[The Seven by Nine Squares home page]
[YAWN 17]
[Art Strike 1990-1993]
DOTTING THE 'i'S AND CROSSING THE 't'S
Lettre Documentaire, not having a dogmatic concept of the Art Strike (1990-1993), finds it opportune to offer it minimum service, in partially maintaining its activity of observation and description of certain particular artistic forms, which would in any case be a legitimate part of its larger activity of observation and description of various forms of reality in general. We force ourselves however to hold to this task, aiming for a certain editorial seriousness, in that we don't value the effusiveness and the ill-considered foaming at the mouth that seems to characterize not only much of the babble of the official and mercantile realms, but also much of the babble coming from the underground. Besides, Lettre Documentaire (from the Latin documentum: that which serves to instruct) intends to pursue, as it grows, its didactic project of observation and description of certain non-artistic forms of reality, if not for the purpose of studying their intrinsic psychotropic qualities, then more generally for dealing with the sincere sense of wonder for "the totality of things that happen". Nevertheless, we do not disregard the virtues of an Art Strike (1990-1993) as a vow of artistic chastity: it seems to us that an Art Strike has the beneficial power of a fast. But we simply feel that the Art Strike (1990-1993) is more useful as a rumour than as a catechism.
[Lettre Documentaire #9