Archive for June, 2010

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

In The Society of the Spectacle (Now in 3D) by Pascual Sisto, one views a version of Guy Debord’s 1974 film La Société du Spectacle in which the film’s original black and white images appropriated by Debord from pre-existing mass media are, then, themselves re-appropriated by Sisto.

He adds a layer of images tinted blue and a layer of images tinted red – each positioned slightly off of the original image – so that they resemble a 3D image requiring cheap 3D glasses.

(In fact, it doesn’t work as actual 3D imagery.)

This is ironic because it was Debord himself who was one of the great theorists of image appropriation and re-contextualization – he called his own strategy détournement.

Détournement is “to divert,” “to distract,” or “to re-direct” – the artist appropriates a media image and re-contextualizes it in order to negate its value as a fetishized commodity.

Debord saw the world increasingly mediating all of its social interaction through media imagery, e.g. quality time between lovers is spent flipping through magazines, watching television or going to the movies; and, as a reaction to this, he sought to create a form of auto-destructive artwork in which media images are appropriated and re-contextualized in order to unveil their operations as the increasingly universal mediator of human interaction.

The Society of the Spectacle (Now in 3D) is a textbook example of détournement:

An artist appropriates a piece of media and re-contextualizes it in order to negate it and refute its claim.

Sisto’s version both breaks apart the original imagery as well as points out its own spectacular tendencies by making his version 3D, the contemporary sign of spectacle in the wake of Avatar and other recent 3D blockbusters.

But, there’s a paradox here as the original film is executing the exact same operation.

Can one detourn a détournement?

Before getting tangled up here, though, it should be said that Debord himself provides an answer in his text “A User’s Guide to Détournement.”

He writes:

The literary and artistic heritage of humanity should be used for partisan propaganda purposes. It is, of course, necessary to go beyond any idea of mere scandal. Since opposition to the bourgeois notion of art and artistic genius has become pretty much old hat, [Marcel Duchamp’s] drawing of a mustache on the Mona Lisa is no more interesting than the original version of that painting. We must now push this process to the point of negating the negation […] It is in fact necessary to eliminate all remnants of the notion of personal property in this area. The appearance of new necessities outmodes previous “inspired” works. They become obstacles, dangerous habits. The point is not whether we like them or not. We have to go beyond them.

*****

What Debord is saying here is that the history of the avant-garde is not so precious for it to be above contemporary critique.

Duchamp was once radical, but is now safely absorbed into the fables of academic art history – the point is not to fight against this unfortunate reality, but to carry on the fight into the future, responding to one’s own time.

Looking back at Debord’s career and his careful framing of his own work reveals him to be a great showman – his polemical texts and romantic tilting at the windmills of post World War II media culture is today as easily sentimentalized as Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. was in Debord’s day.

That doesn’t mean, though, that his ideas are suddenly irrelevant.

On the contrary, while Sisto negates Debord’s claims, he carries them forward.

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

From Beyond the Blue Event Horizon (1980) by Frederik Pohl:

Of course, even Albert did not use all sixty billion gigabits all the time. For one thing, they were not all shared. Even the shared stores were occupied by tens of thousands of programs as subtle and complicated as Albert, and by tens of millions of duller ones. The program called “Albert Einstein” slipped through and among the thousands and the millions without interference. Traffic signals warned him away from occupied circuits. Guideposts led him to subroutines and libraries needed to fulfill his functions. His path was never a straight line. It was a tree of branching decision points, a lightning-stroke of zigzag turns and reverses. It was not truly a “path,” either; Albert never moved. He was never in a specific place to move from. It is at least arguable whether Albert “was” anything at all. He had no continuous existence. When Robin Broadhead was through with him and turned him off he ceased to be, and his subroutines picked up other tasks. When he was turned on again he recreated himself from whatever circuits were idle, according to the program S. Ya. had written. He was no more real than an equation, and no less so than God.

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Internet surfing clubs are blogs authored by multiple users in which short, visually immediate posts, each of which often involve re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet, are shared in on-going conversation.

