Reflection in the Porcelain Pond
Pilar Tena and Ilana Percher, "Jell-O Bog," 2007
In the fine art world, the story of the thing is the stuff comprising the thing. Paint, bronze, steel, video, screenprinting, mud, written language—the work is about the medium. And it’s also about another medium, its cultural context—movies, comic books, advertising, written language, or the art gallery itself.
But the point of a piece of art is primarily its social role, rather than some physical or symbolic essence. Melting into its environment, its audience, and its constituent pigments, the modern artwork tries both to command and to disappear, leaving us with volitional interrogation, an expensive insistence of excess matter. In doing so, it comes to represent another medium—a medium of exchange.
In a market society, art’s function, content, and exchange-value are all connected by the idea of excess. Art, like the rest of us, announces its place in the world in predominantly economic terms. In the dreams and desires of the unconscious mind, as in an unfettered free market, boundaries are meaningless, and enough is never enough. As we consume and produce, the excess currency—the profit we create—is another form of what is left over when we consume. Depending on how you take “consume,” this could mean sacralized cultural fetishism. Or, on the other hand, excrement. Either way, we long to contain it or to manipulate it.
The ephemeral abstractions of high finance and the primeval repugnance and joy in bodily processes are joined in modern visual art—a talisman to the sublime force of individual will (will being a faculty, sayeth Freud, that we discover during the period we learn to control our bowels). While visual art remains far from the mainstream, mostly by choice, it is in some sense the most dramatic result of humanism, the ideological bedrock supporting the motivational matrix of our society commonly known as capitalism. A visual icon—like a flag, religious symbol, or work of art—is a deeply affecting “interpellation,” a term coined by Louis Althusser for an ideological signifier that hails me and to which I respond. It addresses me like my own face in the mirror, without any acknowledgment of the assumptions and connotations of the icon. Artwork in the last century has teased out many of the implications of the current core dogma of the First World. which I sum up below in three motifs: autonomy, transparency, and the new man.
Jacques-Louis David, "Patrocle," 1780
Autonomy, the principle of individual freedom that insists on choice and rejects interpellation, is the hallmark of the commercial gallery, as well as the classical avant-garde. The artwork reveals the anointed maker in a way that words never could, in the retentive tableaux of Jacques-Louis David’s paintings, or in the explosive cartography of Jackson Pollock. The writings of Clement Greenberg and Dave Hickey offer lengthy modernist apologies for having anything at all to say about these ineffable things, whose solipsism admits no error. Purity is the only experience, and the market frequently rewards this work. The anal retentivity that Freud associates with the miser can simply replace one unspeakable medium of exchange with another. Damien Hirst’s preserved animals, much like the gleeful food-based artwork of Surrealist sculptor Meret Oppenheim, depict a closed statement, decay forever suspended, echoing the food-smeared African idols that have served as touchstones of authenticity since the height of European imperialism.
Piero Manzoni, "Merde d'artista (Artist's shit no.066)," 1961
Transparency connects art to writing, but in modern times has rejected interpretation, or any other form of exegesis whose gaze turns away from the hideous fascination of the Thing itself. This oracular reading is enunciated in the symbolism of the cultural and pedagogical institution. Rosalind Krauss and Susan Sontag are noteworthy haruspices of this post-war tendency, in which images and words are allowed to taint one another as multiple expressions of a single perception, and art starts to attempt depicting the conditions of its own legibility—often using empty spaces and vast grids. National Endowment for the Arts culture-wars martyr Andres Serrano has been displaying closeup photos of stool as signifiers, much in the same way Wim Delvoye created a defecation machine, Piero Manzoni canned his offal for sale, and Marcel Duchamp anointed a urinal as artwork—all in self-aware gestures that try to realize our alchemical dream of turning filth to gold.
What a Way to Make a Living: New Artist Economies and the Role of the Arts Administrator
Elaine Tin Nyo, "The Bake Sale." Deitch Projects, NYC, 1997.
I am an arts administrator, which is arguably the second invisible position in line behind the artist. The administrator’s cultural discount is not only applied when independently presenting an exhibition without receiving a curatorial fee, or when asked to moderate a panel discussion without compensation; it is also applied daily in the work force, when we are paid less than what we are worth at gallery jobs, museum positions, as editors and writers (not to mention when those jobs are lost due to layoffs). While the financial downturn is a particularly difficult time for artists and arts administrators, it seems that the issue of the artist’s “cultural discount” (a principle that has been incorporated by Andrew Ross in his 2000 Social Text article “The Mental Labor Problem”), in which “artists and other arts workers [are] accept[ing] non-monetary rewards [and] the gratification of producing art as compensation for their work, thereby discounting the cash price of their labor,” has perhaps existed long before the 2008-09 recession but just now is being challenged. I am interested in discussing how existing economic models for arts funding as well as emerging models of arts fundraising may support or defy this cultural discount.
