Author : Sophie Le-Phat Ho
E-mail : veryseriousmail@yahoo.ca
Last Update : 2007-02-20

The last Critical Worlds I  conference featured an art exhibition, including one participatory work under the contextually appropriate title of "Auto-Contaminating Art." Speakers and audience members were invited to participate in creating a scroll by writing and/or using cuts from magazines & newspapers featuring world music or topics of globalization - serving as an exercise in exploring (auto)contaminating processes involved in "collective" work. Thus, auto-contaminating art was inspired by artist Gustav Metzger's "Auto-Destructive Art" coined in the 1960s (and revived in the 1980s), as part of the artistic movement against nuclear weapons and the larger modern mechanization of society.  Here we present a brief overview of the context of Auto-Destructive Art, and how it can inform our last conference's interrogations regarding "contaminations" through the perspective of critical art and creativity.

Please see also events for more documentation of the last Critical Worlds I. 

 

2006-01-03 Wow. Excuse the outdated terminology, but this is heavy stuff. Not so much the artwork (which is heavy too), but the attitude that goes along with it: this overbearing sense of anger and alienation. In some people this leads to the desire to destroy things, in others to create in the image of something beautiful, and still others become completely powerless. There seems to be a more creative than destructive impulse in the Critical World scroll, which in itself is very polite as it can be rolled up and as people stay nicely within the lines and medium. Did anyone try to destroy it? Are we all numb?

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