Posts Tagged ‘time’

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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.

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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.

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Friday, 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 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 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.

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 artists 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 created buzz in 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 of “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  certain filmmakers, generally speaking, I had hit a brick wall with film on a creative level.  This led me YouTube where my interests were rekindled.

On YouTube, the attraction, at first, was to surf through the 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 this, 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.  It 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 performative 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 Internet is accrued through “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, following the performing of the making of art on the Web.

5.

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.

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Friday, July 23rd, 2010

Performance

The democratic culture of the Internet (blogs, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.) is increasingly a part of daily life. If somebody wants their voice heard, they can do it with a couple of clicks.    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 noise.  In this scenario, both Proust and pornography flatten out in value to right around zero—each just a drop of water in a continuously expanding ocean.

Information theorists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner discussed this problem in the early days of cybernetics research. Information is a ratio of signal to noise.  The more noise–or entropy–in a system, the less clear the information.  On the Internet, there is so much culture that it becomes like what Weiner, in a different context, called a “Niagara of entropy.”  There are so many people shouting in the room that one voice cannot be heard clearly.

For a contemporary artist, this scenario poses an interesting problem.  In prior models of media dissemination it was difficult for an artist’s work to reach  large public audiences, critics, or curators without the artist 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 Internet, though, allows for anyone and everyone with a 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 Internet, 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 other media through which it’s competing against.  The artist, then, is left in a 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?  For some, I guess, this is the dream of the Internet in which the postmodern death of the author is made official and all culture just swirls around as anonymous memes.  For others, though, it may be frustrating.

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 individual work and more the ongoing exhibition of multiple instances of work.

*******

Before continuing, a step back in time:

Pablo Picasso began to consider the location of his art as residing in his entire ongoing practice—one action after another after another.  Picasso wrote, “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 the point in his career in which he made the “Algerian Women” paintings, but, rather, “the artist”–in this case, the artist  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 a sense of Picasso’s evolution.  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 traveling 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 and 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 Internet, automatic.

The artist’s website, as a publicly 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 Internet and I do it again and again and again and again, then this managed presence itself becomes a performative work.

*******

There are many examples of this type of approach to making work in the context of the Web.  One of those examples is 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, first, focus on collisions between automatic effects which read as either “painterly” or “digital,” and, second, shift 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.

The question “what is a digital painting?” (a noun) is here better phrased as “what is digital painting?” (a verb).  The significance of Poster Company’s 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.

****

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. 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.

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Thursday, 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 chronologically (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 the webcam and 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 one-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, the 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.

His seemingly unaffected performance brings up a 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 as part of an art project—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.

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: action, , body, , jstchillin, martin kohout, , playlist, self portrait, , video, watching martin kohout, , youtube
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Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

Apples and Enamel by Lance Wakeling is a series of fifty-five process sculptures—each of which consist of a rotting apple covered in gesso and, then, glossy white (and in two instances, glossy yellow) lead-based enamel paint.

They are process sculptures in the sense that one views each of the apples as an individual art object—yes—but one also views the processes of gravity, entropy, and decay.

These processes are pictured through the artist’s use of the gesso and enamel over the apple’s surface which allows it to flexibly compress without cracking as the apple itself rots away from the inside (one might think of the look of certain Claes Oldenburg “soft” sculptures from the mid 1960s—Soft Toilet, for example).

Thus, the form of the sculpture is in a continual state of transformation.

Eventually, the surface of the apple will compress to the point that it has nowhere else to go, but, at that point, the form of the apple reads as a sign of decay as much as it does a solid form and, as such, one is nudged towards continuing to think of the sculpture in terms of the time of its decay which continues unabated from the inside.

What significance, though, does the apple as the locus of this decay afford the work?

What does an apple do here that, say, a peach or roast beef wouldn’t do?

Well, one could think of the apple as bound up with the Apple corporation—a sort of The Picture of Dorian Gray meets the iPad.

That’s one possibility.

Another would be that on art historical/iconographic level, the apple is perhaps best known to be “forbidden fruit”—desire incarnate as described in the story of Adam and Eve.

And if one is to view the works in the context of the white cube art space on either a pedestal or in a vitrine (which would each mark the work as capital-A-Art), then this reading makes a certain amount of sense.

One could say, then, that the work pictures the glossy white sheen of desire incarnate as much as it pictures this desire’s ongoing decay.

