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Just in passing, a brief thought floats out over the assembled conference, and is destined to the oblivion of forgetfulness; not because it has no value or is unheard, but because it is so obvious as to be continually forgotten: "Within aesthetics emancipation is born."(1) And the relationship between art work that resists the establishment and the issue of political change emerges. Art work that resists is politics, the politics of questions, the politics of change: not a specific and categorised phenomenon to be put up instead of the present establishment, but an amorphous unrest characterised by general misgivings about the way things seem to be at the moment. We are working now in a time after aesthetics can be considered in terms of prescriptive rules and qualitative judgement. The recent project of modern man and woman to provide value for mankind as a whole and to assure us that progress is possible has failed. Out right. Nobody believes that we will return-to a time when there is employment for everyone, baring total holocaust, of course, which must be an option left aside for mankind, unprepared by its total reject-ability. And nobody believes that cultural hegemony is a possible on-going position for the wealthy West. Though exploitation has served us selfishly well, it is finished, not because we wish it, but because it is intrinsically a failing method for existence, leaving us friendless, vulnerable, and strategically weak. Exploitation has bred insecurity between allies and deception of the majority of people worldwide. Enough. Things are bad. The spiritual project of re-inventing the present is unfinished but now influenced by the struggle for survival. We struggle with confusion over lost ideals, with being alone in the absence of those ideals. We struggle with technology, with fragmentation and with the supplanting of bits of information where wisdom used to be revered. Life is crumbling into a struggle to beat systems, which try to ensure that the past may continue. We struggle with guilt, having inherited a dream which is not possible to fulfil, still partly believing that we should have been able to live that dream, not accepting its impossibility. Survival of mind, as well as body, not in pieces, but as one construct, body-mind, is difficult to achieve. Rules are changing. Though seeming to be a general assault on the political establishment, this writing is really an assault on aesthetics. May, 1985. Dear Aesthetics, You are very ill, and the prognosis isn't very good. I regret seeing you at this moment because your once powerful self is in decline, and I wish I could have held on to the image of you as being whole, right, knowing how things should be done in a pleasing and beautiful manner.
