The best I can do is to enter into some sort of Socratic dialogue about them, delineating what I think they are, what they’re not, so on and so forth. So, I will try to avoid them, but I know I will have momentary lapses, where the temptation to contain the moment, the era, the movement, will just be too much to resist.
*Disclaimer*
This blog is originating from an academic assignment. I am not a scholar, nor even an expert by any stretch of the imagination, on things I might share with you in this blog. I hope to keep you entertained, engaged, sometimes even enraged, but mostly interested… I am an undergraduate student of Art Practice at UC Berkeley and I am to reflect upon our studies of Contemporary Art movements in Julia Hamilton’s Art 119 [Contemporary Art From a Global Perspective] (yikes! those scary terms again), and particularly related to a final interactive project that was performed on Thursday May 5th, 2011, at approximately 6:17pm. More information and documentation will follow along with an reflection and analysis of the event, it’s efficacy, it’s impact, and the relation of the event to other contemporary art thinking. I hope you will enjoy this reflection, perhaps find it somewhat intriguing, and possibly even inspire you to create your own event or think about things just a little bit differently.
Thank you for reading and welcome to my blog.
Peace~
Laura Lorenz