Tags: apple, apples, apples and enamel, decay, desire, emptiness, entropy, food, gloss, lance wakeling, object, process art, rotting, sculpture,
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Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

“The ink wasn’t dry yet on their divorce papers before he was shacking up with you-know-who.”

In this sentence, there’s an idiom—“the ink wasn’t dry yet”—which does a nice job of creating a picture of a temporal event—a relatively short temporal event—by thinking of this event in terms of observable material phenomena—ink drying on paper.

One could say, “It didn’t take that many days after their divorce before he was shacking up with you-know-who,” but, in so doing, one loses the image of time as material; it lacks the bite of the previous sentence in which time is given the same oppressive materiality as an object in space.

Here’s another example:

“We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s let the dust settle and talk this over in the morning.”

Again, one could say here, “We’ve each said things we don’t really mean, so let’s wait a couple of hours and talk this over in the morning,” but, in so doing, one might lose something of the imagistic power which the idiom “let the dust settle” affords the sentence.

All of the sudden, that stretch of time becomes an object—an accumulation of dust following a confrontation—and, thus, becomes more dynamic than a reference to the passage of time through standardized time units—minutes, hours, etc.–which are decidedly more difficult to picture concretely.

The idioms in which time is pictured as an entity with its own materiality and its own objective weight on one’s experience are often powerful because they nudge one towards the intuition that time is as much a material as space (albeit a very different kind of material).

In Damon Zucconi’s Grey series, which consists of (as of right now, anyway) eight images created using a digital scanner and varying amounts of naturally-occurring dust and light leakage into the scanner, the artist invests himself in a similar experimentation with the material representation of time.

As viewed through his website, he presents, to begin with, a series of four images composed of dark shades of grey, accented by bursts of horizontal white bars, and pools of off-white specks that remind one of the scratches, hairs, and other noise of poorly preserved celluloid films.     

In the fifth instance of the series, one views a similarly dark grey field which, likewise, contains traces of light leakage and dust and, then, an additional bright burst of orange/tan (almost fleshy) light which extends vertically in the upper right corner of the work.

In the following two instances of the series, a dark grey to black field is crossed by a series of rhythmically ordered straight horizontal lines of varying colors.

And, then, in the most recent instance of the series, one views another dark grey to black field upon whose entire right edge bursts a bright white streak of (almost cosmic) light whose own inner edge is a shade of bright green.

Now all that said, in each of these instances, one views the varied constellations of formal elements just mentioned—yes–but one also views something else—a unique picture of materialized time.

One views the changing amounts of dust and light recorded in each particular image which, in turn, are records of particular lengths of time.

Each formal variation here is due to an experimentation with time—whether it be the amount of time allotted to accumulate dust on the bed of the scanner or the amount of time allotted to accumulate light flares of varying degrees of strength.

Thus, as one reflects on a given formal element in the work, one is nudged towards reflecting on the time which each of these elements records.

Tags: accumulation, damon zucconi, dust, grey, image, light, material, materiality, scanner, series, temporal,
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Tuesday, May 18th, 2010

Jay-Z’s “Young Forever,” a re-working of the “80s” Alphaville song “Forever Young,” opens with the same moody synthesizers one finds in the original and, then, (almost) the same romantic, Sting-esque vocals (the difference here being that the contemporary pop star Mr. Hudson fills in for the Marian Gold vocals in the original track).

As, then, the track continues to open, one settles into a schmaltzy, but compelling reverie as the vocalist muses:

Let’s dance in style,
Let’s dance for a while,
Heaven can wait we’re only watching the skies
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst,
Are you gonna drop the bomb or not?
Let us die young or let us live forever,
We don’t have the power but we never say never,
Sitting in a sandpit,
Life is a short trip,
The music’s for the sad man

********

Now, the hook of romantic lyricism like this is that the tragedy of it all—the fact that the singer’s prayer for eternal youth will never be answered—is known by the singer as he sings.

One falls for the fact that despite the certainty that his protests against death will go unheeded, he protests nonetheless.

It’s mad (it oscillates between the depths of depression and the heights of romantic ecstasy), but it’s pretty.

And one can almost imagine it to be true.

