Notes toward a New Aesthetic

Abstract

artist as it has been imported into our societies carries within it a very specific cultural ring. It implies that the arts are somehow transcendent and unrelated to ordinary life, that they are cordoned off from economic and political processes. I use the term cultural worker to evoke the notion that the cultural worker wants to break with some of the forces that constrain the life of the artist in the west and north. S/he wants to break out of that particular notion of sensitive passivity, intelligent and inquiring powerlessness. That the task of the cultural worker is an attempt to re-create life so that the realms of thought, feeling and action are no longer kept separate and distinct. That this work is not seen as something separated from economic or political activity, but as part and parcel of the attempt to reveal experience in an integrated way. It is an attempt to find a road through which the passion of ideas and aesthetic experience can find a way to effect power-through institutions and through individuals. It is an attempt to find specific ways of doing this around a continuum of strategies. It is a way of subverting the constraints of working within the market. There are two important historical movements which enabled the idea of cultural worker in the post-colonial world to be significantly developed. The first is the anti-colonial movement, which legitimized the first rupture with the European artistic contract. It did this by naming a space within the specifics of everyday life that could be conceptualized as a basis for resistance. In the societies with a history of slavery, forms such as dance and language offered a site for covert resistance that could survive and build precisely because it could not

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