Pool is was an online platform and publication dedicated to expanding and improving the discourse between online and offline realities and their cultural, societal and political impact on each other.
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Issue Eight
If you look at a city, there’s no way to see it. One person can never see a city. You can miss it, hate it, or realize that it’s taken something from you, but you can’t go somewhere and look at it and just see it empirically. It has to be informed, imagined, by many people at a time. It’s an everyday group hallucination. This novel is modeled on that phenomenon. 150 writers, professional and amateur, have contributed to it, not using the mutually blind exquisite corpse method, and not using the “may I have this dance” method where writers take turns being the author, but using the old Hollywood screenwriting system whereby a studio boss had at his disposal a “stable” of writers working simultaneously to crank out a single blockbuster, each assigned specific functions within the overall scheme. The result is generic and perfect. And Reena herself benefits from it by being more of a material entity, a being, than a character – her thoughts and actions are not spanned by any author’s mind. Who pulls her strings?
Preface
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
This publication is dedicated to pioneering curators and presents a unique collection of interviews by Hans Ulrich Obrist: Anne d’Harnoncourt, Werner Hofmann, Jean Leering, Franz Meyer, Seth Siegelaub, Walter Zanini, Johannes Cladders, Lucy Lippard, Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén, and Harald Szeeman are gathered together in this volume. Their contributions map the evolution of the curatorial field, from early independent curating in the 1960s and 1970s and the experimental institutional programs that developed in Europe and America at this time, through Documenta and the expansion of biennales.
We call on all cultural workers to put down their tools and cease to make, distribute, sell, exhibit, or discuss their work from Janury 1st 1990 to January 1st 1993. We call for all galleries, museums, agencies, ‘alternative’ spaces, periodicals, theatres, art schools &c., to cease all operations for the same period.
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Brooklyn, New York, April 2008. A row of street stalls in front of graffiti-covered iron gates. Tables full of merchandise: Louis Vuitton handbags and wallets, with their familiar “LV” monograms; brown and beige; white with multicolor fruit-like designs. You can find them for sale on Canal Street in New York, in the night markets of Hong Kong and Singapore or the covered market in Mexico City, and in many other places around the world where the urban poor go to shop—”LV” articles piled up alongside the Patek Philippe watches, Chanel perfume, North Face jackets, and Adidas shoes. Copies, fakes, counterfeits; cheap, poorly made reproductions . . . or are they?
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The hypothesis that I wish to propose is that the word dispositif, or “apparatus” in English, is a decisive technical term in the strategy of Foucault’s thought. He uses it quite often, especially from the mid 1970s, when he begins to concern himselfwith what he calls “governmentality” or the “government ofmen.”
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Remix, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, informs the development of material reality dependent on the constant recyclability of material with the implementation of mechanical reproduction.
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This work is a sustained examination of the automaton as early modern machine, and curious ancestor of the twentieth-century robot, who slaves away at the assembly line of being, sustaining the most precious fantasies of our humanity, while entertaining us with nightmares of the treachery of others.
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When an individual enters the presence of others, they commonly seek to acquire information about him or to bring into play information about him already possessed. They will be interested in his general socio-economic status, his conception of self, his attitude toward them, his competence, his trust worthiness, etc. Although some of this information seems to be sought almost as an end in itself, there are usually quite prac tical reasons for acquiring it. Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in ad vance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him. Informed in these ways, the others will know how best to act in order to call forth a desired response from him.
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Utopias seem to be out of fashion these days. The old ideologies, such as communism, have shown their inadequacies, and the “laissez-faire” liberalism that has replaced them is coming under more and more criticism. Instead, the intellectual climate has turned to either gloom and doom, or an “anything goes” postmodernist relativism. This general pessimism and apathy is fed by an increasing amount of bad news about wars, terrorism, ecological catastrophes, global warming, rising xenophobia and inequalities.
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With a characteristic flourish of perversity linking painting to pasta, Martin Kippenberger identified the most important problem to be addressed on canvas since Warhol in an interview of 1990–91: “Simply to hang a painting on the wall and say that it’s art is dreadful. The whole network is important! Even spaghettini . . . . When you say art, then everything possible belongs to it. In a gallery that is also the floor, the architecture, the color of the walls.” If we take Kippenberger at his word, a significant question arises: How does painting belong to a network?