He sings:

Forever young,
I wanna be forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever and ever
Forever young I wanna be
Forever young
Do you really want to live forever?
Forever, forever

*********

In Jay-Z’s version of the track, though, a shift in emphasis occurs as the words here are not hauntingly ironic, but seemingly literal:

The singer’s prayers will be answered.

Indeed, there they are—on contemporary pop radio more than twenty-five years after their conception and just as young.

Forever young.

In Jay-Z’s rap, he addresses the way in which media archiving allows the paradoxical situation of endless youngness to emerge.

The opening line (following an ad lib toast to the act of living in the moment), finds the artist declaring the following words:

So we livin’ life like a video

*******

Now, this opening declaration could have two possible readings:

1. On the one hand, it could mean that he and his crew are living a life of expensive cars, beautiful young women, freely flowing champagne, etc.

That is to say, the sort of life depicted in cliché rap videos.

2. On the other hand, though, it could be read to mean that the way they’re living is like a video in the sense of its being indelibly captured in archival media.

That is to say, one’s body may age, but one’s bodily presence in the media archive is forever young.

The lines of the verse succeeding this opening nudge one, first, in the direction of (1.), and, then, in the direction of (2.).

Here it is in its entirety:

So we livin’ life like a video
Where the sun is always out and you never get old
and the champagne’s always cold
and the music’s always good
and the pretty girls just happen to stop by in the hood
and they hop they pretty ass up on the hood of that pretty ass car
without a wrinkle in today
cause there is no tomorrow
just a picture perfect day
that last a whole lifetime
and it never ends cause all we have to do is hit re-wind
so let’s just stay in the moment, smoke some weed, drink some wine
reminisce, talk some shit, “Forever Young” is in your mind
leave a mark that can erase neither space nor time
so when the director yells cut
I’ll be fine
I’m forever young

********

They’re living like a video here, then, in the sense that, if life is going too fast, then “all we have to do is hit re-wind” as life itself has been archived in video.

This makes a certain amount of sense to consider in the case of a star such as Jay-Z whose own life is lived in video to a non-negligible degree; no matter what happens to his body, “when the director yells cut,” he’ll “be fine” as the now exists indelibly printed in media storage—forever young, “neither space nor time.”

But, is it really him?

If not, than what is it exactly?

Before dismissing this question out of hand, though, consider the importance of the avatar—the media representation of one’s own self—which one increasingly manages as much as one manages one’s own physical body.

That’s just to say that even though one’s personhood may not intuitively mix with anything but a biological body, pragmatically speaking (and no matter how repulsive it may seem), one’s person is uncannily out (t)here in the infosphere.

(If it’s not you, who is it?)

That said, though, (and no matter its truth) there’s an anxiety:

Things—both biological things as well as media things—die.

There’s nothing guaranteeing that Jay-Z’s video representation (being it actually him or not) will itself actually be forever young.

Indeed, by glancing at the pop charts, one sees that Jay-Z’s version of the track has already peaked–at number ten.

So, whether immortalized in media or not (and whether this has any bearing on anything or not), the track will age.

Before one gets caught up here, though, let’s return to the rap to see how it addresses this very issue, developing its own philosophy towards it.

Jay-Z raps:

Fear not where, fear not why, fear not much while we’re alive
life is for livin’ not livin’ uptight
until you’re somewhere up in the sky, fear not die
I’ll be alive for a million years, bye bye
so not for legends, I’m forever young, my name shall survive.

******

What one  might take from these lines is that, according to Jay-Z, if one is to be forever young in archival video media, then one must, it seems, live in the moment.

And one must continuously create one’s self every moment by existing fully in every moment, living life as if it will end not someday but in the very next moment.

The star–here–lives forever young by living life as if the opposite were true, as if nothing matters but the inhabitation of this moment.

And, for Jay-Z his star lives forever not just through video media, but through legend—oral history passed down through generations.

He raps:

Through the darkest blocks, over kitchen stoves, over Pyrex pots, my name shall be passed down to generations while debatin’ up in barber shops
young slung, hung here showed that a nigga from here with a little ambition just what we can become here
and as the father pass the story down to his son’s ear, younger get younger every year, yeah
so if you love me baby this is how you let me know, don’t ever let me go, that’s how you let me know, baby

********

Now before going on, at the end of this verse—it should be said–an interesting moment of hesitation occurs.

