Onajide | artist

Teaching isn’t cutting the butter either. There are a thousand reasons for that. So, I’ve been updating (rewriting) my résumé in preparation for the soon to happen job search, not that I’m not looking some now. I was told at the employment agency to write up something generic enough to fit a variety of jobs. That’s not easy without knowing what to target. I’ll just make it up based on my most recent work, teaching, drawing all the skills I can out of that experience added to my extensive volunteer experience.

But, I must move this month and maybe it can get done with as little pain and bother as possible. There will be a selling off of things collected and not used. I’ll post a listing of them as soon as I have something compiled, starting in the next couple days. I have two friends with trucks to help me. Where I hope to move is with four other people. I’ve never lived with anyone for any length of time other than family. When I first returned to Miami I slept on the floor of a friend’s apt. for a month until I found a place. She was my godmother. Other than that, I shared a house that had a cottage with a friend. My friend stayed in the cottage and used the house bedroom for his office and storage. We cooked separately and paid rent separately.

I will soon be offering for sale some items made by other artists, beginning with necklaces. A “Home Show” is in the making too. I’ll use my newsletter for getting the word out. I suspect if you say art opening, wine and snacks, people will show. They usually do. Now, re-reading some of this:

To pass beyond the modern framework, it seems as if we must be willing to surrender the ideology of aesthetic autonomy–the compartmental conception of fine art that segregates it to the separate realm of the museum. Art, life and popular culture have all suffered from these entrenched divisions and from the consequently narrow identification of art with elitist fine art. There is a fundamental passivity that underlies our established appreciation of high art, which is heightened by the traditional aesthetic attitude of disinterested, distanced contemplation, and which discourages communal interaction or deeply embodied participatory involvement. In any social function can be ascribed to autonomous art at all, it is the function to have no function. The aesthetic attitude implies a break with the world and the concerns of ordinary life; its premise is that art and real life are, and should be, strictly separated. There is, however, no compelling reason at this point to accept the narrow aesthetic limits imposed by the established ideology of autonomous art, an ideology that is no longer profitable, or even creditable. The emancipatory enlargement of the aesthetic involves reconceiving art in more liberal terms, freeing it from its exalted cloister, where it is isolated from life and differentiated from more popular forms of cultural expression.

Richard Shusterman: There’s another connection I want to make about science and art that relates to the economic regime of modernity–capitalism. In both art and science we see the need for radical new discoveries. Part of the impulse of modernity–and this has come with us into the postmodern–is the demand for change, new discoveries, new movements in art. It’s like you’re not a real scientist, or a real artist, unless you’re making something new, or pioneering a novel discovery. I don’t want to suggest that there’s a simple, reductive, economic explanation to this common demand, but it’s part of a whole Zeitgeist of always seeking innovations instead of using older forms that may still have good use-value. It dovetails very nicely, and is certainly in the spirit of a capitalist economy, which depends for its survival on constant innovation, because if there aren’t new products, there won’t be new profits. New products, new markets and new needs–the demand for novelty is something that runs throughout modernity. It has its scientific expression, and it has its aesthetic expression. There is a kind of artificial demand for novelty that keeps us breathless, unsatisfied and neurotic. I can even see it in the world of academic publishing, where there’s so much pressure to come up with something new all the time, even when it’s only superficially new. Autonomous art may resist straightforward moral engagement, but one of the major ethical injunctions for modern art has been the idea of “making it new.” In other words, you weren’t a serious artist if you weren’t trying to make a radically new statement. Not to attempt this, for an artist, was a moral failure, not merely an aesthetic one.

Suzi Gablik: Postmodernism, of course, has done a pretty efficient job of dismantling that entire ideology.

(Suzi Gablik, Conversations Before the End of Time, London: Thames and Hudson 1995)