August 27th, 2010

Feedback

In Feedback: Television Against Democracy, the art historian David Joselit explores the idea that all commodities, including works of art, are figured as commodities against the ground of networks, including media networks such as television and the Internet.  In relation to works of art, that would be to say that the ground against which works of art are to be evaluated as units in a broader economy is no longer just the physical space of the art institution; e.g., the white cube art museum; but, instead the networks of interrelated flow through which both actual commodities and the capital surrounding those commodities now exist and disperse.  For Joselit, art can no longer be thought of as a static object which one gazes upon, but instead as a “transjective” object, continuously networking between multiple fields of objects and subjects, which one follows.  He brings up the fact that Wall Street quants have conceived of incomprehensibly complicated models for dematerializing and dispersing bundles of capital and, as such, it is incumbent upon anyone interested in the relationship between a work of art and the broader economy to appreciate the fact that works of art—as commodities–are also dematerialized and dispersed.

When viewed against this networked ground, Joselit discusses artworks which create viral paths, leaving trails of “feedback” between themselves and this networked ground.  This feedback functions as noise, disrupting its own flow as a commodity and illuminating the ground upon which it circulates.

In what follows, I’ll discuss the television series Mad Men, suggesting that, on the one hand, the actual episodes of the series create a disruptive feedback loop between themselves and the television network; but, on the other hand, that the series’ branded image avatar, which is perhaps more widely culturally dispersed than the actual episodes of the show, lacks this disruptive feedback loop between itself and the Internet network.

*****

Mad Men’s protagonist Don Draper is known to be ruthlessly effective at selling things to people.  Time after time, the campaigns he engineers for a host of invariably silly products are able to exploit an emotion or a desire lurking beyond the product’s practical usage.  And while these products may themselves be silly, the desires Draper creates around their advertising are often complex and psychologically astute.  For example, an automated slide photo projector developed by Kodak is not the “Wheel”—Kodak’s name for the device— but rather—in Draper’s pitch—the “Carousel”; that is, it’s not an efficient way to display a loop of slide photographs, but a way to go around and around “and back home again” to something fondly remembered from the past.

However, Draper knows that these desires which people seek to satisfy through products like the Carousel are not ever going to be satisfied; desire is endlessly deferred—always trying to re-capture something which one thinks used to be there, but never really was and certainly never will be again.  This principal is, through one lens, how capitalism operates: it depends on the endless impossibility of satisfying desire to keep selling ways to satisfy desire. In the finale to the series’ third season and in the wake of the assassination of John F. Kennedy (“the day America lost its innocence”), Draper explains this to his protégé, Peggy Olson.  Here’s the exchange of dialogue between the two:

Don – Do you know why I don’t want to go to McCann?

Peggy – Because you can’t work for anyone else.

Don – No. Because there are people out there—people who buy things—people like you and me—and something happened; something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.

Peggy – Is it?

What he’s getting at is that there was a picture of what it meant to be a consumer in America, but the assassination of the President made even the pretense towards living that image even more absurd than it ever was.  That absurdity, though, will not stop people from endlessly trying to be this image and this is what good advertising creatives understand.   Olson’s “Is it?” at the end of this exchange, though, reveals the tension at the heart of these characters: their insight into the emptiness of consumer desire is “very valuable,” but it’s also their own tragedy.  What Draper sees in Olson is the same emptiness he sees in himself.  Indeed, “Don Draper” is not even the character’s real name.  Through an accident in the Korean War, the actual Don Draper was killed and a fellow soldier named Dick Whitman took Draper’s dog tags and commenced pretending to be him.  “Don Draper” is, thus, nothing—an outer sheen through which someone who used to be “Dick Whitman” haunts the world.  This awareness of his own nothingness makes Draper/Whitman a great “Ad Man,” but makes it difficult for him to participate in the very rituals of capitalism he sells, including monogamous suburban love and the nuclear family.  The same could be said for Peggy Olson.  Her throughline is premised on the fact that she’s a lapsed Catholic who underwent an abortion in-between the first and second seasons of the series.  This abortion (in extremely crude terms, an “emptying out”) traumatized Olson and, since then, she hasn’t been able to participate in the flow of sexuality and day-to-day, mindless chit-chat demanded by corporate-sanctioned urban existence.  And, so, instead of living it, Draper and Olson sell it.

What is particularly powerful about the series’ explorations into advertising, though, is the fact that they are occurring on commercial television.  The entire ground upon which this content rests is mass media advertising.  When one watches the show and follows its explorations into the emptiness of desire, the mechanisms of advertising, and, in particular, the mechanics of television advertising, these thematic explorations collide with the actual television advertisements which allow for the show to exist in the first place.  Some viewers, then, may view Mad Men and—armed with concepts provided by the series–reflect critically upon the advertisements which surround a given episode.

The result is a variation on “culture jamming” or the sort of “feedback” which Joselit discusses.  As mentioned above, feedback, for Joselit, is an effect accrued through an artwork’s dispersion in which the artwork creates a disruption in the trajectory of itself as a commodity.  He writes, “If a commodity’s meaning results from its circulation, it is possible to develop a politics whose goal is not to abolish or “critique” commodification (objectives that are utopian and inefficacious by turn) but rather to reroute the trajectories of things.”  Joselit gives the example of African Americans feeding back images produced by their own community into television in the 1960s and 1970s as a way to develop a more accurate representative presence in the mediascape.  He also discusses a television commercial created by Andy Warhol for Schrafft’s restaurant chain, the content of which is, in the artist’ words, “all the mistakes they do in commercials.”  What one views in Warhol’s commercial is the image of a Sunday with a cherry on top which is drowning in video noise, thus selling the technological ground of the video image as opposed to the actual Sunday: it’s feedback, designed to reroute the trajectory of the commodity.  The same could be said for Mad Men: by picturing the ground of advertisement and capital which it circulates in and out of on television, the series tangles up the clean circulatory flow of the series as a commodity in the television network.

However, the network Mad Men circulates through is not just television.  In the 21st century, it lives and circulates on the Internet and myriad other forms of media, as well.  For example, I’ve never viewed an episode on television, but, as a follower of the show, I’ve viewed every single episode released so far through a combination of DVD’s, iTunes, Limewire, and “Freemium” sites like megavideo.com.  Additionally, the way in which the show is largely dispersed through culture is not even through these episodes, but rather through images of the show’s sex icons on blogs, magazines, online versions of magazines, Facebook chatter, banner advertisements on blogs, bus ads, gossip mills, and, in general, the branding of a full-blown retro-chic style which celebrates dapper young metrosexuals with slicked-back hairdos.  That is to say that even though the episodes of the show create an interesting level of feedback distortion in relation to television, the way they circulate as a brand through the broader networks of interconnected digital ephemera is actually fairly harmless—it’s just another thing to sell.

As mentioned above, one of Joselit’s intuition’s is that commodities are not static, physical objects; rather, they are, in the wake of networked communication such as television, animated and in-motion media viruses, travelling through all avenues of life from the living room to the water cooler to the bedroom.  Effective counter-culture, then, does not stand outside out of these animated commodities, but rather reroutes their trajectories through feedback.

With this in mind, the trajectory of Mad Men doesn’t stop on Sunday nights at eleven o’clock EST on the AMC cable network.  In fact, that one hour a week is a small piece of the pie surrounding the show’s “social life” as a commodity circulating through the broader networks of digital communication.  The episodes of the series could be Shakespeare or Thomas Mann, but it wouldn’t matter when the meme of Mad Men—the way it travels virally—has very little to do with a critique of advertising and a lot to do with developing a brand until it ceases to be a dynamic force in the marketplace.

One way to frame this problem in relation to Joselit’s understanding of feedback, is through the “avatar.”  For Joselit, the avatar is the managed media presence of an individual or team of individuals which can be virally dispersed as a commodity on the marketplace.  He discusses the avatar images of American politicians becoming far more important than the actual policy positions they espouse.  If the politician’s avatar seems somehow “American” than the public will support the politician at the polls despite factual evidence of corruption and the embodiment of qualities which run counter to so-called “American values.”  The most effectively disruptive media avatars, for Joselit, create entirely new, non-corporate-sanctioned “publics” who follow the performed movements of the avatar.  He writes,

If television alienates viewers from their own representations through a skewed identification with commodified norms, avatars both acknowledge this alienation and attempt to combat it by inventing new ‘social lives’ for such readymade characters.  Avatars function as political agents by bringing persons and pictures face-to-face to produce publics.

He points to Melvin Van Peebles’ “Sweet Sweetback” character as an effective avatar who developed an entirely new set of ways to inhabit social space and relate to mainstream consumer culture.

To return to Mad Men, the series’ avatar, best represented by the Don Draper character, extends beyond the episodes of the series.  However, this viral avatar lacks the disruptive feedback that the actual episodes of the series create when situated solely in the television network.

*********

On the one hand, Joselit’s book, which is about television and sticks largely to examples of 1960s and 1970s art history and visual culture, would seem oddly out of place for an audience interested understanding the relationship between works of art and digital networks connected through computers.  However, the virus he’s trying to spread is relevant and challenging.  Artworks and the evaluation of artworks in the wake of media networks, be they television or Internet networks, require one to refocus the entire framework through which one usually thinks of an artwork. Mad Men is not about the themes of the show, but the trajectories in which the themes of the show circulate.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

August 20th, 2010

The cultural theorist Walter Benjamin is perhaps best known for his observation that the mechanical reproduction of unique works of art eliminates the “aura” or ritualistic cult value around these works.  A mass-produced photograph of the Mona Lisa, for example, is not going to call for a ritualized pilgrimage to see it “in-person” and take-in its aura in the same way that the original is able to accomplish every single day at the Louvre.  Instead of bemoaning this withering-away of aura due to mechanical reproduction, though, Benjamin turns on the point, suggesting that both the religious undertones and the focus on the individual which are suggested by aura are, in fact, a tool of fascist politics and that reproducible media, especially film–with its radically more dispersed and instantaneous modes of reception–open the door to an art conducted in the name of communism.

In this widespread reading of Benjamin’s theory of media, though, there is no clear-cut understanding of what it is exactly that Benjamin means by “aura.”  As commentators such as Miriam Hansen have pointed out, in Benjamin’s writings, he seems, at times, to celebrate the demise of aura, and, at other times, to demonstrate a certain nostalgia for it, if not suggesting that aura still, in fact, exists—albeit through very different means–in reproducible media such as photographs of people who are now dead.  Likewise, there is a certain murkiness surrounding the ways in which Benjamin defines aura, both in the “Work of Art” essay and beyond it.

One way to understand his use of the term is that it denotes a quality which does not emerge from within the work and emanate out, but is rather accrued in time through both the work’s testimony to history and the trajectory of its social transactions through this history.  That is, the aura around a work is not beauty or a magic which originates from the inside of the object, but a conceptual field around the work accrued through time as it reflects back upon its own history as a material object.   In what follows, I’ll discuss Benjamin’s use of the term aura in these terms and, then, briefly consider its relevance to digital media reproduction.

*****

Benjamin’s earliest usage of the term “aura” occurred during one of his writing experiments while under the influence of hashish.  He describes it here as an “ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case.”  What one can gather from this description is that it is something external–“ornamental”—to the object; there is nothing magical inside the case of aura; the aura is generated by the case itself.

Later, in his essay “A Short History of Photography,” Benjamin considers the influence of time on this “ornamental halo.”  He describes aura here as “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.”  There is a suggestion in this description that aura involves not just the space of the physical object, but an invocation of linear time.  This interest in the effect of time in the experience of a work puts Benjamin outside of many other theorists of the phenomenology of the art experience.  For example, it contrasts with what Michael Fried, in his essay “Art and Objecthood,” terms “presentness” or a sort of atemporality in the work of art.  Whereas, for Fried, the most powerful art objects exist outside of time (and, thus, outside of theater)—continuously re-creating themselves anew every moment—the auratic work of art, for Benjamin, creates a sense of distance around itself by actively invoking a continuum of time (a continuum which would be eliminated by mechanical reproduction).

