Near the beginning of Caroll's essay on Margolles's work, Margolles is cited saying "'Mi ética es mi estética' (my ethic is my aesthetic)." It seems like many of us are having fairly deep problems with both her ethics (As Carl quotes below - ""Does a remembrance and deployment of dead bodies whose owners were victims of violence give a voice to the anonymous dead of further victimize them?") and her aesthetic (As Sam says "Do such (visceral) images serve the art or distract the mind?").
This binding of ethics to aesthetics is a theme, and a problem, that appears in a lot of the work we're examining in this class. It seems like we often examine works that take their ethical/ideological perspective so far that we ask ourselves "Can this even be considered art?" (a la Anna, below). How far can an artist take their ethical/ideological perspective before that perspective degrades the artistic integrity of the work? And when does a focus on artistic integrity prohibit an artist from adequately expressing that perspective?
Is the binding of ethics to aesthetics inherently problematic? Do we feel like it's something to pursue? To avoid?
Can we find examples of art that is both bound to its ethical/ideological perspective AND artistically successful?
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