Onomatopee

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Comment by Freek Lomme - director Onomatope on April 18, 2010 at 19:16

As a first stance, on behalf of Onomatopee:


Reversed progression
Onomatoproduction in an era of anomie.

‘Finally, however, there is this fundamental stake in art and academy: the preservation, in an administered, affirmative culture, of spaces for critical debate and alternative vision’ (Hal Foster, The return of the real, 1996, p. Xvii)

Onomatopee isn't an institute; we cannot afford in-depth research. Should we mind...for the authority of research erodes within our current post-political, post-ideological cultural amnesia?

The killing fields of high culture
As part of this cultural amnesia, the domain of art, being a sphere of formal distance has eroded. Evidently art cannot compete with the visual omnipresence of experience economy's logic's, but that's to easy a statement. Art's formal distance to reality got in distance to itself: both on the level of applied arts as in art theory, reality got lost in the abstract chain of ism's. Quite recent, according to Hal Fosters' The return of the real (1996), critical theory would be immanent to innovative art and, extra more, the relative autonomy of aesthetics can be a critical resource.
This art, regarded as a pure form of high culture, actually became pop culture of a presumptuous elite. This is the story of both a visual succumbing of the post war elite, with old money in fake investments, of the old politics based on proven false morals of the 68' generation, as it is a story of a democratic visual succumbing of the masses into the myth of art.
This is the current cultural frame for a false currency, a false autonomy. Exactly this notion on the domain of (western) art has become a self-indulgent self-fulfilling prophesy of cultural capitalists’, matching up to their economic league of experience. For the mystery of abstraction is never easy, the urge for a democratization of this very mystery made high culture unintelligible. Democracy itself ended up as a false modernist dogma; founded on the valued, Kafkan objects of assurance such as pensions, interior maintenance, charity and, indeed... art.
Now, the dichotomy between abstraction and reality, often championed by high cultural critical theory, lost its authority. Abstract notions on form and content, on subjects and objects within specific sphere's are not clear enough, got to abstract and cannot compete with visual culture's experiences. These experiences are either channelled via populist subjects or via designed objects. These stances dó challenge our human point of reference. Abstract resistance ís futile.

Reversed progression
If we want to reason effective in order to bring about the responsibility of our stances, we need to acknowledge that there's no gap between abstraction and reality effectively. While reasoning, we engage with both. While reasoning effectively, we reason clearly. Most of all, when reasoning with responsibility, we reason with morality.
Should we resist either high-culture's abstraction or populist design, or can we utilize these currents? It seems that the high-cultural artistic domain neglects the potency of effective communication as practiced by designers. It seems like high-cultural theoreticians ignore the clarity of populists. These high-cultural practitioners preach for an in crowd without taking any responsibility. Simultaneous, there's evidently no responsibility in utter experience economy either.
Furthermore: are we able to revise our notion of recent history in respect to the promises and stances that this reading of modernity brought about? Can we reflect upon the historical paradigm of abstract autonomy? Are we able to anticipate progressively on a new type of responsibility, one that supplies not just an exterior, abstract and formal accountability but also an effective one, a responsibility containing cultural innovation as a result of a call to a fundamental morality? We need to reconsider the form of our sociability in order to unveil this cultural illusion.

Onomatoproduction
Despite this hegemony of an old bourgeois, Onomatopee challenges the parameters of our (visual) culture; that's our objective as a foundation. We operate in the field of cultural production, previously known as the domain of art. Onomatopee derives from motivations, voiced by subjects and speaking through objects. Onomatopee posits itself beyond the dichotomy between art and design, beyond the dichotomy between theory and praxis.
Onomatopee challenges fundamental values as motives for production. Furthermore, we debate the strategies of professionals in the field, such as urban planning, visual communication, politics and such. Onomatopee mediates within this field, in between theory and practice, not supplying results but debating parameters, for if innovation truly exists, cultural producers should stimulate the new capital to arise within specialists fields.