The pace of posting on, for example, the clubs Double Happiness, Loshadka, Nasty Nets, Spirit Surfers, and Supercentral was, several years ago, much more active than it is now, but, generally speaking, the pace currently ranges from several times a day to several times a month (in some cases less than that or simply not at all).

In the heyday of the Internet surfing club phenomenon, one of the contested theoretical topics hashed out on the message boards of new media art sites like rhizome.org, was the question of what separates material found on an Internet surfing club from very similar material found on a vernacular imageboard site like 4chan.

People seem to generally agree that something is different, but that something is difficult to account for (if it’s not itself an illusion).

For example, if one is to view two images whose iconography is exactly the same – one of which appears on 4chan and one of which appears on Nasty Nets – in one sense, each would look identical to the other and, yet, in another sense, each would look very different from the other.

One account for this difference is premised on the distinction between the world of the vernacular web in which material on 4chan is arguably framed and the world of art in which material on Nasty Nets is arguably framed.

A given image – let’s say that it’s a funny picture of a cat – would, on 4chan, be viewed against its relationship to other funny cat memes and judged as such, while, on Nasty Nets, it would be viewed against its relationship to an alternative category – the artworld discourse of, for example, the Readymade or Appropriation art (or some such) – and judged as such.

These modes of viewing are, of course, not dogmatically valid – obviously viewers of 4chan say “this is art” and viewers of Nasty Nets say “this is funny” in regard to the material on each respective site – but, nevertheless, one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the vernacular Web world and one would seem to nudge one in the direction of the artworld.

(Some works, such as Cory Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, are intriguing because they straddle both worlds.)

This discrepancy is related to what Arthur Danto refers to as art’s “transfiguration of the commonplace” in which the simple re-contextualization of a commonplace object into art transforms the way one views it.

For Danto, viewing contemporary art doesn’t involve what the eye sees, but rather what the eye sees plus the theory and history of art surrounding what the eye sees.

His famous example is Warhol’s Brillo Box which, he claims, “ended” the history of art by shifting the burden of the work’s working from the visible (a Brillo Box) to the invisible (a Brillo Box plus the theory and history of the readymade and pop art which together allow the Brillo Box to be legitimately viewed as art).

Danto writes in his essay, “The Artworld”:

To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry – an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an artworld.

*****

As such, the difference between material on an imageboard and an Internet surfing club is – through this lens, anyway – a question of what is made formally visible to the eye – yes – but what is made conceptually visible to the mind, as well.

The fact that there is art theory and the positing of art historical connections in relation to Internet surfing clubs is itself the mechanism which makes a funny cat picture function as a work of art on an Internet surfing club and not on an imageboard site in which different theories and histories are in play.

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, June 1st, 2010

Economics, politics, sociology, anthropology, national defense, law, cognitive science, and myriad other fields are increasingly focusing their investigative energies onto the ramifications of the ever updating financial flows, communication paradigms, sub-cultures, social norms, personal security concerns, and general experiential phenomena emerging in relation to the growing public usage of the Internet.

That said, it would really be something for the rarified air of the contemporary art world to not follow suit.

But, nevertheless, that is largely the case.

Contemporary art, for a variety of reasons, chooses to bypass or ignore the opportunity to reflect on these technologies.

Stroll through the kunsthalles of Europe or the galleries of Chelsea (to name two prominent examples), and one would be hard-pressed to find any indication (outside of certain for better or for worse ghettoized new media spaces) that the constellation of technologies surrounding digital networked computing have any influence over one’s relationship to space and time.

It’s like it doesn’t exist.

Which seems like a problem (if, that is, one believes that art, as a “humanity,” is pressed to reflect on the condition of being a human).

Perhaps I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, though.

After all, I spend a lot of time on my computer and while it seems to me like my own life is radically different than it was before I started logging onto my friend’s Prodigy Internet provider when I was a kid, that doesn’t necessarily mean that other people are quite as hooked.

In fact, most people don’t spend nearly as much time on-line as I do.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the opposite is actually the reality – most people are luddites who are actively not engaging with these technologies – they write letters not e-mail; they read books not blogs; they read The New York Times not nytimes.com; they have big family dinners not social network updates.