In one line of thought in Benjamin’s writing on the subject, he discusses the experience of time in the aura of a work of art in relation to the materialist history through which the object has existed.  He points to this in “The Work of Art” essay, writing:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object.

The auratic authority around an object, then, is—again—not generated by something inside the object as if it were magic, but rather through an “ornamental halo” accrued through the object’s testimony to a period of history.  The fact that the object was there in a certain corner of historical time is what affords it any more authority than an identical object which did not experience that history, much less a reproducible photograph of the object.

Related to this is the idea of provenance or the history of ownership of a work of art.  If a particular painting has been passed through the hands of famous collectors for centuries, what one would find auratic about the painting is not the alchemical effect of the artist’s application of paint to canvas, but rather the series of transactions from one historical figure or collecting institution to another over time.  For example, if one can say that the Mona Lisa possesses any sort of aura for its viewers at the Louvre, it is not necessarily because they find it to be a particularly beautiful painting, but rather because of its history and prominence in the museum’s collection.  Art historians and aficionados may be entranced by its formal qualities, but the aura of the work for the public is, in Benjamin’s terms, accrued through the painting’s testimony to its history.

Benjamin also relates this to collections of objects other than works of art.  For example, in his essay “Unpacking My Library,” Benjamin discusses the value of the books in his collection in relation to their historical testimony and provenance.  He writes, “The period, the region, the craftsmanship, the former ownership–for a true collector the whole background of an item adds up to the magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of his object.”  This relates to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s understanding of commodities as having a “social life” in which value around the object is accrued and lost depending on how it is socially transacted.  For example, one of my favorite t-shirts belonged to my father when he was roughly the age I am now.  When I see that t-shirt, it possesses, for me, a ritualistic value–an “ornamental halo” related to the transaction which led from my father’s wardrobe to my own.  If I had purchased an identical t-shirt at a retail store or even a thrift shop, my entire relationship to it would be different; it’s provenance would be a mystery to me and, thus, diminish the t-shirt’s aura.

In the 20th century modernity which Benjamin experienced, he saw this sort of aura to be withering away as the mechanical reproduction of images diminishes the relationship of the mass public to unique works of art bearing traces of historical time.  All authority in the object which could be potentially utilized by the forces of fascist politics is challenged, opening the door to a new relationship of art and politics, one based on dispersion and the communication of communist political ideas.

In the age of digital reproduction, which would seem to even more radically destroy the possibility of aura, though, there is, paradoxically, a form of aura which persists not in relation to objects, but to information.

On social bookmarking sites like delicious.com, for example, works of net art become valuable based on the way in which the link to the work is transacted.  If an artist produces a work and shares it through the Internet, the work can either stop there and be ostensibly forgotten or it can be bookmarked by another user, re-blogged elsewhere on the Web, or generally digitally dispersed.  Additionally, the work can be re-versioned–meaning that it is appropriated, changed, and further re-circulated through the Internet as a mutation of the orignal.  As all of this dispersion occurs, the “original” information on the Internet gains a certain aura—an “ornamental halo” or “a peculiar web of space and time: the unique manifestation of a distance, however near it may be.”  Additionally, this aura is enhanced by the particular provenance of its trajectory through the Internet.  If the information is collected and re-circulated by Internet users who have been bookmarking and re-blogging for long enough to have developed a proven “track record” as opposed to a user lacking a proven track record, then the aura of the information is further increased.

I recently viewed the original YouTube video which inspired the widespread “Double Rainbow!!” meme.  In the video, an apparently stoned man—YouTube user Hungrybear9562–is looking out onto a beautiful mountain landscape in which two rainbows are in the sky.  He’s so profoundly moved by the site of the “double rainbow” that he begins an emotionally overwhelmed ramble in which he shouts “Double Rainbow!! Oh my God!!” and generally expresses his stoned enthusiasm for the vividness of the rainbows.  Prior to my viewing of the original video, I had only come across versions of the video created by other YouTube users.  When I did view this original video, the information it contained possessed an aura based on how widely the meme it inspired had been virally spread through the Internet.  If the video had not been so widely dispersed, then it would have lacked that “ornamental halo” around the information it contained.  For works of net art, this principal applies, as well, but with a slightly different emphasis.  The aura of a work of net art is not necessarily based on its dispersion through mass culture, but through the a combination of both mass dispersion and dispersion through the smaller community of net artists and fans of net art.

******

For Benjamin, aura is a complicated term.  One way to understand it is that it is, first, not synonymous with beauty.  Aura is something placed onto the object by history as it is travels through social transactions.  He believed, or at least advocated for, the idea that when objects with this aura around them are photographed and re-distributed, the aura is necessarily lost and that, furthermore, this loss of aura around the way works of art are received in culture creates an opportunity for an art based not on ritual, but rather politics.  However, in the contemporary moment in which culture is radically more technologically reproduced than it was even in Benjamin’s time, a sense of aura in terms of the social transactions around the work persists in the form of memes.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

August 15th, 2010

Performance 4 (Seth Price)

1.

According to the computer science guru David Gelertner, the increasing migration of digital information from personal hardware to data clouds, which aids in making information radically mobile, necessitates a shift in the picture one refers to when visualizing the Internet.  The Web—as in a relatively static network of data nodes—is out; the lifestream—as in continuously mutating network of data clouds—is in.  He writes:

The Internet’s future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story.

For artists working on the Web, this principal applies as well.  Creativity is not evaluated on the basis of an individual work of art, but rather on the basis of the artist’s ongoing, performed net presence.  For better or for worse, a week ago an artist may have created a masterpiece work of art which in previous epochs would have been discussed for decades or even centuries; in the age of the CVS Pharmacy Twitter feed, though, the artist’s masterpiece will be quickly forgotten, at best sentimentally recalled or academically cited, but no longer felt. What will be felt, though, is the artist’s ongoing engagement with time—the molding of the NOW.

It should be said, though, that Gelertner is ambiguous about this obsession with flow and the NOW.  He writes, “The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.”  Furthermore, focusing on an endless NOW, can be oppressive for an artist’s creative expression.  Part of what it means to be working in the tradition of the history of art is to work against the demands of one’s own time; or at least working in relation to it from a skewed angle, keeping everyone on their toes.  The Puck-ish delight the artist has in convoluting expectations is frustrated in this grinding system which demands one to endlessly perform, endlessly produce ever newer novelties if one is to remain relevant as an artist.  Nothing becomes shocking when there’s a new revolution every week and, thus, any avant-garde action becomes neither here nor there—it’s like whatever.  The avant-garde in this scenario is not called upon to further speed things up, but to slow things down, demanding the audience to shift the focus of their attention to longer time spans.

In what follows, I’ll discuss this performative approach to art making and look at the artist Seth Price’s response to some of the anxieties which it brings up.

2.

An artist has a website.  At first, this website is, depending on the artist, either a handy novelty or a frustrating necessity of the digital age.  Either way, it’s not that super-important.  One makes a work—be it digitally-created or handmade—and one, then, uploads a photograph or some other form of representation of this work to their website to serve as a second-hand reference for curators, collectors, critics, and the general contemporary art audience.

An artist maintains this website.  Gradually the artist comes to realize just how handy and how necessary this tool is for the dissemination of their work.  As newspapers, mainstream culture, an exploding amateur culture, communication with friends, banking, and a host of other day-to-day activities are increasingly conducted via the Internet, the artist realizes that not only do people greatly prefer, and even expect, the ease of viewing the work through this website, but the once-obvious line between the actual work and the representation of the work is becoming oddly blurry.  For many members of the artist’s audience, including curators, critics, and other arts professionals, the image of the work on the website is good enough.  This is exacerbated by the increasingly global nature of contemporary art, perhaps best represented by Biennial culture.  Furthermore, as the artist David Horvitz has pointed out, artists working on the Internet are now presented with an entirely new potential audience of Internet users who are not necessarily well-versed in the discourses and history of art.

All of the sudden, the way the artist thinks about their work is at least as much dictated by how a .jpeg of the piece looks in the context of their website as they are by how it would look in the physical art space.  This is what the artist Guthrie Lonergan calls “post Internet” art—the art after the Internet changed the way that art reaches an audience.

For many younger artists who, by historical accident, came of age without ever really experiencing the “pre-Internet” relationship between artist and audience, this is not a novelty, but an obvious fact that almost goes without saying.  Even if one works in traditional media, art is primarily experienced on the Internet.  The art/curatorial collective VVORK curated a show called “The Real Thing” which was based on the idea that, as members of mediatized cultures,  most of their own knowledge of art was not accrued through the original, but through art history books, lectures, conversations, and, of course, the Internet.  In other words, through “versions.”  In their statement for the show, which was held at MU in Eindhoven, they write:

Some of our favourite works have only been described to us, unsurprisingly as the majority of our art experiences have been mediated in one form or other. The majority of works presented in this show have been selected through written commentaries, verbal descriptions and jpegs found online. In fact most of the works presented at MU are the type of manifestations mentioned above: stories, descriptions, translations and interpretations, all understood as primary experiences.

One of VVORK’s cited inspirations for the show is the following Seth Price quote from Dispersion:

Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation?

Now, when the primary experience of art is legitimately conceived in this way–as an endless series of versions–there are going to be repercussions.  One of those repercussions is that, because contemporary art is now more often than not viewed on the Internet, and, because it’s so easy for anyone to express themselves as artists on the Internet, the individual work of art, contextualized as a digital representation on the Internet, is greatly diminished in qualitative value.  The glut of information through which media consumers are presented nudges the consumer to surf through this media, including contemporary art, rather than engaging deeply with any one particular unit.  The artist Chris Coy recently described this in terms of the way the computer urges its users to view images in sequences, as in, for example, thumbnails—further versions of versions.  In an e-mail interview conducted for the SFMOMA website, he claims:

A computer screen is very much a sequential image-viewing device. Which is significantly reshaping the function of the Image in my life. I have become a very adept surface skimmer – gliding my way across glossy roll over buttons, tumblr blogs and Google image searches and stock photo sites… which means hundreds, if not thousands of images pass before me on any given day. Imagery is being totally integrated into our vocabulary – I mean you can shoot, edit and upload video from an iPhone now. Even the core function of the phone is changing as technology facilitates this hypermediated kind of ubiquitous computing thing.

This understanding of the computer as a “sequential image-viewing device” necessitates a decrease, then, in the aura around a single instance of artwork.  In the context of the Internet, all media drowns in value to right around zero.

To my mind, though, this is not the end of the story or, for better or for worse, the elimination of artistic aura.  Rather, what one sees happening on the Internet is a new type of temporal activation—a “net presence” in which the artist’s work is viewed as one on-going performance in which the audience follows the artist as he or she performs the act of creating individual works.  This performance, unlike the individual works of art made during the course of the performance, is where audiences are nudged to qualitatively sort out and find meaning in artistic experience on the Internet.

3.

Now, there is a dangerously romantic appeal to this idea.  It seems to advocate for a “survival of the fittest” scenario in which the future is an endless, regularly-scheduled assembly line of novelty and only those art workers who keep up with the administered pace of production get a gold star.  Performance here sounds like “engine performance.”  This is obviously not the sort of situation which would be in the artist’s favor.  It’s not exciting for an artist (or an art theorist, for that matter) to follow a theoretically pre-prescribed pattern which was dictated by the pressures of the market, the audience, or the curatorial/critical apparatus around the work’s reception.  Furthermore, in an endless rush for new change and novelty, it becomes increasingly unclear as to what the point is or where all this performing is headed.

In many of Price’s works, for example, 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, For a Friend, and Poems, the anxiety surrounding endless performance and novelty is examined. 

