avuncular |əˈvə ng kyələr| adjective 1 of or relating to an uncle. • kind and friendly toward a younger or less experienced person : an avuncular manner. 2 Anthropology of or relating to the relationship between men and their siblings’ children.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Latin avunculus ‘maternal uncle,’ diminutive of avus ‘grandfather.’
9.29.2010
def- subterfuge
subterfuge |ˈsəbtərˌfyoōj| noun deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal. • a statement or action resorted to in order to deceive.
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French, or from late Latin subterfugium, from Latin subterfugere ‘escape secretly,’ from subter- ‘beneath’ + fugere ‘flee.’
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: from French, or from late Latin subterfugium, from Latin subterfugere ‘escape secretly,’ from subter- ‘beneath’ + fugere ‘flee.’
def- sedition
sedition |siˈdi sh ən| noun conduct or speech inciting people to rebel against the authority of a state or monarch. ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [violent strife] ):
from Old French, or from Latin seditio(n-), from sed- ‘apart’ + itio(n-) ‘going’ (from the verb ire).
from Old French, or from Latin seditio(n-), from sed- ‘apart’ + itio(n-) ‘going’ (from the verb ire).
def- irrevocable
irrevocable |ˌiˈrevəkəbəl| adjective not able to be changed, reversed, or recovered; final : an irrevocable step. DERIVATIVES irrevocability |iˌrevəkəˈbilitē| noun irrevocably |-blē| adverb
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from Latin irrevocabilis, from in- ‘not’ + revocabilis ‘able to be revoked’ (from the verb revocare).
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French, or from Latin irrevocabilis, from in- ‘not’ + revocabilis ‘able to be revoked’ (from the verb revocare).
def- epistemology
epistemology |iˌpistəˈmäləjē| noun Philosophy the theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.
def- Weltanschauung
A world view, (or worldview) is a term calqued from the German word Weltanschauung (pronounced /ˈvɛlt.anˌʃaʊ.ʊŋ/) meaning a “look onto the world”. It implies a concept fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology and refers to a wide world perception. It refers to the framework through which an individual interprets the world and interacts in it. The German word is also in wide use in English, as well as the “translated” form world outlook.
def- polemic
polemic |pəˈlemik| noun a strong verbal or written attack on someone or something : his polemic against the cultural relativism of the sixties | a writer of feminist polemic. • (usu. polemics) the art or practice of engaging in controversial debate or dispute : the history of science has become embroiled in religious polemics. adjective another term for polemical . DERIVATIVES polemicist |pəˈleməsist| noun polemicize |pəˈleməˌsīz| verb ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: via medieval Latin from Greek polemikos, from polemos ‘war.’
def- capitulation
apitulation |kəˌpi ch əˈlā sh ən| noun: the action of surrendering or ceasing to resist an opponent or demand : the victor sees it as a sign of capitulation | a capitulation to wage demands. • ( capitulations) historical an agreement or set of conditions. ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from late Latin capitulatio(n-), from the verb capitulare (see capitulate ).
def- aphorism
aphorism |ˈafəˌrizəm| noun a pithy observation that contains a general truth, such as, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” See note at saying . • a concise statement of a scientific principle, typically by an ancient classical author. DERIVATIVES aphorist noun aphoristic |ˌafəˈristik| adjective aphoristically |ˌafəˈristik(ə)lē| adverb aphorize |-ˌrīz| verb
ORIGIN early 16th cent.: from French aphorisme or late Latin aphorismus, from Greek aphorismos ‘definition,’ from aphorizein ‘define.’
Thesaurus
aphorism noun she was a fount of Orwellian aphorisms saying, maxim, axiom, adage, epigram, dictum, gnome, proverb, saw, tag; rare apophthegm. See note at saying .
ORIGIN early 16th cent.: from French aphorisme or late Latin aphorismus, from Greek aphorismos ‘definition,’ from aphorizein ‘define.’
Thesaurus
aphorism noun she was a fount of Orwellian aphorisms saying, maxim, axiom, adage, epigram, dictum, gnome, proverb, saw, tag; rare apophthegm. See note at saying .
def- archaic
archaic |ärˈkāik| adjective very old or old-fashioned : prisons are run on archaic methods. See note at old . • (of a word or a style of language) no longer in everyday use but sometimes used to impart an old-fashioned flavor. • of an early period of art or culture, esp. the 7th–6th centuries bc in Greece : the archaic temple at Corinth. DERIVATIVES archaically adverb
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French archaïque, from Greek arkhaikos, from arkhaios, from arkhē ‘beginning.’
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from French archaïque, from Greek arkhaikos, from arkhaios, from arkhē ‘beginning.’
bib- Society of the Spectacle
Guy Debord. The Society of the Spectacle. trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994.
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/4/en/display/70
About this entry
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Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: bibliography
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/4/en/display/70
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ bib- Society of the Spectacle ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: bibliography
bib- Quantum Society
Zohar, Dana and Marshall, Ian .The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics, and a new Social Vision. New York: William Morrow, 1994.
article- Theory of the Dérive
Essay
Theory of the Dérive
by Guy-Ernest Debord
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.
The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.
In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.
Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.
If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.
An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”
At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.
The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.[1]
The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.
The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.
In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.
In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.
Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.
The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.
Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.
Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:
“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
(To be continued.)
Bibliography
A slightly different version of this article was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives.
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Category: article
Theory of the Dérive
by Guy-Ernest Debord
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/314
One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
But the dérive includes both this letting-go and its necessary contradiction: the domination of psychogeographical variations by the knowledge and calculation of their possibilities. In this latter regard, ecological science — despite the narrow social space to which it limits itself — provides psychogeography with abundant data.
The ecological analysis of the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network, of the role of microclimates, of distinct neighborhoods with no relation to administrative boundaries, and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction, must be utilized and completed by psychogeographical methods. The objective passional terrain of the dérive must be defined in accordance both with its own logic and with its relations with social morphology.
In his study Paris et l’agglomération parisienne (Bibliothèque de Sociologie Contemporaine, P.U.F., 1952) Chombart de Lauwe notes that “an urban neighborhood is determined not only by geographical and economic factors, but also by the image that its inhabitants and those of other neighborhoods have of it.” In the same work, in order to illustrate “the narrowness of the real Paris in which each individual lives . . . within a geographical area whose radius is extremely small,” he diagrams all the movements made in the space of one year by a student living in the 16th Arrondissement. Her itinerary forms a small triangle with no significant deviations, the three apexes of which are the School of Political Sciences, her residence and that of her piano teacher.
Such data — examples of a modern poetry capable of provoking sharp emotional reactions (in this particular case, outrage at the fact that anyone’s life can be so pathetically limited) — or even Burgess’s theory of Chicago’s social activities as being distributed in distinct concentric zones, will undoubtedly prove useful in developing dérives.
If chance plays an important role in dérives this is because the methodology of psychogeographical observation is still in its infancy. But the action of chance is naturally conservative and in a new setting tends to reduce everything to habit or to an alternation between a limited number of variants. Progress means breaking through fields where chance holds sway by creating new conditions more favorable to our purposes. We can say, then, that the randomness of a dérive is fundamentally different from that of the stroll, but also that the first psychogeographical attractions discovered by dérivers may tend to fixate them around new habitual axes, to which they will constantly be drawn back.
An insufficient awareness of the limitations of chance, and of its inevitably reactionary effects, condemned to a dismal failure the famous aimless wandering attempted in 1923 by four surrealists, beginning from a town chosen by lot: Wandering in open country is naturally depressing, and the interventions of chance are poorer there than anywhere else. But this mindlessness is pushed much further by a certain Pierre Vendryes (in Médium, May 1954), who thinks he can relate this anecdote to various probability experiments, on the ground that they all supposedly involve the same sort of antideterminist liberation. He gives as an example the random distribution of tadpoles in a circular aquarium, adding, significantly, “It is necessary, of course, that such a population be subject to no external guiding influence.” From that perspective, the tadpoles could be considered more spontaneously liberated than the surrealists, since they have the advantage of being “as stripped as possible of intelligence, sociability and sexuality,” and are thus “truly independent from one another.”
At the opposite pole from such imbecilities, the primarily urban character of the dérive, in its element in the great industrially transformed cities — those centers of possibilities and meanings — could be expressed in Marx’s phrase: “Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image; everything speaks to them of themselves. Their very landscape is alive.”
One can dérive alone, but all indications are that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions. It is preferable for the composition of these groups to change from one dérive to another. With more than four or five participants, the specifically dérive character rapidly diminishes, and in any case it is impossible for there to be more than ten or twelve people without the dérive fragmenting into several simultaneous dérives. The practice of such subdivision is in fact of great interest, but the difficulties it entails have so far prevented it from being organized on a sufficient scale.
The average duration of a dérive is one day, considered as the time between two periods of sleep. The starting and ending times have no necessary relation to the solar day, but it should be noted that the last hours of the night are generally unsuitable for dérives.
But this duration is merely a statistical average. For one thing, a dérive rarely occurs in its pure form: it is difficult for the participants to avoid setting aside an hour or two at the beginning or end of the day for taking care of banal tasks; and toward the end of the day fatigue tends to encourage such an abandonment. But more importantly, a dérive often takes place within a deliberately limited period of a few hours, or even fortuitously during fairly brief moments; or it may last for several days without interruption. In spite of the cessations imposed by the need for sleep, certain dérives of a sufficient intensity have been sustained for three or four days, or even longer. It is true that in the case of a series of dérives over a rather long period of time it is almost impossible to determine precisely when the state of mind peculiar to one dérive gives way to that of another. One sequence of dérives was pursued without notable interruption for around two months. Such an experience gives rise to new objective conditions of behavior that bring about the disappearance of a good number of the old ones.[1]
The influence of weather on dérives, although real, is a significant factor only in the case of prolonged rains, which make them virtually impossible. But storms or other types of precipitation are rather favorable for dérives.
The spatial field of a dérive may be precisely delimited or vague, depending on whether the goal is to study a terrain or to emotionally disorient oneself. It should not be forgotten that these two aspects of dérives overlap in so many ways that it is impossible to isolate one of them in a pure state. But the use of taxis, for example, can provide a clear enough dividing line: If in the course of a dérive one takes a taxi, either to get to a specific destination or simply to move, say, twenty minutes to the west, one is concerned primarily with a personal trip outside one’s usual surroundings. If, on the other hand, one sticks to the direct exploration of a particular terrain, one is concentrating primarily on research for a psychogeographical urbanism.
In every case the spatial field depends first of all on the point of departure — the residence of the solo dériver or the meeting place selected by a group. The maximum area of this spatial field does not extend beyond the entirety of a large city and its suburbs. At its minimum it can be limited to a small self-contained ambiance: a single neighborhood or even a single block of houses if it’s interesting enough (the extreme case being a static-dérive of an entire day within the Saint-Lazare train station).
The exploration of a fixed spatial field entails establishing bases and calculating directions of penetration. It is here that the study of maps comes in — ordinary ones as well as ecological and psychogeographical ones — along with their correction and improvement. It should go without saying that we are not at all interested in any mere exoticism that may arise from the fact that one is exploring a neighborhood for the first time. Besides its unimportance, this aspect of the problem is completely subjective and soon fades away.
In the “possible rendezvous,” on the other hand, the element of exploration is minimal in comparison with that of behavioral disorientation. The subject is invited to come alone to a certain place at a specified time. He is freed from the bothersome obligations of the ordinary rendezvous since there is no one to wait for. But since this “possible rendezvous” has brought him without warning to a place he may or may not know, he observes the surroundings. It may be that the same spot has been specified for a “possible rendezvous” for someone else whose identity he has no way of knowing. Since he may never even have seen the other person before, he will be encouraged to start up conversations with various passersby. He may meet no one, or he may even by chance meet the person who has arranged the “possible rendezvous.” In any case, particularly if the time and place have been well chosen, his use of time will take an unexpected turn. He may even telephone someone else who doesn’t know where the first “possible rendezvous” has taken him, in order to ask for another one to be specified. One can see the virtually unlimited resources of this pastime.
Our loose lifestyle and even certain amusements considered dubious that have always been enjoyed among our entourage — slipping by night into houses undergoing demolition, hitchhiking nonstop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in the name of adding to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public, etc. — are expressions of a more general sensibility which is no different from that of the dérive. Written descriptions can be no more than passwords to this great game.
The lessons drawn from dérives enable us to draw up the first surveys of the psychogeographical articulations of a modern city. Beyond the discovery of unities of ambiance, of their main components and their spatial localization, one comes to perceive their principal axes of passage, their exits and their defenses. One arrives at the central hypothesis of the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. One measures the distances that actually separate two regions of a city, distances that may have little relation with the physical distance between them. With the aid of old maps, aerial photographs and experimental dérives, one can draw up hitherto lacking maps of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage is no worse than that of the first navigational charts. The only difference is that it is no longer a matter of precisely delineating stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism.
Today the different unities of atmosphere and of dwellings are not precisely marked off, but are surrounded by more or less extended and indistinct bordering regions. The most general change that dérive experience leads to proposing is the constant diminution of these border regions, up to the point of their complete suppression.
Within architecture itself, the taste for dériving tends to promote all sorts of new forms of labyrinths made possible by modern techniques of construction. Thus in March 1955 the press reported the construction in New York of a building in which one can see the first signs of an opportunity to dérive inside an apartment:
“The apartments of the helicoidal building will be shaped like slices of cake. One will be able to enlarge or reduce them by shifting movable partitions. The half-floor gradations avoid limiting the number of rooms, since the tenant can request the use of the adjacent section on either upper or lower levels. With this setup three four-room apartments can be transformed into one twelve-room apartment in less than six hours.”
(To be continued.)
Bibliography
A slightly different version of this article was first published in the Belgian surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues #9 (November 1956) along with accounts of two dérives.
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Category: article
article- an introduction to relational art
http://place.unm.edu/relational_art.html
Happy to Meet You: An Introduction to Relational Art
Relational Art is an emerging movement in art identified by Nicolas Bourriaud, a French philosopher, who recognized a growing number of contemporary artists used performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others: pedestrians, shoppers, browsers—the casual observer-turned-participant. As an art critic, Bourriaud has reviewed many internationally renowned exhibitions and performances. Over the course of writing editorials for the French magazine Documents sur l’Art, Bourriaud came to term what he was seeing—more accurately, experiencing—as a movement in Relational Art. Bringing together his many essays on the subject of these artists and their activities, Nicolas Bourriaud, in 1998, launched his theory and book entitled Relational Aesthetics. While art critics, theoreticians, and historians have argued whether Nicolas Bourriaud was accurate in naming what he was seeing as a new movement—or, even a movement at all—artists have been busy carrying out their relational activities.
Bourriaud observed something different in the art practices of today. Artists across all disciplines were collapsing the distance between their art form and the average citizen. No longer were actors up on stages telling stories at people. Now, the stage was gone and the actor was merging into the general public and the “story” was theirs to tell. The artist no longer clung to making objects that were set before an adoring gallery visitor, instead the artist merged into a cyber world prompting an anonymous, global public to interact through telepresence. Now, musicians are innovators, designing and creating new musical instruments, software and compositions that prompt the random passerby to interact, conduct and perform a musical piece that is uniquely their own. While artists have long since challenged the constrictions of museums, stages, and performance halls, Bourriaud observed a significant turn in context and meaning.
Below are a few links to some artists engaged in relational art activity. We encourage you to look at these examples now before we go on.
Corpos Informaticos Research Groups: http://www.corpos.org
Walk and Squawk Performance Project: http://walksquawk.org
In relational art, the artist is no longer at the center. They are no longer the soul creator, the master or even celebrity. The artist, instead, is the catalyst. They kick-start a question, frame a point of consideration, or highlight an everyday moment. And then, they wait. They wait for a response from the random stranger, the passerby, the usual suspect—you and me. We are the missing piece and until we react, respond or relate, the “art” lies in wait to say: “Happy to meet you. I’ve been waiting for you.”