Even in this case, though, the actions just mentioned are conducted in explicit reaction to the phenomenon of the Internet.

A world of “not Internet” still presupposes the existence of Internet – be it an existence worth celebrating or problematizing.

To go out of one’s way to not use the technology, the technology still impacts one’s actions.

But still, it might be argued, that’s obscuring the problem here.

It’s not that there is a world of Internet and not-Internet, but that most people in the world have never even thought to think about these technologies because they’re too busy breaking their backs in manual labor and, as such, it’s imperialistic (not to mention petty) to suggest that anything so wild as the Internet is worth taking seriously.

Fair enough, but even if, for the sake of argument, most people in the world will never interact with these technologies (or choose not to do so), their lives may very well be effected, nonetheless.

With the proliferation of n.g.o.’s and transnational corporate interests into parts of the world where Internet access is limited, the livelihood of all but the hardiest human beings is in one way or another dependent upon capital which is now streaming through and enabled by digital computer networks.

But, perhaps, that, too, is missing the point.

Perhaps it’s not that the art world doesn’t think these technologies are on some level “worthy” of inclusion into the contemporary art discussion, but that it’s never really been the job of contemporary art to automatically start wringing its hands over new technologies.

In this reading, it’s not that the art world doesn’t understand the Web, but that the Web doesn’t understand the art world.

Neither Internet art nor art about the Internet actually partakes in what’s interesting about the contemporary art discussion and, as such, makes it difficult for themselves to be included.

For better or for worse, contemporary art is a world and (as worlds tend to do) it spends a lot of time reflecting on its self.

If the artists can’t figure out a way to connect the development of the steam engine or the television to contemporary art, then why would contemporary art have to automatically reflect on the steam engine or the television?

They might be important technologies (no one is arguing that they aren’t), but it’s simply not the job of contemporary art to account for them just because somebody outside of contemporary art demands that it be so.

Besides, that’s what new media art spaces or art & technology journals like Leonardo are for.

Related to this argument is the question of quality.

Again, it’s not that contemporary art is automatically predisposed to reject the inclusion of art made about these technologies or with these technologies, but that, entre nous, there just hasn’t been any good examples of this type of art.

The proof is in the pudding and one can’t expect artwork that’s at best working at an undergrad level of sophistication to just waltz right in and take over the conversation.

This might be the most powerful argument against the notion of contemporary art’s embrace of work explicitly made on or about digital computer networks.

However, I believe it’s an argument which is ignorant regarding the work that is actually out there – the proof in the pudding so to speak.

From one view, the artists I’ve written about on this blog, for example, are working very creatively in the wake of (again, from one view) early video art, “the Pictures generation,” painters like Christopher Wool, and on through the Guyton, Price, Smith, Walker crowd.

From other views, other genealogies could be posited and, if one is willing to put aside their own embarrassments concerning the computer, then one might see how these connections aren’t forced, but are rather logical and even obvious.

That’s not to say that this is the most astounding work ever made, but that at the very least it’s positioning itself in ways that seem like they should be intriguing for a contemporary art audience to reflect on.

Now, in contemporary art’s defense, it’s not so easy to just up and change its whole game plan.

First of all, there’s the problem about how to create financial value around this type of work and, thus, circulate it through its own well-oiled economy.

But outside of that, there’s another anxiety.

Contemporary art, to my mind, is in the business of asking “what is contemporary art?”

If contemporary art were pressed to say “contemporary art exists in the digital network as much as it does outside of the digital network,” then contemporary art would all of the sudden be operating from radically different premises.

The “white cube” paradigm (as the site where contemporary art occurs) would be threatened from within.

The “where” of “where the art occurs” would be altered as the simulation of the physical work through (primarily) the Web archive would be understood to be art’s arena.

To my mind, work which successfully bridges the worlds of the digital computer network and contemporary art is work which, on some level, implicates contemporary art into this very network.

It’s not work about the digital computer network, it’s work about contemporary art’s own entanglement in the digital computer network.

And for contemporary art to acknowledge this, it would demand that contemporary art changes the way it sees itself.

As such, contemporary art wouldn’t be taking in an orphan, but a virus.