W.A.G.E., the arts activist group based in NYC, has been rallying for changes in arts infrastructure to include fees paid to artists and cultural workers as compensation for their labor. An attempt to create movement in this stagnant situation—while waiting for the government to act in support of the arts, and for museums and art institutions to adopt a “best practices” policy that includes a valid fee structure—has been initiated. Groups like InCUBATE (Institute for Community Understanding for Art and The Everyday), FEAST (Funding Emerging Art with Sustainable Tactics), and my own project, Sweet Tooth of the Tiger (a mobile bake sale table that engages ways of thinking about circulating capital in the arts), are functioning as socially collaborative practices that view a dissolved hierarchy shifting the public’s role from distant viewer to active participant as integral to preserving artist networks and communities. Much like socially collaborative artwork (such as the work of Kaprow and Fluxus), a desire for art’s sake is at the heart of these groups (for more on this subject, see RoseLee Goldberg’s text Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present or Claire Bishops’s Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art). Unfortunately, the cost of living in U.S. cities has skyrocketed while the infrastructure of the art institution hasn’t changed much. Adapting to these circumstances, these groups view arts administration as a creative practice that is adept at problem-solving in a dysfunctional system. By incorporating an economy that is facilitated by a democratic model, in which the public pays small amounts of money directly to the artist (contrarily, criticism has recently cropped up regarding “new” economic models in the arts; see Morgan von Prelle Pecelli’s Jan 29, 2009 City Council Testimony), we are able to support artists in their pursuit of sustainable practice both monetarily and culturally as a way to undermine the authority of the art institution and its infrastructure.
In his essay, “Sure, everyone might be an artist…but only one artist gets to be the guy who says that everyone else is an artist” (in What We Want Is Free: Generosity and Exhchange in Recent Art, edited by Ted Purves), Bill Arning writes about NY-based artist Elaine Tin Nyo’s bake sale at Deitch Projects several years ago. Artists baked sweets and sold them to passersby, intending to “analyze the relations between galleries, critics, curators, and artists.” Arning alludes to the art world’s confusion regarding the process of sustainable practice through self-sufficient means, perhaps further alluding to the rigid infrastructure that ignores the issue of the artist’s cultural discount. He writes,
Bake sales are, of course, a small-town American way of raising funds for modest projects of civic betterment. The art world tends to raise its funds with black tie parties, celebrities, and blockbuster auctions. The confusion between fundraising styles maligned neither, but rather reminded us that art is an activity that takes place within a network of other worthy activities, and that its systems of promotion and self-sustenance are as strange and as normal as baking and selling a pie to pay for new soccer uniforms.
Here, Arning engages in the discussion of participatory and socially collaborative practice that blurs the distinction between art and life, and in turn sustains itself by recasting a capitalist economy that is in favor of the artist rather than the institution.
While I persist in unpacking the details of these emerging artist economies that I am helping to create, it must be considered that this democratic system, which raises funds for artists, is still neglectful of the arts administrator. The administrator attempts to create access points for the public in an effort to navigate issues such as visual literacy and artistic citizenship. This desire to bring people closer to the arts undergirds the administrator as a valuable position in the art ecosystem. As an arts administrator, my consistent end goal is that of assisting artists with their projects. In my effort to formulate a sustainable model for these artists, I am curious about how to sustain my own work, pay my rent, my cell phone bill, my Internet connection, and secure all of the cash flowing into renting equipment, creating announcements, and competing with the for-profit system that has capital for these sorts of things. I feel that I must function something like a small business, where I, as the “owner,” pays myself last. This act of artists and administrators having to function like businesses is outdated and is a non-working method that naturalizes creative practice as not worthy of monetary compensation.
Concerning “newMedia” as one word
Front Page of Mundus Subterraneus by Athanasius Kircher as used in "Deep Time of the Media" by Siegfried Zielinski
For my last guest post and in response to Kelly’s question, I thought I’d address the way that I spell newMedia and my intentions behind doing so. As I mentioned in my first post; I don’t work exclusively with new technology, or even with new forms per say. However, I feel as though the content of the word addresses or is linked to concerns in newMedia art. So with this in mind, I want to take the emphasis away from the “newness” of this art form, and to readjust the focal point of this genre to be based in cultural commentary as opposed to gadgetry. Although there are some superior newMedia art pieces that implement new technologies (for instance The Dumpster by Golan Levin or Google is not the Map by Les Liens Invisibles), these project address the specific cultural implications that we are hampered with as a result of our growing integration/co-habitation with technology.