To Bourriaud’s mind, and the artists who’s aesthetic is you and I, the relational aspect of their activities is the fundamental difference between today’s art experience and previous art activities such as Fluxist, Happenings and Performance Art to name a few. Moreover, today’s relational art emerges from the profound and ever-changing impact of media technologies. Technologies capable of sending us into spaces that are inhabited by anonymous, disembodied others—the good, bad, and ugly—but who we can nevertheless relate to through this technology. Whether relational artists are high tech or low tech, what Bourriaud insists they have in common is the desire and intention to relate across the artificiality of time and space whether physical, social or institutional space.
Ironically, many of Bourriaud’s examples of artists and activities from the mid-to-late 1990s were still within the domain of traditional institutions of art (museums, performance centers, etc.) despite their intentions to comment on and/or break through these socially defined borders of space. Nonetheless, considerable relational arts practice is happening all around us. Much of the activity is happening outside of the traditional institutional channels that alert us to an event, a fashion, or celebrity. For this reason, it is harder to report on relational arts practice since it resists seeking the institutional channels of art presentation, but it is out there—and it is in here!
Since relational arts practice operates in different places and spaces than what we have been trained to seek out, we encourage you to do your own investigation. Explore the internet for relational art that either uses the internet to document and report relational activity or uses the internet as its relational form for activity. It’s tricky stuff to talk about, but makes more sense when you see/experience more examples.
If you find some internet examples of relational art you want us to post for others, email us with the web link and we’ll put it here.
Here are a few more links to activities that we think are relational in practice:
“bourriaud’s … theoretical leaning, summarized as ‘relational art,’ gives a new interpretation of the aesthetic object. the object is no longer materially or conceptually defined, but relationally. “what do relations eventually create? relations to the artistic work, institutions and so on? - context.” art magazine boiler #1, 1999″ Quoted from the website: http://straddle3.net/context/03/en/2004_02_10.html on August 16, 2004.
Check out an interview with Bouriaud at http://www.boiler.odessa.net/english/raz1/n1r1s02.htm
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- an introduction to relational art ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
Happy to Meet You: An Introduction to Relational Art
Relational Art is an emerging movement in art identified by Nicolas Bourriaud, a French philosopher, who recognized a growing number of contemporary artists used performative and interactive techniques that rely on the responses of others: pedestrians, shoppers, browsers—the casual observer-turned-participant. As an art critic, Bourriaud has reviewed many internationally renowned exhibitions and performances. Over the course of writing editorials for the French magazine Documents sur l’Art, Bourriaud came to term what he was seeing—more accurately, experiencing—as a movement in Relational Art. Bringing together his many essays on the subject of these artists and their activities, Nicolas Bourriaud, in 1998, launched his theory and book entitled Relational Aesthetics. While art critics, theoreticians, and historians have argued whether Nicolas Bourriaud was accurate in naming what he was seeing as a new movement—or, even a movement at all—artists have been busy carrying out their relational activities.
Bourriaud observed something different in the art practices of today. Artists across all disciplines were collapsing the distance between their art form and the average citizen. No longer were actors up on stages telling stories at people. Now, the stage was gone and the actor was merging into the general public and the “story” was theirs to tell. The artist no longer clung to making objects that were set before an adoring gallery visitor, instead the artist merged into a cyber world prompting an anonymous, global public to interact through telepresence. Now, musicians are innovators, designing and creating new musical instruments, software and compositions that prompt the random passerby to interact, conduct and perform a musical piece that is uniquely their own. While artists have long since challenged the constrictions of museums, stages, and performance halls, Bourriaud observed a significant turn in context and meaning.
Below are a few links to some artists engaged in relational art activity. We encourage you to look at these examples now before we go on.
Corpos Informaticos Research Groups: http://www.corpos.org
Walk and Squawk Performance Project: http://walksquawk.org
In relational art, the artist is no longer at the center. They are no longer the soul creator, the master or even celebrity. The artist, instead, is the catalyst. They kick-start a question, frame a point of consideration, or highlight an everyday moment. And then, they wait. They wait for a response from the random stranger, the passerby, the usual suspect—you and me. We are the missing piece and until we react, respond or relate, the “art” lies in wait to say: “Happy to meet you. I’ve been waiting for you.”
To Bourriaud’s mind, and the artists who’s aesthetic is you and I, the relational aspect of their activities is the fundamental difference between today’s art experience and previous art activities such as Fluxist, Happenings and Performance Art to name a few. Moreover, today’s relational art emerges from the profound and ever-changing impact of media technologies. Technologies capable of sending us into spaces that are inhabited by anonymous, disembodied others—the good, bad, and ugly—but who we can nevertheless relate to through this technology. Whether relational artists are high tech or low tech, what Bourriaud insists they have in common is the desire and intention to relate across the artificiality of time and space whether physical, social or institutional space.
Ironically, many of Bourriaud’s examples of artists and activities from the mid-to-late 1990s were still within the domain of traditional institutions of art (museums, performance centers, etc.) despite their intentions to comment on and/or break through these socially defined borders of space. Nonetheless, considerable relational arts practice is happening all around us. Much of the activity is happening outside of the traditional institutional channels that alert us to an event, a fashion, or celebrity. For this reason, it is harder to report on relational arts practice since it resists seeking the institutional channels of art presentation, but it is out there—and it is in here!
Since relational arts practice operates in different places and spaces than what we have been trained to seek out, we encourage you to do your own investigation. Explore the internet for relational art that either uses the internet to document and report relational activity or uses the internet as its relational form for activity. It’s tricky stuff to talk about, but makes more sense when you see/experience more examples.
If you find some internet examples of relational art you want us to post for others, email us with the web link and we’ll put it here.
Here are a few more links to activities that we think are relational in practice:
“bourriaud’s … theoretical leaning, summarized as ‘relational art,’ gives a new interpretation of the aesthetic object. the object is no longer materially or conceptually defined, but relationally. “what do relations eventually create? relations to the artistic work, institutions and so on? - context.” art magazine boiler #1, 1999″ Quoted from the website: http://straddle3.net/context/03/en/2004_02_10.html on August 16, 2004.
Check out an interview with Bouriaud at http://www.boiler.odessa.net/english/raz1/n1r1s02.htm
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- an introduction to relational art ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
article- interview with Nicholas Bourriard
http://www.boiler.odessa.net/english/raz1/n1r1s02.htm
INTERVIEW OF MIROSLAV KULCHITSKY WITH NICOLAS BOURRIAUD
Miroslav Kulchitsky (M.K.): My first question is about your theoretical works, primarily “Relational Aesthetics”. As far as I know, this is one of the first attempts of an overall analysis of an artistic process in 90-s. What is the role of the “relational aesthetics” in theory of contemporary art? Do you believe, that in ten or twenty years conception of “relational” might be a key one in the analysis of art of 90-s?
Nicolas Bourriaud (N.B.): I can not say, that I am dealing with “an art of 90-s”. ” The art of 90-s” - it means nothing for me. It is quite possible, that this conception will become really significant in the next decade; it is hard to forecast. But I have not tried to typify art, I have tried to create a conception, which might be an instrument of analysis and criticism of art, which is currently being done, that’s it. But this is something, anyway, isn’t it?
M.K.: However, either way, you essentially apply to artistic practice of one generation, specifically to those, who appeared on the art scene in 90-s, don’t you?
N.B.: And how about Franz West? Or let say Felix Gonzales-Torres, both are prominent figures, talking about “the relational aspect”. There are some other artists of an elder generation, who we may also talk about. As a matter of fact, any historic period of time appears to be emphasis of one or two aspects of art. At present we emphasize “the relational aspect”, although this aspect existed earlier, therefore, this is not a pure outcome of 90-s. We have never paid attention to it, because it was not “the basic trend”. So, in 80-s the focus was made on an object and an object’s position. Nowadays, this is primarily “the relational aspect”. But, in 90-s, we might raise up the problem of object again. Every time this is an issue of priorities, in other words, what happens to be the main problematics for the time being.
M.K. : Therefore, you have never intended to identify a basic tendency in art recently?
N.B. : I would rather say no. I just wanted to find a common point of contiguity of diverse artistic practices and that point was “the relational idea”. My assignment has been not only the identification of a certain tendency, but rather the identification of basic problematics.
M.K. : The following issue is the issue of the artist and the context. From my point of view, it is worthwhile to review a contemporary artistic process in two basic aspects: “relational” and “contextual”:
N.B. : Which is mainly one and the same thing.
M.K. : Not exactly.
N.B. : Let us assume, they have something in common. What do relations eventually create? relations to the artistic work, institutions and so on? - Context.
M.K. : O.K. Let’s come back to my question. I have just remembered my talk with EricTroncy, which we had last spring in Dijon in “Le Consortium”. We talked mainly about our mutual works with Checkorsky, but also dwelled upon a global issue of the contextual factor in the artistic practice and of the role of a network in the contemporary art. At that time, Troncy’s position seemed to be slightly contradictory to me. On the one hand, he assured that the geographical remoteness can not be an essential problem for a contemporary artist, since if he is a part of “the network” of contemporary art, so he is provided with a proper existence, but at the same time he asks me puzzled questions, as: “What do you actually do in Odessa? As far as I know, there is no context for your art there’. What do you think about it? And how essentially important is the problem of artist and context and what is the role of a contemporary art network and interactions within this network?
N.B. : Location is certainly not a problem. The problem is when one is not involved in the network. There are locations, which are hard to cover by this, so to speak, “network”. And of course, one can work in Odessa and be a part of this “network”. And if any problems arise, it means that these problems are not mainly your problems, but problems of the network, since in this case very little depends on you.
M.K.: How would you evaluate operation of this “network”? Does it work well?
N.B. : Why not ? It works pretty efficiently.
M.K.: I remember my first impression of publication titled “Relational Aesthetics” in “Documents”. ‘This is exactly what we are doing now. Hit the target’. At the same time we have a feeling of a certain remoteness, since we have a feeling of being in relational stream, at the same time we discovered that we were not recognized by the other members of this movement. Isn’t it a problem of the ‘network’? From the very beginning of our artistic activity we worked as international artists and it was really important for us to feel that we belong to the “tendency”, that we were a part of this movement, that we were able to see who goes by, but often, paradoxically, we turned out to be in the “wrong” context. We have been frequently invited to the international video festivals, which at times were successful, although we have been invited because we use video in our works:
N.B.: Similarly you might have been invited because you use the videocamera “Sony”.
M.K.: That’s right. And in the other case, because we are Ukrainians. But does it have anything to do with our artistic practice? We only use video in our works. We are not video artists, our artistic experiments are entirely different. Many European art forums are pretty dull in this respect. They constrain genres, i.e. video, audio and so on. I guess, that this problem is the problem of obtaining of a relevant background (and of accessibility to the relevant channels) appears to be the basic one for the contemporary artist, since artist is “possible” when he is placed in the proper environment.
N.B.: I got your point. The problem is to become “visible”, that provides for setting up communication with like-minded people, arrangement of travels, and an active interaction. Actually, this is very simple. One could have an opportunity to invite counterparts and go out. Certainly, one can create a smashing art inside of the room, but at a certain point it should become visible, be exhibited. It is also important from the standpoint of reviewing of personal ideas. I made pals with a lot of artists in the early 90-s, whose approaches to art have been strongly changed, ever since, owing to the impact of the other artists, and this “space for discussion”, which I constantly talk about, is of great importance.
M.K.: What is the role of interpretation in the “relational” theory? Does the focus displacement onto relations within the audience mean shifting of the center of gravity to the field of a description of events?
N.B.: I would compare interpretation with a map. You are drawing a map for someone to see what you can see. That’s it. Then somebody else will draw another map, which will be a bit different or completely different.
M.K. : A sort of navigation chart.
N.B.: Yes, it is. We constantly show up these charts to each other. When I am interpreting, I just want to show something to somebody. The art critic’s task is to show you, what you did not see earlier or show it in a different way, at another angle.
M.K.: In your lecture you draw attention to an issue of impacting of new technologies on contemporary art. Talking about art, which exists on the institutional level, we can emphasize an increase of the role of festivals of a new media, appealing to the blunt statement, that development of a contemporary art is determined by development of new technologies, and that all experiments in art lately have been related to involvement of new technologies in the artistic practice. What can you say about it?
N.B.: I think that new technologies create new structure of thinking. As a matter of fact, this new structure of thinking does not mandatory express itself through these technologies. Internet does not give a rise to artists, who use Internet. Internet creates new possibilities in our consciousness. New technologies penetrate art. This is an instrument which gives opportunity to do something different.
M.K.: I wonder whether you take part in the discussion about the status of contemporary art, provoked by Boudrillard, Foster and other of that ilk?
N.B.: Yes, I did it once. In a French weekly magazine. I will be sued by Jean Claire, in this regard. He charges me with slander. The case will come up for trial the day after tomorrow. I don’t care much though. I called him a fascist. But I do really think so!
M.K.: Generally speaking, is this a serious discussion?
N.B.: There is a tendency here, in France, to blow it up. You know, this is an old French tradition of an intellectual struggle. In France this discussion is more acute then anywhere.
M.K. : It might be more efficient.
N.B. : It is not very efficient, since those, who are involved in discussion, have a lack of arguments.
M.K.: Do you still keep on collaborating with “Documents”?
N.B. Yes, of course. I was the founder of this magazine.
M.K.: I am sorry, I did not know about it.
N.B. : Yes, I founded ” Documents” in 1992 and asked Eric to be my assistant, actually to provide me the help.
M.K. : How is it going, with the magazine?
N.B.: We planned to issue it during one year and then to publish collection of texts three months apart. To work rather as a publishing house, with subsequent annual issuing of magazines, than as an editorial office.
M.K.: Mr. Bourriaud, how are the things going with publication of our materials in “Documents”?
N.B.: What materials?
M.K. Mr. Troncy, your assistant, has made us a suggestion to write an article for “Documents” #11. We have made it and safely posted it to “Le Consortium”, with attached illustrative materials. In a little while, we have been advised that materials were received and that they were approved and would be published. Unfortunately, I have never had any news from Dijon ever since.
N.B.: But he didn’t even tell me anything!
M.K.: Might it be a problem of communication?..
N.B.: He really didn’t tell me anything. But now I will certainly make it clear. You see, I am in Paris, and he is in Dijon. He doesn’t always inform me, what is going on.
M.K.: Are you going to make curator’s projects shortly?
N.B.: I am currently working on French exhibition for ARCO. It’s not easy. Selection of participants, contacts with institutions etc: A lot of fuss.
M.K.: In our curators’ projects, I mean “4 rooms” and “Supermarket”, we intended to reach up an ultimate collaboration, aimed at that form of work , which does not emphasize distribution of roles, but establishes priorities of interactions inside of the team of curators-artists and joint decisions making. Does this approach to curators’ practice is apt to you or you prefer “tough” curating?
N.B.: I prefer a “collaborative” approach, on conditions of availability of powerful ideas, I hope… First of all, I need to have a general conception. Then a discussion starts out. I am more concerned not with creation of works, but with, I would say, a program, I would compare it with a computer program, with the same degree of flexibility.
M.K.: How does the team of artists look like? I mean those who you, actually, work with. Who are those artists you basically work with?
N.B.: Regardless that I am working with artists of both 60-s and 70-s, I find it more attractive to do something with artists of my generation and I do enjoy it, since that is what has not been packed up yet, I would say, and that what I know much less about. It occurs, that I work with it, analyze it, make findings, and all of a sudden I realize - Oh hell! - I was wrong, everything is different. And now I have to start over. I truly like it. This is a power, which demolishes my habits.
M.K.: You wrote about it in the “Relational Aesthetics”.
N.B. : Correct. Art constantly transforms me. I am not a historian, and I am not interested in writing good things about good artists.
M.K.: Who would you identify on today’s European art scene?
N.B.: Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick. New works of Pierre Josef are very interesting. By the way, his exhibition is supposed to be open today. You may see it, if you go to the airport right now.
M.K.: OK. I am leaving in 10 minutes. And where is the exhibition? In Paris?
N.B.: Yes, in “Air de Paris”.
M.K.: Good gallery.
N.B.: : Of Pierre Hyughe, although his last works are slightly straightforward.
