Re: <nettime> Interview with Charles Green

[Dr Charles Green <c.green@unimelb.edu.au>]

David Garcia's response to the fibreculture interview by Geert 
Lovinck with me regarding my book on artist collaborations, The Third 
Hand, is thoughtful and wise.

He asks "whether it is possible to understand any of the significant 
work of this time outside of the political. . . . This period was 
saturated in utopian optimism of an intensity that is difficult to 
imagine today. The freedoms won when large numbers of artists threw 
off Greenburg's formalist constraints and began making works 
unmediated by the conventions of specific mediums was widely 
perceived as part of a wider emancipatory
movement."

He is right, and these are exactly the points I make all through my 
book, which takes great care to name and explain the wider 
psycho-social context, and the different way that artists conceived 
of their activities, which was much more holistic and complex than 
the simple connection of art to politics as this had been imagined 
before.

Mr Garcia notes that he has not read my book, and I think that when 
he does he will find that I have tried to home in on exactly the 
now-obscured motivations and distinctions he thinks should be 
remembered. This recovery, and the analysis of a foundational moment 
beyond the 1980s context of a transition into postmodernism, was one 
of my chief motivations in writing a revisionist history of art that 
has importance to contemporary visual culture beyond a narrow history.

Charles Green

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