8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, for example, is a downloadable, eight-hour electronic dance music mix.  It was created in the downtime from Price’s work over the course of several years.  As one begins to stream the mix, there’s something polished about its fun—it feels really open and cool and one appreciates the labor of the mix’s flow as much as the individual tracks themselves.  As the stream continues, though, an anxiety arises:  What’s all of this polished labor flowing for?  An hour has passed—it’s still going—endlessly, relentlessly upbeat.  Two hours have passed—it’s still going.  Three hours—still going.  Now, one might grow tired and leave the work’s mix mid-stream or one might keep up with it as the editorial power and taste level of the mixing itself continues unabated.  But––still—in either case, one may wonder, where is this “going” going?  Will it ever change or is it just endless tasteful funkiness?  A hint is provided by the work’s title–8-4 9-5-10-6 11-7. These can be decoded as the eight hours of the daily work grind: 8:00-4:00; 9:00-5:00; 10:00-6:00; 11:00-7:00.  The eight hours of music is at once both powerfully upbeat as well as nightmarishly endless and the same could be said of creative labor itself, of the eight-hour work day which blurs into the twenty-four hour work day, the intermingling of “on the clock” and “off the clock”–an endless streaming of data into an already well-clogged database with seemingly no justification other than to produce more endlessly fun content.

In For a Friend, a pair of friends engage in a seemingly endless conversation filled with reasonably interesting observations, but, ultimately, never getting anywhere.  The conversation begins with an amateur philosophical discussion concerning a journalistic trope in which a writer begins an article with a mention of the date in which the events described in the body of the article take place.  However, meaningful as the content of their question may be (and there is something interesting about it), this meaning is neutralized in the text by, first, the factual inaccuracies and misspellings embedded into the examples of the trope raised by the friends, as well as, second, the illogic of the discussion which follows.  The friends go from the trope of dating the events described in the beginning of a journalistic article to the rise of personal computing and network usage, hacking, personal consumption choices, obsolescence, personal charisma, looking at everything versus seeing structure, puberty, Zen, anarchy, revolution, mythology, architecture, bare life, progress, and, finally, “self-annihilating question(s).”  Each development of the discussion raises a true-ism regarding structure, but each true-ism is itself situated in a wildly flimsy structure.  The result is that, the text becomes its own “self-annihilating question,” picturing its own limitations–its own endless series of true-isms never getting anywhere real.

And in Poems, Price presents a series of fragments scribbled in notebooks.  Snippets of pseudo-intellectual conversation networking into nowhere; analyses of philosophical thought without clear points; calls to political action lacking in direction; lists that only make sense if one rationalizes them.  Occasionally, phrases seem to summarize what the poems are about.  One that got me was titled “Fantasy of History.”  We see a post-it note attached to a piece of paper, reading, “The idea of trying to remember something and getting it wrong–But embarking successfully on a quest from wrong information.”  Unfortunately, though, one remains unsure of whether or not this, too, is just another dumb idea in a notebook full of dumb ideas.  One of Price’s most powerful effects is his ability to draw one deeper and deeper into thinking they have a handle on something—anything—and then—bam—pulling the rug out from under one’s feet.  What one is left with is an image of something that seems like it might be about this or that theme, but whose meaning will be endlessly deferred.

4.

Through his career, though, Price has developed strategies which resist the anxieties posed by these endless cycles of performance and novelty .  Two of those strategies are delay and re-versioning.  In both of these cases, one might say that Price’s medium is his own archive or database.

Delay, as a strategy, is less concerned with the moment in which it is produced and more concerned with the blast it gives off at a later date.  And re-versioning allows Price to participate in the NOW of the performance by returning to its past.  Price’s body of work is open to continuous re-working by the artist himself.  This mutability of his archive simultaneously destroys the past and keeps it alive.

In Price’s text Dispersion, he discusses “delay.”  He writes:

Slowness works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of speed. Moving with the times places you in a blind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add a dissonant note. But the way in which media culture feeds on its own leavings indicates the paradoxical slowness of archived media, which, like a sleeper cell, will always rear its head at a later date.  The rear-guard often has the upper hand, and sometimes delay, to use Duchamp’s term, will return the investment with massive interest.

His work with the Continuous Project collective, for example, is dedicated to public readings and illegal publishing of historical art (and occasional non-art) texts.  By distributing these archival works as contemporary works, they are given a new lease and sense of relevance.  And, in 2009, Price exhibited for the first time a set of calendars that he originally produced in 2004.  In the press release for this exhibition, he writes, “Sometimes it’s good to go forward and then double back, and circle around again. To those who turned their feet around so that their tracks would confuse their pursuers: why not walk backward?”  The calendars’ content is composed of a collision between pre-Modern, WPA-era American painting and graphic design tropes dating from the early 1990s which read as “futuristic.”  WPA-era painters like Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, are–for better or for worse– best known, not for their own work, but rather for paving the way for an artist like Jackson Pollock, who was a pupil of Benton’s.  The “hot” cursive fonts and gradiated neon backdrops read the same way:  they are—for better or for worse–all but forgotten—depreciated–not unlike an out-of-date wall calendar.

I don’t believe that in either the case of Continuous Project or the calendar pieces, Price is dedicated to the idea that the delayed effect of a given work re-introduced into the art system will ever necessarily solve anything or become all that meaningful.  Perhaps what they each do accomplish, though, is to create meaning through a sort of quietism, serving as memento mori—a reminder of one’s own finitude.

The other strategy Price employs is to re-version his own work.  For example, Dispersion is a text which, for Price, is a mutable document, continuously open to change and alteration.  And his artist lecture, Redistribution, is likewise open to further revision.   By re-versioning an older work, it is re-inserted into the cultural system and given a new opportunity to create an effect.

These strategies keep the past alive by erasing it, introducing false memories, and avoiding a static personal archive of work.  As mutable digital code, the artist’s archive is just as open to continuous revision as anything else displayed on the Internet.

5.

Tim Griffin argues that as Price disappears through a continuous re-tracing of his own personal archive, he is able to successfully elude calcification at the hands of the art world, but at a significant cost: the evacuation of any memory or stable sense of meaning of this personal archive.  In Griffin’s words: “He behaves as a kind of filter, continually reintroducing a sense of this loss in his work, this emptying of memory, in order to mine the effects and affects of such depletion.”

There’s something sacrificial about Price’s work, then–killing it in order to preserve it.  However, at some future date, Seth Price will himself die and will no longer be able to go back and confuse his pursuers by introducing false memories and histories, and a reading of his work will become crystallized and the galleries and museums will sum it all up and show something that stands in for it the whole thing.

Perhaps, though, one can think of Price’s project not as an endgame, but as a sort of therapy for the knots one gets into when conceiving of art as endgame.  It’s a method for future artists to keep going.

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized, sethprice | Comments Off

August 6th, 2010

Performance 3

1.

Brad Troemel, an artist perhaps best known for his work with the Jogging collective, claimed in a 2009 interview with the Counterfeit-Mess Blog that,

A couple years ago when I became a Photographer-hater, I realized that you can’t possibly explain the world through a single tool.  I feel that way now in regard to The Art Project, that 10 projects can’t explain everything or anything either.  All you can do is have a constant engagement with art, trying to find meaning.  On Jogging, we, the creators, are the art and artists…Creating this way makes assessing/accessing our work on the whole difficult.  There’s no fitting “grading rubric” for everything at once because the intent of the art is multiple.  So, you can either assess every single work individually, or, you can assess us, ourselves, as the work.

The artist Duncan Alexander recently wrote a blog post which made a similar point regarding certain artists working on the Internet.  Before making that point, though, he divides current net art practices into two (admittedly) very broadly sketched camps—on the one hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with art history and, on the other hand, those artists making work on the Internet in conversation with the cultural history of the Internet itself.  He, then, claims that for the “net historical” camp,

What matters…is not so much the individual artwork as the artist’s oeuvre and net presence. This is one reason why these artists don’t receive as much coverage – you can’t pin a work down as easily. Where most camp one works are one-way in terms of links (and this appears to be a strategic move), camp two relishes hypertext and cross-platform performance. Their work spills across the social networks that the artists inhabit.

Alexander’s division of the current net art paradigm into two broadly sketched camps is perceptive and works well as a shorthand.  To my mind, though, the work of both camps is most potently experienced in terms of what he calls ongoing “net presence” as opposed to through an individual work.   For example, Ryder Ripps, who (if we are going to follow Alexander’s “two camps” framework) is a member of the “net historical” camp, has created important work which explicitly embraces a plurality of production occurring in time; but the work of Jon Rafman, who is a member of the “art historical” camp, is also, for me, anyway, more meaningfully experienced when considered in terms of ongoing presence—even if this presence is less pronounced. Google Street Views and Brand New Paint Job, for example, are memes he’s actively improvising with in time; they are knowingly performed and are responsive to the demands placed on them by both general Internet culture as well as the history of art.

In the two previous posts on this blog, I’ve tried to work through a similar idea; namely, that the “aura” of an individual work of art in the age of the digital media network is, for better or for worse, not eliminated, but rather relocated.  Instead of associating cult value with an artifact, one associates it with the live performance of the artist as he or she creates individual works of art and uploads them to the data cloud in sequential order.  Following this publicly viewable sequence as it happens live is where meaningful artistic experiences are happening on the Web.  There are, of course, interesting individual works of art on the Internet, but that’s all they can be—“interesting.”  Each individual work of art in the context of the incomprehensible amounts of artistic media on the Internet is leveled out in value to right around zero.  For example, both the avant-garde music of Arnold Schoenberg and humorous videos of cats playing the piano are equally “interesting”—one no more qualitatively valuable than the other when viewed through a computer in the context of all of the other media one is able to consume on the Internet. The result of this is that those invested in reflecting on works of art in the context of the Internet are nudged towards following the artist’s live “presence” as he or she disseminates work in time.  These live performances are where one is able to draw qualitative distinctions.  This is not something that I necessarily approve of or disapprove of—it does seem, to me, to be the case, though.

That said, there are a number of clear objections to this idea.  One of those objections is that the use of the terms “performance” and, especially, “live performance” are problematic.

For example, for the performance theorist Peggy Phelan, the ontology of live performance is explicitly divorced from image reproductions and explicitly involves the co-presence of a limited number of bodies in the same space.   Likewise, in the performance historian Chris Salter’s book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, Salter refuses to include a discussion of performance on the Internet even though he does so for many other “entanglements” of performativity and technology.  For Salter, performance is necessarily “situated” meaning that, even if the stage is filled with technological gadgetry and television monitors intermingling with live bodies, the audience and performers need both be situated in the same physical space for the same amount of shared co-present time.  The disembodied quality of Internet experience is beyond the pale of what one could call “performance.”

Before going any further, I should say that this aggressive line-drawing between what is real performance and what is not real performance makes a great deal of sense to me.  There’s always going to be something more visceral about the sharing of physical space which needs to be preserved and honored.  For example, jumping up and down and slamming into other sweaty bodies for an hour and a half while listening to loud, deliriously pounding rock music would be more exhilarating than the experience of watching the same music through a live stream on the Web.  Similarly, physical contact during sex is not something that you could hope to reproduce on the Internet.  I’m not interested in arguing against these obvious facts or diminishing the value of these experiences.

What I am interested in thinking through, though, is that while one’s body is clearly not to be transcended as one’s consciousness is downloaded into cyberspace (or whatever), there may be multiple ways to talk about a body which include both the experience of, for example, the body in a dance club in “natural time” as well as the body online, surfing through the Internet in “Internet time.”  Again, I am not in favor of one conception of the body in time over the other; I do think, however, that it’s possible for one to seriously conceive of their bodies as being in two (or more) places at once.

In what follows, I’ll discuss several theories of performance working around these issues.

2.