M.K.: His exhibition of video projections in “Le Consortium” in 1997 was perfect.
N.B.: Agree. I have know these people almost 10 years, from the very beginning. However, I am interested in new artists.
M.K.: Let’s get back one more time to the “relational aesthetics”. Are you happy with the way a process of recognition and mastering of your conceptions is going on?
N.B.: Yes and no. Yes, because I am recognized in art circles, more and more artists start working this way. No, because there is a strong resistance from “external world”. All they want is - to copy objects. It’s really important for me, because this is an anthropological and sociological direction, and it, sooner or later, should be in the field of vision of institutions. It has not happened so far, but in the future…
M.K.: It may happen, but not shortly.
N.B.: Quite possible. Remember, for instance, how it was with the conceptual art.
M.K.: And what is the reason for a slow recognition of the relational art? Stereotypes? Art market?
N.B.: Main reason is a custom. People get accustomed to something and are scared to lose it. As far as the art market is concerned, it needs to have products to sell them out. In regard to relational artists, it is pretty hard to do. For instance, what is done by Rirkrit Tiravanija - how it could be sold? But anyway, it’s being sold, may be not very good, but it is.
M.K.: But may be these cases are exceptions? Can buying and selling of relational works become casual practice?
N.B.: Absolutely.
M.K.: But most people who buy artworks today are motivated by a wish to “possess a thing…”
N.B.: Moreover, they prefer to buy autographs. Not as much of a thing itself, as autographs of the famous artists. How one can recognize a bad collector? He seeks something typical for the specific artist. A good collector, on the contrary, looks for something specific - a work, that falls out from context of his activity. As for relational works, they are often “not signed”. Taking a look at works of Tiravanija, you will not exclaim: oh! this is the work of Tiravanija! But when you come to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, you recognize them at the first sight, after you’ve just come in the hall. This is a sort of mimetism.
Kiev, March 199
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- interview with Nicholas Bourriard ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
INTERVIEW OF MIROSLAV KULCHITSKY WITH NICOLAS BOURRIAUD
Miroslav Kulchitsky (M.K.): My first question is about your theoretical works, primarily “Relational Aesthetics”. As far as I know, this is one of the first attempts of an overall analysis of an artistic process in 90-s. What is the role of the “relational aesthetics” in theory of contemporary art? Do you believe, that in ten or twenty years conception of “relational” might be a key one in the analysis of art of 90-s?
Nicolas Bourriaud (N.B.): I can not say, that I am dealing with “an art of 90-s”. ” The art of 90-s” - it means nothing for me. It is quite possible, that this conception will become really significant in the next decade; it is hard to forecast. But I have not tried to typify art, I have tried to create a conception, which might be an instrument of analysis and criticism of art, which is currently being done, that’s it. But this is something, anyway, isn’t it?
M.K.: However, either way, you essentially apply to artistic practice of one generation, specifically to those, who appeared on the art scene in 90-s, don’t you?
N.B.: And how about Franz West? Or let say Felix Gonzales-Torres, both are prominent figures, talking about “the relational aspect”. There are some other artists of an elder generation, who we may also talk about. As a matter of fact, any historic period of time appears to be emphasis of one or two aspects of art. At present we emphasize “the relational aspect”, although this aspect existed earlier, therefore, this is not a pure outcome of 90-s. We have never paid attention to it, because it was not “the basic trend”. So, in 80-s the focus was made on an object and an object’s position. Nowadays, this is primarily “the relational aspect”. But, in 90-s, we might raise up the problem of object again. Every time this is an issue of priorities, in other words, what happens to be the main problematics for the time being.
M.K. : Therefore, you have never intended to identify a basic tendency in art recently?
N.B. : I would rather say no. I just wanted to find a common point of contiguity of diverse artistic practices and that point was “the relational idea”. My assignment has been not only the identification of a certain tendency, but rather the identification of basic problematics.
M.K. : The following issue is the issue of the artist and the context. From my point of view, it is worthwhile to review a contemporary artistic process in two basic aspects: “relational” and “contextual”:
N.B. : Which is mainly one and the same thing.
M.K. : Not exactly.
N.B. : Let us assume, they have something in common. What do relations eventually create? relations to the artistic work, institutions and so on? - Context.
M.K. : O.K. Let’s come back to my question. I have just remembered my talk with EricTroncy, which we had last spring in Dijon in “Le Consortium”. We talked mainly about our mutual works with Checkorsky, but also dwelled upon a global issue of the contextual factor in the artistic practice and of the role of a network in the contemporary art. At that time, Troncy’s position seemed to be slightly contradictory to me. On the one hand, he assured that the geographical remoteness can not be an essential problem for a contemporary artist, since if he is a part of “the network” of contemporary art, so he is provided with a proper existence, but at the same time he asks me puzzled questions, as: “What do you actually do in Odessa? As far as I know, there is no context for your art there’. What do you think about it? And how essentially important is the problem of artist and context and what is the role of a contemporary art network and interactions within this network?
N.B. : Location is certainly not a problem. The problem is when one is not involved in the network. There are locations, which are hard to cover by this, so to speak, “network”. And of course, one can work in Odessa and be a part of this “network”. And if any problems arise, it means that these problems are not mainly your problems, but problems of the network, since in this case very little depends on you.
M.K.: How would you evaluate operation of this “network”? Does it work well?
N.B. : Why not ? It works pretty efficiently.
M.K.: I remember my first impression of publication titled “Relational Aesthetics” in “Documents”. ‘This is exactly what we are doing now. Hit the target’. At the same time we have a feeling of a certain remoteness, since we have a feeling of being in relational stream, at the same time we discovered that we were not recognized by the other members of this movement. Isn’t it a problem of the ‘network’? From the very beginning of our artistic activity we worked as international artists and it was really important for us to feel that we belong to the “tendency”, that we were a part of this movement, that we were able to see who goes by, but often, paradoxically, we turned out to be in the “wrong” context. We have been frequently invited to the international video festivals, which at times were successful, although we have been invited because we use video in our works:
N.B.: Similarly you might have been invited because you use the videocamera “Sony”.
M.K.: That’s right. And in the other case, because we are Ukrainians. But does it have anything to do with our artistic practice? We only use video in our works. We are not video artists, our artistic experiments are entirely different. Many European art forums are pretty dull in this respect. They constrain genres, i.e. video, audio and so on. I guess, that this problem is the problem of obtaining of a relevant background (and of accessibility to the relevant channels) appears to be the basic one for the contemporary artist, since artist is “possible” when he is placed in the proper environment.
N.B.: I got your point. The problem is to become “visible”, that provides for setting up communication with like-minded people, arrangement of travels, and an active interaction. Actually, this is very simple. One could have an opportunity to invite counterparts and go out. Certainly, one can create a smashing art inside of the room, but at a certain point it should become visible, be exhibited. It is also important from the standpoint of reviewing of personal ideas. I made pals with a lot of artists in the early 90-s, whose approaches to art have been strongly changed, ever since, owing to the impact of the other artists, and this “space for discussion”, which I constantly talk about, is of great importance.
M.K.: What is the role of interpretation in the “relational” theory? Does the focus displacement onto relations within the audience mean shifting of the center of gravity to the field of a description of events?
N.B.: I would compare interpretation with a map. You are drawing a map for someone to see what you can see. That’s it. Then somebody else will draw another map, which will be a bit different or completely different.
M.K. : A sort of navigation chart.
N.B.: Yes, it is. We constantly show up these charts to each other. When I am interpreting, I just want to show something to somebody. The art critic’s task is to show you, what you did not see earlier or show it in a different way, at another angle.
M.K.: In your lecture you draw attention to an issue of impacting of new technologies on contemporary art. Talking about art, which exists on the institutional level, we can emphasize an increase of the role of festivals of a new media, appealing to the blunt statement, that development of a contemporary art is determined by development of new technologies, and that all experiments in art lately have been related to involvement of new technologies in the artistic practice. What can you say about it?
N.B.: I think that new technologies create new structure of thinking. As a matter of fact, this new structure of thinking does not mandatory express itself through these technologies. Internet does not give a rise to artists, who use Internet. Internet creates new possibilities in our consciousness. New technologies penetrate art. This is an instrument which gives opportunity to do something different.
M.K.: I wonder whether you take part in the discussion about the status of contemporary art, provoked by Boudrillard, Foster and other of that ilk?
N.B.: Yes, I did it once. In a French weekly magazine. I will be sued by Jean Claire, in this regard. He charges me with slander. The case will come up for trial the day after tomorrow. I don’t care much though. I called him a fascist. But I do really think so!
M.K.: Generally speaking, is this a serious discussion?
N.B.: There is a tendency here, in France, to blow it up. You know, this is an old French tradition of an intellectual struggle. In France this discussion is more acute then anywhere.
M.K. : It might be more efficient.
N.B. : It is not very efficient, since those, who are involved in discussion, have a lack of arguments.
M.K.: Do you still keep on collaborating with “Documents”?
N.B. Yes, of course. I was the founder of this magazine.
M.K.: I am sorry, I did not know about it.
N.B. : Yes, I founded ” Documents” in 1992 and asked Eric to be my assistant, actually to provide me the help.
M.K. : How is it going, with the magazine?
N.B.: We planned to issue it during one year and then to publish collection of texts three months apart. To work rather as a publishing house, with subsequent annual issuing of magazines, than as an editorial office.
M.K.: Mr. Bourriaud, how are the things going with publication of our materials in “Documents”?
N.B.: What materials?
M.K. Mr. Troncy, your assistant, has made us a suggestion to write an article for “Documents” #11. We have made it and safely posted it to “Le Consortium”, with attached illustrative materials. In a little while, we have been advised that materials were received and that they were approved and would be published. Unfortunately, I have never had any news from Dijon ever since.
N.B.: But he didn’t even tell me anything!
M.K.: Might it be a problem of communication?..
N.B.: He really didn’t tell me anything. But now I will certainly make it clear. You see, I am in Paris, and he is in Dijon. He doesn’t always inform me, what is going on.
M.K.: Are you going to make curator’s projects shortly?
N.B.: I am currently working on French exhibition for ARCO. It’s not easy. Selection of participants, contacts with institutions etc: A lot of fuss.
M.K.: In our curators’ projects, I mean “4 rooms” and “Supermarket”, we intended to reach up an ultimate collaboration, aimed at that form of work , which does not emphasize distribution of roles, but establishes priorities of interactions inside of the team of curators-artists and joint decisions making. Does this approach to curators’ practice is apt to you or you prefer “tough” curating?
N.B.: I prefer a “collaborative” approach, on conditions of availability of powerful ideas, I hope… First of all, I need to have a general conception. Then a discussion starts out. I am more concerned not with creation of works, but with, I would say, a program, I would compare it with a computer program, with the same degree of flexibility.
M.K.: How does the team of artists look like? I mean those who you, actually, work with. Who are those artists you basically work with?
N.B.: Regardless that I am working with artists of both 60-s and 70-s, I find it more attractive to do something with artists of my generation and I do enjoy it, since that is what has not been packed up yet, I would say, and that what I know much less about. It occurs, that I work with it, analyze it, make findings, and all of a sudden I realize - Oh hell! - I was wrong, everything is different. And now I have to start over. I truly like it. This is a power, which demolishes my habits.
M.K.: You wrote about it in the “Relational Aesthetics”.
N.B. : Correct. Art constantly transforms me. I am not a historian, and I am not interested in writing good things about good artists.
M.K.: Who would you identify on today’s European art scene?
N.B.: Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick. New works of Pierre Josef are very interesting. By the way, his exhibition is supposed to be open today. You may see it, if you go to the airport right now.
M.K.: OK. I am leaving in 10 minutes. And where is the exhibition? In Paris?
N.B.: Yes, in “Air de Paris”.
M.K.: Good gallery.
N.B.: : Of Pierre Hyughe, although his last works are slightly straightforward.
M.K.: His exhibition of video projections in “Le Consortium” in 1997 was perfect.
N.B.: Agree. I have know these people almost 10 years, from the very beginning. However, I am interested in new artists.
M.K.: Let’s get back one more time to the “relational aesthetics”. Are you happy with the way a process of recognition and mastering of your conceptions is going on?
N.B.: Yes and no. Yes, because I am recognized in art circles, more and more artists start working this way. No, because there is a strong resistance from “external world”. All they want is - to copy objects. It’s really important for me, because this is an anthropological and sociological direction, and it, sooner or later, should be in the field of vision of institutions. It has not happened so far, but in the future…
M.K.: It may happen, but not shortly.
N.B.: Quite possible. Remember, for instance, how it was with the conceptual art.
M.K.: And what is the reason for a slow recognition of the relational art? Stereotypes? Art market?
N.B.: Main reason is a custom. People get accustomed to something and are scared to lose it. As far as the art market is concerned, it needs to have products to sell them out. In regard to relational artists, it is pretty hard to do. For instance, what is done by Rirkrit Tiravanija - how it could be sold? But anyway, it’s being sold, may be not very good, but it is.
M.K.: But may be these cases are exceptions? Can buying and selling of relational works become casual practice?
N.B.: Absolutely.
M.K.: But most people who buy artworks today are motivated by a wish to “possess a thing…”
N.B.: Moreover, they prefer to buy autographs. Not as much of a thing itself, as autographs of the famous artists. How one can recognize a bad collector? He seeks something typical for the specific artist. A good collector, on the contrary, looks for something specific - a work, that falls out from context of his activity. As for relational works, they are often “not signed”. Taking a look at works of Tiravanija, you will not exclaim: oh! this is the work of Tiravanija! But when you come to the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, you recognize them at the first sight, after you’ve just come in the hall. This is a sort of mimetism.
Kiev, March 199
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You’re currently reading “ article- interview with Nicholas Bourriard ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
def- relational aesthetics
October Magazine, 110
There was this term “relational aesthetics” critics threw around in the 90’s to explain the type of art that was being made. The idea of relationship to objects in the carrying of meaning. Could that be similar to what Hayles was talking about in explaining quantum physics - the objects aren’t of focus any longer but the relationships between them?
I am just going to do a google search for that term and see what I come up with.
There was this term “relational aesthetics” critics threw around in the 90’s to explain the type of art that was being made. The idea of relationship to objects in the carrying of meaning. Could that be similar to what Hayles was talking about in explaining quantum physics - the objects aren’t of focus any longer but the relationships between them?
I am just going to do a google search for that term and see what I come up with.
article- Laurie Parsons Vanished Artist
Dematerial girl - Whatever Happened To - Biography
ArtForum, April, 2003
Find More Results for: “laurie parsons ”
The challenge to…
Existential theory:…
2010
Just pathetic: Michael…
LAURIE PARSONS made a modest stir in the mid-’80s with her ephemeral interventions. Less than a decade later, she had all but vanished from sight. Another testament to the brutal vagaries of artistic success? Not exactly:
BOB NICKAS’s year-by-year chronicle of the dematerialization of an art career puts Parsons’s disappearing act at the center of her project.
1986-87
An artist sends her slides to a gallery and is asked to take part in a group show. (And how often does that happen? Does never sound about right?) She exhibits unaltered found objects in the show, most memorably two metal patio chairs stacked one on top of the other, paint-flecked and rusted, holding a package wrapped in plain brown paper. Seen up against all the shiny new objects on display in galleries at the time, the work takes me by surprise. What’s in that box? And who left it there? The artist, I’m told, doesn’t make anything at all. Her name is Laurie Parsons, and she collects things on walks through natural, industrial, and urban areas–mostly in northern New Jersey– brings them back to her studio, and lives with them for a while. Individually photographed pieces of wood, all dated 1986, account for one full sheet of slides. Parsons later writes that she was “interested in the presence they had that I found as powerful as that of a piece of art.”
1988
A one-person show at Lorence-Monk Gallery, of objects collected over the course of a year. They are placed directly on the floor around the perimeter of the room in the order in which Parsons encountered them. A pile of charcoal, a weathered coil of rope, a battered suitcase, a yellow nylon noose, an uprooted log, and more. She later describes one particularly cryptic object, from 1987, as “an inverted triangle formed by three lengths of a bed frame with the two longer sides crossed at the bottom, which is titled V, to recall the Thomas Pynchon novel.” No one, if you hadn’t already guessed, buys anything.
