ART IS NOT FREE

From the archive:
FEB. 1977 (audio tape)
Your reasons for being here may be varied: social, professional, skeptical, critical, hostile...You could be here by mistake, with a friend, by force, because of your boredom, because of your interest, to be seen, maybe to see an exhibition of art...You have arrived from many different areas to this specific location, which is the Workspace gallery. Which is not only a location to see this exhibition, but all those before and after. In this context, do you not think that this location has effect on the exhibitions which you come to see here? Outside the fact of the physical location I have just described, this gallery, although it is new, has a certain reputation from preceding exhibitions from which this exhibition cannot escape. At the same time, the next exhibition will be partly framed by this one. All the exhibitions here have the same frame, and this frame is not neutral. But to pretend to escape from these limits is to reinforce the prevalent ideology which expects diversion from the artist. Art is not FREE, the artist does not express himself freely (he cannot). Art is not the prophesy of a free society. Art, whatever it may be, is clearly political. What is called for is an analysis of the formal and cultural limits (and not one or the other) within which art exists. These limits are many and of differing intensities. Although the prevailing ideology and the associated artists try in every way to camouflage them, and although it is to early, the conditions are not meant to blow them all up, but instead the time has come to unveil them.
jc garrett