These cultural association are not something particularly new. Our relationship with technology has been a long development process, and can be traced back several hundred years. The Media Archaeology field of study has emerged in recent years in order to chart this relationship and how it has manifested itself in several time periods. Siegfried Zielinski and Erkki Huhtamo stand out as two representatives of this study and offer up alternatives to our otherwise limited notion of media art history. Jon Cates has also been tracing and tracking alternative media histories that run through Fluxus, conceptual art of the 60s, performance, and in particular, early video art based out of Chicago. In doing so, these individuals influence me (and others) to acknowledge the un-newness of newMedia culturally and historically. Oftentimes I find myself mired in gadgetry fanaticism; glorifying the new for providing solutions to problems we never really had, or giving us “new” ways to say the same old thing. This obsession—or better, preoccupation—with newness often limits the cultural productivity we could otherwise be engaging with. To recapitulate the same stale productivity in new cyberspatial ways does not justify a work. Furthermore, this speed and rate in which digitally technology is developing leaves little room for self-reflection or awareness, thus perhaps perpetuating the need for the new, and to allow our commentary on it to be so limited.
Sample photo from "Stolen Identity Project" by Andrew Schroeder
As I’ve said earlier, the ideological significance of newMedia art is vested on the metamorphosing relationship we’re experiencing with digital technology. The above image is a photography project by Andrew Schroeder that I often think of as being a good example of non-new-technology-newMedia-art. The project is a series of photographs released as a book/catalog that follow individuals that stole Schroeder’s identity in 2006. Instead of immediately reporting these individuals to the authorities he decided to tour the locations they had visited using his VISA, and take tourist-like photographs of these locations. In a strange play, he beings to tour himself, tracking himself vicariously through others passing off as him. The piece addresses the growing dissociation we’ve experienced as a result of our digital selves taking more precedence over our physical bodies. In following his captors, he isn’t concerned with who they are, or why they have done this (necessarily), but instead questions if his own identity is represented fairly by these thieves (ie, would he stay where they stayed, what would he have eaten differently in such-and-such diner, etc). The dislocation between self and identity is captured magnificently in this project, by exposing our digital privacy as containing little to no reflection on our physical identity.
Another such project that incorporates reflection on our integrated circuit as well as the media histories I have spoken about above is Sal Randolph’s Free Words project. This work incorporates using public space as a venue for distributing free literature and books. As a conceptual observation on the proliferation of mass-produced publishing, Free Words aims to undo some of the tension found in the economy of information dissemination. Using a framework that could possibly function easier on the web, Sal takes the project to the streets in order to encourage active participation with the pursuit of information/knowledge. Free Words’ “publications” are found in typical book stores across the country, and are tagged by stickers to notify interested parties. Although this project can also be viewed as an art activist piece speaking against the isolation/profiteering of the book publishing industry, I like considering this project as newMedia due to its hacking/remodeling the idea of publishing being explicitly linked to making things available to the public.
McLuhan (I know, I know) states that the translation of messages between mediums accelerates its digestions: “For the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern it introduces into human affairs.” Because the breadth and speed of our digital networked lives, we have very little time for collective conscientiousness concerning the rate at which we consume (both culture/art and otherwise). As a result, we can succumb to the shiny, glossy, and immediacy of our media culture rather than perhaps its effectiveness in communication/observation. By simply removing the proper noun quality of “New Media Art” I tend to divert the attention away from the “new” part, as well as hopefully/playfully acknowledge that the history and culture of newMedia is not necessarily exclusive to art culture. This spelling also hopes to break away from the typical implication that capitalization provides to a genre: its solidity in time and place. newMedia art history and production is intrinsically hybridized and multi-threaded. I like to think of media art history as being a rope; the more intertwined strands, the stronger it becomes.
Experimental Economies: Talking with Chicago’s InCUBATE
Sunday Soup at InCUBATE
In the current state of financial precariousness, artists and arts administrators need to build mutually beneficial trust economies and supportive networks to rally for funding. And with arts institutions and nonprofits closing their doors and liquidating their collections in hoards, the need to demonstrate why art should be valued seems particularly vital now. However, InCUBATE, a research institute based out of Chicago that critically interrogates current models for arts funding, asks whether a revaluation of art is really what is needed.
“It’s weird to frame the question like: why is art valuable? Versus why is science valuable? Or why are the humanities valuable?” says Abigail Satinsky, who founded InCUBATE along with Roman Petruniak and Ben Schaafsma in 2007.