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Art is a history of doing nothing and a long tail of useful action. It is always a fetishisation of decision and indecision – with each mark, structure and engagement.
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Of all the frames, envelopes, and limits-usually not perceived and certainly never questioned-which enclose and constitute the work of art (picture frame, niche, pedestal, palace, church, gallery, museum, art history, economics, power, etc.), there is one rarely even mentioned today that remains of primary importance: the artist’s studio.
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As the art world careens this way and that, and its many institutions, markets, and audiences adapt and adjust, supporting it all is the generative activity of studio practice. The studio is a space and a condition wherein creative play and progressive thinking yield propositions for reflecting on who we are—individually and collectively—and where we might go next.
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The significane for art of the year 2008 is not limited to the market crash in October, but includes the founding of the blog Contemporary Art Daily in November, and the concurrent mushrooming of social media. Although the first and the last development have been much discussed (albeit rarely in tandem), all three have produced effects which are deeply interrelated.
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I used to really hate art object and the buildings that housed them. This was because I thought they werde unnecessarily exclusive, that only certain people could interact with them in certain places at certain times. To a degree, I still belive this.
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People keep trying to get a handle on what’s happening. There’s a fear that others are hastening to make startling connections among the raw material, tracing lines between points we didn’t even know existed. Exacerbating this anxiety is the fact that despite its supposed insistence on the consolidation of knowledge and the worth of information, the Internet produces ritualized unknowing. You could say, however, that this is a good thing, for it provokes a desire to remystify the frenzy of technological change through ritual, through a personal and allegorical rehearsal of what is perceived to be a manic and distorting increase in density, a compression exponentially telescoping in reach and magnitude.
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Twenty-two years since the arrival of the first consumer digital camera, Western culture is now characterized by ubiquitous photography. The disappearance of the camera inside the mobile phone has ensured that even the most banal moments of the day can become a point of photographic reverie, potentially shared instantly. Supported by the increased affordability of computers, digital storage and access to broadband, consumers are provided with new opportunities for the capture and transmission of images, particularly online where snapshot photography is being transformed from an individual to a communal activity. As the digital image proliferates online and becomes increasingly delivered via networks, numerous practices emerge surrounding the image’s transmission, encoding, ordering and reception. Informing these practices is a growing cultural shift towards a conception of the Internet as a platform for sharing and collaboration, supported by a mosaic of technologies termed Web 2.0. In this article we attempt to delineate the field of snapshot photography as this practice shifts from primarily being a print-oriented to a transmission-oriented, screen-based experience. We observe how the alignment of the snapshot with the Internet results in the emergence of new photographies in which the photographic image interacts with established and experimental media forms – raising questions about the ways in which digital photography is framed institutionally and theoretically.
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Roland Barthes despaired of keeping a diary. Too boring. Too frustrating. The diary disease, he called it. But there was one point of interest, and that had to do with re-reading an entry several months or years later. This could provide pleasure due to the awakening of a memory not in what was written but in “the interstices of notation.” For instance, on re-reading the entry relating his having to wait for a bus one disappointing evening on the rue de Rivoli in Paris, he recalls the grayness—”but no use trying to describe it now, anyway, or I’ll lose it again instead of some other sensation, and so on, as if resurrection always occurred alongside the thing expressed: role of the Phantom, of the Shadow.” This is certainly intriguing, yet what is this Phantom, and what might it tell us about fieldwork notebooks?
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With medium specificity a passé historical concern confined chiefly to the pages of art history, it may seem prosaic and anachronistic to question the position and relative validity of a single medium—photography— within the world of contemporary art.
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The “New Aesthetic” is a native product of modern network culture. It’s from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a “theory object” and a “shareable concept.”
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If, according to Debord, “the spectacle is capital accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image”, then the New Aesthetic is technology accumulated to such a degree that it becomes an image.