To reiterate, Jay-Z raps:

So if you love me baby this is how you let me know, don’t ever let me go, that’s how you let me know, baby

********

That is to say, Jay-Z—at that moment—indicates his own knowledge of the possibility that his legend will not persist unless those that love him refuse to let him go.

His destiny is–it seems–in the hands of others.

Why would Jay-Z  be basically begging for his fans to never let him go if he didn’t doubt his own existence as a “true” star?

But, once again, at that moment, Jay-Z turns the kaleidoscope.

As the timeline of the song is itself on its own last legs, he raps:

Less than four bars,
Guru bring the chorus in,
Did you get the picture yet?,
I’m painting you a portrait of young

*****

“Did you get the picture yet?” he asks.

Did you see that all this talk about forever young and life in a video is not drawn out here for its own sake, but rather to create a broader picture?

And what is this picture?

A portrait of “young”—the last line of the song.

The endless same-ness of young-ness in which one does everything in their power and thinks through every possible angle to ensure their immortality, but only ends up in knots.

Tags: 80s, alphaville, , , cover, , document, endlessness, forever, forever young, immortality, jay-z, knots, media, music video, now, obsolescence, person, pop, record, romantic, star, , video, young, young forever
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Monday, May 17th, 2010

In “Free Art,” a text by the Jogging, it is suggested that the Web’s economy of re-blogging and fast-paced communal interaction creates its own economic model and, thus, its own best practices for understanding how value around work is accrued.

Furthermore, it is thought that the art world–even if it did acknowledge this work–would not know what to do with it as this online economy is alien to its own—premised as it is on the exchange of materially sensual objects for amounts of (financial) capital unavailable to all but the most wealthy members of society.

Jogging writes:

In the lives of contemporary artists, Free Art is a place to find one’s self through the existence of others– to individually reclaim the ability to self-mythologize and empathetically pick from your peers for influence. Thus, Free Art is marked by the compulsive urge of searching (or, surfing) to connect with others in a way that is not dictated by profitability, but found and shared charitably among individuals based on personal interests.

***********

A couple of thoughts:

I’m not sure that the Web is any less tainted by economics than the art market.  The re-blogging format preferred by Jogging did not appear out of nowhere; power relations are alive and well (t)here as one might say that all of this activity is ultimately in the service of market research for corporations.

Meanwhile, the world of contemporary art is obviously not perfect, but it’s not entirely dominated by auctions and abusive gatekeeping, either.

And if one is interested in placing their creative endeavors on the Web in both the most critically sympathetic as well as the most critically astute environment possible (the environment in which it will be judged as more than style alone), one can’t so easily dismiss the art world as it has been thinking about these questions very seriously for a very long time.

Furthermore, the work will (if it is as good as it thinks it is) end up back in the art system as saleable objects; the question here, then, is how much control does the artist exert over this entry into the system.

This is just to say that the conversation occurring inside the art world is worth taking a second look at before one abandons it outright.

Also, Jogging’s reference to the immaterial or de-materialized quality of the work is problematic.

For the sake of argument (and it is debatable), let’s say that—yes—a virtual .jpeg of a sculpture is immaterial—free of the problems of aura and material commodification which the sculpture depicted in the .jpeg itself affords.

But, what about the hardware displaying this content?

The notion that the Web has accomplished some sort of Hegelian transcendence is precisely what, say, Steve Jobs wants consumers to believe:

Go on, keep chatting with your friends, watching videos, listening to music—it’s all fluid and immaterial now and that’s great—just so long as you do so through the iPad.

These devices which display the work which Jogging thinks of as lacking aura, are, in fact, highly susceptible to aura or, from a slightly different angle, fetishism.

One can’t wait to get home and log-on to their machine, touch it, ride the time of computing cycles; anytime the threat of boredom creeps in, one can immediately start fingering their iPhone, dexterously running their hands all over it in the hopes of generating more immaterial content.

Indeed, perhaps one could think of the endless stream of a blog as lubricant—sweet nothings in one’s ear, easing one’s entry into a more rhythmically sustained fingering of their device.

This is just to say that the materiality of digital culture is worth taking a second look at before one denies its presence outright.

Now all that said (and on the other hand), there’s another consideration which comes into play here:

“Free Art” was posted on the Jogging tumblr on May 12th, 2010.

In the five days which have passed since the 12th, Jogging has posted six additional unique works—each possessing their own unique power and each propelling my own following of their posting (as in an on-going performance).