“If we set up the conversation all the time about how things need to be justified in economic terms then we’re running up against a fundamental problem,” Satinksy continues. “It’s important to start from the opposite end of things, and not just demand that money be thrown at whatever you think is interesting. You should figure out why it exists, who you want it to exist for, and what resources you need to make it happen and build it up. I could go off about how I think art provides us with unique ways of looking at the world, but then I would just be reinforcing the question.”
InCUBATE, which stands for the Institute of Community Understanding Between Art and the Everyday, is currently run by Satinsky, Petruniak, Bryce Dwyer, and Matthew Joynt. The group is more of a platform for asking questions than a tangible collective, although they have a space in Chicago where they present programming, an artist residency, and a regular monthly brunch where funds raised are granted out to an artist or project.
The brunch, which began as a weekly program called Sunday Soup, was initiated to streamline the process of applying for artist grants. The process is participatory, with brunch patrons voting on which project receives the grant. These are only micro-grants—never more than $200-300 at a time—but for individuals for whom the bureaucracy of grantwriting is impossible to comprehend, every little bit helps. InCUBATE has taken Sunday Soup on the road, from Creative Time’s Democracy in America exhibition to SKYDIVE, a contemporary art space in Houston. In its various incarnations, Sunday Soup is a grantmaking resource, a platform for discussion, and an art project in its own right.
The problem of sustainability is one at which InCUBATE balks. The members are explicit about the fact that they are asking these questions for themselves, and that any sense or manifestation of community that comes from it is is a bonus. “Success is often gauged by the fact that we get ‘cushy’ jobs and that we can support ourselves out of it,” says Satinsky. “We made this choice, but we also have the economic realities of our daily lives like everybody else does, and this is enriching in other ways. I don’t think [InCUBATE] should be gauged as successful by whether or not it’s a functioning institution. As soon as this becomes un-interesting to us, we’re going to stop. That’s the freedom you’re allowed by doing a project that’s for yourself. I don’t think it’s about building something that is a replicable model.”
Instead of asking how we can come up with a sustainable model for arts funding, InCUBATE asks the opposite. They want, first of all, to question why we value sustainability, whether some projects are meant to endure, and what it means to be successful as an artist or organization. The group is currently working on a project called Artist-Run Credit League, where they are asking artist spaces local to Chicago to pay into a monthly “pot.” The idea is that these spaces will throw fundraisers, the money from which gets paid into a collective account. Each month, the same spaces receive payouts, hopefully with interest if fundraisers are successful.
“We were interested in the idea that a lot of apartment galleries in Chicago are not actually organizations, are not incorporated as nonprofits, and actually don’t have plans to be in operation for a while,” explains Satinsky. “So we were trying to figure out a flexible banking structure that would be helpful to those organizations versus all the granting opportunities being geared at nonprofit organizations with five-year plans.” While this might only benefit short-term projects or spaces that will likely disappear in a year or two, InCUBATE is building a workable network of mutual support.
InCUBATE proceeds by framing questions to identify ways of being in institutions. From these questions arise key principles that can be tested in practice. These are not unbendable or categorical imperatives; rather they are modes of operating within systems in order to continue learning, growing, and having new conversations. This, notes Satinsky, is why she and her colleagues asked these questions in the first place. “If we think of InCUBATE as a really good learning tool, in terms of figuring out how the system works and how we want to operate within it, then we can go out and get jobs and implement our values and see how they work on a much larger scale than what we’re able to do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not about being oppositional; its about figuring out how the system works.”
Indie Games +/or Games as Art
Invisible Threads, Double Happiness Jeans by Stephanie Rothenberg and Jeff Crouse
In continuing the thread (no pun intended with Double Happiness) of Play and it’s relationship to newMedia art, I thought an appropriate—perhaps unavoidable—topic would be Art Games. I can’t begin to talk about this genre without properly pointing towards the history/community of game modding and machinima. Not to say that these communities get overlooked, but I think this history/hystory and its subculture is essential in approaching the type of critical engagement certain artists putting forward with their work.
For instance, a couple of years ago JODI (browsers be warned) came to Chicago to give a retrospective-type talk at Conversations at the Edge (a screening program organized/curated mostly by Amy Beste and the department of Film, Video, and New Media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and the question arose concerning the efficacy of making art games with regards to it being similar (if not identical) to other game mods developed by “fans.” JODI responded that essentially there was no difference and that their mods can be seen as either being in homage to this community or else a reflection upon different strategies of gameplay. Machinima, along with game modding culture, has inseparable roots in fandom culture/subculture; Machinima.com is surely a testament to thriving community that produces this type of work.