What is liveness?  One way to approach that question is to ask, first, “what is not liveness?”  If one views video documentation of a live performance, is what one views anything like a live performance?  I personally don’t think that it is.  Here’s an example:

Joy Division, the British post-punk band best known for both its sparse sound as well as vocalist Ian Curtis’s baritone renderings of his own moody lyrics, was, for me, a band whose sound I liked, but had to be in a very particular head space if I was to be infected by it.  That changed, though, after I viewed live concert footage of the band performing and, in particular, after I saw Ian Curtis performing.

As individual records, the songs are so dark and hermetic that they could easily lull one to sleep late at night; however, as live performances, they take on an opposed set of attributes—they’re charged and vital.  For example, in a performance of “Transmission” broadcast from a BBC television studio, one views Curtis begin the song in a deep focus—he stands awkwardly, his eyes are almost closed, and he grips the microphone, holding it next to his mouth–as the tempo escalates and Curtis’s vocals follow suit, though, he moves the mic stand out of the way and begins making spastic movements—choppy running in place, circular motions with the index finger he’s pointing to his head, pushing the finger away as if pushing something out of his mind, and swinging his forearms in semi-circles.  He goes deeper and deeper, doing what he can to get the words out the way he means them to sound, ending up in positions resembling Christian revivalists or the seizures of an epileptic (as a matter of fact, Curtis would occasionally go into epileptic seizures while performing).

There’s something unsettling about watching these performances as they go beyond irony—it’s not as if he’s joking.  In an interview, Curtis spoke about this seriousness of intention in his performances, claiming, “Instead of just singing about something you could show it as well, put it over in the way that it is, if you were totally involved in what you were doing.”

If one is to view the depictions of Curtis by actors in the films 24 Hour Party People and Closer, and, then, compare those depictions to the mania in Curtis’ eyes when he’s in the grips of his performance, there’s really no comparison; it only makes sense if the artist is present, totally involved in what he’s doing.

But, all that said, is the video footage I viewed of Curtis on the Internet really what one would call a “live” performance?  Despite all my enthusiasm for the liveness of the band, did I even witness anything “live”?

The OED defines “live” as, “Of a performance, heard or watched at the time of its occurrence, as distinguished from one recorded on film, tape, etc.”    Similarly, Peggy Phelan claims that the ontological character of live performance demands that it disappears as it is enacted, that it only exists in the “now” of its performance.  She writes,

Performance’s only life is in the present.  Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.  To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.

Phelan’s argument around this ontology of liveness is complex and astutely weaves through dense theoretical terrain involving Lacanian psychoanalysis, speech act theory, and feminist critiques of representation.  She takes a polemical stance not as an angry conservative reactionary to the forces of technological reproduction, but as a believer in the possibility of cultural experiences which resist commodification, simulation and the male gaze.  For Phelan, live performance’s “promise” is its automatic tragedy, the fact that as one views the work, the work slips from one’s grasp, resisting representation and unable to be accurately reproduced, commodified, or otherwise “marked.”  The video of the live Joy Division performance, then, would be missing the point of the performance as it tries to preserve what, by definition, cannot be preserved.

Perhaps what the video affords is the idea of the performance–the idea that the band was doing something other than playing music on well-produced albums; the idea that the band only makes sense when viewed “live.”  With this idea in mind, I was able to appreciate Joy Division–an intellectual response rather than a bodily one.  To actually be in a pub in the north of England in the late 1970s watching Ian Curtis perform would be powerful for precisely the reasons which Phelan suggests—it would be un-reproducible, demanding my bodily engagement in the moment.  I’ll never be able to watch Joy Division perform live which is precisely what makes the live performance valuable for those who did view it—its mortality, its preciousness not as an object but as a stretch of unique time.  Nothing like that occurs when I view the video—again, it’s the intellectual idea that Curtis did perform this way which I respond to in the video, not the performance itself.

3.

This ontologically “pure” understanding of liveness has been criticized, though.   For example, the performance theorist Philip Auslander has critiqued Phelan’s understanding of liveness, suggesting that there’s really no such thing as what Phelan describes as “live performance” because almost any performance in “mediatized cultures” is a jumble of both liveness as well as media effects.  Think of the fans at a baseball game watching the Jumbotron television screen rather than the actual players on the field or even something as simple as a microphone and amplifier which create a layer of technological interpretation of a live performance.  Furthermore, think of the “live” television broadcast of the six o’clock news or the multimedia performance art of Laurie Anderson or Ann Liv Young.  Don’t these performances involve both “live” as well as re-producible elements?

It’s not that Auslander is saying that there can be nothing like what Phelan describes, but that the actual condition of live performance as it is practiced in the contemporary moment is endlessly hovering between both pure liveness as well as a technological mediation of this liveness and, therefore, the idea of defining a fixed definition based on its separation from technological reproducibility is admirable, but ultimately futile.  He writes, “Much as I admire Phelan’s commitment to a rigorous conception of an ontology of liveness, I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a mediatized culture or should be expected to do so, even to assume an oppositional stance.”

I agree with Auslander that the “friend or foe” lines drawn by Phelan in regard to technological reproduction sets up unrealistically high standards given the massive amount of cross-pollination there actually is between live and reproducible elements in a given work of performance.  However, I believe that liveness as a disappearance, as Phelan defines it, is, nevertheless, still possible, still, for better or for worse, uncommodifiable, and, in fact, (and probably to the horror of Phelan) occurring on the Internet.  What is my experience of, for example, a surf club or a tumblr blog or dump.fm if it’s not the unfolding of a live performance, un-reproducible as itself—a sense of presence to a unique stretch of time?

4.

A point of contention here revolves around the word “body.”

For Phelan, this would be the biological body co-present to its audience in situated space.  She writes, “Performance honors the idea that a limited number of people in a specific time/space frame can have an experience of value which leaves no visible trace afterward.”  There is something crucial to performance in that one must go there and be co-present to it in the same “specific time/space frame.”

This is similar to what the philosopher Arthur C. Danto termed “pilgrimage” in a recent New York Times article he wrote about the performance artist Marina Abramović .  The performance is only potent for Danto if one is actually there in the room with Marina Abramović; if one tries to understand it through a second-hand account (on the Internet, say) then, of course, the performance comes across as phony—an imitation of something deep and profound.  He writes, “Art is something that demands presence. That calls for pilgrimage. How many visitors came for Marina because they felt they were called from afar? That they needed to be there? It is not tourism, strictly speaking. It is being in the presence of something.”

In his book, On the Internet, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus discusses the phenomenological differences between live performances and live reproductions of live performances.   He contends that live actors “are, at every moment, subtly and largely unconsciously adjusting to the responses of the audience and thereby controlling and intensifying the mood in the theater.”  This co-presence, he contends is why the cost of live performance is greater than that of a movie.  While that particular line of reasoning is suspect, his basic premise regarding the actor’s ability to respond to the actual mood of the audience is worth taking a look at.  Dreyfus’s dedication to embodied co-presence is not based on a whimsical prejudice against computers, but rather a deeply held belief, following Merleau-Ponty, that the risk and continuous re-adjustment process in which one seeks to get a “grip” on the reality in front of one’s eyeballs, is what gives this reality a sense of meaning.  He writes,

Not only is each of us an active body coping with things, but, as embodied, we each experience a constant readiness to cope with things in general that goes beyond our readiness to cope with any specific thing.  Merleau-Ponty calls this embodied readiness our Urdoxa or ‘primordial belief’ in the reality of the world.  It is what gives us our sense of the direct presence of things.  So, for there to be a sense of presence in telepresence, one would not only have to be able to get a grip on things at a distance; one would need to have a sense of the context as soliciting a constant readiness to get a grip on whatever comes along.

Dreyfus is skeptical about the possibilities of ever getting a “grip” on a world in which one is only present to via telepresence.  His practical concern actually has less to do with performance than with “distance learning”—say, a simple lecture conducted via videoconferencing or a doctor teaching medical students how to perform surgery via a camera mount attached to his head (or some such).

I agree with this.  I agree that Shakespeare performed on an empty stage to an audience of computer users is an embarrassing idea.  I also agree that doctors cannot responsibly teach surgery to medical students remotely.  These are human practices that need to occur in space and need to be preserved and honored.

My interest, rather, is in thinking through the possibility that as people begin to, for better or for worse, spend more and more of their lives on the computer and as certain specific relationships between these computer users and the ocean of cultural media which they consume becomes more and more a part of banal daily life, is there a way to have a new type of live performance, a live performance which creates new types of risks, new types of grips on the world?  Is there a type of live performance whose actions are not imitations of those in physical space, but rather live performances of actions which could only be conducted through computing?

Could one perform Internet surfing through Internet surfing?

Or is that just nonsense?

5.

One way to think about this perplexing question is this:

Through the course of one’s day, one is all sorts of different moods which define one’s relationship to reality.  Sometimes one is anxious, optimistic, sexually aroused, quietly reflective, whatever it may be.  None of those moods are absolute, but they each have a devilish power over one which creates the illusion that that one particular mood is, in fact, what is true.  So with that in mind, on the one hand, if I’m in a mood in which I picture my body’s boundaries ending where the skin meets the air, then these performances on the Internet are not anything that I would ever be present to; on the other hand, though, if I’m in a mood in which I picture my body’s boundaries extending outside of my skin (say through various online representations), then these performances on the Internet  are something that I may be present to.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

July 30th, 2010

Performance 2

1.

In “The Present Age,” an 1846 essay by Søren Kierkegaard, the author lambasts his own age for its passionless stance towards the world in which everything is sort of interesting and sort of boring at the same time and, as such, nothing is worth loving or dying for.  Kierkegaard felt that the massive quantitative increases in information dispersion which emerged in relation to the rise of the “public sphere” of the nineteenth century were a disaster because they leveled out the sorts of experiences one could have.   When everyone is encouraged to be opinionated about everything, no one knows anything with any depth and, in turn, no one really cares about anything with what could be called love or the sense that one would sacrifice themselves for that one particular thing.  According to Kierkegaard, a reliance on consensus, daily newspapers, and scientific expertise to define the course of human life is a sure way to create a world in which sacrifice is unnecessary and love is almost impossible.  When nothing stands out as any more qualitatively interesting thing than anything else, it becomes difficult to say that one “loves” anything and really mean that word.  In other words, it was a prototype of the age of “whatever.”

About a decade ago, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus compared Kierkegaard’s vision of the “present age” to the rise of the Internet in his own contemporary moment.  According to Dreyfus, the qualitative leveling-out of all experience at zero which Kierkegaard describes in relation to the public sphere is “perfected” on the World Wide Web and, furthermore, that Kierkegaard’s proposal for a risky, unconditional commitment or “leap of faith” in the face of this leveling out is made almost impossible.  This impossibility is due to the technology’s simulated and anonymous experiential reality which, according to Dreyfus, demands no commitment to any particular decision.

For a contemporary artist who believes or at least wants to believe that what they are doing is more than a vague combination of “interesting” and “cool,” the prospect of making work in the type of world described by Kierkegaard and Dreyfus is a daunting prospect.  Why sacrifice one’s time to making art if no one cares, including oneself?

One response is that one could simply not participate in the online arena, at all.  That certainly seems plausible—the artist Tino Seghal, for example, goes to all sorts of great lengths to avoid new technologies.  But, even by not participating, one is still highly engaged with this media environment by going out of one’s way to avoid it.  That is, it’s still, at the very least, a source of anxiety. So, if one is going to directly participate, how would one do that and maintain any belief that their works of art are meaningful?

For the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg, that question is based on a faulty premise which will always inevitably bog one down.  For Steinberg, an individual work should not be thought of as a “good investment” in meaningfulness.  One work will always be a hive of contradictions and limitations.  And, furthermore, anytime an artist becomes anxious about the meaning or lack thereof in regard to a given one of their works, that anxiety won’t be resolved by reasoning one’s way to its meaningfulness.  What’s meaningful—or at the very least a way to cope in the face of all that novelty—is to, following Kierkegaard, make a “risky investment”–a “leap of faith”–going into each and every new day with an openness to experience and to the shifting of criteria in one’s world, and, then, making meaning out of that.