As a matter of fact, this immediacy and performative enthusiasm is relatively more exciting (to me, anyway) than most things happening in most of the shows advertised via, say, e-flux.

Which is precisely the effect which Jogging describes in their text.

An anxiety arises:

I have some issues with the idea, but I’m compelled to follow it nonetheless.

That is to say, it can’t be dismissed outright as the artists demonstrate it for me, placing it directly in front of me, demanding my acknowledgment.

And through this acknowledgment, I may never quite decide for certain if the idea of Free Art is naïve or pioneering (or both), but I may be infected by it, nonetheless.

Tags: , art world, brad troemel, community, , device, , economics, essay, free art, freemium, immaterial, , ipad, jogging, lauren christiansen, material, , text, ,
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Friday, May 14th, 2010

“3 weeks ago” Charles Broskoski uploaded a diptych of images, each of which depicts a digitally-created still-life composed in a painterly style.

One views, in the first of these images (the image to the left of the diptych), a vertical composition composed of  an open door which itself frames—in the foreground–an arrangement of fruit situated on a small end table and—in the background–the obstructed view of a window.

Additionally it should be said that these figurative elements are themselves each carved out in chunky, geometrically-legible units of color.

In the second of these images (the image to the right of the diptych), one views a similar composition whose differences with the first are localized to shifts in color and re-considerations of the given shapes of objects (perhaps most notably in the cubist-inspired centerpiece of the fruit arrangement).

Now, one might say that Broskoski’s model here is not necessarily an arrangement of objects in space, but rather, an art-historical style—say, Fauvism.

And these particular works are apt studies of the style; they’re well-executed and have a certain aesthetic appeal.

But, that said, whereas the Fauves (“The Wild Beats”) were notorious for depicting objects in space in an un-realistic manner (or, alternatively, mutating their own definition of “realistic”), Broskoski’s pair of paintings here lack that sort of “shock effect.”

Indeed, one’s mind apprehends each image here less as a phenomenological entity and more as an icon reading as “painting” or “art” or “art history.”

Now, that said, the fact that these images do not catalyze the shock effects which, say, Matisse’s work catalyzed in its own time should not be surprising.

After all, Matisse’s work was once contemporary, but is now safely at home in Ikea or Pier One Imports; it’s been absorbed and neutralized into the flow of commodofied  signage.

So, where does this leave Broskoski?

Well, to start, this diptych—as it is displayed on his website, anyway—is situated directly below another diptych which itself is housed under a heading reading “2 weeks ago…”

In the lower-most image of this second diptych, one views iconography reading less as painterly or in reference to any other art historical style than it does digital and visionary.

One views what might be taken for a 3D “metal fence” (3D in the sense of digital “3D animation” not trompe-l’oeil ) through which undulating chunks of lightly-shaded colors which might be taken for “stingrays” pass through and intermingle with small, concentric circles of color which might taken for “eyeballs.”

And, in the upper image of the diptych, one views a similarly surrealistic arrangement of iconography; however, in this case, the icons do not read solely as “painterly” or solely as “digital,” but rather as a collision between the two.

The background and immediate foreground here are composed of graffiti-like scribbles created with a tool that automatically re-produces this “real world” effect, and the middle-ground of the image is composed of a series of “3D” representations of what one might take to be “vertebrae” extending not in a straight line (as in a spine) but in a wild swirl throughout the space of the image (as in a nightmare).

It should be said, though, that as with the images in the diptych mentioned above, these more digitally-inflected images are themselves each well-executed and sort of privately powerful, but perhaps lack the bodily shock effects which the various avant-gardes of art history are interested in.

Which would be fine—perhaps Broskoski isn’t interested in that sort of thing—were it not for the fact that, if one is up for it, there’s another way to view what’s going on here with its own unique shock:

When the artist places these paintings in conjunction with one another and in the context of an on-going stream of paintings which a viewer might follow (as in a performance) on his website, the viewer’s lens on the work here is nudged away from each of the individual images and closer towards the legible pattern of filtration through which the individual images stream.

The shock of shifting one’s lens from such simultaneously well-executed and differently well-executed images creates a space of indeterminacy—a sort of surrealist heterotopia picturing less space than movements in time.

Tags: 3d, charles broskoski, , fauves, images, matisse, maya, , , surrealistic, , virtual, website
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