The rhetoric involved in game art includes a multitude of conversations; gameplay, interactivity, immersion of senses, virtual reality, and a growing (if not innate) dialog concerning cinema. Lev Manovich’s discourse on newMedia is heavily vested in the cinematic relationship in newMedia art, and points towards early cinema as being a visual and cultural gateway into the digestion and analysis of digital arts. He positions Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is the essential reference point in Manovich’s book as being a primary example and case of interest in mapping the emergence of newMedia as an art form. The self-reflexivity, the formalistic concerns, and interface (or HCI), are the particular elements that Manovich highlights that are relevant to the discourse surrounding Games as Art. When addressing the formal qualities of Game Art, a common solution, or route, I’ve notived artists employ involve one of two strategies of investigation; Self-reflexive machinima (see Brody Condon), or media vested in the language and history of experimental cinema (see Philip Solomon’s Last Days in a Lonely Place).
Although these works reflect on the cinematic qualities/possibilities of games as art, what has emerged as perhaps the most culturally potent engagement with this medium is how games themselves, unaltered (un-modded) or self-created, can exhibit a(A)rtistic qualities. It seems irrefutable that games as a source of entertainment are an undeniable mode of cultural production and media creation. The easy way of substantiating this is by observing how the finances of the game industry (profit/production/distribution) have surpassed the movie industry. A whole generation has grown up considering games—as opposed to “the movies”—as being the new industry to creatively delve into (as could be also evidenced by the growing number of academic institutions providing game development degrees and coursework). Games have exponentially grown to hold more and more cultural capital, and in doing so, museum/gallery society cannot refuse the force of this emergent form any longer.
Cowboyana Trailer by Mark Essen
Although I’ve probably gone on a tangent, I wanted to bring up art games, and using game engines for artmaking purposes, to accentuate certain aspects of Play and interactivity in newMedia creation and engagement. The above examples of game art, or indie games, provide good examples of some of the concerns I have with this genre. Mark Essen’s Cowboyana is an interesting example of re-purposing 8-bit aesthetic into a type of cinematic gesture; connecting the nostalgia for the “Old West” with Nintendo-esque graphics. Cowboyana also conveys a critical engagement with side-scroller shoot-em-ups/run and gun (of the Contra variety) gameplay, questioning the relationship of co-operative play as well as the frenzied feeling of this sub-genre of games.
The Endless Forest - chocolate and blue deer from Tale of Tales on Vimeo.
Tale of Tales’ The Endless Forest is perhaps one of my favorite Indie games right now. A “social screensaver, [and] virtual place where you can play with your friends” (quoted from TOT website), this game/social interactive environment directly deals with the critical argument about 3D art being merely “screen saver art.” The game works when your computer goes to sleep (a wonderful use of techonological metaphors) and uses this rest period to connect you to other cyber-dreamers. In exploring this mythical space (which is designed beautifully), TEF subverts notions of gameplay being related to vegetative states, and re-contextualizes this into virtual meditative space. The format, and the execution of this project encourages “breaks” in typical computer use, by forcing users/players to play this only during states of natural “rest.” This layer of engagement changes the dynamic of game play into a casual exploration as opposed to task/goal-based games.
(poor quality video) Suicide Solution by Brody Condon
Brody Condon’s Suicide Solution is perhaps one of the most intriguing and disturbing pieces of machinima that I know of. It traverses hundreds of suicides in 50 game engines over the course of 19 minutes. The piece, watched in its entirety, shifts from humor to disaffection, to abject horror. The process of self-obsessive killing reinforces notions of our digital-self being impermanent and malleable, but only through destruction and mutilation.
Invisible Threads exhibits a fascinating approach to destabilizing the connection between cyber-virtual environments and RL. In re-imagining the sweatshop through the potentially suspicious practice of crowd sourcing, we’re asked to rethink layers of media interactivity and productivity. In making “everyday” users of Second-Life into active participants in the decentralized manufacturing of paper clothing, the line between digital participation and exploitation becomes blurry. I feel like this project also asks the greater question of our willingness to put our faith of personal identity and representation into the hands of corporations (ie Second-Life being a proprietary product/service). By using the Second-Life engine and community as its production core, Invisible Threads poses the question of how games can produce cultural goods and breach/complicate our standard concept of the purpose of gaming environments.
Obsolescence as Cultural Production
Thinking about this topic often reminds me of a section of Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo is describing a city to Kubla Kahn in which its center is made of the latest, most expensive and impressive pieces of technology. This city is also composed of rings around the center, each layer containing the most recent detritus of the closest inner province. Marco Polo suggests that Kubla Kahn’s entire empire is just a succession of rings that surround the center of this magnificent mythical city.
