Letters to the Red Crayola X, 1988-2012
| Letters to the Red Crayola X, 1988-2012 | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Art & Language | |
| Project |  Letters to the Red Krayola
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| Year | 2012 |
| Dimensions | 73.4 × 75.2 cm[1] |
| Materials | Ink, acrylic, collage and mixed media on paper |
Text
Dear M, We were not at all unhappy to hear 'Index 01' described as 'a Stalinist reading room'. Not that it was, but it is tempting to think that it could have been — perhaps even that it ought to have been. What the Index did was generate a social space in which already discursive art-works underwent further work. The logical system which controlled this work was not itself directly liable to re-writing by those who participated, but their activity could have had the effect of radically redescribing it. The social space was an art-world of sorts. The 'objects' with which the filing cabinets were stuffed were texts that had composed a new genre. But these were texts that had already been recognised as opaque, and indeed incomplete. They were (or had been) art-objects according to some more or less relaxed version of the Institutional Theory, but the Index concerned itself with the question of what kind of worlds they made and what kind of world made them. These were not art texts waiting as indiscernibles simply to be ratified as art — to be described as functional (or meaningful) in a certain non-finite social context, an art-world: a context. The Index as a context itself was not concerned with the art-candidacy of indiscernibles, nor did it supply a strategy for aesthetic scepticism. It signified, rather, the possibility of social circumstances — art-worlds of sorts — in which art was no more and no less than the detail of its changing fabric. Wittgenstein asks how (or when) we can say that a calculation has been checked enough. He says that at some point we must give up justification and then say, for example, that this is how we calculate. The intellectual armature is just made that way. The Index asks us to go on as artists socially and discursively, and to describe and re-describe an intellectual scaffolding which is as unstable as it is without need of justification. And this is scaffolding that can hold (quite small) worlds.
Interpretations
- The text discusses Index 01 (1972)
- The background image references Hostage (1988)