Sylvere Lotringer, the French born literary critic and cultural theorist who founded the journal Semiotext(e) died last week, at the age of 83.
Lotringer was in an editorial collective with Georges Perec, played chess with John Cage and published books about David Wojnarowitz, Nancy Spero and Antonin Artaud.
In 1978 he hosted The Nova Convention, a tribute to William S Burroughs that featured John Giorno, Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Les Levine, Patti Smith, John Cage, and others (see earlier post, here). Three years prior Lotringer organized the Schizo Culture event.
As a professor at Columbia for 35 years, his students included filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow, art critics Tim Griffin and John Kelsey, and poet Ariana Reines.
He appears as a fictionalized version of himself in Kathy Acker's Great Expectations and My Mother: Demonology, in Eileen Myles' Inferno, and in I Love Dick, Alien & Anorexia and Torpor by Chris Kraus, his wife. He was portrayed by Griffin Dunne in the recent TV adaptation of I Love Dick.
Lotringer died on Monday in Baja California, after a long illness.
"A sizeable portion of young artists are critical of the art institutions, and of the kind of life they offer, but do they really want to change the way their own world is being run? At this point it is being handed down to them ready-made and they struggle to fit in it as best they can. Today’s art world embodies all the excesses of private enterprise and the neo-liberalist economy. Whether or not the global acceleration and fragmentation that we are experiencing can be resisted is a moot question. Technological progress comes to us as a by-product of the military industry, and it seems to be irreversible. Resistance is preempted from the start and invoking it is at best a kind of mantra, a stance-a “resist-stance”-meant to assuage the general sense of powerlessness. Although Foucault indicated that every power relation is reversible, in Discipline and Punish he himself only mentioned the word “resistance” once, and without specifying it. There’s no such thing as resistance in general. One always resists something. When power is diffused throughout the entire society, everything becomes reversible and ambivalent. There is no easy way out. The question would be how could artists invent forms of resistance that would be specific to art, but not limited to it? Let’s take the example of Duchamp. He resisted the gallery system and came up with the idea of the ready-made. The ready-made was an active response to his own environment. Getting art out in the world, turning the world into a gallery. It was an impertinent idea. This was what Dada’s strategy was about. It was the end of gallery art. But the system jumped back and turned this iconoclastic idea into another fetish. The entire American art sprung out of this idea. It may not be what Duchamp had in mind, but this is what his idea became. It changed the way art was being made, but it also gave the art gallery system a new boost. The irreverent gesture was made reactive. That may explain why Duchamp stopped making art and became the “thin” artist, an artist who doesn’t make art. He was regaining the initiative and thumbing his nose again at the art world and its system of value. It was a disappearing act, but an act all the same. He kept his studio empty, and worked in his studio next door. Whether he actually stopped making art or not is irrelevant. He kept making art in his own terms. The end of art had already happened, but it took another half century to become a reality. The gallery system was a dead end, but it became all the more powerful for all that. Duchamp’s real art was staying below the radar. It was the art of resisting."
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