Bad Boy Art

I liked the silences as part of the conversation today. The 'so what' question I raised about the ultimate relevance of our work in gen-art is in part rooted in experience in the visual arts world. More than in other art-specialty areas (I think, anyway) simply tweaking the parameters of a form has qualified as an aesthetic act in the visual arts. In some ways this may qualify as a kind of reverse orthodoxy, in the sense that tweaking boundaries has, in some instances or strands, become a requirement. "Bad Boy Art" is, paradoxically, an identified genre.

I'm most interested in artists who seem to have escaped the gravitational pull of 'tweaking for tweaking's sake' (or 'art for art's sake'). A prime example of this for me is Bill Viola. Early on in his career he was among those who tweaked the parameters of the visual arts by doing video, but it seems to me he has always maintained a focus on having something to say. His content remains aesthetic (rather than intellectual, propositional, or didactic) but his work is content-driven nonetheless. I'd like to show an example in class.