smapp art: February 2010

Monday, February 22, 2010

Radicant part 1

With the globalization comes standardization. Bourriaud suggests this includes identity. We have a portable culture, one less dependent on geographic proximity or neighborhood identity and more focused as expression takes form through "images, clothing, cuisine, and rituals." How will this affect real estate markets? If younger generations do not feel compelled to settle or identify with a particular place, will real estate values become unstable? As a culture, if we are not tied to our land but instead to our iPhone, we will all be chameleons, connected to data and ready to adopt the most recent trend. Life becomes a trade instead of an investment. Connectivity favors short term decisions.

According to feminist and sexuality theories devised by Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan we have entered a "postidentitarian regime" defined only by actions performed.

Tsuyoshi Ozawa

"It is a matter of replacing the question of origin with that of destination. Where should we go?"

Bourriaud then cites Walter Benjamin and Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, this is an inauthentic world of infinite reproduction. He suggests this notion will be especially challenging for Westerners who are the cultural heirs.

"Altermodernity promises to be a translation-oriented modernity, unlike the modern story of the twentieth century, whose progressivism spoke the abstract language of the colonial West." Explain? He suggests a type of Esperanto universal subtitling that affords no authenticity. Instead artists will be valued for the intercultural connections they establish. How will the artist profit if authenticity is questioned at every turn?

Globalization displaces cultural tradition for labor. Capital liquidity controls culture, further evidence of a homogeneous world. We all come to be part of the same tradition, responding to the same symbols and watching the same entertainment. With diverse values of increasingly hard to find, what will happen to creativity? The assimilation age will pillage others and history via globalization and democratization, leaving fewer and fewer stones unturned.

Is art only responsible for producing style? Is this the only function?

Piet Mondrian

Joseph Beauys

How is progress defined? The postmodern globalized world only measures progress in terms of monetary gain, but when GDP falters what happens to our sense motion?

"And yet the immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer are the dominant figures of contemporary culture." 21st century flaneur?

Sarah Morris

"Thus, today's artists do not so much express the tradition from which they come as the path they take between that tradition and the various contexts they traverse, and they do this by performing acts of translation." Translation as interpretation? Selection as opposed to subtraction. Dj culture, choice is cheap and available.

Mike Kelley, Memory Ware Flat #29, 2001

"Thus, radicant art implies the end of the medium-specific, the abandonment of any tendency to exclude certain fields from the realm of art." What about craft? A tradition that inherently looks back and has difficulty assimilating the present. Does an artist work in service of his talents or the idea?

"Airports, cars, and railroad stations become the new metaphors for the house, just as walking and airplane travel become the new modes of drawing."

Franz Ackermann

Julie Mehretu

"Abstraction is the very language of inevitability."

"A century later, one cannot but admire the contemporary relevance of his thought, which declares that the source and driving energy of all beauty is difference, yet never lapses into idealization of the other."

Something is always lost in translation.

Pg. 69 - Exoticism is on the decline, suggests a loss of creativity , energy, life - equated to entropy. Multitude represents the life force of human experience. We have a creolized world and art market.

Rareity as opposed to seriality.

Haim Steinbach

Kelley Walker

"Creolization produces objects that express a journey rather than a territory, objects that are province of both the familiar and the foreign." p. 74

"Epicurus wrote that the universe was nothing but a rain of atoms before the clinamen (spontaneous deviation) caused a pile-up accident, a collision that was the origin of worlds. Before the encounter takes place, the atoms fall like drops of rain, without meeting; their existence, as elements taking part in the encounter, thus proves to be purely abstract." p.75

Graft - tissue of one is merged to another.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Postproduction

Nicolas Bourriaud delivers a tale of contemporary art of the new media and installation realm. Epitomized by the dj, a recursive culture defined by the ability to respond. The internet and digital media have enabled the masses to rewrite rather than simply read, content is recycled. Cultural language in it's various manifestations, auditory, visual, written etc...is now broadly accessible via the computer and internet, and as a logical extension, modified. As follows the story of art, this evolution requires sampling and mixing, mashing and manipulation in search of new form. Artists have employed such tactics since the beginning of time. The Greek Kourai was modeled on the archaic Egyptian statues. Slowly a sense of motion and controposto was developed through a new emphasis on empiricism and anatomy. Soon, Greek tradition became Roman tradition and later the inspiration for the Renaissance. Leonardo looked at Giotto. Caravaggio to Leonardo and thus leading toward the modern era. Monet admired Japanese prints while Hemingway gained a voice in the shadow of James Joyce. Just as the late John Updike identified with the even later Salinger, (two of my favorites, r.i.p.). Picasso referenced Cezanne and Andre Breton was guided by Freud. And then we have Pollock, who has since become one of the defining visions of abstract art in the post-war period. But I can't forget the mighty Duchamp, who likely took interest in synthetic cubism and Picasso's language games. Appropriation as a tool of specificity persuades with calculated measure. Acute relationships dissolve ambiguity and invite critique as a form of art. Imitation and adaption may be equated to analysis and synthesis, these strategies provide an approach to art that is at once oriented to the past and future. Employ history on behalf of the present and future. To his own admission, Bourriaud presents these contemporary works within a system of shared information, input, discourse - in short, sampling. Perhaps what he means to say is the world is full of prose, waiting for form to make poetry. Or in this case, subversive-gain through critical negation. Which brings me to my questions.

Does Bourriaud's argument feel fresh? Is this evolutionary study the product of a new cultural phenomena? Or does it follow the well trodden historical path? I think this point is contentious because new media artists face licensing issues.

Does the term postproduction imply an inability to create, that is from scratch? And if so, does it also devalue skill and tradition in favor of the sample? Once this has passed, and I think it has, where will these artists be? Artists without formal skill, instead, engaging the world and culture vis-a-vis abundant data and a compulsive need to mix and expose. Creation normally implies addition or accretion, but in this case suggests manipulation as a process of negation. Of course these works are symptomatic of the postmodern period, one marked by skepticism and divorced ideologies.

What if artists decide the culture no longer works, without skill, how will we revolt? What would a 21st century Neo-Dada movement look like?

In an age of postproduction, how has the value of art changed? And as an extension, the individual? The modern period was marked largely by entrepreneurship and an emphasis on innovation. The new dismissed the old. But now, the new exclusively employs the old in service of the new, or i suppose, newer. The exotic once informed Monet and Picasso, while creolization now defines the contemporary world. But with Monet and Picasso, while the foreign reference informed their new expression, the emphasis still rested on the new because the translation marked a radical departure. Postproduction suggests less translation and interpretation in favor of direct citation and manipulation.

Interpretation as transformation embraces the new through the interpretive work of the hand and mind.

Daniel Pflumm

Tony Smith, Black Box, 1962

Allan Kaprow

How has the audience changed? If it expected and encouraged to always participate, does that diminish the value of a finished work, or the efforts of the individual? How has the idea of connoisseurship changed? If everyone has a voice then, effectively, no one is heard. The democratizing process has leveled the landscape.