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The practice of conceptual art in the context of a surfing club is based on games played between the participants and audience. In some cases participants and audience are synonymous. The nature of these games is purely semiotic, i.e. concerned with arrangement of signs, their belonging to certain cultural codes/discourses, and a capacity to generate meaningful statements.
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With the rise of the Web, writing has met its photography. By that, I mean that writing has encountered a situation similar to that of painting upon the invention of photography, a technology so much better at doing what the art form had been trying to do that, to survive, the field had to alter its course radically. If photography was striving for sharp focus, painting was forced to go soft, hence impressionism. Faced with an unprecedented amount of available digital text, writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.
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This link has always been affected by a symptom – that of an oscillation or a pulse.
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The use of the word “social” in the context of information technology goes back to the very beginnings of cybernetics. It later pops up in the 1980s context of “groupware.” The recent materialist school of Friedrich Kittler and others dismissed the use of the word “social” as irrelevant fluff—what computers do is calculate, they do not interfere in human relations. Holistic hippies, on the other hand, have ignored this cynical machine knowledge and have advanced a positive, humanistic view that emphasizes computers as tools for personal liberation. This individualistic emphasis on interface design, usability, and so on was initially matched with an interest in the community aspect of computer networking. Before the “dot-com” venture capitalist takeover of the field in the second half of the 1990s, progressive computing was primarily seen as a tool for collaboration among people.
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In the 1990s, a single term came to stand for the whole range of new technologies, new expressive and communicative possibilities, new forms of community and sociality that were emerging around computers and Internet. The term was “digital.” It received its official seal of approval, so to speak, in 1996 when in the director of MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte collected his Wired columns into the book that he named Being Digital. Many years later, the term “digital” still dominates both popular and academic understanding of what new media is about.
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When we claim to have been injured by language, what kind of claim do we make? We ascribe an agency to language, a power to injure, and position ourselves as the objects of its injurious trajectory. We claim that language acts, and acts against us, and the claim we make is a further instance of language, one which seeks to arrest the force of the prior instance. Thus, we exercise the force of language even as we seek to counter its force, caught up in a bind that no act of censorship can undo.
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Is it certain that to the word communication corresponds a concept that is unique, univocal, rigorously controllable, and transmittable: in a word, communicable? Thus, in accordance with a strange figure of discourse, one must first of all ask oneself whether or not the word or signifier “communication” communicates a determinate content, an identifiable meaning, or a describable value.
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I COULD HAVE pretended to begin with a “false” beginning, my penchant for falsity [pour le faux] no longer requiring special demonstration. I could have simulated what in French is called a “faux départ” (I ask that the translator retain the quotation marks, the parentheses, the italics, and the French).
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How do we think about media art aesthetics and the production of critical knowledge as the creative industries paradigm consolidates around us, amidst ongoing financial, environmental and political crises? Can we still claim a special place for media art given the increasing ubiquity of informational technologies in everyday life and the intensification of cultural distribution through social media platforms? This book reflects on these questions through the recent New Aesthetic. More specifically, we are interested in reflecting on why a notion developed by the British designer James Bridle caused such a reaction across multiple contexts, sectors and segments of network culture. Pitched as a highly-curated batch of crowdsourced visual and textual content on the commercial microblogging and social networking platform Tumblr, the New Aesthetic was presented as a ‘shareable concept’, a ‘theory object’. This collection, moreover, was delivered wit h a message: the machines were telling us something, trying to speak to us, and we just need to return their affectionate, surveillant gazes, and communicate with their program languages.
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To consider glitch art as a communitie[s].exe is to emphasize that glitches are social constructs, rather than definitive algorithms. While these communitie[s] are in a state of perpetual beta, there is still a rough consensus and a [failing] deep[er] code ++ w/feedback of consistent patterns in thematic content + iconography + discrete narrative structure[s].
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To write means, of course, to perform an action by which a material, (for instance chalk, or ink), is put on a surface, (for instance a blackboard or a leaf of paper), to form a specific pattern, (for instance letters). And the tools used during this action, (for instance brushed and typewriters), are instruments which add something to something.
