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Artwork
What interests Vilém Flusser particularly about
artworks are their communicative qualities, and
to a lesser extent their aesthetic ones. His study
of art is motivated by what he calls communicology.
Artworks are objects informed by artists
in order to inform viewers. Artworks are discursive
media. Their messages can be received
only one-sidedly and are, moreover, difficult to
understand. Art is no longer equal to the task of
explaining and producing reality. This role has
been taken over by the mass media and technologically
reproduced cultural goods. For art
to become important again, artists will have to
occupy both mass media channels of communication
and the apparatuses of communication. In
order to achieve this, artists must be present and
apparent throughout the apparatuses, both large
and small. They cannot become functionaries of
the apparatuses, but they have to understand how they function and redesign them from the
inside out. They should not comply with the programs,
they must rewrite the programs; they
should not describe the conditions, but change
them.
But this alone will not suffice. The world has become too complex for that, and the volume of information too enormous. So artists have to cooperate, not only with one another, but also with people from other professions: philosophers, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers, and last but not least with Flusser himself, who became increasingly interested in artistic practices and involved in art projects. Organized in dialogic, nonhierarchical collaborations, these interdisciplinary projects and “constellations” produce new and surprising information, and hence represent a counterprogram to the predetermined programs of apparatuses: the artistic position is diametrically opposed to a position rooted in the apparatus. And Flusser was convinced that the primary responsibility of art is to express the essentially human in a world determined by apparatuses.
Original article by Marcel René Marburger in Flusseriana