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9 - Strategic Alliance
Kris Carlon
There is strength in numbers. Nowhere is this more evident than in a
battlefield, and with recent events establishing the current global climate
as just exactly that, art finds itself under siege as well. There seems to
be little need for art in the crisis we all face, and yet it is in
these times that art plays its most important roles; art attempts to
interpret and understand its environment, while simultaneously providing an
escape from the pressures of everyday life.
The artworld has been a battlefield for a long time, with
emerging artists having to serve an appropriate period of time in the
trenches before receiving recognition and praise for their
hard work. It is this analogy that draws these nine artists together, having
done t heir time in the minefield of art education they have emerged from
the rubble as a united force.
Against insurmountable odds they have prevailed and found
strength and wisdom in each other and within themselves, ensuring the
strength of the bonds needed to succeed.
The modern artworld has largely been based upon oppositions, yet these
artists have come together to form a dynamic mixture of eclectic styles,
concerns and approaches. Like the Freeze artists before them they have
understood that there is strength in numbers and that the best front is a
united one. Despite the heterogeneity of output each artist occupies an
essential position and contributes to the concept of Gestalt: the whole
being greater than the sum of its parts.
The lack of recognisable movements in the postmodern
artworld entices one to imagine new forms of artistic movements, perhaps not
those articulated by style or manifesto, but those found in the collective
mindset of the inadvertent scions of the estate of art history.
Contemporary artists are drawn together not by stylistic or theoretical
concerns, but through
strategic and mutually beneficial alliances of like -minded individuals with
compatible ideologies.
The dynamism of the group as a whole supercedes the individual, and it is
thr ough this alliance
that the nine thrive.
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