Intent on opening up a greater engagement with viewers, Parsons shifts from gathering individual objects to large sections of the landscape. Field of Rubble, 1988, is drawn from a fifteen-hundred-square-foot plateau beside the Hudson River where rubble mixed with such oddities as “packets of soy sauce, keys, butts of lottery tickets,” the artist recalls. “I spent weeks collecting the detritus, to later entirely cover the floor of a gallery.” My immediate take is Smithson, entropy, non-sites, and a freewheeling spirit of adventure more ‘6os than ’80s–a search for realism through the thing itself. About a year later, a worker at a storage facility will go into her unit, open up some of the containers, and, finding what seems to be merely gravel and grimy trash (in actuality, Field of Rubble), throw all of it away.
1989
Rolf Ricke, whose Cologne gallery was one of the first European venues for artists such as Barry LeVa, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier, presents a Laurie Parsons exhibition. All the pieces from her New York debut are shown. This time, however, someone walks in and, with the idea of keeping the show together as a complete installation, buys everything. His purchase, followed by those of a few other intrepid collectors, will lead Parsons to request that dealers no longer offer anything of hers for sale.
1990
A card comes in the mail, blank except for the name Lorence-Monk at the bottom, along with the gallery’s address and phone number. This is Parsons’s third solo show, and yet her name does not appear on the announcement, nor do opening or closing dates. The gallery has been retouched with a fresh coat of paint and the lighting has been redone, but the rooms are completely empty. She would later remark, “I felt it essential that I consider the gallery itself, rather than continue to unquestioningly use it as a context. With its physical space and intricate social organization, it is as real, and as meaningful, as the artwork it houses and markets.” I pass more than a few confused visitors and note that Parsons has enacted a reversal of sorts of Robert Barry’s famous 1969 piece Closed Gallery. She eventually removes the show from her bio, later saying that it felt “righter as opposed to wronger” to leave it off.
By year’s end, Parsons considers installing a videocamera in her bedroom/studio to transmit “live images continuously for several weeks into a gallery….In some ways this project will recall the American Family television broadcasts of the Loud family in the early 1970s, but I will be alone with the camera and, unrecorded, the documentation will only exist in real time. I will try to be unaffected by the camera as I pursue my habitual activities. If I am out, the image will be of the unoccupied room, and at night, when the public venue is closed, the images will continue to be transmitted, though no one will be present to see them.”
1991
Udo Kittelmann offers Parsons a show at the Forum Kunsr Rottweil. She proposes to move herself and a few personal belongings into the exhibition space for the seven weeks scheduled and to work in a local psychiatric hospital. Unable to speak German, she immerses herself in the language. She will ultimately split her time between the museum, the hospital, and a school for developmentally disabled children. Little by little, people come by to see this person living in the museum, many of whom have never before been inside. Parsons leaves the door unlocked and talks with everyone from the woman who owns a nearby bakery to a drunken man banging on the door late at night. Parsons had worded the announcement for the show to include her name, that of the curator, and Rottweiler Burger–the people of Rottweil. At a big closing party it seems as if the entire town has turned out.
Invited to create a work for a Paris gallery during the winter, she proposes that the glass from the skylights be removed for the duration of the show–”it would just open things up to the sky.” Faced with the possibility of rain and snow, the gallery declines.
1992
Parsons participates in “The Big Nothing” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Most of the artists play hide-and-seek with their work, installing pieces on the ceiling or in other unlikely locations. Parsons contributes a stack of dollar bills about four inches high (the museum provides half of the three hundred dollars) and tells the guards not to interfere when people avail themselves of the piece. It quickly disappears.
1994
Asked to enter a competition for a sculpture park in Nordhorn, Germany, Parsons visits the site and comes away with a number of ideas, some of which are completely fantastical, with no hope of being realized. “I had the thought that the moon should be brought to settle over Nordhorn…. I do have issues with the format of proposals and art. What do you want? Make it. Pay for it. Anyway, this thought was not as tongue in cheek as it may sound. I meant it with warm feelings. Bring the moon to hang over Nordhorn each night that you may, that it is visible. I meant a sincere level of poetry here.” After seeing Joris Ivens’s film Rain (1929), and one by Kenneth Anger with fountains (Eaux d’artiflce [1953]), she suggests “a fountain that goes straight up.” My favorite idea, part fairy tale, part Thoreau, had implications for all her work to date. She proposed that visitors to the park be told she had camped there for an entire year. “What would it matter if I didn’t? Indeed, isn’t that somewhat more interesting? Pe ople would bring their imagination to the project, regardless of whether or not I actually had been there. And it would be a departure for me from my rigid ‘real’ investigations of the past. Is not ‘deception,’ subterfuge, also real?”
From this point on, Parsons no longer participates in exhibitions, although a project developed with the New Museum is ongoing since ‘92. That institution, like most, had an unspoken policy that guards shouldn’t volunteer opinions about the works being shown; if they spoke with visitors at all, it was to ensure that the art was neither touched nor photographed. When curator Laura Trippi asks Parsons to propose a project for the educational component of the New Museum’s exhibition “The Spatial Drive”), to think about how the show could be presented to the public, she recalls a recent experience there: “I had a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in the New Museum benefit; a friend visited and told me about listening to a guard go on and on to a visitor about the plywood. How ridiculous he had thought it was, and then how it grew on him. It was very clear to me what to suggest; this guard, Kimball Augustus, had already taken it upon himself to express stuff about the work. We spent a good year having the guards and admissions-desk staffers do studio visits where possible, or have museum meetings with participating artists, or at the very least full presentations of their work.” The security and admissions staff, having been given an opportunity to meet artists before shows open, visit studios, and learn about works the y would otherwise simply be guarding or merely selling tickets to see, are able to directly engage the public during each exhibition.
1994-PRESENT
Having come to the realization that “art must spread into other realms, into spirituality and social giving,” Parsons leaves the art world behind and focuses her energies on her own personal writing and on social work: interviewing children for a study on physical and mental health at a Newark hospital; taking part in an art program for adolescents with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations; most recently, working with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Her advocacy for the rights of the mentally ill who are homeless grew out of an encounter with a man she’d always seen around Hoboken. Shocked to discover that he’d lived in a tent for over ten years, Parsons spent months to help him find a subsidized apartment of his own. She tells me that what she learned about the long bureaucratic process will at least make it easier the next time.
Over the years, Parsons has kept a journal, which has evolved from more diaristic entries to “an abstract collecting of works and phrases.” She says that she collects words the way she used to collect objects, but that the writing is for herself and isn’t meant to be published–at least not in her lifetime. We meet in a park near my house to talk, but I don’t take notes. I mention that we’ll probably need to get together again, and she suggests that if I’m not clear about anything I can just make it up. Looking back on the afternoon, it’s something else she said that I can’t get of my mind: She never tells people about having been an artist. So when I ask if she’ll actually read this article, her answer comes as no surprise.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- Laurie Parsons Vanished Artist ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: about
ArtForum, April, 2003
Find More Results for: “laurie parsons ”
The challenge to…
Existential theory:…
2010
Just pathetic: Michael…
LAURIE PARSONS made a modest stir in the mid-’80s with her ephemeral interventions. Less than a decade later, she had all but vanished from sight. Another testament to the brutal vagaries of artistic success? Not exactly:
BOB NICKAS’s year-by-year chronicle of the dematerialization of an art career puts Parsons’s disappearing act at the center of her project.
1986-87
An artist sends her slides to a gallery and is asked to take part in a group show. (And how often does that happen? Does never sound about right?) She exhibits unaltered found objects in the show, most memorably two metal patio chairs stacked one on top of the other, paint-flecked and rusted, holding a package wrapped in plain brown paper. Seen up against all the shiny new objects on display in galleries at the time, the work takes me by surprise. What’s in that box? And who left it there? The artist, I’m told, doesn’t make anything at all. Her name is Laurie Parsons, and she collects things on walks through natural, industrial, and urban areas–mostly in northern New Jersey– brings them back to her studio, and lives with them for a while. Individually photographed pieces of wood, all dated 1986, account for one full sheet of slides. Parsons later writes that she was “interested in the presence they had that I found as powerful as that of a piece of art.”
1988
A one-person show at Lorence-Monk Gallery, of objects collected over the course of a year. They are placed directly on the floor around the perimeter of the room in the order in which Parsons encountered them. A pile of charcoal, a weathered coil of rope, a battered suitcase, a yellow nylon noose, an uprooted log, and more. She later describes one particularly cryptic object, from 1987, as “an inverted triangle formed by three lengths of a bed frame with the two longer sides crossed at the bottom, which is titled V, to recall the Thomas Pynchon novel.” No one, if you hadn’t already guessed, buys anything.
Intent on opening up a greater engagement with viewers, Parsons shifts from gathering individual objects to large sections of the landscape. Field of Rubble, 1988, is drawn from a fifteen-hundred-square-foot plateau beside the Hudson River where rubble mixed with such oddities as “packets of soy sauce, keys, butts of lottery tickets,” the artist recalls. “I spent weeks collecting the detritus, to later entirely cover the floor of a gallery.” My immediate take is Smithson, entropy, non-sites, and a freewheeling spirit of adventure more ‘6os than ’80s–a search for realism through the thing itself. About a year later, a worker at a storage facility will go into her unit, open up some of the containers, and, finding what seems to be merely gravel and grimy trash (in actuality, Field of Rubble), throw all of it away.
1989
Rolf Ricke, whose Cologne gallery was one of the first European venues for artists such as Barry LeVa, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier, presents a Laurie Parsons exhibition. All the pieces from her New York debut are shown. This time, however, someone walks in and, with the idea of keeping the show together as a complete installation, buys everything. His purchase, followed by those of a few other intrepid collectors, will lead Parsons to request that dealers no longer offer anything of hers for sale.
1990
A card comes in the mail, blank except for the name Lorence-Monk at the bottom, along with the gallery’s address and phone number. This is Parsons’s third solo show, and yet her name does not appear on the announcement, nor do opening or closing dates. The gallery has been retouched with a fresh coat of paint and the lighting has been redone, but the rooms are completely empty. She would later remark, “I felt it essential that I consider the gallery itself, rather than continue to unquestioningly use it as a context. With its physical space and intricate social organization, it is as real, and as meaningful, as the artwork it houses and markets.” I pass more than a few confused visitors and note that Parsons has enacted a reversal of sorts of Robert Barry’s famous 1969 piece Closed Gallery. She eventually removes the show from her bio, later saying that it felt “righter as opposed to wronger” to leave it off.
By year’s end, Parsons considers installing a videocamera in her bedroom/studio to transmit “live images continuously for several weeks into a gallery….In some ways this project will recall the American Family television broadcasts of the Loud family in the early 1970s, but I will be alone with the camera and, unrecorded, the documentation will only exist in real time. I will try to be unaffected by the camera as I pursue my habitual activities. If I am out, the image will be of the unoccupied room, and at night, when the public venue is closed, the images will continue to be transmitted, though no one will be present to see them.”
1991
Udo Kittelmann offers Parsons a show at the Forum Kunsr Rottweil. She proposes to move herself and a few personal belongings into the exhibition space for the seven weeks scheduled and to work in a local psychiatric hospital. Unable to speak German, she immerses herself in the language. She will ultimately split her time between the museum, the hospital, and a school for developmentally disabled children. Little by little, people come by to see this person living in the museum, many of whom have never before been inside. Parsons leaves the door unlocked and talks with everyone from the woman who owns a nearby bakery to a drunken man banging on the door late at night. Parsons had worded the announcement for the show to include her name, that of the curator, and Rottweiler Burger–the people of Rottweil. At a big closing party it seems as if the entire town has turned out.
Invited to create a work for a Paris gallery during the winter, she proposes that the glass from the skylights be removed for the duration of the show–”it would just open things up to the sky.” Faced with the possibility of rain and snow, the gallery declines.
1992
Parsons participates in “The Big Nothing” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Most of the artists play hide-and-seek with their work, installing pieces on the ceiling or in other unlikely locations. Parsons contributes a stack of dollar bills about four inches high (the museum provides half of the three hundred dollars) and tells the guards not to interfere when people avail themselves of the piece. It quickly disappears.
1994
Asked to enter a competition for a sculpture park in Nordhorn, Germany, Parsons visits the site and comes away with a number of ideas, some of which are completely fantastical, with no hope of being realized. “I had the thought that the moon should be brought to settle over Nordhorn…. I do have issues with the format of proposals and art. What do you want? Make it. Pay for it. Anyway, this thought was not as tongue in cheek as it may sound. I meant it with warm feelings. Bring the moon to hang over Nordhorn each night that you may, that it is visible. I meant a sincere level of poetry here.” After seeing Joris Ivens’s film Rain (1929), and one by Kenneth Anger with fountains (Eaux d’artiflce [1953]), she suggests “a fountain that goes straight up.” My favorite idea, part fairy tale, part Thoreau, had implications for all her work to date. She proposed that visitors to the park be told she had camped there for an entire year. “What would it matter if I didn’t? Indeed, isn’t that somewhat more interesting? Pe ople would bring their imagination to the project, regardless of whether or not I actually had been there. And it would be a departure for me from my rigid ‘real’ investigations of the past. Is not ‘deception,’ subterfuge, also real?”
From this point on, Parsons no longer participates in exhibitions, although a project developed with the New Museum is ongoing since ‘92. That institution, like most, had an unspoken policy that guards shouldn’t volunteer opinions about the works being shown; if they spoke with visitors at all, it was to ensure that the art was neither touched nor photographed. When curator Laura Trippi asks Parsons to propose a project for the educational component of the New Museum’s exhibition “The Spatial Drive”), to think about how the show could be presented to the public, she recalls a recent experience there: “I had a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in the New Museum benefit; a friend visited and told me about listening to a guard go on and on to a visitor about the plywood. How ridiculous he had thought it was, and then how it grew on him. It was very clear to me what to suggest; this guard, Kimball Augustus, had already taken it upon himself to express stuff about the work. We spent a good year having the guards and admissions-desk staffers do studio visits where possible, or have museum meetings with participating artists, or at the very least full presentations of their work.” The security and admissions staff, having been given an opportunity to meet artists before shows open, visit studios, and learn about works the y would otherwise simply be guarding or merely selling tickets to see, are able to directly engage the public during each exhibition.
1994-PRESENT
Having come to the realization that “art must spread into other realms, into spirituality and social giving,” Parsons leaves the art world behind and focuses her energies on her own personal writing and on social work: interviewing children for a study on physical and mental health at a Newark hospital; taking part in an art program for adolescents with a history of psychiatric hospitalizations; most recently, working with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. Her advocacy for the rights of the mentally ill who are homeless grew out of an encounter with a man she’d always seen around Hoboken. Shocked to discover that he’d lived in a tent for over ten years, Parsons spent months to help him find a subsidized apartment of his own. She tells me that what she learned about the long bureaucratic process will at least make it easier the next time.