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Es handelt sich darum, ein Material auf eine Oberfläche zu bringen (zum Beispiel Kreide auf eine schwarze Tafel), um Formen zu konstruieren (zum Beispiel Buchstaben). Also anscheinend um eine konstruktive Geste: Konstruktion = Verbindung unterschiedlicher Strukturen (zum Beispiel Kreide und Tafel), um eine neue Struktur zu formen (zum Beispiel Buchstaben).
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This book is about the process of how we became bookish at the turn of the nineteenth century. It asks what we did with books and what books did to us when there were suddenly too many books. As historians of the book have shown, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a dramatic expansion in the number and circulation of printed books across Europe and North America. It was a period that saw the rise of a variety of social practices and spaces centered around the organization of books, whether it was the emergence of the public lending library, the private family library, the reading club, or the expansion of gift-giving rituals involving books.
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The theory of lock picking is the theory of exploiting mechanical defects. There are a few basic concepts and definitions but the bulk of the material consists of tricks for opening locks with particular defects or characteristics.
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To write means, of course, to perform an action by which a material, (for instance chalk, or ink), is put on a surface, (for instance a blackboard or a leaf of paper), to form a specific pattern, (for instance letters). And the tools used during this action, (for instance brushes and typewriters), are instruments which add something to something. Thus one would suppose that the gesture of writing is a constructive action, if by “construction” we mean the bringing together of various objects to form a new structure (=”con-struction”).
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Paratexts are those liminal devices and conventions, both withing and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher, and reader: titles, forewords, epigraphs, and publishers’ jacket copy are part of a book’s private and public history.
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“Informal art” is open in that it proposes a wider range of interpretive possibilities, a configuration of stimuli whose substantial indeterminacy allows for a number of possible readings, a “constellation” of elements that lend themselves to all sorts of reciprocal relationships.
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GIVEN the total colonisation of daily life by Capital, we are forced to speak the received language of the media. It has always been impossible to give coherent expression to thoughts and practices which oppose the dominant ideology. However, we do not seek the creation of new languages. Such an act is doomed to failure and plays into Capital’s hands (by reinforcing the myths of ‘originality’ and Individual creativity’). Rather, we aim to re-invent the language of those who would control us.
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“The digital revolution is over.” (Nicholas Negroponte, 1998) Over the past decade, the Internet has helped spawn a new movement in digital music. It is not academically based, and for the most part the com- posers involved are self-taught. Music journalists occupy themselves inventing names for it, and some have already taken root: glitch, microwave, DSP, sinecore, and microscopic music.
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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, sampling is practiced in new media culture when any software users including creative industry professionals as well as average consumers apply cut/copy & paste in diverse software applications; for professionals this could mean 3-D modeling software [...] and for average persons it could mean Microsoft Word, often used to write texts like this one. Cut/copy & paste which is, in essence, a common form of sampling, is a vital new media feature in the development of Remix.
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The label “New Media Art” does not identify an art genre or an art movement, and cannot be viewed – as it usually is – as a simple medium-based definition. On the contrary, a work of art – whether based on technology or not – is usually classed as New Media Art when it is produced, exhibited and discussed in a specific “art world,” the world of New Media Art. This art world came into being as a cultural niche in the Sixties and Seventies, and became a bona fide art world in the Eighties and Nineties, developing its own means of production and distribution, and cultivating an idea of “art” that is completely different from that entertained by the contemporary art world.
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Compared to other neo-avant-garde movements that emerged during the 1960s, conceptual art is conspicuous by virtue of the lack of serious discussion by art historians and critics over the last two decades. This gap in the reception is particularly ironic given the tremendous influence conceptual art has had on subsequent artistic developments, on the critical discussion surrounding the concept of postmodernism, and on the recognition and use, more generally, of various forms of theory by artists, curators, critics, and historians.
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At first I thought I could simply draw a line under word “medium”, bury it like so much critical toxic waste, ans walk away from it into a world of lexical freedom. “Medium” seemed too contaminated, too ideologically, too dogmatically, too discursively loaded.