In what follows, I’ll discuss in greater depth the relationship of the Internet and making artwork on the Internet in relation to Steinberg’s ideas regarding the potential for meaningfulness in art.

2.

The pop star Prince, has, since 2007, been at war with the Internet in regard to, amongst other claims, its users’ ability to distribute his music for free.  A recent highlight of Prince’s feud with the Net came several weeks ago when Prince declared that “the Internet is over.”  According to the artist, “The Internet’s like MTV…At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

Contrary to Prince’s analysis, though, while it’s debatable whether or not the Internet is hip anymore, it’s not necessarily “over.”  In fact, the amount of time people spend consuming media online is only increasing.  And, according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Foundation which was reported in The New York Times, young people in the United States are consuming an eye-popping seven and a half hours of electronic media a day—basically every waking minute outside of school—which actually increases when one considers the layers of media involved in multitasking (for example, surfing the Web while listening to music), pushing the figure up to eleven hours of media consumption a day.  According to Donald F. Roberts, one of the study’s authors who was quoted in the Times, “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

One reason why it’s possible to spend that much time consuming media, is that there is now an effectively unlimited amount of instantaneously available, free media through which one may consume twenty-four hours a day as well as the devices through which one can execute this consumption.  It becomes plausible to just sit and consume all day, popping from one “interesting” thing to another “interesting” thing to another—all of them different and equally “interesting.”  For instance, while I don’t remember the actual circumstances in which I read the article about Prince, I’m picturing a typical scenario in which it would have been crammed-in amongst thirty other news items and a half-dozen advertisements on a Web page, which is itself nestled-in amongst four other tabs on my browser–all of which contain other “interesting” media.  No matter what the actual circumstances, though, I almost instantaneously forgot about it in my rush to continue consuming other “interesting” media until, several days later, I overheard some other people referencing his comments and coming to the conclusion that Prince himself was “interesting.”

I bring all this up, though, to actually sympathize with Prince and with every other person creating all of these hours of free media which are consumed at these astounding rates.  How, after all, is one supposed to make a living as an artist in this scenario?  And, perhaps more importantly, how is one supposed to find any meaning in participating in this scenario?  That is, how is one supposed to find any meaning in one’s work when it’s competing to make a little noise in an endlessly noisy room?  Even if one’s work is fortunate enough to receive “fifteen minutes of fame,” will that fifteen minutes be enough to provide one with a sense of meaning in regard to what one is producing?   I recently read something the filmmaker Harmony Korine said about his own frustrations with producing anything in the cultural context of the media explosion engendered by the Web.  He said,

…at a certain point everything becomes noise. I find it increasingly difficult for movies to have a lasting emotional resonance, the way they did when I first started watching. You would see something and it would live with you forever and could change the way you thought about things. There seems to be this shift where now it is just about consuming them. Even the movies that people say they love for the most part they forget the next day.

There’s a paradox to democratic culture in which all media is accessible, but, because all media is accessible, it all becomes equal in value to zero–like fifty almost identical brands of shampoo in a super market.

2.

This concern is related to the “plight” of contemporary art which the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg describes in his 1962 essay “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public.”  In this essay, Steinberg describes a contradiction in the very idea of Modernism in which the Modernist imperative to continually overturn the hard fought insights of the generation of artist’s just historically prior to one’s own, compounded by the ever-narrowing cycles of these generations, results in the absurd situation in which no one—no matter who they are—feels secure in the knowledge that any individual work of art they produce or any artistic breakthrough they accomplish  will retain any meaning for anyone in more than a year or two, most likely in less time than that.  When faced with this reality, how can an artist believe that what they’re fighting for or fighting against has any meaning?  This contradiction creates, for Steinberg, an anxiety.   He writes,

I know that there are people enough who are quite genuinely troubled by those shifts that seem to change the worth of art.  And this should give to what I call “The Plight of the Public” a certain dignity.  There is a sense of loss, of sudden exile, of something willfully denied—sometimes a feeling that one’s accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution.  And this experience can hit an artist even harder than an amateur.

For Steinberg, this anxiety is bound up with both the quantity of new art pumped out every month in the contemporary art system as well as the speed in which this system seems to be moving since it became aware of the demands placed on it by both the art market and the art magazines hungry for “the next big thing.”  That is, all contemporary art comes with what, in a related essay, Steinberg terms “built-in obsolescence.”

Thinking of these anxieties in the context of the Internet, then, this situation is further compounded as the surfeit of art through which to sift through is by now greater and the cycles of built-in obsolescence are by now narrower.  This is especially true in relation to the history of artists working directly on the Internet.  The “net.art” generation of artists in the 1990s and early 2000’s, for example, seem, for better or for worse, like distant art history and even Internet Surfing Clubs which dominated the buzz of the net.art community for a couple of key years seem like a hazy memory which is too difficult or embarrassing to remember in the face of keeping up with RIGHT NOW.  Furthermore, if the words you’re reading right now are at all “interesting,” that interest will be long gone within a month—you won’t even remember reading this.

Perhaps this was always the case, though.  Perhaps artists have always dealt with this and it’s besides the point to even bring it up because it’s so obvious.  But the particularly disarming element of the contemporary moment which Steinberg presciently noticed in his own time is that the rate of turnover at present is so accelerated that it rubs this built-in obsolescence in one’s face and doesn’t allow one a decade or two of breathing room in which to pat one’s self on the back.  No one can even pretend to love an individual work of art anymore (another’s work or one’s one) because one knows that that love will be obsolete almost as soon as it’s proclaimed.

So, why even do it?  Why even participate in this system if one’s work is going to be chewed up and spit out without much serious reflection?

The way Steinberg addresses this anxiety in the essay is to quell the need one has for each individual work to be thought of as anything like a “good investment” in terms of either financial or art historical capital.  As long as one focuses their desires on the worth of an individual instance of one’s ongoing art practice instead of on the ongoing evolution of the art practice itself, one will always inevitably run into these anxieties.  Steinberg’s goal here is not to reverse the situation or to reason himself away from it, but rather to come to grips with this loss of one’s ability to love a work of art, identify it as an anxiety and propose a way forward.  What he comes to is that for the contemporary artists or the contemporary art lover, a shift in focus is needed in which one focuses their attention away from investments in individual works and towards an ongoing, daily practice.

What’s potentially horrifying in regard to this, though, is that it requires, for Steinberg, following Kierkegaard, a “leap of faith” with zero logical certainty in regard to the value of this potential evolution in daily practice.  At least with the individual work of art, it’s there, you know it’s done, it’s something concrete which you can evaluate.   What comes next in one’s ongoing practice or “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, is completely anybody’s guess.  If one is to follow his argument, though, it’s the only way forward for both artist and art lover if they are to overcome the anxieties o “the present age.”

4.

Although perhaps lacking the existentialist angst which Steinberg describes, many artists working on the Web right now, particularly younger artists working on tumblr blogs and sites like dump.fm, have come to a similar conclusion: no single instance of a work which is thrown up onto the Web is going to be very meaningful.  What could be meaningful, though, is a discernible shift in the object of inquiry from the individual work to the ongoing performed practice of creating work.

I, personally, became interested in this idea through my experience of watching “Internet Surfing Clubs” around 2007 and 2008.  Internet Surfing Clubs are blogs authored by multiple users in which short, visually immediate posts–each of which often involve re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet–are shared in on-going conversation.  The Surfing Club I was aware of first and to this day have the most affection for is Nasty Nets.

Before I became acquainted with Surfing Clubs, I wasn’t particularly interested in art and only moderately interested in Internet culture.  I came from a background in film production and, while I was still watching  filmmakers riffing off of Hitchcock such as Cronenberg, Verhoeven, and De Palma, generally speaking, I had hit a brick wall with “the movies” on a creative level.  This led me YouTube where my interests were rekindled.

On YouTube, the attraction, at first, was to surf through their archive, finding weird stuff that I watched as a child in the 1980s, television news bloopers, “mashups,” etc.  Eventually, though, I became particularly interested in following regular YouTube users who talk into their webcams everyday—sometimes to large audiences of people.  Many of these personalities were genuinely intriguing and I began to pick up on the fact that it didn’t matter if what they were saying was logically incoherent or creatively limited, I loved the fact that they kept going, they kept performing everyday and, in the best cases, they kept transforming themselves.  And you could watch this transformation happen in real time.  For me, this was revelatory: the individual movie was sacrificed for the performance of daily moviemaking over time.  What becomes valuable is the performance of it—the fact that the person will be there, improvising, talking, interacting with the network of other users and they’ll do it (almost) every day.  To my mind, this is where the energy of cinema was going—focusing on the improvisatory authorship of cinematic objects, as opposed to the cinematic objects, themselves.

Shortly after my conversion to YouTube, I became aware of Surfing Clubs and, in particular, Nasty Nets through “The Year in The Internet 2006” which was a series of “best of” lists by people interested in Internet culture and Internet memes which was edited by the artists Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel, who also made a similar list the year before.

On Nasty Nets, the same principles applied except, in this case, there was a level of meta-criticality in regard to what was being shared.  It was Internet culture about Internet culture, and, in some cases, it was about the history of conceptual art, as well.  Once again, though, the point, for me, was not to spend too much time asking whether or not the individual posts were good or bad, but to simply follow the stream, day after day, every day.  And, just as in my experience on YouTube, in the process of following these streams, the posts began to differentiate themselves and different voices began to emerge.  I didn’t know anybody that was on a Surf Club or have any idea what their backgrounds were, but, all of the sudden, certain surfers on Nasty Nets became, to me anyway, the most relevant, significant artists that I knew of—period.  If one watches this type of work, one quickly realizes that the meaningful art on the Web is accrued through “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, following the performing of the making of art on the Web.  Being able to consider art in this way is potentially therapeutic in that it quells anxieties regarding the ultimate novelty of one individual instance of work in an ocean of other works.

5.

To conclude, when faced with a leveling-out of all individual units of culture to right around zero, both the artist and the art follower are presented with a choice: either drown or surf.  The work which one views on the Internet which retains a sense of meaning and the possibility of inspiring further work by artists and further following by art followers is, more often than not, produced by those who surf.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized, nastynets | Comments Off

July 23rd, 2010

Performance

The democratic culture of the Web (blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) is increasingly a part of banal daily life.  However, as this democratic culture creates more instantaneously available media on a daily basis than anyone could possibly consume in a lifetime, a tension emerges in which each of these individual units of media is transformed into mere noise.  In this scenario, both deep media (say, Proust) and shallow media (say, “squirter porn”) flatten out in value to right around zero—each just a drop of water in a continuously expanding ocean.

For a contemporary artist, this scenario poses an interesting problem.  In prior models of media dissemination it was difficult for one’s work to reach either large public audiences, critics or curators without one’s being based in one of a handful of cities or receiving support from a commercial art space or a not-for-profit art institution.  The democratic culture enabled by the Web, though, allows for anyone and everyone with an Internet connection to have their work viewed by both casual audiences and international arts professionals.  This means that an aspiring young artist is now able to radically disseminate her work.  The flip side of this situation, though, is that the meaningful value of this work becomes relatively minuscule because it’s now just one drop in an ocean of other works.  As an artist uploads a work to the Web, the chance that it will be viewed by more than a handful of people or reflected upon for more than a couple of minutes is minuscule due to the massive amount of media through which the media “prosumer” surfs.  The artist, then, is left in an existential tangle: what’s the point of making anything if, at best, the work becomes a viral meme for a couple of hours and, at worst, is completely ignored by anyone other than the person that uploaded it?