Over the years, Parsons has kept a journal, which has evolved from more diaristic entries to “an abstract collecting of works and phrases.” She says that she collects words the way she used to collect objects, but that the writing is for herself and isn’t meant to be published–at least not in her lifetime. We meet in a park near my house to talk, but I don’t take notes. I mention that we’ll probably need to get together again, and she suggests that if I’m not clear about anything I can just make it up. Looking back on the afternoon, it’s something else she said that I can’t get of my mind: She never tells people about having been an artist. So when I ask if she’ll actually read this article, her answer comes as no surprise.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- Laurie Parsons Vanished Artist ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: about
bib- essays on blurring art and life
http://books.google.ca/books?vid=ISBN0520240790&id=HMKyDQr4kHEC&pg=PR5&lpg=PR5&ots=qXte8sVKRy&dq=Essays+on+the+Blurring+of+Art+and+Life&sig=B-Rlkl921l0gHtQVaaWjCENul9I
def- the term INTERMEDIA
“The term intermedia implies fluidity and simultaneity of roles. When art is only one of several possible functions a situation may have, it loses its privileged status and becomes, so to speak, a lowercase attribute…We are not used to thinking like this, all at once, or nonhierarchically, but the intermedialist does it naturally. Context rather than category. Flow rather than work of art.” (Allan Kaprow)
article- Some call it Art
article- Some call it Art
Gregory Sholette
Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other’s face: what am I worth? - Balzac
Western culture has, at least since the enlightenment, defined the artist as set apart from the rest of society. The best known version of this artistic autonomy is the constitution of the solitary genius. Today, that imaginary realm of independence is increasingly visible as an ideological construction. Yet, like other myths, including those of nationalism and race, the manifest falsity of artistic autonomy remains operative within specific circles as a mechanism of control (As Slavoj Zizek quips, the subject of ideology knows very well, but… [1] ). The target of this control is the potential power to excel management, something all creative work represents. By necessity, this control includes the administration of the working artist herself, a practice that dates back at least as far as Plato’s writings about the ideal republic. Curiously, the idea of artistic autonomy has played a dual role in this regulatory logic. This separation presents a symbol of transcendent freedom that has been especially useful to bourgeois ideology.
Art and museum culture is the secular religion of capitalism. It provides a space for inner meaning in an otherwise spiritually empty world. The return of Art for art’s sake as exemplified by the neo-conservatism of critic David Hickey proves just how durable this mythology can be. At the same time, the idea of autonomy implies that art, as well as labor, can stand alone and be self-sufficient from the managerial class. This is the version of autonomy that draws my attention here. The question I pose asks if it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to retool the bankrupt idea of artistic autonomy, not as a means of withdrawing once more into a closed-off aesthetic sovereignty, but instead as a model for sedition, intervention and ultimately political transformation that reaches beyond the realm of art itself. If such a redemption is conceivable, it first requires a final emptying-out and decomposition of artistic autonomy as a bourgeois ideology. That task raises another set of questions. How and for whom is this evident fiction useful? Perhaps this is more clearly stated in terms of when is the term art invoked and in whose presence? It is an inquiry that can not be addressed without taking into account the social and economic changes taking place at both the local and international level that are in turn directly affecting the actual practices of artists themselves. This transformation is most evident in the cultural climate of the United States.
Despite the so-called “boom” years of the 1980s or the purported “new” economy of the 1990s, most working people in the United States today are financially worse off than their counterparts of the 1960s who enjoyed far more evenly distributed income levels, lower housing costs, and strong welfare support systems. [2] According to economist Doug Henwood “Overwork is at least as characteristic of the labor market now as is underwork. Nearly twice as many people hold down multiple jobs as are involuntarily limited to part-time work (7.8 million vs. 4.3 million) - and well over half the multiply employed hold at least one full-time job.” [3] Facing the dismantling of the so-called safety net and increasing unemployment, workers were forced to compete with each other and with overseas labor while intensifying productivity. Longer work hours and multiple job holdings now extend the work-week beyond the forty hour limit once fought and died over by working class movements in the nineteenth century.
Artists, especially sculptors, painters, and crafts people, are in an even poorer state than most working people in the United States, especially when compared to other specialized professionals. While the overall artist population has grown considerably (doubling between 1970 and 1990 [4]) and while some 164 programs offering graduate and undergraduate art degrees became available in 1980, the actual median income of visual artists today remains concentrated in the 10,000 to 20,000 dollar range, not enough even to afford housing in cities like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. [5] In addition, the rate of unemployment for artists during the past few decades has averaged about twice that of other professional workers. [6] Since approximately half earned less than $3000 from their art and a quarter earned only $500 from art sales in 1990, not surprisingly, most have little choice but to work several jobs, often in an alltogether different field, in order to maintain a close to living wage. [7] The “drop-out” rate among artists is also high and unlike in other professions carries a financial reward. According to an unpublished study, one third of those who graduated from a major U.S. art school in 1963 had given up making art by 1981 and were actually earning more money than those who continued being artists. [8]
As difficult as it has always been to be a practising artist in the U.S., artists today must also contend with the withering of public support and an increasing dependency on private money. In practical terms this means learning how to market oneself. While museums and other support structures for artists claim cultural autonomy from capital, as Chin-tao Wu points out, the new corporate enterprise culture only appears to be at odds with the institutions of art. “Indeed multinational museums and multinational corporations have become in many ways inseparable bed-fellows. Despite the fact their proclaimed aims and purposes may be worlds apart, they share an insatiable appetite for improving their share of a competitive global market, their ambition involves them in physical expansion and the occupation of space in other countries. It also involves making aggressive deals in an open marketplace and maneuvering capital (money and/or art) across different borders.” [9]
Perhaps this new global cultural hegemony is best summarized by one of its own: the director of the Guggenheim Museum chain Thomas Krens who, without a trace of self-doubt, boasts of the museum’s corporate alliance stating, “We have put this program of global partners in place, where we have long-term associations with institutions like Deutsche Bank and Hugo Boss and Samsung.” If the museums and palaces of high culture have appeared in the past as a shelter for civic life, set apart from the vulgarities of capitalism, less than two decades later the effect of the massive economic restructuring that started in the 1980s is evinced by the increasingly eager and unashamed embrace not only of corporate money but also of corporate values. This open display of affection for the private sector flows not only from artists and museum administrators, but also from institutions of public education, civic welfare, even criminal incarceration. [10] Nor is this condition of privatization likely to remain localized within the United States or Great Britain. As the entrepreneurial model gradually takes hold in museums as well as state and civic institutions of every kind, the aura of artistic autonomy cannot help but be jeopardized. According to cultural critic Masao Miyoshi, under pressure from the totalizing influence of trans-corporate capitalism: “…museums, exhibitions, and theatrical performances will be swiftly appropriated by tourism and other forms of commercialism. No matter how subversive at the beginning, variants will be appropriated aggressively by branches of consumerism”. [11]
Even if Myoshi’s bleak prophecy is not our collective future, at least in the United States the effect of corporate hegemony has already forced into view a confrontation between the symbolic position and actual practices of art. It is most apparent when one looks at changes in the institution that occupies the symbolic center of American high culture: The National Endowment for the Arts. Recently the National Endowment or NEA has been involved in heavy campaigning to regain the support of the United States Congress and the populace at large. It has approached this by attempting to prove that art is not a purely symbolic or autonomous activity, but is instead a kind of labor that contributes to the overall well-being of society in direct ways, including public education and community service. A recent document entitled the American Canvas Report, sponsored by the NEA supplies the blueprint for a post-Cold War approach to public patronage in which artists and arts agencies are encouraged to venture into: “a broad range of community-based activities. In 1996, fully two-thirds of the 50 largest LAAs [local arts agencies] addressed five or more of the [following] issues: Community Development Issues, Cultural/Racial Awareness, Youth at Risk, Economic Development, Crime Prevention, Illiteracy, AIDS, Environment, Substance Abuse, Housing, Teen Pregnancy and, Homelessness”. [12]
One post-script to artistic autonomy therefore is the recognition of the artist as social worker. However, the indirect consequences of this cultural utilitarianism in a capitalist economy are just as predictable. Let me again quote from the NEA American Canvas Report which celebrates this shift in the most unabashed language: “While there are no one-size-fits-all models for the integration of the arts into community life, two areas in particular — urban revitalization and cultural tourism — are especially popular right now, and both were the subject of much attention at the American Canvas forums. In many respects, of course, revitalization and tourism are simply two sides of the same coin: as cities become more “livable” and more attractive, they’ll prove increasingly alluring to tourists, whose expenditures, in turn, will help revitalize cities. As mutually reinforcing pieces of the same puzzle, moreover, both urban revitalization and cultural tourism invite the participation of arts organizations. The arts can come to these particular “tables”, in other words, confident that they won’t be turned away.” [13]
Here is a new, post-public, post-cold-war artistic pragmatism. It accepts the need to “translate” the value of the arts into more general civic, social and educational terms that will in turn be more readily understood, by the general public and by their elected officials alike. Nevertheless, such phenomena as gentrification and the displacement of low income residents that accompanies the movement of artists into cities is one social problem not even on the NEA radar screen. Meanwhile, cultural tourism and community-based art practice must be thought of as a local consequence of the move towards a privatized and global economy. If the remnants of public, civic culture aim to make art appear useful to the voting population as a form of social service and tourism, then how long can the idea of artistic autonomy and its celebration of individual freedom, even in its current, transparently bankrupt form, remain useful to the de-territorialized needs of global capital? In other words, what position can artists expect to hold, symbolically and economically, in the coming, trans-national corporate hegemony?
In the universal language of finance, the “fine” arts make up a pretty thin slice of the overall leisure and entertainment industry [14]. Still the image of artistic freedom and autonomy has for some time now presented a colorful (if imaginary) life-style choice for the overstressed and over worked professional. (Consider the way lawyers, brokers and psychiatrists rush to buy “lofts” in gentrified art ghettos.) Yet that role may be on its way out as popular culture and advertising have come to bestow an artistic aura on basketball players, movie stars, rock musicians and now corporate entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is not the apparent autonomy of the artist but her actual productive constitution that, in terms of Hardt and Negri’s thesis, serves the global economy as the very prototype of the new worker. Far more than most other workers, artists are in fact trained - in fact train themselves - to adapt to changing and unstable economic conditions. Consider the way the artist is at once highly specialized, yet infinitely re-trainable, willing to volunteer enormous time and labor to generate cultural capital (that is typically accumulated by others), while in theory remaining subversive towards institutional power, even though seldom is the artist willing to subvert the power that most affects her: the art industry itself.
Privatization and the “new” economy also have other, more immediate consequences for artists who continue to think of themselves as autonomous producers that make art for galleries and museums. For one thing, expanded work schedules (in those other paid jobs that support one’s artistic career) simply allow less time for making art. This might be seen reflected even in the choice of materials contemporary artists’ employ. Think of easel painting, modeling in clay or casting in bronze. During the early twentieth century these were overpowered by more direct methods of art making such as collage, photography, steel welding and assemblage. As life (and production) speeds up, time-consuming methods are broken down or eliminated. Today, even these relatively instantaneous techniques for producing art require quantities of time beyond the means of many artists. For them, the computer combined with graphic applications is the art studio of our day. This is especially true in such hot real estate markets as New York City and is a logical extension of what the late artist and art historian Ian Burn describes as a “de-skilling” of artistic craft. Together with critic Lucy R. Lippard, Burn argues that in the 1960s conceptual art did away with artistic proficiency as a means of avoiding the commodification of art. According to Lippard, the process culminated in the total disappearance of the art object. [15] The unanticipated outcome of de-skilling is the merging of high and low art and a contemporary generation that serves as aesthetic service providers rather than object makers. [16] Art historian Brandon Taylor refers to some of this new de-skilled work as “slack art.” [17] The use of ephemeral materials, dead-pan performances and aimlessly shot video appears to avoid major investments of labor and materials while it thumbs its nose at the over-produced art of the late 1980s (such as Koons, Holzer, or Longo). Yet with a slight shift of context, “slack art” becomes indistinguishable from many other informal practices among people who do not identify themselves as artists. For example, how, other than by location, is an arrangement of products purchased through a retail catalog or borrowed from someone’s attic any different from the work of Jason Rhoades, Laurie Parsons or Sylvie Fleury? The Duchampian argument that context is everything no longer satisfies. While readymades provoked questions about the definition of art by working against a normalized artistic tradition inside the museum, in the current dissipated, post, post-modern world, such work is indistinguishable from advertising and pop-culture that has already adopted the legacy of subversive art itself. When a prestigious museum like the Guggenheim displays motorcycles and Armani suits, is this not an inevitable response to the breakdown between the fine arts and other forms of artistic-like production taking place both inside and outside the museum?
Meanwhile, the publicity-machine that drives consumer culture has always required a great deal of moderately skilled, visual labor, even if this labor is repetitive and uninspired in nature. For every Marcel Breuer or Olivetti there is an army of lesser artisans who perceive graphic design not as a profession but as toil that is nevertheless still preferable to sheet-rocking apartments or waiting on tables. Graduates of fine art programs (artists) are finding employment laying-out innumerable retail catalogs, book covers, movie posters, liquor ads, travel brochures; and most of all producing website designs. Globalism accelerates this trend. As the borders that once separated national economies implode, the demand for design, packaging, and commodity labeling explodes and with it the job market for “creative” labor. This phenomena is already affecting academia, as evident from the growth of visual culture studies. Concurrently, at the level of artistic practice, a very small gap appears to separate the production of so-called fine art and that of commercial, visual culture. Simply from a practical perspective, the increasing throng of artists using digital technology in their art makes it impossible to draw an absolute line between the kind of artistic labor done for money and that performed in the service of fine art. Indeed, a new ethos appears to be emerging among some digital practitioners that sees no contradiction between an avant-garde world-view and entrepreneurial business skills. Like the early avant-garde, the post, post-modernist digital artist claims a new utopianism. The one crucial difference is that now avant-garde practice must also be viable as a business enterprise. By using modern marketing techniques, dot.com-gardism actually operates in a vanguard, productivist mode, treating the consumer as a producer, even as its artistic agenda mixes aesthetic play with profiteering. All of this puts a new spin on the classical avant-garde call to transform art into life, a point I will return to below. Yet, where does this leave the traditional idea of artistic autonomy? What purpose has artistic autonomy served the state, and is its practical demise truly a reason to celebrate?
According to enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, the special categorization of art as a human activity that transcends the material world depends upon an a priori separation between nature and culture. At the same time the artist can breach this divide through that singular person known as the genius. Perhaps the most influential art critic and theoretician of the post-war period, Clement Greenberg, made use of Kant’s aesthetic theories to articulate and ground his version of modernist art. If Kant “used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “withdrew much from its old jurisdiction” what was left was “all the more secure.” [18] The resulting art object affirms its own conditionality and celebrates its freedom - its autonomy - from representation by rejecting any association with literature or illusory space. Greenberg’s aesthetic axioms proved especially useful to post-war capitalism because, unlike the official culture of Stalinism or Maoism, modernism in Greenberg’s Kantian revision offered the intellectual an aura of imagined freedom from all social constraints. I say imagined because recent scholarship has uncovered historic alliances between Greenberg’s promotion of a modernist concept of autonomy and the cold war politics of the United States. [19] Today, supporting the autonomy of the artistic genius to ward off the chill of communism is no longer a viable rational for public art spending. Indirectly citing this dilemma, Bill Ivey, the outgoing Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently commented, “Cold War thinking lay just beneath the cultural policy of the last century”. [20] Public funding agencies, including the NEA, now must struggle to reestablish a rationale for government support of art even as citizenship is increasingly measured by one’s participation in the economy as a producer/consumer, rather than by transcendental beliefs such as nation. In this post-national environment, the very notion of artistic autonomy, together with art’s symbolic value, is bound to be both marginalized and absorbed by global marketing as one more brand for specialized leisure products.
There is a different approach to artistic practice that comes from the philosophical tradition of Hegel and Marx. Cultural critic Walter Benjamin, for example, called on artists and intellectuals to put themselves at the service of the working class in their struggle against capitalist exploitation, to make art that actively transformed artistic means of production. He cited as examples of this utilitarian art the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, Soviet newspapers that were authored by their readers, and the photomontages of John Heartfield. [21] Ironically, the avant-garde promise to drag art out of the museums and into life is today remarkably visible in all the wrong places. Museums and foundations now claim to nurture art as social activism, multiculturalism drives the cultural tourism industry and what remains of public funding agencies call on artists to end their isolation and become civil servants. In the post-Cold War and anti-socialist United States, the Left has joined the center-liberal establishment in its call for a utilitarian and serviceable art that integrates “the arts into community life”. [22] Meanwhile, if the private sector still upholds an idea of artistic autonomy, that altruism comes with a leash which discourages artists from overtly challenging the economic foundation of their patronage. In sum, the collapse of artistic autonomy would not be so profound or irreversible if not for the changes under way in the post-Cold War political economy. As already noted, one of these changes is the privatization of civic life and the disappearance of the nation-state. The other permutation is the generalization and visibility of art-like, creative production within the collective arena of mass culture.
