Radicant part 2

Radicant aesthetics considers the conflation between space and time. Data saturation and connectivity along with hyper consumption via disposable production and obsolescence, all contribute to a sense of accessibility. Divisions marked by geography, production time and investment no longer define or impede the conception of form. Instead the Radicant attempts to "spatialize time" through the geometry of translation, "topology". This is a measure of quality rather than quantity. "Thus, it refers to movement, to the dynamism of forms, and characterizes reality as a conglomeration of transitory surfaces and forms that are potentially movable. In this sense, it goes hand in hand with translation as well as with precariousness."

-The dismantling of time and space can be seen in education. MIT now offers lecture notes and recordings for free online. An experience privileged by money and proximity is now mostly a question of time and ambition. Information is readily available, permitting almost anyone the ability to learn almost anything. The democratizing process has further flattened the surface, with many people assimilating the same information and experience through mass media and the inter web.

"In an immediate environment that is constantly being updated and reformatted, in which the short-lived is overtaking the long-term and access is overtaking ownership, the stability of things, signs and conditions is becoming the exception rather than the rule."

Jeff Koons
Jenny Holzer
Cindy Sherman
Haim Steinbach
Cady Noland

"But in a radicant universe, principles mingle and multiply by means of combinations." In a postmodern world everything is equal. By contrast the radicant world seems to be marked by exponential growth. If the Oil well symbolized the explosive nature of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps the particle accelerator best describes the altermodern/radicant period.
Particle Accelerator, CERN, Switzerland
Particle Accelerator pictogram

"It may be that, in these early years of the twenty first century, our own modernity is developing on the basis of this collapse of the long term, at the very heart of the consumerist whirlwind and cultural precariousness, countering the weakening of human territories under the impact of the globalized economic machine." p.86 Does this reaffirm postproduction? Is this another attack on tradition?

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Much of this argument seems to be hinged on an aesthetic of the precarious or instability. This is about ephemeral experience instead of traditionally measured objects prepared for the gallery.

Maurizio Cattelan

This is period of history defined by the city population. Cultural density encourages the flaneur as artistic model. An observer, wander and assessor, the flaneur engages the community and adjudicates value.

Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1993

'Each megacity is a concentration of the world economy.'

Francis Alys

Walking and flanerie as a sign of criminality? Wandering as a political inquiry into the city.

The twentieth century is defined by a Hegelian sense of progression. "The notion of the painting as a window, which dominated the classical age and which organizes the visible around the perceptual channel of monocular perspective, is to space what the Hegelian vision of history is to time: a tension modulated toward a single point. At the end of the nineteenth century, pictorial modernity begins to obstruct perspective, diverting the linearity of space toward time." p. 101

Fragmentation suggests it is no longer possible to have a master narrative.

"quilting point" suggests an artwork is no longer the terminal destination, but just a point along the continuum. recycling postproduction thesis.

Abraham Poincheval and Laurent Tixador

Expedition as inquiry into displacement as a consequence of culture. "The emergence of the journey as a compositional principle has its source in a cluster of phenomena that form part of a sociology of our visual environment: globalization, the transformation of tourism into everyday phenomenon, and the advent of the computer screen as a feature of daily life, a phenomenon that began in the 1980s but has accelerated since the early 1990s with the explosion of the internet." p.114

"...the contemporary journey-form combines the forms of the ruin (culture after the modernist narrative) and that of the flea market (the eBay economy) in nonhierarchical and nonspecific spaces (globalized capitalism)." p.117

Julie Mehretu

This painting captures the chaotic sense of layer and interconnectedness found in the contemporary world. A topography, a translation of interaction. Reminds me of Pollock. A network of relationships.

Doug Aitken: "How can I break through this idea [that time is linear], which is reinforced constantly? How can I make time somehow collapse or expand, so it no longer unfolds in this one narrow form?" p.122
Pierre Huyghe

Here Pierre considers time as an accumulation on a gallery wall that has been successively sanded to reveal previous layers of paint.

Globalization seeks to unify the world into a single esperanto, or set of agreed symbols. Translation by contrast offers to reinterpret what is given, bringing new life and valuing individual interpretation.

"No doubt, one could describe the ambition of the twenty-first-century artist as the desire to become a network."

Instead of producing an object, the artist works to develop a ribbon of significance, to propogate wavelength, the modulate the conceptual frequency on which his propositions will be deciphered by an audience." p.134