The above video is an observation of a service repairman fixing a payphone I made while waiting for the subway in Chicago. My initial thought was that this fixing was somehow a superfluous action of maintaining an obsolete mode of communication; I thought, “who uses payphones anymore?” In the age of massive telecommunications cellular networks—flooded with iPhones, G1’s, and Blackberry’s—information (or staying within the grid) is more readily available by 3G technologies and mobile architectures than even a year ago. However, I felt as though the cyber-optimist in me was too quick to acknowledge the real-life fact that the grid does not reach as far and as wide as one would hope.
That being said, it made me want to address “obsolete” practices. Obsolescence as a mode of cultural production has many manifestations: hardware hacking, media reclaiming, data bending, etc. But I think the most compelling part of this type of practice is the politics of reclamation. In using “obsolete media,” artists and craftsmen/craftswomen alike inherently are making a statement concerning consumer electronics/economics and the growing problem of digital waste. I like to think that work of this kind makes a statement similar to the idea that, “We already have everything we need, we just don’t know it.” With works like Paul Slocum’s synthcart made from reprogramming Atarai 2600’s, and Christoph Hess’s sound performance installations/performances, we see obsolete media being performed, used, and reclaimed to create new and innovative procedures to reconsidering how to still engage with “old media.”
Obsolescence also comments on the issue of Hacking; taking something that had an original design and repurposing it for a different use (like the above projects show). The way in which we address the issues of Hacking and Hackers in mainstream media is certainly an outdated, obsolete way of thinking. Perhaps it is needless to say, but Hackers are far from the conventional stereotype of basement-dwelling malicious computer programmers that pilfer precious digital information from the government and exploit networks to steal our identities. I prefer (if it isn’t already obvious) to consider Hacking, and “The Hack,” as an appropriate metaphor for contemporary cultural production in general. McKenzie Wark uses Hackers and the act of hacking (in his A Hacker Manifesto) as an apt metaphor for an emergent class of cultural producers. Their efforts (and hopefully all our efforts), aim to undo the proprietary captivity of what he calls “vectors of information,” which ensnare us in the trap of perpetual oppression from traditional frameworks of power and capital. Hacking—and using obsolete media—speak to a need of renegotiating the terms of how we interact with our media technology. The planned obsolescence of our telecommunication gadgets (which a far beyond the point of merely being “toys”) force us into perpetual modes of consumption. Reusing/misusing technology that is no longer in maintenance provides a creative and wonderful outlet for reorganizing the methods of technological participation. It could be said that the model of consumerism that we typically abide by is obsolete; in the growing avalanche of change, we could use a bit of stability.
Perhaps this post brings me back to the idea of Play. A hack is not simply a reprogram, or a break in a system; it can circumvent the potential problems of a closed system and open it up to new possibilities. In doing so, a hack often renders the initial intended mode uninteresting and stale. In an interesting turn of creativity, hacking can reveal that the only thing obsolete about an object or an idea is our perception and our acceptance of its provisional use. Hacking destabilizes, recontextualizes, refreshes, reformats, updates, and very simply picks apart and rebuilds. Likewise, Play deals with turning something static into something viscous. It could be said that Play and hacking are interchangeable/interwoven paths and histories essential to media creation and involvement.
O hai :: Approaches + Modes
Nicholas O'Brien, Untitled still from an ongoing project made with Google SketchUp, 2009.
I thought before I get really started the guest blogging here, I’d speak a little bit about my intentions/directions/plans. BEFORE that, however, I’d like to thank Kelly Shindler for giving me this great opportunity as well as fellow Art21 bloggers and staff for their continued efforts and insight.
Although I hope not to linger too often on my own personal work while blogging here, I feel the need to provide slight context for what I will hopefully discuss. The easiest way I see myself establishing this context is through a brief examination of what I’m working on.
My academic and artistic practice (and these should be seen as being mutually influential or one in the same) filters through many sub-genres of what has often times been commonly dubbed newMedia Art (I prefer this spelling for reasons I might get into during my visit). Although I am sometimes in conflict with this classification and its specificity for mostly digitally-based artworks (according to some), I find it to be the most appropriate genre for me to identify with. Although my work encompasses Super-8mm film, photography, sound, performance, video, video games, and installation, I still feel most at home with wanting to associate with newMedia, even when the medium in which I’m working in is not often considered part of this genre, or even particularly “new.” In other words I feel as though newMedia is based more on ideology than on technology.
Nicholas O'Brien, Untitled still from a video sketch made in 2009.