In the past, such things as home made crafts, amateur photography (and pornography), self-published newsletters, fanzines and underground comics had little impact beyond their immediate community of producers and users. Today, an ever more accessible and sophisticated technology for manufacturing, copying, documenting and distributing “home-made” or informal art has dramatically ended that isolation. Today, one cannot escape the spread of this heterogeneous and informal art-like activity. It radiates from homes and offices, schools and streets, community centers and in cyberspace. Its contents are typically filled with fantasies drawn from popular entertainment as well as personal trivia and sentimental nostalgia. In form it can range from the whimsical to the banal and from the absurd to the obscene. It is a qualitative shift unique to the last ten years, and I will argue in a moment, the increased visibility of amateur and often collectivized cultural production is more than any other factor accelerating the withering of autonomous artistic practice as such.
The computer hacker mentality of today is not so far removed from the organized fence cutting tactics of farmers in Nebraska in the 1880s. Culture “Jamming” the system is not so different from the tactics of the Industrial Workers of the World who, at the turn of the century, battled anti-free speech laws in places like San Diego by overloading the local jails with arrested protestors. However, up to now these activities remain divided from each other, their political relationship fragmented and diffused. Yet even the most conservative analysis would find it difficult to ignore the expansion of unregulated and inventive activities made possible by the growing accessibility of communication and reproductive technologies. Without dismissing the enormous number of people still laboring in traditional manufacturing and agricultural industries, especially in developing countries, global capital’s dependency on communications technology virtually assures the spread of digital networks and information technologies. One of the tasks of activists must be to see to it that the market’s cellular and digital circulatory system is infected by the demands of non-technical laborers. Once again, it is less that art is being disseminated down into society from on high, than the social matrix is itself predicated upon a submerged collective creative capacity. As Negri and Hardt explain: “Labor is productive excess with respect to the existing order and the rules of its reproduction. This productive excess is at once the result of a collective force of emancipation and the substance of the new social virtuality of labor’s productive and liberatory capacities.” [23]
*Therefore, alongside the passive consumption of commodities and popular entertainment there emerges a different realm in which unofficial and informal cultural capacity is exercised. The more these informal cultural producers become aware of their own capacity for creative and transformative action, the more the privileged space once reserved for “trained” artists recedes. Already, this generalized artistic activity mixes together consumption, production and exchange as it recycles and redistributes, purchases and appropriates. It is evident when people download commercial music for
free, duplicate copyrighted images for personal use and in so many ways re-direct or simply loot institutional power. Many of these activities also circulate within ungoverned or ungovernable economic zones including flea markets or through the postal system or over the Internet in what I have described elsewhere as “creative dark matter.” [24] They vary in form from the criminal to the radical to the insipid. Each garners equal space within the expanded and informal cultural sphere. Thanks to the exploitative needs of global capital, the cost of making visible one’s subjective and creative excesses is falling. In theory it is a short distance from group visibility to collective autonomy.
A selective list of current art activist practices suggests that an informal political aesthetic is already in existence, much of it emerging from loosely structured autonomous collectives focused on production, distribution, intervention and disruption. In certain cases these groups are so interdisciplinary that the art world discourse just ignores them. This list would include some or all of the work of RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Reclaim the Streets (various locations, in both digital and actual spaces,) REPOhistory (the NYC based group co-founded by the author that makes site-specific public art about alternative histories), ABC No Rio (NYC space dedicated to all forms of counter-cultural practice, from music to graffiti to housing activism), Reverend Billy (also based in NYC, the “reverend” executes anti-corporate performances with his accomplices in Starbucks coffee shops and at the Disney Store on the new Times Square), Ultra-Red (a Los Angeles based group of audio-activists), The Center for Land Use Interpretation (also in LA with projects that produce tours of radioactive and ecologically damaged environments), Ne Pas Plier (French activists using art to focus attention on housing for guest workers), WochenKlausur (Austrian group that stages encounters between elected officials and marginalized peoples), A-Clip (Berlin-based media activists), Collectivo Cambalache (originally from Bogata, CC creates alternative exchange economies in public spaces), Temporary Services (disseminates art and information in Chicago streets using newspaper dispensers), Blackstone BicycleWorks/monk prakeet/Dan Peterman (a recycling, organic garden and art center on Chicago’s South Side), The Stockyard Institute (Jim Duignan works with urban school children in Chicago to produce “gang-proof” armored suits), and the group Ha Ha (Laurie Palmer and John Ploof develop projects on AIDS, ecology and housing in Chicago and elsewhere).
These informal, politicized micro-institutions have made art that infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate websites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for either art world discourse or private interests. At the same time, the pressures of privatization combined with a generalization of artistic activity that is most clearly visible in digital form, have sapped the words “art” and “artist” of their previously imagined autonomy. While Joseph Beuys prophesized that his social sculpture would transform everyone into an artist, the ordinary routines of the populace have done more to achieve that goal without professional artists to guide them. [25] What remains of artistic autonomy is now a specialized marketing tool of both the high-culture and mass media industries. As such, it now openly manifests itself for what it has been for some time - a label for a specific brand of cultural capital called “art”.
However, the closer this idea of autonomy nears extinction or outright exposure, the more interesting becomes the possibility of its rescue. Only when it has hit the floor and gone cold might a version of this archaic idea possibly be infused with new value. If Benjamin argued that only a redeemed mankind could hope to win back its entire historical legacy, our redemption of artistic autonomy could not be a nostalgic return to the past, especially not the disengaged and heroic individualism of modernism. Nor would it be grounded in either the Kantian ideal of disinterested beauty or the Hegelian or even Marxist notion of an evolving totality. Rather this autonomy would have to recognize the end of the once powerful contradictions between artist and society, nature and culture and individual and collective. This new, critical autonomy would not even be centered on artistic practice per se, but would recognize the already present potential for political and economic self-valorization inherent within contemporary social conditions. Instead of asking what is art, it would instead query what is politics? Instead of asking if “they are allowed to do that?” or worrying about the uncertain status of art’s social capital, this critical autonomy would proceed to activate cells of artistic producers not afraid to utilize and manipulate the entire range of culture making (and culture-thieving) technologies and strategies that are now multiplying within the circulatory system of the global body. The autonomous status of these informal working groups or cells might indeed leverage discursive power from the lingering aura of the Kantian/Greenbergian aesthetic. They could for example borrow the idea of freedom (exemplified by art) for doing politics. What a radical notion! [26] However, they would do so in a utilitarian (thus anti-Kantian) manner, not to insure art’s usefulness to the liberal, corporate state as much new genre public art appears to do, but as a model of political and economic self-valorization that is applicable for social transformation in the broadest sense. The point is to begin to recognize and bring to light what already exists and to re-direct or retool this so that its practitioners become self-conscious of their already present collectivity, a force potentially independent from what Negri and Hardt term the Empire. [27] Here a final displacement is possible. Politics superimposes itself at all levels as a practical art that is at the same time symbolic. But it does so only if we understand politics as the exploration of ideas, the pleasure of communication, the exchange of education, and the construction of fantasy, all within a radically defined social practice of collective, critical autonomy.
NOTES
[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 33.
[2] Lawrence Michel, Jared Bernstein and John Smitt, in State of Working American: (Economic Policy Institute: 2000).
[3] Doug Henwood, “How Jobless the Future?,” Left Business Observer #75 (Dec. 1996).
[4] Joan Jeffri and Robert Greenblatt in Artists Who Work with Their Hands: Painters, Sculptors, Craft Artists and Artist Printmakers: A Trend Report,, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts Research Division, (Washington: NEA, August 1994), p. 28.
[5] Note too that the US poverty level in 1998 for a family of four was $16,000 (US Dept of Labor) while the median income for painters and craft artists in 1990 was only $18,187. Compare this to the $36.942 average for professional workers in other fields. Jeffri & Greenblatt, p. 36.
[6] Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40, (Washington: NEA, 2000), p. 97.
[7] According to the same NEA report: The most frequent explanation provided by artists for holding multiple jobs was that they needed the additional earnings generated by the second jobs to meet their household’s expenses. This was the same reason most other professionals held a second job. Note that “Visual artists were almost three times as likely, on average, to have worked in the [professional] service industries than other artists (31% versus 11 %).” Ibid, pp. 44 - 46.
[8] A study of 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were tracked between 1963 to 1980 by researchers Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, Jacob W. Getzels and Stephen P. Kahn in Talent and Achievement (Chicago:1984, an unpublished report), p. 44.
[9] Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, (London: Verso 2001), p. 213.
[10] Consider the term cultural capital employed by Pierre Bourdieu. It is a phrase that appears to “save face” for some sort of sophisticated artistic practice, and yet implicitly acknowledges the triumph of the marketplace over every aspect of life. Consider also a recent report entitled Unseen Wealth: Report of the Brookings Task Force on Understanding Intangible Sources of Value by Margaret Blair and Steven Wallman in which the authors argue that “organizational and human capital, “goodwill” and other intangibles, as well as other items that are not usually viewed as “assets” are becoming the real sources of value in corporations.” The authors call on economists to use such “intangibles” for future analysis “as the dominant drivers of economic activity and wealth shift away from manufacturing toward information-based services”.
[11] Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State,” Critical Inquiry
[12] American Canvas Report, op. Cite.
[13] Ibid.
[14] The United States Entertainment business is ranked the 18th largest industry in Fortune Magazines’s Fortune 500 with Time Warner ranked the 128th largest corporation and Disney the 176th in the global top 500. To get a sense of how small the “high” art world is by comparison, contrast the combined annual revenue of $6,763,989 — based on total sales, receipts and shipments — from museums and historic sites in the U.S. to the nearly ten times larger revenue of $60,331,549 just for gambling, amusement and recreation spending.
[15] Ian Burn, “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (Or The Memories of an Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text (Fall 1981), pp. 49-65, and Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: the Disappearance of the Art Object (Praeger, 1973).
[16] Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere?” in October #80 (Spring 1997), pp. 11-116.
[17] Brandon Taylor , Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: Abrams,1995), p. 153.
[18] Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,” collected works, (Chicago: William Benton, 1952).
[19] Eva Cockroft “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum (June 1974), pp. 39-41, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[20] Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey speaking at the National Organization of Arts Organizations, Brooklyn, NY, June 2000
[21] Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1978).
[22] American Canvas Report, op. cite.
[23] Hardt and Negri, op. Cite., p. 357.
[24] See my essay, “Dark Matter, Las Agencias, and the Aesthetics of Tactical Embarrassment” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Politics, on-line at: www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/yomango/index.html
[25] It could be argued that it is precisely this Kantian/Greenbergian tradition that provided the theoretical framework for the self-analysis leading to a more politicized art practice, including the work of Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren and later the “institutional critique” of younger artists like Andrea Fraser and Renée Green. Without dismissing the logic of this claim, I have tried to show elsewhere that this approach gives far too little credit to non-art world influences, including politics and popular culture, on the work of these artists. See Gregory Sholette “News from Nowhere: Activist Art & After,” Third Text #45, (Winter, 1999), pp. 45-56. For a German version of this essay see the book “Metropolenkultur. Kunst und Kulturpolitik der 90er Jahre in den Zentren der Welt”, ed. by Jutta Held (Weimar, 2000)
[26] The School of the Art Institute’s student newspaper recently carried an article proclaiming that art was a “major force binding and guiding” a reawakening of political activism in the United States. While there is an old if unwritten history to this affiliation, the fact that young people are making these connections in the “heartland” of America is significant. Meanwhile, similar links between pirate radio broadcasters, puppeteers, culture-jammers, and direct action groups is apparent in all of the recent protests against the World Trade Organization. Joanne Hinkel, “How Art is Helping Activism” F Newsmagazine (October 2000), pp. 14-15.
[27] What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and redefined as a positive, political power…Empire can only isolate, divide, and segregate…the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of crossing and breaking down the limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command.” Negri and Hardt, op. cite., pp. 400-401. See also Gregory Sholette, “Counting On Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice,” Afterimage (November 1999), pp.18-20. #19 (Summer 1993), p.747.
Originally appeared in Eva Sturm / Stella Rollig (ed.), Dürfen die das? Kunst als sozialer Raum , Wien: Turia+Kant 2002, and online on eiPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) in January 2002.
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Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
Gregory Sholette
Isn’t it rather, all things considered, that I remain suspended on this question, whose answer I tirelessly seek in the other’s face: what am I worth? - Balzac
Western culture has, at least since the enlightenment, defined the artist as set apart from the rest of society. The best known version of this artistic autonomy is the constitution of the solitary genius. Today, that imaginary realm of independence is increasingly visible as an ideological construction. Yet, like other myths, including those of nationalism and race, the manifest falsity of artistic autonomy remains operative within specific circles as a mechanism of control (As Slavoj Zizek quips, the subject of ideology knows very well, but… [1] ). The target of this control is the potential power to excel management, something all creative work represents. By necessity, this control includes the administration of the working artist herself, a practice that dates back at least as far as Plato’s writings about the ideal republic. Curiously, the idea of artistic autonomy has played a dual role in this regulatory logic. This separation presents a symbol of transcendent freedom that has been especially useful to bourgeois ideology.
Art and museum culture is the secular religion of capitalism. It provides a space for inner meaning in an otherwise spiritually empty world. The return of Art for art’s sake as exemplified by the neo-conservatism of critic David Hickey proves just how durable this mythology can be. At the same time, the idea of autonomy implies that art, as well as labor, can stand alone and be self-sufficient from the managerial class. This is the version of autonomy that draws my attention here. The question I pose asks if it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to retool the bankrupt idea of artistic autonomy, not as a means of withdrawing once more into a closed-off aesthetic sovereignty, but instead as a model for sedition, intervention and ultimately political transformation that reaches beyond the realm of art itself. If such a redemption is conceivable, it first requires a final emptying-out and decomposition of artistic autonomy as a bourgeois ideology. That task raises another set of questions. How and for whom is this evident fiction useful? Perhaps this is more clearly stated in terms of when is the term art invoked and in whose presence? It is an inquiry that can not be addressed without taking into account the social and economic changes taking place at both the local and international level that are in turn directly affecting the actual practices of artists themselves. This transformation is most evident in the cultural climate of the United States.
Despite the so-called “boom” years of the 1980s or the purported “new” economy of the 1990s, most working people in the United States today are financially worse off than their counterparts of the 1960s who enjoyed far more evenly distributed income levels, lower housing costs, and strong welfare support systems. [2] According to economist Doug Henwood “Overwork is at least as characteristic of the labor market now as is underwork. Nearly twice as many people hold down multiple jobs as are involuntarily limited to part-time work (7.8 million vs. 4.3 million) - and well over half the multiply employed hold at least one full-time job.” [3] Facing the dismantling of the so-called safety net and increasing unemployment, workers were forced to compete with each other and with overseas labor while intensifying productivity. Longer work hours and multiple job holdings now extend the work-week beyond the forty hour limit once fought and died over by working class movements in the nineteenth century.