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The figure of the middleman is typically seen as a conformist, parasitical agent responsible for short-circuiting authenticity. The middleman has an aura of mediocrity. The middleman is average, and a suspect character. There is always the risk that he knows more than he should and that he feathers his own nest. In other words, the middleman has an opaque presence in social space.
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“‘The contemporary artist … produces production itself, presentation itself … images and ideas of these that are at the same time (like it or not) ethical propositions.’” [...] “Perhaps we have already moved too quickly. Is something to be done at all? Faced with the apparent emergence of art as a fully functioning industry … might it not be better to take industrial action, that is to say to strike, to withdraw labor from the art system as it is now constituted? Maybe nothing is to be done.” [...] “While her ‘free time’ is spent working with her female friends on an art project—as she says, ‘one interesting project or another is always blowing into my house’— her days remain filled with different activities characterized by usefulness and/or idealism, both informal and normally undocumented.”
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From the start of modernity art began to manifest a certain dependence on theory. At that time – and even much later – art’s “need of explanation” (Kommentarbeduerftigkeit), as Arnold Gehlen characterized this hunger for theory was, in its turn, explained by the fact that modern art is “difficult” – inaccessible for the greater public. According to this view, theory plays a role of propaganda – or, rather, advertising: the theorist comes after the artwork is produced, and explains this artwork to a surprised and skeptical audience.
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Since 1945 Austria has produced two generations of artists concerned with experimental cinema.
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What distinguishes the emergent New Institutionalism in the late 1990s from the historical premise of institutional critique is the convergence of three key factors: firstly, relational and/or socially-engaged practices emerge as dominant strands of mainstream contemporary visual art through theoretical discourse and social networks; secondly, cultural experience becomes recognised as a primary component of urban regeneration and the consequent influx of considerable funds for newly built spaces for contemporary art leads to a reconsideration of the role of museums and galleries.
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In ideal terms, subjects visiting traditional exhibitions (with hanging paintings) to a certain extent train attributes that benefit the (inconspicuous) controlled, judgmental, responsible citizen. Visitors who are confronted by a confusing, compelling media exhibition, experience fragmentation, atomisation, hallucinatory excess, and an incomplete narration experience – an interpellation that positions them as overwhelmed and fragmented. When visiting projects committed to the educational turn, we are addressed as subjects able to participate in some way or another. We educate ourselves and engage in discussion, communicate amongst ourselves, and enter into contact and networks.
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So if we view exhibitions and art projects as an institutional apparatus making it possible to convey certain meanings and new perspectives to a larger public sphere, then what is important is how new publics are addressed, how knowledge circulates, and which social spaces and therefore institutions can be created and addressed. Thus criticism may have only just begun through the medium of the institution art, which is why we have to take the issue of the messages of exhibitions seriously.
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The end of the Nineties saw a spate of symposia and related publications looking at independent and freelance practice in the field of curating, discourse about a growing field of practice that many of us felt had for too long remained in the dark. Since then, against the backdrop of changing working conditions for curators, the blurring of traditionally distinct roles in cultural work and an increase in the number of curatorial study-programs, curatorial practice has moved into the spotlight.
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To make exhibition project politically means to actualize the idea of soviets as a collective organ which produce and govern all forms of activity. It is important to transform the governmental logic of curating through the creation of Artistic Soviets, which would be involved in the making of the exhibition project as political undertaken from its earliest phases onward. It is the Artistic Soviet that could serve as a prototypical social model, capable of formulating and realizing its goals independently, taking on the function of an alternative power, an open system for interaction with society at large.
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On some general level, the rise of social networking and the professionalization of web design reduced the technical nature of network computing, shifting the Internet from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and grandmas and sports fans and business people and painters and everyone else. Here comes everybody.
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In this post-digital age, digital technology is no longer a revolutionary phenomenon but a normal part of everyday life. The mutation of music and film into bits and bytes, downloads and streams is now taken for granted. For the world of book and magazine publishing however, this transformation has only just begun.
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The less punctuation marks,taken in isolation, convey meaning or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in language to names, the more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means exhausted by it.
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Human life can be described as a prolonged dialogue with the world. Man interrogates the world as is interrogated by the world. This dialogue is regulated by the way in which we define the legitimate questions that we may address to the world or the world may address to us – and the way in which we can identify the relevant answers to these questions.
