<nettime> The "Embarrassment"

[Timothy Druckrey <druckrey@rcn.com>]

The recent ‘embarrassment’  lament has been responded to in many ways, some hazy, some forlorn, some pointed. Reminded me of something a friend said to me a long, long time ago: “Every creation is a future embarrassment.” Always kept this actively in mind while the heady and often wild media scene of the 90s ran it course. Never did it seem that the ‘media arts’ had accomplished anything that needs an apologia, never thought it was permanent, never expected it to incorporate itself as some of its current ‘festivals’ continue to desperately promote. Nor has its history found a suitable outlet - but instead futile attempts to salvage the spirit of the time regardless of any ‘second modern’ aesthetic presumptions or in largely bungled museum or written surveys attempting to formalize or even canonize some version of non-existent ‘digital’ masterpieces.

 

Instead always bore in mind the exceptional explorations (many, many continue) that came from artists whose works probed and often circumvented the delirious post-moderns and offered ways of integrating technology which broke free from the meager expectations of the engineers, the mainstream art-world’s resistant and imbecile ‘scholars,’ that exposed mere technique’s novelty as an empty fallacy of modernity, that exploited the very mechanisms and systems fueling the global techno-culture (why Netflix is such a vacuous presence), and that mobilized media without much regard for whether or not it would become obsolete, or crash, or outlast the immediacy of its experience. Some of the artists whose work continues to reverberate and expand have been named by others. Surely each of us has a list and it would be ridiculous to add a very long list of favorites. Yet it cannot be left unsaid that a quite insensitive, self-serving characterization denigrates the work of many, many dedicated practitioners and confirms that ‘embarrassment’ is a mere opinion utterly devoid of relevance.

So, to Lev and all who share this disenchantment, I offer this from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets [East Coker]:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

 

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