One artistic stance in response to this question takes an ongoing, constructive approach to creating meaning on the Web.  This stance sees that, if there is meaning in this context, then it is accrued through the ongoing performance of an artist making individual works through time—less the molding of space (virtual space or physical space) in an individual work and more the molding of time conducted through the ongoing exhibition of multiple instances of individual works by an artist.

In what follows, I’ll examine this performative stance in greater depth.  I’ll begin by claiming that the evaluation of an individual work of art can be based upon the performed action of the artist which led to the art object’s materialization.  From there, I’ll claim that for some artists, this possibility opens the door for thinking of their art as an ongoing performance—one action after another after another.  I’ll spend the remainder of the text connecting this idea to the Web and look at an example–the Poster Company project by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff.

*******

In order to think  of an artist’s work as an ongoing performance, it’s necessary to think about a single artwork as the accomplishment of an artist as opposed to an object with certain artistic properties.  That is, if one is standing in front of a Rembrandt painting, then one would ask themselves “what did Rembrandt accomplish?” as opposed to “what are the formal and iconographic properties of the work?”  Of course, both types of questions are inevitable in the analysis of a work; however, what is perhaps more meaningful in the work for a contemporary art audience brought up on postmodern irony is the accomplishment of the artist—a human being doing something which another human being can relate to.    What this understanding allows for, then, is the possibility of conceiving of those accomplishments in a performed sequence.

Let’s look at an example of a work which predates the Web—Henri Matisse’s Bathers by a River–which would have been aesthetically powerful for an art audience upon its exhibition in 1917, but in the contemporary moment lacks that aesthetic power.  What is meaningful about this work for a contemporary art audience, though, is the artist’s action—the idea that a human being—Matisse—accomplished this, spending nine years of his life battling through a resistance to Cubism and a belief in art’s anti-intellectual appeal before settling on this work which is seen as a brilliant compromise between these two tensions.  This personal struggle in completing the work is what allows it to retain a sense of meaning for an art audience as its aesthetic shock effects decrease.   And, as a matter of fact, this focus on the actions of the artist as opposed to the formal characteristics of the art object is the angle which the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art employ in presenting Matisse’s work in a recent exhibition–the pièce de résistance of which is the documentation of x-ray techniques employed to examine the underpainting of key works such as Bathers in a Stream.  The audience of this documentation follows the progression of the artist as he struggles with varying stylistic approaches, working through the evolution of his approach to the figurative elements in the painting.  Some might feel as though this is a gimmick, and to some extent that’s true, but it does get at what makes a contemporary art audience care about works like Bathers in a Stream. The curatorial decisions in the exhibition put the work in time and in the context of a human struggle akin to the turn Harold Rosenberg put on abstract expressionist canvases by thinking of them as documents of human action before they were legible as “significant form.”

With this idea in mind, certain artists such as Matisse’s rival, Picasso, began to explicitly consider the location of their art as residing in the artist’s entire ongoing practice—one action after another after another.  Picasso wrote, “I cannot bear people who talk about Beauty.  What is Beauty?  In painting you have to talk about problems!  Paintings are nothing but research and experiment.  I never paint a picture as a work of art.  Everything is research.  I keep researching, and in this constant enquiry there is a logical development.  That is why I number and date all my paintings.  Maybe one day someone will be thankful for it.”  For Picasso, who pictured himself as a blind minotaur crashing his way through a labyrinth in many of his paintings, the work occurs in the cumulative effect of his ongoing search for meaning;  each individual painting functioning as a piece of “research” conducted in the name of this search.

As Leo Steinberg demonstrates in his long essay “The Algerian Women and Picasso at Large,” Picasso’s medium is not even painting at this point in his career, but, rather, “the artist”–in this case, the artist at large performing an allegorical quest for a “realistic” two-dimensional representation of three-dimensional perceptual space.  It is, for Steinberg, only through the catharsis of following this performed myth wherein the most powerful meaning of Picasso’s work is realized for his audience.  As such, Steinberg takes it upon himself to critique the performance as a whole, subjecting Picasso himself to the lens of “the work of art.”

In re-constructing the historical drama of a myth surrounding Picasso, Steinberg painstakingly re-constructs the order of historical events, giving the viewer both a sense of the drama as well as carefully-written descriptions of the works involved.  Indeed, one can surmise that the essay was something of a labor of love for the author to construct due to, if nothing else, the raw amount of time consumed in travelling to see these dozens of works in dozens of museums and other collections all over the world.

And that’s the wager of Steinberg’s analysis—it operates on a highly privileged scale and, as such, describes things that are effectively impossible to view for anyone but an academic art historian with an expertise in that particular field.  For almost anyone else, be they casual art fans or enthusiastic ones, access to Picasso’s work is limited to the handful of art museums one has the ability to visit firsthand in the course of one’s lifetime.  Because of this limit, Picasso’s audience cannot easily appreciate the work as an ongoing performance.

Viewed through the lens of the Web, though, this distance between dramatic stage and audience is dramatically squashed.  When an artist uploads a work, anyone with an Internet connection can view it.  Furthermore, the vast majority of work—from artists working both on the Web as well as far outside of it (such as painters [even dead painters like Picasso])—is now viewed in the context of the artist’s chronological development as it is displayed on a Web page.  That is to say, the idea which Steinberg is at pains to describe in regards to Picasso—the artist’s self-authoring performance of the role of “the artist” in time—becomes, on the Web, automatic.

The artist’s website, as a publically accessible database, may be followed by a public interested in the artist’s work.  As an artist continues to create work, this creation is knowingly performed—one views the drama of an unfolding practice in which each “move” is in dynamic dialogue with past practice as well as a navigation into future practice.  If I encounter the work of the contemporary artist through their managed presence on the Web and I do it again and again and again and again, then this managed presence itself becomes a performative work.

If one didn’t make this leap from the individual work to the performance of the artist, then one might grow anxious as one would be facing an eternal line of works of each which is drowning in the ocean of other works.

For some theorists, though, this anxiety is not to be avoided but rather embraced.  For example, in his essay “The Weak Universalism,” the theorist Boris Groys provocatively suggests that Internet culture is a ripe site for avant-garde action precisely because anyone can easily become an artist now and, furthermore, because all of the work produced by this plethora of artists become what Groys calls “weak signs.”

He begins by defining the avant-garde artist as a “secularized apostle” whose task is to prophesize the “weak” messianic event in which, according to Groys, all signs, even presumably the sign of the apocalypse itself, are leveled out to “weak signs,” signs lacking any of the mythically “progressive” political or economic strength of what Groys terms “strong signs.”

The weak messiah does not save the world, but demonstrates the universal impossibility of saving the world.

The weak sign is not strong, but, through its repetition, it demonstrates the universal impossibility of individual strength.

The avant-garde is at home in the realm of weak signs as the point of avant-garde art is, for Groys, to demystify cultural production, returning it from the world of elite strength to the world of everyday life by revealing the delusional pretensions of elitism and power.  As such, the avant-garde artist is an iconoclast, stripping meaning from pretenders to a throne which doesn’t even exist and, furthermore, calling for a leveling-out of all artistic production to the level of true democracy in which the hierarchies between the artist and non-artist are irretrievably blurred.

On the Internet, both the sheer amount of informational noise as well as the intermingling of both professional as well as amateur content in the stream of this noise create an intriguing environment for the emergence of a new artistic avant-garde.  According to Groys, though, this “weak universalism” is never completely fulfilled; on the contrary, it needs to be endlessly replicated.

He writes:

Artistic activity is now something that the artist shares with his or her public on the most common level of everyday experience. The artist now shares art with the public just as he or she once shared it with religion or politics. To be an artist has already ceased to be an exclusive fate, becoming instead an everyday practice—a weak practice, a weak gesture. But to establish and maintain this weak, everyday level of art, one must permanently repeat the artistic reduction—resisting strong images and escaping the status quo that functions as a permanent means of exchanging these strong images.

So, for Groys, the plurality of cultural production on the Web  is able to accomplish what no individual artist could do before: merge art and life.

With that in mind, though, a question emerges:

If the true avant-garde artist is to “permanently repeat the artistic reduction,” doesn’t that then imply the creation of a new artistic category upon which qualitative judgments are passed?

If one is to follow Groys’ argument, avant-garde production is only effective when the artist is able to repeat and continue repeating the production of what Groys terms weak signs.  As such, the audience of this work (be they co-participants or not) begins to invent all sorts of ways to sort out which avant-garde artists are more avant-garde than others, which weak signs are more powerfully weak than others, which repetition of weak signs is more repetitively weak than others, and so on.  For example, as one views a highly active message-board site in which communities of users post streams of images and other assorted memes (examples of what Groys terms “weak signs”), one might—at first–consider each individual post in a democratic manner.

However, as one continues to view the site, an anxiety might build up.

Is this stream of signs just going to go on forever?

Is the viewer locked into evaluating only each and every individual sign forever?

Is there nothing else to follow?

As one asks these questions, one’s view on the stream might, then, leap from each particular image to the particular image streams of particular users in relation to other particular users.  And, then beyond that, to the existing criteria for discerning one post from another post and one user from another user.

Not every viewer will make this leap, but some inevitably will.  Thus, the images themselves remain weak signs, while time molded by users becomes strong.

There are many examples of this type of approach to making work in the context of the Web.  One of those examples is the Poster Company by Travess Smalley and Max Pitegoff.

Poster Company is a Flickr page consisting of over two hundred paintings produced between July 2009 and May 2010.  In this project, the artists maintain a relevant painting practice in the face of the information explosion engendered by the rise of the Web by, first, focusing on collisions between automatic effects which read as either “painterly” or “digital,” and, second, shifting the focus of their labor in the work from the production of the individual painting to the performance of producing  many paintings over the course of months.  As such, their work is in dialogue with the painter On Kawara’s Today series and Josh Smith’s influential painting project—each of which are meaningful when considered as reactions to the automatic reproducibility of images as well as an ongoing, long-form performance.

In regard to the subject matter of these paintings, it should be pointed out that just as the digital technology behind the Web enables anyone to easily express themselves to a global audience, so, too, does the digital technology of imaging software such as Photoshop or the other Adobe tools easily allow anyone to mimic analogical effects meant to resemble non-digital gestures.  The digital converges as much previous visual media as it can handle—painting, photo, film, video, animation, printmaking, newspaper, etc.—and creates automatic simulations of gestures that “read” as these media.  For instance, the “film grain” look or “sun flare” effect or the “spray paint” tool are examples of these simulations.  It also has created a suite of effects that are often derived from these analogical functions, but have gained their own uniquely digital feeling, such as the ubiquity of the “rounded corners” look familiar to users of Macs or Web 2.0 applications, or the jagged, hard-edged look that comes from a rough usage of the “lasso” tool, or the uncannily smooth, but hollow renderings accomplished in the Maya 3D imaging software.  Poster Company’s posters throw all of these digital affects and effects—both in reference to functions analogical and digital—into a stew of action painting, untutored Photoshop fiddling, glitch-y Quicktime files, 8-bit vampire castles, Matisse, Leger, Lichtenstein, soft film footage of lunar landings, Terminator 2-esque liquid-metal, Kandinsky, late 60’s psychedelia, ”cheesy” public-access video effects, etc.  In the process of doing so, they create a portrait of the tangled intersections between painting and painting effects, as well as between art and design.

When Poster Company showed this work at Foxy Gallery in New York, they filled an entire room with a surfeit of these posters.  This is a strong curatorial decision as it amplifies the sense of massive quantity and production-line infinitude to the work.  But, perhaps the more powerful element of the work resides in the artists’ devotion to daily production.  The question “what is a digital painting?” (a noun) is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?” (a verb).  The significance of their work lies not in the individual compositions, nor in the volume of output (although these elements are undeniably crucial for the full execution of the work to occur), but rather in the performance of the work.

