comunismo ingl.qxd
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song unaccompanied by the images –the first is inadequate to stand alone and the latter does fine. This utter dependence of the images on the sound track to become meaningful is the delight of the medium. In conventional movies, meaning is produced via a tender marriage dance between the sound and the images. Music video is a pure S&M relationship. 2] I own two toolboxes to make art, not separate groups of tools but connected like arms. In one hand I have my brain and in the other I have a hand holding a piece of the world. Either my hand with my brain is trying to get my other, empty hand to find an object or a color or a gesture to finish the thinking begun by the hand with the brain or one hand has to grasp something wonderful and the other hand with the brain is trying to make it meaningful. When all ten fingers are wrapped around the same thing, fused together as an artwork, it is done. 3] Leon Trotsky in his book, Art and Literature, argued that for a period of time the Soviet revolution and the Soviet avant-garde art scene both inhabited the same conceptual space and moved in the same ideological direction, however, when the shape of the revolution changed the artists necessarily had to tailor their art making to accommodate that new political agenda. Subsequently, there were many artist career casualties within the ranks of uncooperative artists (Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Kasimir Malevich, Victor Shklovsky, Vladimir Mayakovsky etc). As an artist often working with political content in my work, I have always seen my voice as an individual voice commenting on culture: a middle class guy articulating his point of view. I am not an activist, I am an artist. The mandate of Trotsky subsumes the individual voice to the larger political machine. When the question of art and revolution comes up, I always hope that the revolution will be going the same direction as my art making.
Carlos Issa and Leandro Lima 1] Leandro: it could be any piece of audiovisual material in which the construction is directly related to the rhythm of a song. Carlos: A song adrift?
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