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The point of departure for the selection of texts in this reader is the social dimension of participation – rather than activation of the individual viewer in so-called “interactive” art and installation. The latter trajectory has been well rehearsed elsewhere: the explosion of new technologies and the breakdown of medium-specific art in the 1960s provided myriad opportunities for physically engaging the viewer in a work of art.
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How does a rethinking of Richard Serra’s Verb List relate to the Post‐Internet use of forms? Taking one selected verb from each column of Serra’s original list we find: To Open [...] To Collect [...] To Expand [...] To Continue. Drawn from a list of more than one hundred proposed actions, these four terms speak directly to our cultural situation.
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Since its beginnings in the late 90s, internet art has had a fickle relationship with the museum. While commissions and granting initiatives have been established for media arts in Europe and America, the relationship between internet art and its fluctuating appearance in institutions demonstrates that it has not yet been wholly embraced by mainstream contemporary art.
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The work of the curator consists of placing artworks in the exhibition space. This is what differentiates the curator from the artist, as the artist has the privilege to exhibit objects which have not already been elevated to the status of artworks. In this case they gain this status precisely through being placed in the exhibition space. Duchamp, in exhibiting the urinal, is not a curator but an artist, because as a result of his decision to present the urinal in the framework of an exhibition, this urinal has become a work of art.
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Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral rooms called “galleries.” A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society.
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“Aaaaarg.org is a conversation platform – at different times it performs as a school, or a reading group, or a journal,” writes Sean Dockray about the online library he founded, which offers numerous philosophical, media, political and art-theory texts as free downloads. “Aaaaarg.org was created with the intention of developing critical discourse outside of an institutional framework. But rather than thinking of it like a new building, imagine scaffolding that attaches onto existing buildings and creates new architectures between them.” In his essay The Scan and the Export (published in the magazine Fillip, 12/2010) Sean Dockray analyses the ambiguity and the transience of a medium in which the reproduced and reproducible texts circulate on the platform and beyond: “The scan is an ambivalent image. It oscillates back and forth: between a physical page and a digital file, between one reader and another, between an economy of objects and an economy of data. Scans are failures in terms of quality, neither as ‘readable’ as the original book nor the inevitable ebook, always containing too much visual information or too little.”
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In continuing this written monologue about conversation, I am becoming aware of the sheer weirdness of thinking in this way about something that behaves so differently than writing “for the record.” But if, as Maurice Blanchot demonstrates, conversation can be defined as a series of interruptions—perhaps the most powerful of which being the neutrality of silence—then writing, which is a kind of silent speech, may itself constitute an interruption to the way conversation is imagined.
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Much has been said of late about “the conversational” or “the discursive” in and around the field of contemporary art. And yet we seem reluctant to talk about an art of conversation in the same breath. Maybe it is the all-too-powdery whiff of seventeenth-century aristocratic ladies and gentlemen, fanning themselves amidst idle chatter, whose connections to our own aspirations we would rather sweep under the shaggy carpet?2 Or perhaps it is because we are desperately hoping to talk ourselves out of stale notions of art as a cultural practice that to suggest an art of conversation might at first seem utterly oxymoronic?
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Multiple new models of curation have evolved in stark contrast to the traditional model that centers itself around the expert opinion of the curator. Independent curators are utilizing alternative configurations of gallery space or abandoning it entirely, a rejection of the museum as a monopolistic cultural producer.
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At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation, which seems immediate and obvious: I have a sensation of redness, of blueness, of hot or cold. It will, however, be seen that nothing could in fact be more confused, and that because they accepted it readily, traditional analyses missed the phenomenon of perception.
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The field of art is today frequently equated with the art market, and the artwork is primarily identified as a commodity. That art functions in the context of the art market, and every work of art is a commodity, is beyond doubt; yet art is also made and exhibited for those who do not want to be art collectors, and it is in fact these people who constitute the majority of the art public. The typical exhibition visitor rarely views the work on display as a commodity.