****

To conclude, in many ways, digital technologies and the Web make life easier for those who use them.  This ease, though, frustrates the sense of accomplishment and meaning involved in laboring over something.  For example, when everyone can easily “broadcast themselves” on the Web or create a modern art masterpiece with a few clicks of a mouse, these actions become meaningless.  In the face of this quandary, some artists have conceived of art production less in terms of the creation of a single work and more in terms of the performance involved in creating multiple works over time which an audience may follow “live.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized, postercompany | Comments Off

July 16th, 2010

Marisa Olson

1.

As the Internet allows anyone and everyone to be a cultural producer, how might an individual artist producing work in this context feel as though their work means anything?  In other words, how might an artist negotiate the tension between the ideals of democratic culture and the existential threat of relativism?

Instead of searching for any definitive answers to these questions which will inevitably result in contradictions, one strategy employed by several contemporary artists working on or around the Internet is to make work about these very tensions by acknowledging them as anxieties and describing them to those whom they make anxious.  The resulting work is not illuminating in the sense that it has any concrete answers, but is rather therapeutic in the sense that it seeks to quell the desire for answers to these and similar questions by focusing instead on what is creating the anxiety in the first place.  For these artists, the concern is to describe the ever-shifting form of life in which he or she understands the tensions between contemporary cultural media and audience to exist.

In the work of the artist Marisa Olson, for example, one is presented with a series of investigations into anxieties surrounding the very idea of an artist producing a meaningful artwork in the context of the digital information explosion.  Instead of placing her work in this system and hoping for the best, Olson addresses the system head-on by describing its own tensions between media and audience to itself.

In what follows, I’ll sketch out the tension between democratic culture and the anxiety it provokes in greater depth and, then, spend the remainder of the text discussing several works produced by Olson which exemplify the therapeutic approach to this very anxiety.

2.

The World Wide Web radically enables its users to publish and share cultural media in the form of text, music, photography, video, video games, etc.  In many ways, this is a triumph of democratic thought as the barriers to creative expression on a global scale are now open to anyone with an Internet connection whereas in previous scenarios only those with professional ties to the handful of corporations controlling the means of production could take part.  This pleasant vision becomes complicated, though, when one considers that because of this very democratization of cultural production, the landscape of cultural reception transforms, as well.

The viewer or receiver of cultural data is now presented with a seemingly infinite amount of novelty and amateur cultural ephemera to both sift through as well as actively contribute to.  This novelty amplifies when one considers all of the additional professionally-created media as well as all of the additional social, legal, financial, intellectual, and spiritual communication media available via the use of the Web.   Because of this infinite novelty in media choice, the viewer’s relationship to media becomes one not of audience member to media work, but rather of “prosumer” to media unit.

In the ocean of infinite media novelty, the media viewer is nudged towards surfing through media; on the one hand, consuming it in much the same way that the cable television ”zapper” surfs through three hundred plus cable channels without settling on a single program; on the other hand, producing it in the hopes of providing another surfer with good, quick zappable content.  This surfing/consuming/producing model is, in general, not conducive to deeper modes of reflection or engagement with individual units of media.  On the contrary, it is conducive to shallow skimming of media, scraping the surface of works as pleasure is derived from the leap from media unit to media unit as opposed to a deeper engagement with a single unit.  In turn, the single drops of media in this ocean which will be most attractive are fast, funny, and immediately clear.  They need to be, otherwise the surfer will grow bored and surf to the next article or the next image or the next whatever of media.  The result is that media requiring a relatively greater degree of depth of thought is lost in the shuffle to an arguably greater degree than at any other point in the history of cultural media.

Now, with all of this in mind, an artist might grow anxious.

What is the point of making anything and casting it out to this ocean of media if it’s just going to be at best buzzed through in an actualization of Warhol’s “fifteen minutes” or at worst completely ignored?  It’s great that the Web allows anyone to put their own production into the sphere of public consumption, but at what cost?  For the contemporary artist especially, whose motivation is ostensibly to create culture with a greater depth and preciousness than a “Fat Kid on Roller Coaster” video, it would seem absurd to even participate in this dog-eat-dog system.

Still, though…would anyone earnestly desire for everything to return to the pre-Web model in which only a handful of individuals are able to put their ideas out there into the world?  No, probably not.  Fifteen minutes is better than none.

What to do then?

How can an artist participate in this system which is in many ways preferable to the prior model without feeling as though their individual works of art are on some level meaningless due to the fact that everyone else is doing the same thing?

3.

Marisa Olson approaches this anxiety by setting aside the question of her works potential meaningfulness or meaninglessness and instead acknowledging the conditions which create the anxiety surrounding this tension to begin with.  By focusing on the anxiety itself, Olson’s work can be said to have a therapeutic effect.

In the first two examples of Olson’s work which will be discussed, Whew! Age and Double Bind, the artist examines the phenomenon of contradictory forces underlying feelings of anxiety.  In the latter two examples to be discussed, Easy Listening and Space Junk, she examines these underlying contradictions specifically in relation to anxieties surrounding cultural production.

Whew! Age (2010), a performance at PS122 in New York, operates as itself a take on a therapy session in which the patient oscillates between a search for meaning and cynicism regarding the very idea of meaning.  This oscillation between meaning and meaninglessness with an endlessly deferred synthesis serves as an allegory for much of the artist’s other work which deals more directly with clashes between media, technology, and audience.  The strategy is to present the impossibility of objective meaningfulness as, paradoxically, a form of meaning.

In a set composed of cardboard crystal shards outlined in dayglo duct tape and cheap-o Persian rugs sparkling with glitter and tinsel, Olson’s character interacts with the video projection of a customer-service rep-slash-self-help guru (played by Olson, as well).  On the one hand, the guru character leads Olson inside herself on a mission to “chill out” and stop worrying about all the things she thinks she needs.  To some extent, it works.  Olson comes to the stage in a translucent mask and the guru is able to get her to take the mask off (there’s a good gag where after Olson takes the mask off, it reveals another mask, but the guru is sharp enough to have her remove that mask, too).  On the other hand, the guru is a sleazy con-man, convincing Olson to put on blinders—avoiding hope in more rigorously intellectual traditions such as empirical science or psychoanalysis.  And, in a musical montage in the middle of the show, the new age approach of the guru is marketed as a cheesy, 100% guaranteed enlightenment or your money back-style video series.

This tension between sleaze and truism is explored in a moment in which the guru demands of Olson to put her finger in her mouth and imagine that her finger is a glacier.  Olson does so and the guru says to be as chilled as the glacier.  This starts to work, but then one remembers that the glaciers are melting. And this melting—ostensibly due to climate change—is what created anxiety for Olson in the first place.

Between wisdom and mass-produced wisdom, chilling and heating, going into one’s self and back out to the world, is the space Whew! Age inhabits.  In the process, it produces a therapeutic effect by nudging its audience towards neither one nor the other but rather towards an acknowledgment of the inevitable contradiction between the two.

The second example of Olson’s work is Double Bind (2010), a two-channel video first exhibited at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California.  The work is composed of two YouTube videos—one a “response video” to the other.  In the first video, one views Olson dressed professionally in a black suit with make-up and styled hair as she wraps her head in hot pink vinyl bondage tape until it’s completely covered.  In the response video, one views Olson unwrap the pink tape from her head.

So, in one video the artist is tying herself up in bondage tape; in the other, she’s releasing herself from this bondage.  As they play in a loop side by side—not in perfect sync as the runtime of one video is roughly twice as long as the other—the viewer is presented with two contradictory messages—liberation and submission—each competing with the other and in neither case allowing the two messages to coalesce into a synthesis.

The title of the work, Double Bind, refers to the artist’s binding of herself and unbinding herself with the bondage tape, and it also refers to a term developed by, amongst others, the anthropologist/psychologist/cybernetician Gregory Bateson referring to a condition in which two contradictory pieces of information negate one another, creating an anxiety in a given subject in which he or she cannot settle on one piece of information or the other.  For Bateson (following, to some extent, ideas explored in Zen Buddhism), the discussion of the double bind underlying these sorts of contradictions possesses a therapeutic value by demonstrating that the desire for solution or synthesis is not a pressing human concern due to its logical impossibility.

In Double Bind, the phenomenon of “double bind” is demonstrated, thus creating a way to confront the anxiety by pointing out the incommensurability of the information in conflict with one another.  Through this demonstration, the subject struggling with the choice of either/or is released from the need to even make such distinctions.

Furthermore, as the curator Richard Rinehart points out in his statement regarding the work, an underlying theme of Double Bind is Olson’s own oscillation between digital culture and the world of contemporary art.  By presenting her work as a YouTube response video replete with the design elements and user comment structure familiar to users of YouTube and placing that in the context of the white cube art space, Olson engages in another double bind—the push and pull between the democratic culture of the Web and the elitist culture of contemporary art.  Without definitively aligning herself in either realm, Olson presents this very conflict between democratic culture and elite culture as the subject matter of the work itself.

In both Whew! Age and Double Bind, one is introduced to the general philosophical outlook present in Olson’s work: cultural production and existence, in general, are composed of contradictory pushes and pulls whose inability to reach synthesis creates anxiety in those who confront these contradictions.  This anxiety can be quelled not by settling on one answer or another, but rather by demonstrating the inevitability of the anxiety in the first place.

4.

In the following two examples of Olson’s work, the artist addresses the underlying cause of anxiety in more specific situations relating to cultural production in the digital age.  In each case, a similar strategy is employed in which the artist seeks to temper an anxiety not through a cure, but rather through an acknowledgment of the conditions which make it an anxiety in the first place.

In Easy Listening (2005) (the initial work of Olson’s ongoing Performed Listening series), the artist directly investigates the passive ease in which consumption occurs through listening to digital music stored in a computer database.  This ease of media consumption is a catalyst for the sense that all of the media being consumed in a digital database is ultimately throw-away–meaningless.

The work is a live performance in which the artist sits down, puts headphones on and listens to MP3’s which are classified as “easy listening” in her iTunes music management application.  What this drastically simple performance  accomplishes is to, first of all, boil down its subject matter to one thing—digital media consumption.  By reducing the performance to this minimal action, Olson focuses the viewer’s attention solely on the act of reception and, in particular, listening to digital music from a database.  In Olson’s own words, “this performance grew out of the admission that much of my work can be boiled down to a process of watching me listen to (and be influenced by) music. The easy way out, then, would be this–to listen to music in front of people.”

The title of the work, Easy Listening, then nudges the viewer one step deeper into the work by affording its narrow subject matter a greater significance through its acknowledgment of the ease of this listening.  By performing the act of listening to digital music culled from her own iTunes database and naming this performance “Easy Listening,” Olson makes a claim about listening to music in the form of digital files in iTunes: this form of consumption is relatively “easy.”  Because there is no fumbling with vinyl LP’s or fast forwarding through cassette tapes, the act of consumption in the digital is passive.  Part of the shock or absurdity of the performance is the fact that Olson doesn’t move.  She just sits there and listens as the computer instantaneously locates a track, plays it, and queues the following track.  The work, then, acknowledges for its viewers the condition of digital media consumption and makes a claim about the passivity which this form of consumption engenders in its users, and, in turn, the emotional distance from an individual unit in this digital media stream which it engenders, as well.   By doing so, Olson brings to light an underlying anxiety involved in the act of cultural production in the digital age and works through it in a mode analogous to the psychoanalyist’s bringing to light his or her patient’s own unconscious desires.

Finally, in the work Space Junk (2009), Olson performs a similar operation in regard to a similar anxiety.  In this case, the problem addressed is the obsolescence which results from endless easy media consumption and, in particular, the “built-in obsolescence” of both digital culture as well as contemporary art culture in which the cycles of obsolescence grow seemingly narrower and narrower every couple of years.