With this in mind, what draws me to newMedia, and what I will be hopefully discussing her , is its possibility for multidisciplinary production. Recently, one primary concern deals with “the virtual.” In typical newMedia art narratives, the virtual is a common semantic replacement for cyberspace, or more simply the WWW. For my practice, however, I’m more interested in how/why this notion of the virtual has been primarily limited to digital experiences in cyberspace. In doing so, this bracketing overlooks a larger art historical discourse concerning representation in general being a virtual process. Virtuality extends beyond cyberworlds, refracting into different prisms; sculpted space, identity politics associated to land(scape), and memory. I feel as though we’re now seeing that the re-translation of virtual experience into physical manifestations is in disproportion to the initial transcription of ourselves into virtual realms; the machine is imperfect, the input is not (or is no longer) equal to the output. Our virtual selves contain more substance than our fleshy counterparts. We embody our tech more than we do our organs. To quote Erik Davis, “We have been cyborgs since year zero.”
Although I’m speaking somewhat abstractly (let’s get used to it), I plan on discussing these discrepancies through looking at works that are personally influential, as well as ones that represent/exemplify several stances on reconsidering the relationship between virtual spaces. Some approaches to this agenda include conversing about obsolescence (physical and cultural), art games/indie games, the disintegration/fabrication (a mutually implicated binary for me) of architectural space, rediscovering/reconsidering Home, reprogramming media myths, and exploring alternative histories(hystories) for newMedia Art.
Nicholas O'Brien, composite still from the Half-Life2 Game engine, made in 2009.
That all being said, one of the most distinct ways that I choose to trudge through this swampy mire is through Play. I love discussing Play (note capitalization, please) as an abstract ideal of cultural production. Play is enabling, empowering, and distinct in that it allows for a type of cultural liquidity that is hard to find in stringent artmaking. How can lolCats, OULIPO, Voltron, Half-Life2, and Philip Glass all be put on the same cultural pedestal without determining each element as pejoratively more or less culturally important? I’m not necessarily going to be providing answers for this, but I feel as though attempting to ask the question is testament to the subject material that I address in my work. The polymorphic significance of these different zones relate to the cultural leveling Barthes proposes in his examination of Wrestling (in Mythologies). I wish not to just analyze or observe anthropologically, I wish to engage (both skeptically and in celebration) how these environments or frameworks encourage and reinforce the importance of Play. To be able to weave through, without misappropriating/misrepresenting, these various lo(l)cals of Play is something that I hope I’m able to convey during my time with Art21.
Art21 Educators 2009-2010 - Apply Now!
Art21 Educators: Contemporary Art in Contemporary Classrooms 2009-2010
Are you interested in contemporary art?
Are you a K-12 art and/or media teacher?
Do you teach in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York?
Art21 Educators is a year-long professional development initiative designed to cultivate and support K-12 art educators interested in bringing contemporary art, artists, and themes into their classrooms. Join a national group of educators to explore, discuss, design, and document curriculum around the art of our times.
We’ll kick off the year with a 5-day workshop in NYC (July 15-21) and continue meeting virtually each month using online technologies and city-specific field trips. Art21 is looking for art and media teachers in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City to start. The initiative will expand to include additional cities and subject areas in future years.
For more information or download an application click here. Application deadline is Monday, May 4.
Jenny Holzer | “Projection for Chicago”
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Jenny Holzer discusses the process behind her series of Xenon Projections as part of the exhibition PROTECT PROTECT at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Featured works include Projection for Chicago (2008), a multi-part projection of the texts of Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska on building facades around the city, including the Lyric Opera House & Riverside Plaza, among others. Holzer’s traveling exhibition opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York on March 12, 2009.
Whether questioning consumerist impulses, describing torture, or lamenting death and disease, Jenny Holzer’s use of language provokes a response in the viewer. While her subversive work often blends in among advertisements in public space, its arresting content violates expectations. Holzer’s texts—such as the aphorisms “abuse of power comes as no surprise” and “protect me from what I want”—have appeared on posters and condoms, and as electronic LED signs and projections of xenon light. Holzer’s recent use of text ranges from silk-screened paintings of declassified government memoranda detailing prisoner abuse, to poetry and prose in a 65-foot wide wall of light in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, New York.
VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller, Nick Ravich & Kelly Shindler. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera & Sound: George Monteleone and Alexander Stewart. Editor: Jenny Chiurco. Artwork Courtesy: Jenny Holzer. Text Courtesy: Wislawa Szymborska. Special Thanks: MCA Chicago & Karla Loring.
A better “we” through art? AREA Chicago’s Daniel Tucker on art and community
"Notes for a People's Atlas of Chicago" exhibition of Chicagoan maps of the city. Photo By Jason Reblando. 1-15-09 opening at Wicker Park Field House, Chicago.