Artists, especially sculptors, painters, and crafts people, are in an even poorer state than most working people in the United States, especially when compared to other specialized professionals. While the overall artist population has grown considerably (doubling between 1970 and 1990 [4]) and while some 164 programs offering graduate and undergraduate art degrees became available in 1980, the actual median income of visual artists today remains concentrated in the 10,000 to 20,000 dollar range, not enough even to afford housing in cities like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco. [5] In addition, the rate of unemployment for artists during the past few decades has averaged about twice that of other professional workers. [6] Since approximately half earned less than $3000 from their art and a quarter earned only $500 from art sales in 1990, not surprisingly, most have little choice but to work several jobs, often in an alltogether different field, in order to maintain a close to living wage. [7] The “drop-out” rate among artists is also high and unlike in other professions carries a financial reward. According to an unpublished study, one third of those who graduated from a major U.S. art school in 1963 had given up making art by 1981 and were actually earning more money than those who continued being artists. [8]
As difficult as it has always been to be a practising artist in the U.S., artists today must also contend with the withering of public support and an increasing dependency on private money. In practical terms this means learning how to market oneself. While museums and other support structures for artists claim cultural autonomy from capital, as Chin-tao Wu points out, the new corporate enterprise culture only appears to be at odds with the institutions of art. “Indeed multinational museums and multinational corporations have become in many ways inseparable bed-fellows. Despite the fact their proclaimed aims and purposes may be worlds apart, they share an insatiable appetite for improving their share of a competitive global market, their ambition involves them in physical expansion and the occupation of space in other countries. It also involves making aggressive deals in an open marketplace and maneuvering capital (money and/or art) across different borders.” [9]
Perhaps this new global cultural hegemony is best summarized by one of its own: the director of the Guggenheim Museum chain Thomas Krens who, without a trace of self-doubt, boasts of the museum’s corporate alliance stating, “We have put this program of global partners in place, where we have long-term associations with institutions like Deutsche Bank and Hugo Boss and Samsung.” If the museums and palaces of high culture have appeared in the past as a shelter for civic life, set apart from the vulgarities of capitalism, less than two decades later the effect of the massive economic restructuring that started in the 1980s is evinced by the increasingly eager and unashamed embrace not only of corporate money but also of corporate values. This open display of affection for the private sector flows not only from artists and museum administrators, but also from institutions of public education, civic welfare, even criminal incarceration. [10] Nor is this condition of privatization likely to remain localized within the United States or Great Britain. As the entrepreneurial model gradually takes hold in museums as well as state and civic institutions of every kind, the aura of artistic autonomy cannot help but be jeopardized. According to cultural critic Masao Miyoshi, under pressure from the totalizing influence of trans-corporate capitalism: “…museums, exhibitions, and theatrical performances will be swiftly appropriated by tourism and other forms of commercialism. No matter how subversive at the beginning, variants will be appropriated aggressively by branches of consumerism”. [11]
Even if Myoshi’s bleak prophecy is not our collective future, at least in the United States the effect of corporate hegemony has already forced into view a confrontation between the symbolic position and actual practices of art. It is most apparent when one looks at changes in the institution that occupies the symbolic center of American high culture: The National Endowment for the Arts. Recently the National Endowment or NEA has been involved in heavy campaigning to regain the support of the United States Congress and the populace at large. It has approached this by attempting to prove that art is not a purely symbolic or autonomous activity, but is instead a kind of labor that contributes to the overall well-being of society in direct ways, including public education and community service. A recent document entitled the American Canvas Report, sponsored by the NEA supplies the blueprint for a post-Cold War approach to public patronage in which artists and arts agencies are encouraged to venture into: “a broad range of community-based activities. In 1996, fully two-thirds of the 50 largest LAAs [local arts agencies] addressed five or more of the [following] issues: Community Development Issues, Cultural/Racial Awareness, Youth at Risk, Economic Development, Crime Prevention, Illiteracy, AIDS, Environment, Substance Abuse, Housing, Teen Pregnancy and, Homelessness”. [12]
One post-script to artistic autonomy therefore is the recognition of the artist as social worker. However, the indirect consequences of this cultural utilitarianism in a capitalist economy are just as predictable. Let me again quote from the NEA American Canvas Report which celebrates this shift in the most unabashed language: “While there are no one-size-fits-all models for the integration of the arts into community life, two areas in particular — urban revitalization and cultural tourism — are especially popular right now, and both were the subject of much attention at the American Canvas forums. In many respects, of course, revitalization and tourism are simply two sides of the same coin: as cities become more “livable” and more attractive, they’ll prove increasingly alluring to tourists, whose expenditures, in turn, will help revitalize cities. As mutually reinforcing pieces of the same puzzle, moreover, both urban revitalization and cultural tourism invite the participation of arts organizations. The arts can come to these particular “tables”, in other words, confident that they won’t be turned away.” [13]
Here is a new, post-public, post-cold-war artistic pragmatism. It accepts the need to “translate” the value of the arts into more general civic, social and educational terms that will in turn be more readily understood, by the general public and by their elected officials alike. Nevertheless, such phenomena as gentrification and the displacement of low income residents that accompanies the movement of artists into cities is one social problem not even on the NEA radar screen. Meanwhile, cultural tourism and community-based art practice must be thought of as a local consequence of the move towards a privatized and global economy. If the remnants of public, civic culture aim to make art appear useful to the voting population as a form of social service and tourism, then how long can the idea of artistic autonomy and its celebration of individual freedom, even in its current, transparently bankrupt form, remain useful to the de-territorialized needs of global capital? In other words, what position can artists expect to hold, symbolically and economically, in the coming, trans-national corporate hegemony?
In the universal language of finance, the “fine” arts make up a pretty thin slice of the overall leisure and entertainment industry [14]. Still the image of artistic freedom and autonomy has for some time now presented a colorful (if imaginary) life-style choice for the overstressed and over worked professional. (Consider the way lawyers, brokers and psychiatrists rush to buy “lofts” in gentrified art ghettos.) Yet that role may be on its way out as popular culture and advertising have come to bestow an artistic aura on basketball players, movie stars, rock musicians and now corporate entrepreneurs. Perhaps it is not the apparent autonomy of the artist but her actual productive constitution that, in terms of Hardt and Negri’s thesis, serves the global economy as the very prototype of the new worker. Far more than most other workers, artists are in fact trained - in fact train themselves - to adapt to changing and unstable economic conditions. Consider the way the artist is at once highly specialized, yet infinitely re-trainable, willing to volunteer enormous time and labor to generate cultural capital (that is typically accumulated by others), while in theory remaining subversive towards institutional power, even though seldom is the artist willing to subvert the power that most affects her: the art industry itself.
Privatization and the “new” economy also have other, more immediate consequences for artists who continue to think of themselves as autonomous producers that make art for galleries and museums. For one thing, expanded work schedules (in those other paid jobs that support one’s artistic career) simply allow less time for making art. This might be seen reflected even in the choice of materials contemporary artists’ employ. Think of easel painting, modeling in clay or casting in bronze. During the early twentieth century these were overpowered by more direct methods of art making such as collage, photography, steel welding and assemblage. As life (and production) speeds up, time-consuming methods are broken down or eliminated. Today, even these relatively instantaneous techniques for producing art require quantities of time beyond the means of many artists. For them, the computer combined with graphic applications is the art studio of our day. This is especially true in such hot real estate markets as New York City and is a logical extension of what the late artist and art historian Ian Burn describes as a “de-skilling” of artistic craft. Together with critic Lucy R. Lippard, Burn argues that in the 1960s conceptual art did away with artistic proficiency as a means of avoiding the commodification of art. According to Lippard, the process culminated in the total disappearance of the art object. [15] The unanticipated outcome of de-skilling is the merging of high and low art and a contemporary generation that serves as aesthetic service providers rather than object makers. [16] Art historian Brandon Taylor refers to some of this new de-skilled work as “slack art.” [17] The use of ephemeral materials, dead-pan performances and aimlessly shot video appears to avoid major investments of labor and materials while it thumbs its nose at the over-produced art of the late 1980s (such as Koons, Holzer, or Longo). Yet with a slight shift of context, “slack art” becomes indistinguishable from many other informal practices among people who do not identify themselves as artists. For example, how, other than by location, is an arrangement of products purchased through a retail catalog or borrowed from someone’s attic any different from the work of Jason Rhoades, Laurie Parsons or Sylvie Fleury? The Duchampian argument that context is everything no longer satisfies. While readymades provoked questions about the definition of art by working against a normalized artistic tradition inside the museum, in the current dissipated, post, post-modern world, such work is indistinguishable from advertising and pop-culture that has already adopted the legacy of subversive art itself. When a prestigious museum like the Guggenheim displays motorcycles and Armani suits, is this not an inevitable response to the breakdown between the fine arts and other forms of artistic-like production taking place both inside and outside the museum?
Meanwhile, the publicity-machine that drives consumer culture has always required a great deal of moderately skilled, visual labor, even if this labor is repetitive and uninspired in nature. For every Marcel Breuer or Olivetti there is an army of lesser artisans who perceive graphic design not as a profession but as toil that is nevertheless still preferable to sheet-rocking apartments or waiting on tables. Graduates of fine art programs (artists) are finding employment laying-out innumerable retail catalogs, book covers, movie posters, liquor ads, travel brochures; and most of all producing website designs. Globalism accelerates this trend. As the borders that once separated national economies implode, the demand for design, packaging, and commodity labeling explodes and with it the job market for “creative” labor. This phenomena is already affecting academia, as evident from the growth of visual culture studies. Concurrently, at the level of artistic practice, a very small gap appears to separate the production of so-called fine art and that of commercial, visual culture. Simply from a practical perspective, the increasing throng of artists using digital technology in their art makes it impossible to draw an absolute line between the kind of artistic labor done for money and that performed in the service of fine art. Indeed, a new ethos appears to be emerging among some digital practitioners that sees no contradiction between an avant-garde world-view and entrepreneurial business skills. Like the early avant-garde, the post, post-modernist digital artist claims a new utopianism. The one crucial difference is that now avant-garde practice must also be viable as a business enterprise. By using modern marketing techniques, dot.com-gardism actually operates in a vanguard, productivist mode, treating the consumer as a producer, even as its artistic agenda mixes aesthetic play with profiteering. All of this puts a new spin on the classical avant-garde call to transform art into life, a point I will return to below. Yet, where does this leave the traditional idea of artistic autonomy? What purpose has artistic autonomy served the state, and is its practical demise truly a reason to celebrate?
According to enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, the special categorization of art as a human activity that transcends the material world depends upon an a priori separation between nature and culture. At the same time the artist can breach this divide through that singular person known as the genius. Perhaps the most influential art critic and theoretician of the post-war period, Clement Greenberg, made use of Kant’s aesthetic theories to articulate and ground his version of modernist art. If Kant “used logic to establish the limits of logic” and “withdrew much from its old jurisdiction” what was left was “all the more secure.” [18] The resulting art object affirms its own conditionality and celebrates its freedom - its autonomy - from representation by rejecting any association with literature or illusory space. Greenberg’s aesthetic axioms proved especially useful to post-war capitalism because, unlike the official culture of Stalinism or Maoism, modernism in Greenberg’s Kantian revision offered the intellectual an aura of imagined freedom from all social constraints. I say imagined because recent scholarship has uncovered historic alliances between Greenberg’s promotion of a modernist concept of autonomy and the cold war politics of the United States. [19] Today, supporting the autonomy of the artistic genius to ward off the chill of communism is no longer a viable rational for public art spending. Indirectly citing this dilemma, Bill Ivey, the outgoing Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, recently commented, “Cold War thinking lay just beneath the cultural policy of the last century”. [20] Public funding agencies, including the NEA, now must struggle to reestablish a rationale for government support of art even as citizenship is increasingly measured by one’s participation in the economy as a producer/consumer, rather than by transcendental beliefs such as nation. In this post-national environment, the very notion of artistic autonomy, together with art’s symbolic value, is bound to be both marginalized and absorbed by global marketing as one more brand for specialized leisure products.
There is a different approach to artistic practice that comes from the philosophical tradition of Hegel and Marx. Cultural critic Walter Benjamin, for example, called on artists and intellectuals to put themselves at the service of the working class in their struggle against capitalist exploitation, to make art that actively transformed artistic means of production. He cited as examples of this utilitarian art the epic theater of Bertolt Brecht, Soviet newspapers that were authored by their readers, and the photomontages of John Heartfield. [21] Ironically, the avant-garde promise to drag art out of the museums and into life is today remarkably visible in all the wrong places. Museums and foundations now claim to nurture art as social activism, multiculturalism drives the cultural tourism industry and what remains of public funding agencies call on artists to end their isolation and become civil servants. In the post-Cold War and anti-socialist United States, the Left has joined the center-liberal establishment in its call for a utilitarian and serviceable art that integrates “the arts into community life”. [22] Meanwhile, if the private sector still upholds an idea of artistic autonomy, that altruism comes with a leash which discourages artists from overtly challenging the economic foundation of their patronage. In sum, the collapse of artistic autonomy would not be so profound or irreversible if not for the changes under way in the post-Cold War political economy. As already noted, one of these changes is the privatization of civic life and the disappearance of the nation-state. The other permutation is the generalization and visibility of art-like, creative production within the collective arena of mass culture.
In the past, such things as home made crafts, amateur photography (and pornography), self-published newsletters, fanzines and underground comics had little impact beyond their immediate community of producers and users. Today, an ever more accessible and sophisticated technology for manufacturing, copying, documenting and distributing “home-made” or informal art has dramatically ended that isolation. Today, one cannot escape the spread of this heterogeneous and informal art-like activity. It radiates from homes and offices, schools and streets, community centers and in cyberspace. Its contents are typically filled with fantasies drawn from popular entertainment as well as personal trivia and sentimental nostalgia. In form it can range from the whimsical to the banal and from the absurd to the obscene. It is a qualitative shift unique to the last ten years, and I will argue in a moment, the increased visibility of amateur and often collectivized cultural production is more than any other factor accelerating the withering of autonomous artistic practice as such.
The computer hacker mentality of today is not so far removed from the organized fence cutting tactics of farmers in Nebraska in the 1880s. Culture “Jamming” the system is not so different from the tactics of the Industrial Workers of the World who, at the turn of the century, battled anti-free speech laws in places like San Diego by overloading the local jails with arrested protestors. However, up to now these activities remain divided from each other, their political relationship fragmented and diffused. Yet even the most conservative analysis would find it difficult to ignore the expansion of unregulated and inventive activities made possible by the growing accessibility of communication and reproductive technologies. Without dismissing the enormous number of people still laboring in traditional manufacturing and agricultural industries, especially in developing countries, global capital’s dependency on communications technology virtually assures the spread of digital networks and information technologies. One of the tasks of activists must be to see to it that the market’s cellular and digital circulatory system is infected by the demands of non-technical laborers. Once again, it is less that art is being disseminated down into society from on high, than the social matrix is itself predicated upon a submerged collective creative capacity. As Negri and Hardt explain: “Labor is productive excess with respect to the existing order and the rules of its reproduction. This productive excess is at once the result of a collective force of emancipation and the substance of the new social virtuality of labor’s productive and liberatory capacities.” [23]
*Therefore, alongside the passive consumption of commodities and popular entertainment there emerges a different realm in which unofficial and informal cultural capacity is exercised. The more these informal cultural producers become aware of their own capacity for creative and transformative action, the more the privileged space once reserved for “trained” artists recedes. Already, this generalized artistic activity mixes together consumption, production and exchange as it recycles and redistributes, purchases and appropriates. It is evident when people download commercial music for
free, duplicate copyrighted images for personal use and in so many ways re-direct or simply loot institutional power. Many of these activities also circulate within ungoverned or ungovernable economic zones including flea markets or through the postal system or over the Internet in what I have described elsewhere as “creative dark matter.” [24] They vary in form from the criminal to the radical to the insipid. Each garners equal space within the expanded and informal cultural sphere. Thanks to the exploitative needs of global capital, the cost of making visible one’s subjective and creative excesses is falling. In theory it is a short distance from group visibility to collective autonomy.
A selective list of current art activist practices suggests that an informal political aesthetic is already in existence, much of it emerging from loosely structured autonomous collectives focused on production, distribution, intervention and disruption. In certain cases these groups are so interdisciplinary that the art world discourse just ignores them. This list would include some or all of the work of RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Reclaim the Streets (various locations, in both digital and actual spaces,) REPOhistory (the NYC based group co-founded by the author that makes site-specific public art about alternative histories), ABC No Rio (NYC space dedicated to all forms of counter-cultural practice, from music to graffiti to housing activism), Reverend Billy (also based in NYC, the “reverend” executes anti-corporate performances with his accomplices in Starbucks coffee shops and at the Disney Store on the new Times Square), Ultra-Red (a Los Angeles based group of audio-activists), The Center for Land Use Interpretation (also in LA with projects that produce tours of radioactive and ecologically damaged environments), Ne Pas Plier (French activists using art to focus attention on housing for guest workers), WochenKlausur (Austrian group that stages encounters between elected officials and marginalized peoples), A-Clip (Berlin-based media activists), Collectivo Cambalache (originally from Bogata, CC creates alternative exchange economies in public spaces), Temporary Services (disseminates art and information in Chicago streets using newspaper dispensers), Blackstone BicycleWorks/monk prakeet/Dan Peterman (a recycling, organic garden and art center on Chicago’s South Side), The Stockyard Institute (Jim Duignan works with urban school children in Chicago to produce “gang-proof” armored suits), and the group Ha Ha (Laurie Palmer and John Ploof develop projects on AIDS, ecology and housing in Chicago and elsewhere).