The viewer is presented, first, with a “black square”–a potent art historical reference to two key examples of artists trying to “end” art by introducing the black monochrome painting to the gallery space.  The first occurred in revolutionary Russia in 1915 when Malevich introduced the Black Square as a way to “end” traditional painting, which did not jive with the revolutionary mood in Russia at the time, and, instead, introduce what he termed, “Suprematism,” which was based on the sheer power of the most reduced, simple forms—in the case of Suprematism, the circle and the square.  The second example is perhaps, not quite as drastic, but, nevertheless, had powerful effects for the development of art in its wake: Ad Reinhardt’s “Black Paintings” of the 1960s which effectively closed the door on Abstract Expressionism by questioning whether the “absolute” that the Abstract Expressionists sought could ever be attained—really—even in the shades of blackest black that Reinhardt painted.

Upon closer examination of the work, though, one sees that there’s more than meets the eye.  Embedded into the blackness of the square is a pattern appropriated from a starfield wallpaper .gif, which is a simple, blinking starfield that one might have put up on their personal web page in the pre-Web 2.0 era (or what Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied refer to as the “vernacular web”).  Indeed the surface of the “black square” is itself wallpaper that the artist had specially fabricated.

In both cases, the stylistic references are by now obsolete—at best sentimentalized, at worst forgotten.  The idea of creating black paintings which will “end” the history of art is a thing of the past and the joy of mildly cheesy vernacular Web effects is, too.  When these two obsolete elements are combined into one work, each element works to point out its companion’s obsolescence.  The work, then, becomes about obsolescence—about the way that things come and go and are, then, forgotten. It’s filled with a distinct melancholy about Internet design and about artists making “the last paintings that anyone can paint,” as Reinhardt described his black paintings.  Of course, artists will continue to make paintings and of course make “black paintings,” but the time when one could say that it would mean something the way that Malevich and Reinhardt meant something in their pieces is history.

In this work as well as several others dealing with the subject of obsolescence, Olson focuses on the tensions for contemporary artists themselves—in this case the sense that with so much art and media in general out there and the cycles of who’s in and who’s out growing narrower and narrower, there’s an anxiety regarding the meaningfulness of any work if it will all inevitably end up drowning in other media a couple of days after it’s initially exhibited.

In Space Junk as well as Easy Listening, Olson examines some of the problems which underlie the production of art in the contemporary era.  Endless easy media consumption and the inevitability of obsolescence in the wake of “the next big thing” create anxieties for contemporary artists interested in engaging with contemporary cultural media.  By acknowledging these anxieties and exploring them directly as the subject matter of her work, Olson perhaps alleviates some of their power over those who feel their pull.

5.

The Internet, which began as a tool for the military and, then, as an obscure tool for academic research, has since blossomed into a mind-bendingly popular tool for, amongst other uses, communication and the dissemination of culture.  For contemporary artists, this tool is both a blessing as well as a threat.  In the examples of the work of Marisa Olson discussed above, as well as many of her other works, important considerations regarding this very anxiety are explored.  Instead of searching for a definitive solution or avoiding the contradiction outright, Olson makes this anxiety the subject matter of much of her work and, in so doing, produces an ongoing series of therapeutic sessions for the audience which follows her.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in marisaolson | Comments Off

July 8th, 2010

Watching Martin Kohout, a work by Martin Kohout recently exhibited on jstchillin.org’s year-long “Serial Chillers in Paradise” online exhibition space, is a YouTube channel consisting of (as of the current date) four hundred and thirty uploaded videos.

Kohout began uploading videos to this channel in April 2010 and is still actively doing so.

The content of each of the videos on the channel consists of (in all but a few cases) a webcam capture of Kohout as he himself views another video on YouTube (some of which are his own earlier videos from this very series).

Each video acts as a sort of loop from YouTube to Kohout back into YouTube (and sometimes looping back out to Kohout again if, as just mentioned, he chooses to watch one of the videos of himself watching another video).

In a gallery setting, the playlist would presumably be run through on an infinite loop (although not necessarily); however, for the viewer of the work on a personal computer, there are any number of ways to engage with it.

I, personally, began by viewing the most recent video–Watching Liam Crockard – Hugh Scott-Douglas – ABSOLUTELY @ CLINT ROENISCH.

In this particular video, one views Kohout–whose distinctive physiognomy is anchored by a pair of glasses with large, rounded frames–looking down towards both the webcam–and, thus, “us” the viewers of the work–as well as the computer screen which displays the video he’s watching.

Because he’s looking down to the webcam, a source of tension in each of these videos is the way in which Kohout’s gaze almost meets the viewer’s own.

It’s sort of like being on the side of a two-way mirror which allows one person the ability to look directly at the other without the other’s ability to look directly back.

As the video goes on, Kohout’s eyes scan over different parts of the screen with a dead-pan expression; at one point, he fidgets and, then, smirks; a bit later, something catches his eye out the window; and near the end, he gives a little smile before again returning to his default dead-pan.

Generally, though, there is only very little variation in Kohout’s performance (he’s just watching the videos) and this minimal, vaguely uncanny fascination persists through the playlist (or at least through the eight videos I personally viewed in full and the four videos I viewed in part).

As one views through multiple videos, this lack of variation in action nudges one towards elements outside of the central action documented in the videos including a heightened awareness of the shifting architectural scenarios, slight changes in Kohout’s hair style and clothing, and, finally, reflective thought regarding the conceptual apparatus of the work.

For example, his seemingly unaffected performance brings up another source of tension in the work regarding the degree to which what one views here is, in fact, an unfiltered view on Kohout as he naturally watches the video or else if it’s a performance of someone as if he was naturally watching the videos.

Kohout knows that his watching is being recorded and is destined to be uploaded to YouTube—does this fact preclude one from saying for sure that he’s naturally watching the videos, and, furthermore, is there a normalizing process in which Kohout’s awareness of the recording process diminishes as the actual naturalness of the performance increases?

Additionally, as one views Kohout responding to the videos, to what degree does the viewer participate in the viewing of the videos he watches (particularly if the viewer is familiar with the content of the video)?

Is one just watching Kohout or is one to some extent watching a version of the video viewed, as well?

To the work’s credit, there aren’t any concrete answers to any of these questions.

As one continues to view through the playlist, one is kept in a vague state of suspension regarding one’s relationship to these tensions.

What one views here, then, is perhaps a self-portrait demonstrating the ways in which the lines between being and being watched are increasingly blurred.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in martinkohout | Comments Off

July 7th, 2010

I recently realized that on more than one occasion on this blog I mistakenly referred to Duchamp’s Fountain, the iconic readymade sculpture of a porcelain urinal which the artist attempted to exhibit at the Society of Independent Artists annual exhibition in 1917, as Urinal.

So, I say something like:

Duchamp’s Urinal, the iconic readymade sculpture of a porcelain urinal which the artist attempted to exhibit at the Society of Independent Artists annual exhibition in 1917, blah, blah, blah…

****

As a would-be art writer pretentious enough to reference Duchamp and net.art in the same sentence, this is especially embarrassing.

I’ll chalk it up to a serial brain fart (I do know what the work is called and would not be surprised to see it referenced by its correct title elsewhere), but this confusion is, I think, nonetheless interesting to take a look at as the shift in emphasis which the title Fountain adds to the work is key and places a decidedly different spin on the way the theory of the readymade is understood.

Initially, to my mind, the work’s power was its arbitrariness—what Duchamp accomplished was to take a decidedly ordinary object with a not-unappealing formal quality derived from its function (some commentators have gone so far as to eliminate theory from the discussion and focus solely on the formal beauty of the urinal), sign it “R. Mutt” as if it were a handmade sculpture made by someone named Richard Mutt, and place it in a space marked for “art” as if it were, indeed, a work of art.

What this arbitrariness accomplishes is to very elegantly flip the entire rationale of art and irreversibly put a question mark around both the notion of “the hand of the artist” and the possibility of making a work which is not “of art.”

All of the sudden, the intriguing artwork is not a beautiful object, but rather an intellectual idea.

As Beatrice Wood wrote in The Blind Man shortly after Fountain’s creation:

He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view — created a new thought for that object.

******

Now, this reading could apply to any of Duchamp’s readymades and Fountain was, in fact, not the first readymade (Bicycle Wheel, from 1915, is thought to be the first).

Fountain, though, is still different.

Why is that?

Well, first of all, an object reserved for dispensing bodily waste turned into a readymade is instantaneously going to accrue more notoriety than, say, a snow shovel, especially in the relatively puritanical American art world in which it was produced.

Also, it could be seen as a broadly striking symbol of the art of its own time—it’s all a bunch of macho posturing—a pissing contest–and belongs in the urinal.

But, what else?

Well, everything I’ve described so far could just as easily be titled Urinal.

What does the fact that Duchamp chose to title his work Fountain add to the work?

Well, on the one hand, a urinal is not a fountain—what is a fountain, though, is the stream of urine going into the urinal.

So, the readymade object on view in Duchamp’s Fountain, then, is both the urinal as well as the human being urinating into the urinal, as if they—the human being–were a fountain.

By titling the sculpture of a urinal Fountain, Duchamp nudges the viewer towards viewing the work as the urinal as well as the human action associated with the use of this urinal.

And, furthermore, he also nudges the viewer of the work towards viewing the work as the art object as well as the artistic action associated with the production of the art object.

This performed, emergent CHOOSING conducted by Duchamp, is, then, when considered in light of the fountain’s role in myth, poetry, and art history, something like a perverse take on the “font of life,” the mystical source of energy which makes the physical world come alive and serves as the eternal well spring of the youthful artistic mind.

Bruce Nauman’s Self Portrait as a Fountain, a color photograph depicting a young, shirtless Nauman spewing a stream of water from his mouth, is perhaps the continuation of this idea, shifting the focus of art one step further away from the art object and one step closer to the ongoing stream of the artist’s performance.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

July 6th, 2010

Ray Gun by Mike Beradino is a 1960s plastic “ray gun” toy in which the artist installed components of a 48X speed DVD burner.

The DVD burner projects a red laser point from the barrel of the ray gun with a non-negligible impact.

For example, in video documentation of the gun’s use which is viewable on Beradino’s personal website, the artist points the gun at a black balloon, initiates the DVD laser, focusing the laser’s point on the surface of the balloon, until—POP—the balloon explodes due to the degree of concentrated heat generated by the laser point.

Now, on the one hand, this work is sort of funny in a one-liner way in that it turns a child’s toy into a working weapon.

On the other hand, though, there’s another level of meaning to the work as, according to Beradino, before the DVD burner was installed into the ray gun toy, it was “broken.”

The broken DVD burner, unable to fulfill its intended function as a reliable inscriber of digital code on the surface of a DVD, is obsolete trash—a bunch of useless plastic and screws.

By re-purposing this broken technology, Beradino breathes new life into it.

In this way, it is in dialogue with the 1960s ray gun—itself a technology, or an idea of a technology, which once heralded a new vision of the future, but is now obsolete.

Furthermore, one could say the same thing regarding fully-functional DVD technology which was also once futuristic and cutting edge but is now in the process of being replaced by digital streaming and download.

It’s all the same process—a technology emerges, promising to bring one closer to one’s desires; it’s consumed; and is, then, replaced by the next technology and the next round of promises.

In no case does the technology definitively answer any of one’s questions or bring one definitively closer to one’s desires.

On the contrary, it always raises more new questions and more new desires.

The collision between the ray gun toy from the 1960s and the broken DVD player creates an impact, then, in the sense that it can pop a balloon, yes, but it can also crystallize one’s awareness of this process.

Two visions of the future—each pointing out the other’s obsolescence.

And if one can see this process then one might consider it critically.

In relation to another of his works involving obsolete technology, Beradino writes:

There is a certain beauty in trying to fulfill the potential of the obsolete. As we have become a culture that is defined by the latest and greatest, and at the same time built in obsoleteness. Why are we in such a hurry to progress when we haven’t realized the potential of what we have, where is this thing called progress taking us?

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in mikeberadino | Comments Off

« Older Entries