"But Is it Politics?"
Circulating Ideologies and the Bloc of Art
http://www.lot.at/politics

"But is it politics?" flips the still-circulating question of "But is it
art?" from the '70s in order to pose a new set of questions regarding
cultural production's potential or effect.

Art can no longer be imagined as an autonomous field, but is mediated
and negotiated as any other social field.

Today's politicised art practice that is engaged in the rearticulation
of social, political and economical formations is confronted with a
multilayered determining system of legitimation and identification. This
system forecloses and appropriates the space and strategies that
politicized art once claimed as its own site of opposition and
legitimation.

To reconceive of the aesthetic as a potentially political factor
necessitates a "reconstruction" of the constitutive frameworks of art.
Using the question "But is it politics" to begin an evaluation of
aesthetic production challenges both the apolitical imperative of art as
well as the imagined limits of the symbolic production of social agency.

Examining, Spacing, Formatting and Fusing offer fields of entry; the
featured works and statements create a concourse where the category of
political art is interrogated and pushed forward by recent practices and
approaches.

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The project was initiated alongside the artists residency "The Long
March" in October-December '98 at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada
by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber.

The residency, where international artists, writers and curators took
part was framed by the theme of art and politics, "Political Art".

The question of politics was introduced to re_frame the discourse and
specify the discussion on various understandings and concepts of art.

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The site features statements and works by: Edgar Arceneaux, Michael
Blum, Nick Brierly, Kaucyila Brooke, Penelope Buitenhuis, Heath Bunting,
Vuk Cosic, Jeff Derksen, Sara Diamond, Skawennati Tricia Fragnito, Emily
Hartzell, ParkBench, Oliver Hockenhull, Katharina Lenz, Wochenklausur,
Nurit Melamed, Julia Meltzer, Branda Miller, Oliver Ressler, Stella
Rollig, Jayce Salloum, Sharla Sava, Nina Sobell, ParkBench, David
Thorne, Peter Wintonick, Irena Woelle, Lesbo.