Archive for August, 2010

Friday, 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.

*********

A final note: 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 in 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

Friday, 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.  He writes: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”  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, Benjamin’s writings seem, 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

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Performance 4 

1.

According to the computer science guru David Gelertner, the increasing migration of digital information from personal hardware to data clouds 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 some artists working on the Web, this principal applies as well.  Creativity is–again, for some–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.

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.

*****

First, here is an example of how an artist may come to think of their work as performative on the Internet:

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.

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 effects.  For example, 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 phenomenon in terms of the way the computer urges its users to view images in sequences, as in, for example, thumbnails.  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 preciousness around a single instance of artwork.

This is not the end of the story, though.  What one sees happening in some corners of 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.

There is, though, 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 Seth 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 considered.

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 flowas 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 numbers can be decoded as the eight hours of the daily work day: 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 and nightmarishly endless.  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.

Similarly, in For a Friend, a pair of friends engage in a seemingly endless conversation filled with reasonably interesting observations, but, ultimately, never progressing forward.  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.

Through his career, though, Price has developed strategies which resist these anxieties.  Two of those strategies are delay and re-versioning.

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.

Similarly, 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-AbEx 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 and the inevitable obsolescence of any new novelty in art and visual culture.

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.

The art critic 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 sethprice, Uncategorized | Comments Off

Friday, 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 and 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 Internet.  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.  

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 divorced from image reproductions and 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 that 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 there may be multiple ways to talk about a body which include both the experience of 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?”  For example, if one views video documentation of a live performance, is what one views really “live”?  I personally don’t think that it is.  Here’s an example:

Joy Division, the British post-punk band best known for its sparse sound and 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 a 1979 interview with the Northern Lights Cassette Magazine, 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 thedepictions of Curtis by actors in the films 24 Hour Party Peopleand 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 liveness and 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” and 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 and 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.”

Similarly, 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.” 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.

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 moves through 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