These informal, politicized micro-institutions have made art that infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate websites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for either art world discourse or private interests. At the same time, the pressures of privatization combined with a generalization of artistic activity that is most clearly visible in digital form, have sapped the words “art” and “artist” of their previously imagined autonomy. While Joseph Beuys prophesized that his social sculpture would transform everyone into an artist, the ordinary routines of the populace have done more to achieve that goal without professional artists to guide them. [25] What remains of artistic autonomy is now a specialized marketing tool of both the high-culture and mass media industries. As such, it now openly manifests itself for what it has been for some time - a label for a specific brand of cultural capital called “art”.
However, the closer this idea of autonomy nears extinction or outright exposure, the more interesting becomes the possibility of its rescue. Only when it has hit the floor and gone cold might a version of this archaic idea possibly be infused with new value. If Benjamin argued that only a redeemed mankind could hope to win back its entire historical legacy, our redemption of artistic autonomy could not be a nostalgic return to the past, especially not the disengaged and heroic individualism of modernism. Nor would it be grounded in either the Kantian ideal of disinterested beauty or the Hegelian or even Marxist notion of an evolving totality. Rather this autonomy would have to recognize the end of the once powerful contradictions between artist and society, nature and culture and individual and collective. This new, critical autonomy would not even be centered on artistic practice per se, but would recognize the already present potential for political and economic self-valorization inherent within contemporary social conditions. Instead of asking what is art, it would instead query what is politics? Instead of asking if “they are allowed to do that?” or worrying about the uncertain status of art’s social capital, this critical autonomy would proceed to activate cells of artistic producers not afraid to utilize and manipulate the entire range of culture making (and culture-thieving) technologies and strategies that are now multiplying within the circulatory system of the global body. The autonomous status of these informal working groups or cells might indeed leverage discursive power from the lingering aura of the Kantian/Greenbergian aesthetic. They could for example borrow the idea of freedom (exemplified by art) for doing politics. What a radical notion! [26] However, they would do so in a utilitarian (thus anti-Kantian) manner, not to insure art’s usefulness to the liberal, corporate state as much new genre public art appears to do, but as a model of political and economic self-valorization that is applicable for social transformation in the broadest sense. The point is to begin to recognize and bring to light what already exists and to re-direct or retool this so that its practitioners become self-conscious of their already present collectivity, a force potentially independent from what Negri and Hardt term the Empire. [27] Here a final displacement is possible. Politics superimposes itself at all levels as a practical art that is at the same time symbolic. But it does so only if we understand politics as the exploration of ideas, the pleasure of communication, the exchange of education, and the construction of fantasy, all within a radically defined social practice of collective, critical autonomy.
NOTES
[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 33.
[2] Lawrence Michel, Jared Bernstein and John Smitt, in State of Working American: (Economic Policy Institute: 2000).
[3] Doug Henwood, “How Jobless the Future?,” Left Business Observer #75 (Dec. 1996).
[4] Joan Jeffri and Robert Greenblatt in Artists Who Work with Their Hands: Painters, Sculptors, Craft Artists and Artist Printmakers: A Trend Report,, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts Research Division, (Washington: NEA, August 1994), p. 28.
[5] Note too that the US poverty level in 1998 for a family of four was $16,000 (US Dept of Labor) while the median income for painters and craft artists in 1990 was only $18,187. Compare this to the $36.942 average for professional workers in other fields. Jeffri & Greenblatt, p. 36.
[6] Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40, (Washington: NEA, 2000), p. 97.
[7] According to the same NEA report: The most frequent explanation provided by artists for holding multiple jobs was that they needed the additional earnings generated by the second jobs to meet their household’s expenses. This was the same reason most other professionals held a second job. Note that “Visual artists were almost three times as likely, on average, to have worked in the [professional] service industries than other artists (31% versus 11 %).” Ibid, pp. 44 - 46.
[8] A study of 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were tracked between 1963 to 1980 by researchers Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, Jacob W. Getzels and Stephen P. Kahn in Talent and Achievement (Chicago:1984, an unpublished report), p. 44.
[9] Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, (London: Verso 2001), p. 213.
[10] Consider the term cultural capital employed by Pierre Bourdieu. It is a phrase that appears to “save face” for some sort of sophisticated artistic practice, and yet implicitly acknowledges the triumph of the marketplace over every aspect of life. Consider also a recent report entitled Unseen Wealth: Report of the Brookings Task Force on Understanding Intangible Sources of Value by Margaret Blair and Steven Wallman in which the authors argue that “organizational and human capital, “goodwill” and other intangibles, as well as other items that are not usually viewed as “assets” are becoming the real sources of value in corporations.” The authors call on economists to use such “intangibles” for future analysis “as the dominant drivers of economic activity and wealth shift away from manufacturing toward information-based services”.
[11] Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation State,” Critical Inquiry
[12] American Canvas Report, op. Cite.
[13] Ibid.
[14] The United States Entertainment business is ranked the 18th largest industry in Fortune Magazines’s Fortune 500 with Time Warner ranked the 128th largest corporation and Disney the 176th in the global top 500. To get a sense of how small the “high” art world is by comparison, contrast the combined annual revenue of $6,763,989 — based on total sales, receipts and shipments — from museums and historic sites in the U.S. to the nearly ten times larger revenue of $60,331,549 just for gambling, amusement and recreation spending.
[15] Ian Burn, “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (Or The Memories of an Ex-Conceptual Artist),” Art & Text (Fall 1981), pp. 49-65, and Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years: the Disappearance of the Art Object (Praeger, 1973).
[16] Andrea Fraser, “What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered in the Public Sphere?” in October #80 (Spring 1997), pp. 11-116.
[17] Brandon Taylor , Avant-Garde and After: Rethinking Art Now (New York: Abrams,1995), p. 153.
[18] Immanuel Kant, “The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement,” collected works, (Chicago: William Benton, 1952).
[19] Eva Cockroft “Abstract Expressionism, Weapon of the Cold War,” Artforum (June 1974), pp. 39-41, and Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
[20] Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Bill Ivey speaking at the National Organization of Arts Organizations, Brooklyn, NY, June 2000
[21] Walter Benjamin, “Author as Producer,” Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (New York: Helen and Kurt Wolff, 1978).
[22] American Canvas Report, op. cite.
[23] Hardt and Negri, op. Cite., p. 357.
[24] See my essay, “Dark Matter, Las Agencias, and the Aesthetics of Tactical Embarrassment” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Politics, on-line at: www.journalofaestheticsandprotest.org/1/yomango/index.html
[25] It could be argued that it is precisely this Kantian/Greenbergian tradition that provided the theoretical framework for the self-analysis leading to a more politicized art practice, including the work of Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren and later the “institutional critique” of younger artists like Andrea Fraser and Renée Green. Without dismissing the logic of this claim, I have tried to show elsewhere that this approach gives far too little credit to non-art world influences, including politics and popular culture, on the work of these artists. See Gregory Sholette “News from Nowhere: Activist Art & After,” Third Text #45, (Winter, 1999), pp. 45-56. For a German version of this essay see the book “Metropolenkultur. Kunst und Kulturpolitik der 90er Jahre in den Zentren der Welt”, ed. by Jutta Held (Weimar, 2000)
[26] The School of the Art Institute’s student newspaper recently carried an article proclaiming that art was a “major force binding and guiding” a reawakening of political activism in the United States. While there is an old if unwritten history to this affiliation, the fact that young people are making these connections in the “heartland” of America is significant. Meanwhile, similar links between pirate radio broadcasters, puppeteers, culture-jammers, and direct action groups is apparent in all of the recent protests against the World Trade Organization. Joanne Hinkel, “How Art is Helping Activism” F Newsmagazine (October 2000), pp. 14-15.
[27] What we need to grasp is how the multitude is organized and redefined as a positive, political power…Empire can only isolate, divide, and segregate…the action of the multitude becomes political primarily when it begins to confront directly and with an adequate consciousness the central repressive operations of Empire. It is a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of crossing and breaking down the limits and segmentations that are imposed on the new collective labor power; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command.” Negri and Hardt, op. cite., pp. 400-401. See also Gregory Sholette, “Counting On Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice,” Afterimage (November 1999), pp.18-20. #19 (Summer 1993), p.747.
Originally appeared in Eva Sturm / Stella Rollig (ed.), Dürfen die das? Kunst als sozialer Raum , Wien: Turia+Kant 2002, and online on eiPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies) in January 2002.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ article- Some call it Art ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: article
the stuff is already there
The ideas that come through the brain tank are the thing, and they don’t need any fussing or mussing. They are the stuff to focus on. Like loving what is, they are what are, and then there is no habit ( or there doensn’t have to be) the disparing what is it? and what does it say? and why do it? what will people think?
That McLuhan guy, from the book I am looking at ( an introduction)says, things are more like light, and happen all at once ( quantum). Things are not linear any longer, one thing after another. The symphony of it all, at once, just there, and the resonance of the idea being completed by the beholder til the beholder becomes a part of it.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ the stuff is already there ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: insight
That McLuhan guy, from the book I am looking at ( an introduction)says, things are more like light, and happen all at once ( quantum). Things are not linear any longer, one thing after another. The symphony of it all, at once, just there, and the resonance of the idea being completed by the beholder til the beholder becomes a part of it.
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ the stuff is already there ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: insight
epif
About this entry
You’re currently reading “ epif ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: insight
lie down long enough
look up through the skylight
especially where the corner meets
sister edge
the epif is this:
in the production of arty-face, poesis
articles and artifact,
there is always an emergency and that emergency belies reason enough to put something together. It is the safty valve, as in, don’t mess with me, as I am facing the drama of my emergeny and that is, putting the thing together. And that is almost more than the thing itself. So, reason here: emergency, and background checks in the way that noone can get close to what it is I haven’t been saying or doing.
Then I think, I usually have a show of somesort to rise to the occassion of putting something together. (and then the emergency, the gotta do do it quickly in order to suffice the desparation of the thing). Why not then just experiement? Why not, forget the ART of the thing. The art isn’t there anyway. If the art is the thing then that shelters the stuff of experiment ( just going for it.)
So, I don’t have a show.
And the experiement, actually, that’s what I’ll call it. The experiment. I saw, and here it is, the epiphany, that the stuff in the house, the stuff, that is mostly just laying about, as a kind of experiemnt. Or, here. I could see it as being wildly excellent as something to experience.
So the folded chairs leaning against the wall are kind of these wall ornaments ( not chairs) as they are not being used as chairs. They are leaning there against the wall and in space as some_ thing_. I can see that I could go and make wall ornaments ( a la the folded chair). Then looking at the osb sheet leaning against the other wall, again an epifany! I could see it as this thing more than just the wood leaning against the wall. There are stripes on it, and the organization of the fibres (the chips) coming together on the plane of the board, all just leaning there. If I thought of that wood ( just leaning there)as a piece of art that I had made, cause after all it’s just taking up the same length of space as though it _was_ an artwork leaning there, then I coud SEE IT, more than when I regularly don’t see what is there. Pay attention.
The other things to experiment with:
context isn’t enought any more….take something out of its context and put it into another context ( a la Duchamp) and is that enough? What might be another ‘gesture’ in order to make something come alive?
The John Cage sound field (noise as composition) and visual “noise” as compoosition to be recognized too.
The tyranny of the mind ( must do things a certain way, and only that way)
Let the stuff done be experiment - the forgetting of a-r-t ( a la Kaprow)
participating in the world. FLOW : action and awareness in sync.
You’re currently reading “ epif ,” an entry on x dormant field journal 1
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: insight
lie down long enough
look up through the skylight
especially where the corner meets
sister edge
the epif is this:
in the production of arty-face, poesis
articles and artifact,
there is always an emergency and that emergency belies reason enough to put something together. It is the safty valve, as in, don’t mess with me, as I am facing the drama of my emergeny and that is, putting the thing together. And that is almost more than the thing itself. So, reason here: emergency, and background checks in the way that noone can get close to what it is I haven’t been saying or doing.
Then I think, I usually have a show of somesort to rise to the occassion of putting something together. (and then the emergency, the gotta do do it quickly in order to suffice the desparation of the thing). Why not then just experiement? Why not, forget the ART of the thing. The art isn’t there anyway. If the art is the thing then that shelters the stuff of experiment ( just going for it.)
So, I don’t have a show.
And the experiement, actually, that’s what I’ll call it. The experiment. I saw, and here it is, the epiphany, that the stuff in the house, the stuff, that is mostly just laying about, as a kind of experiemnt. Or, here. I could see it as being wildly excellent as something to experience.
So the folded chairs leaning against the wall are kind of these wall ornaments ( not chairs) as they are not being used as chairs. They are leaning there against the wall and in space as some_ thing_. I can see that I could go and make wall ornaments ( a la the folded chair). Then looking at the osb sheet leaning against the other wall, again an epifany! I could see it as this thing more than just the wood leaning against the wall. There are stripes on it, and the organization of the fibres (the chips) coming together on the plane of the board, all just leaning there. If I thought of that wood ( just leaning there)as a piece of art that I had made, cause after all it’s just taking up the same length of space as though it _was_ an artwork leaning there, then I coud SEE IT, more than when I regularly don’t see what is there. Pay attention.
The other things to experiment with:
context isn’t enought any more….take something out of its context and put it into another context ( a la Duchamp) and is that enough? What might be another ‘gesture’ in order to make something come alive?
The John Cage sound field (noise as composition) and visual “noise” as compoosition to be recognized too.
The tyranny of the mind ( must do things a certain way, and only that way)
Let the stuff done be experiment - the forgetting of a-r-t ( a la Kaprow)
participating in the world. FLOW : action and awareness in sync.
the form thing
Published: 12.4.06 / 6pm
Category: insight
I can’t get into it, the shiny surface, hard, and impenetrable
Reference this for a moment then - Matisse, and Alan Kaprow.
Matisse because, from what I understand he say shapes in the spaces between things, as well as the things themselves, and Kaprow because of his ‘happenings’.
Category: insight
I can’t get into it, the shiny surface, hard, and impenetrable
Reference this for a moment then - Matisse, and Alan Kaprow.
Matisse because, from what I understand he say shapes in the spaces between things, as well as the things themselves, and Kaprow because of his ‘happenings’.
def- Web 2.0
Published: 12.5.06 / 8am
Category: dictionary
If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
Category: dictionary
If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.
quotes- a Body is not a form
Published: 12.5.06 / 8am
Category: quotes
According to Gilles Deleuze, a body is not a form, but “a complex relation between differential speeds, between a slowing and an accelerating of particles.”1
Category: quotes
According to Gilles Deleuze, a body is not a form, but “a complex relation between differential speeds, between a slowing and an accelerating of particles.”1
the shining
Published: 12.7.06 / 5am
Category: Uncategorized
The thing is to work from the inside out. INstead of responding to what one thinks one should do, work the other way around. From the coordination of materials calmly, in the investigative spirit of experimentation, to see where something might be, and to just pay attention to it, finally. That’s why I like looking at other people’s art. I am reminded of what I have over looked. I see maybe on;y for a flash, a little bit of what is captivating and still. Shining, it all starts to shine
Category: Uncategorized
The thing is to work from the inside out. INstead of responding to what one thinks one should do, work the other way around. From the coordination of materials calmly, in the investigative spirit of experimentation, to see where something might be, and to just pay attention to it, finally. That’s why I like looking at other people’s art. I am reminded of what I have over looked. I see maybe on;y for a flash, a little bit of what is captivating and still. Shining, it all starts to shine
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