the most beautiful failure: the arts of deflection – exoptic art

Despite certain inevitable and extraordinary successes, the efforts of the blind eye projects are destined to fail; whether as art, an art movement, politics or commerce – if not as science and aesthetic speculation.

This is both desirable and necessary. This essential un-success is part ofdeflectionism’s rupture with the historic trajectory of art – and the media that integrate and distribute the arts.

The blind eye projects exist in the reversed reflection or our era, in the reversed echo of the undeniable success of contemporary arts and media that compete for humanity’s attention, each individual’s attention. Where each sonic and visual instant must serve the principal aim: increase infinitely its power to attract and capture its target public from the world of impatient spectators.

The key goals of the projects:

1) Discover new points of reference, critical distances, from which to observe from “outside” the emeging media world.

2) Discover new forms within the framework of deflection beyond avant-garde chock effects and the somniferous New Age arts.

Surrounding “exoptic fields,” an deflective piece, I’ve grouped other works create a setting designed to provoke consideration of the deflective idea. This even if once considered, the idea itself could be – should be – forgotten.

The failure of deflective art is its success. A work made to be deflectiveshould even more than disappear. It should reduce the potential stimulation by the quantity that its non-deflective homologue would arouse. The deflective work’s effect will go beyond the simple and banal rejection by the observer to finish in perfect negation of itself! (See “deflectionexplained for schema.)

the vagabond blind eye store-front installations

My windows, these sidewalk scenes, circulate as manifestations of the book called: the blind eye book of doomed love and hopeless aspirations, vol. i)

Between 2001 and 2003 seven different windows have entertained passersby in Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, in Vienna, Austria, and Nice, France. The most successful of these interventions have been in atypical-gallery windows in Time Square and the East Village, New York and at schikaneder, Vienna, Austria. These installations have remained up for up to a year, with periodic changes and performances.

I prefer the non-gallery store-front for its proto-tv character and for its random audience. Fully conscious of the pretensions of an artistic engagement pretending to be outside art, democratic, more than art…