This post is written as a dispatch from California, where I was at the College Art Association conference and speaking in classes at CalArts, SFAI, and the CCA Social Practices studio.
Initially when invited to contribute, I was challenged by the prompting question, “how can art effect political change?” because of how broad it was and because I didn’t think that I could begin to address that in one short post. It is one of the central concerns of my work. But the challenge was interesting and offered an opportunity to try to communicate (somewhat) concisely some of the lessons I’ve learned from many years of practicing socially engaged art at various levels.
Off the cuff, I should be clear that I work in many different places and in many different ways, which strongly influence my ideas (hence my forthcoming eclectic listing and ranting). Most often the place is in Chicago, and the most consistent method or form I work in has been a biannual publication, AREA Chicago. I also find myself working on numerous other projects simultaneously. That diversity of tactics and approaches is both informed by my life situation, which requires me to work in different ways and different places to earn a living. It is also a recognition of the fact that there are limits to all forms and there is much to be learned by trying new ones. So you’ll find on my website that my time is also spend writing essays, organizing conferences and exhibitions, lecturing extensively, and working on various kinds of documentary and research projects.
Last Wednesday, while speaking on a panel discussion entitled “Relocating Art and its Public” at the CAA conference here in LA, I was compelled to think through the work that I care about and am involved with as it relates to audiences and participants. I realized I could not clearly talk about any of this without spelling out what kind of relationships I wanted to have in this world, in a broader sense. That is not to say that the work I’ve been involved in has always succeeded in creating those relationships which I desire and want others to have. But the work that I do is so informed by a political concern about people’s potential to self-actualize in a world which stifles that possibility that I have to be up front about it. This is how I intend to address the question posed on this blog.
I concluded my presentation by recounting the provocation put forth to me by my friend Chris Carlsson in San Francisco: that the challenge for those opposed to capitalism and in favor of a different (”anticapitalist”) organizing principal for life and economies is to take the “anti” part of our perspective and make it into something that we can all strive for together. A further elaboration would be that a challenge for anticapitalist cultural work is to articulate and represent a life better than the competitive and commodified social relations that currently dominate how most of us relate to one another. One step in that direction would be to create contexts that allow us to see our relationships in ways that both benefit from our diverse experiences and insights needed to face everyday challenging situations, and that also allow us to be powerful enough together through organization so we can tackle the big stuff we all face. I honestly think that most of us barely know what free feels like or looks like. We need each other to figure out how to know how to get there. In the last eight years, most of the projects that I have been involved with have had some component that was about articulating a different kind of “we” or collective toward the ends described above. Admittedly, they are on a pretty micro scale. To the extent to which any transformed social relations are actually realized, the impact beyond the people directly involved is limited, rendering it primarily symbolic and experimental.
DSLR Call For Participation Spring 2001. For more information about DSLR and other critical public art in Chicago from 2000-2005 see "Trashing the Neoliberal City" booklet (free download) by Tucker/Forman at http://www.learningsite.info/trashing003.htm
I’ll now summarize few of the events with which I have been involved as a participant or organizer that have tried to articulate a new or different “we.” The first is the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR), which took place in Chicago in April of 2001. The “campaign” was organized through an open call for participation circulated in email and via heavy postering throughout the city. It asked for people who are concerned about the state of public space in the city to come together and launch a coordinated and highly visible collective effort to highlight potential uses for public space, as well as to articulate criticisms or protests about how space was being controlled. This took many forms. Some were quite playful, such as poetry slams on El trains or ladders leading to nowhere placed on fences to suggest potential over-comings or transgressions. Others asked neighbors to sign petitions in order to get sidewalk kiosks to be accessible to everyone, not just real estate developers. There were over 70 similar small scale temporary initiatives that took place throughout the city that weekend. The effort, like so many complex social projects that involve people from many political persuasions and cultural backgrounds, had its successes and failures. One general success is that temporary space, opened up through coordinated space reclamation, allowed for housing activists, graffiti writers, urban planners, activist educators, pirate radio broadcasters, and critical artists to see themselves in relation to one another through a shared concern about public space in Chicago.
The DSLR spawned many relationships and catalyzed many new projects that continue to this day. By 2005, some of the folks who met through that work, along with others with overlapping interests, got together to develop the biannual publication AREA Chicago, of which I am still an editor. AREA has built on this methodology of creating a lens through which various practitioners and concerned citizens of the city can see themselves in relationship to one another. We have done that through 8 “local reader” publications, the collection of hundreds of hand-made personal maps about subjective experiences of the city into an archive entitled “Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago,” as well as over 50 events in the last 4 years.
