1 Lost Paradise - Armin Kerber

Lost Paradise – “Tu n’as rien vu à Hiroshima”
Artists operating in the critical spirit of what could be termed “appropriation
art” use representations of information claimed by the media.
But what about information producers who venture into the art scene of
media activism from the field of journalism? What if the very media themselves
adopt Hugo Ball’s fundamental criticism of journalism voiced in
1916? The tactics of experimental “independent” media and their slogan
of individuation – “be your own media!” – overlap with those of the socalled
“self media” that first appeared in the late 1960s, which were
fairly modest individualist alternatives to the mass media, but which cut
close to the chase of real-life action in order to overcome the isolation of
the art scene.
When, from the 1990s onwards, art began to infiltrate information
media – take Pierre Huyghe’s Mobile TV projects, for example – the intention
was to enable journalists to cross the invisible line of demarcation
between journalism and art – because to journalists art is like a free zone
in the sense of Gilles Deleuze, who perceived artistic activity as an act of
resistance against capitalism’s current. Today, however, what matters is no
longer to analyse the representational regime’s semantic system in the
global network, as did the artists in the 1980s. What current informationart
can provide is a refuge free from simplifications and entertainment – it
is a freedom that has not been castrated by low viewer ratings and is not
controlled by the pressures of the media-war. And because art is not measured
by ratings or quotas, it has sheltered alternative forms of information,
keeping the microphone open for independent voices that would otherwise
have remained unheard. It is from this vantage point that they have been
calling across the streamlined media landscape. The positive impact of this
transfer would surely benefit the mass media’s ideologies – as well as the
products of the independent media – they, too, should occasionally provide
a somewhat more complex view of the world.
“Aesthetics of resistance” — But how does current art theory view socially
committed art, “art engagé” of the kind that avant-gardes had taken
up as their cause from the days of the “Action Committee of Revolutionary
Artists” until the 1960s and 1970s? Wolfgang Welsch’s study
Ästhetisches Denken (Aesthetic Thought) steers art’s social mission – insofar
as it may claim validity for its own contemporary present – back
towards affirmation even though art has since then become post-modern,
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