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Despite ideological differences, the various factions that make up the political right in America—from the grassroots to the astroturfed to the corporate—have found common ground after Obama’s 2008 victory.1 This ground is the past: an arid patch of mythological land that has become home to a growing organizing effort driven by anti-tax sentiments, elements of nationalism, and a vicious streak against a laundry list of undesirables.2 This movement only knows one way forward: back.
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In Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, two men wait by the side of a country road for a man who never comes. If done right, that is to say, if done with humor, fortitude, and a whiff of desperation, the play is as contemporary, funny, precise, courageous, and unknowable as I imagine it was back in 1952, when the play premiered in Paris.
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A man builds a snowman on his roof garden. It starts to melt in the afternoon sun. He watches. After a time, he takes the snowman to the cool of the mountains, where it stops melting. He bids it good-bye, and leaves. Just images, no words, very simple. It was a story depicted in a short shown on German TV as a fill-in between programs. The film drew complaints from parents reporting that their children had been frightened. That drew the attention of a team of researchers. Their study was notable for failing to find muchit was studying: cognition.
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In Hans Haacke’s pieces Broken R.M… and Baudrichard’s Ecstasy from the late 1980s, Duchamp’s readymades are subjected to transformations that highlight the problematic use of the readymade in the commodity art of the era: in the latter piece, a gilded urinal sits atop an ironing board; water is pumped through it from a bucket in a closed, self-referential loop. After Warhol’s canny exacerbation of the emerging image of the commodity, and the focus on the “picture” in late-1970s Appropriation Art, the commodity art of the 1980s focused on objects once more, but this time on objects devoid of the Duchampian tension between sign and thing, between a utilitarian object and the meanings projected onto it; these objects were programmed from the beginning to signify, to create value through the theological whims of their designed interplay.
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In a text written in response to the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet avant-garde, Carl Einstein claimed that tradition “piles up in the object”; that the object is a “medium for passive thinking,” bound to tradition and bourgeois property relations; and that in order to “assert the human person, objects, which are preserve jars, must be destroyed.” Going so far as to state that “every destruction of objects is justified,” Einstein proclaimed a “dictatorship of the thingless.”1 Einstein’s text seems to reflect simplistic narratives in which modernity is virtually synonymous with a purist, idealist suppression of the thing. Of course, such idealist tendencies did exist, but so did opposition to them. As if responding to Einstein’s quasi-Suprematist essay, Adorno once remarked that “someone who looks upon thingness as radical evil, who wants to dynamize all that exists into pure actuality, tends to be hostile to otherness, to the alien—which has lent its name to alienation, and not for nothing.”
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In modern art, the increasing resemblance of art objects to everyday objects raised the threat of eroding of any real difference between works of art and other things. Barnett Newman railed against both Duchamp’s readymades and “Bauhaus screwdriver designers” who were elevated to the ranks of artists by the Museum of Modern Art’s doctrine of “Good Design.” The danger for art was the same in both cases: the dissolving of the dividing line between works of art and everyday objects. Just as ancient art proper should never be confused with the craft of “women basket weavers,” modern art should never be confused with a screwdriver or urinal. In the 1960s, Clement Greenberg would also worry that a blank sheet of paper or a table would become readable as art, that the boundary between artworks and “arbitrary objects” was eroding. While not evincing any Modernist anxieties about readymades, Paul Chan’s recent assertion that “a work of art is both more and less than a thing” shows renewed concerns regarding such an assimilation—in a context marked, until quite recently, by an unprecedented market boom in which works of art seemed to be situated in a continuum of luxury goods spanning from Prada bags to luxury yachts.
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In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition within the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse. As such, the grid has done its job with striking efficiency. The barrier it has lowered between the arts of vision and those of language has been almost totally successful in walling the visual arts into a realm of exclusive visuality and defending them against the intrusion of speech. The arts, of course, have paid dearly for this success, because the fortress they constructed on the foundation of the grid has increasingly become a ghetto. Fewer and fewer voices from the general critical establishment have been raised in support, appreciation, or analysis of the contemporary plastic arts.
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The question what is life, says Norman O. Brown, turns out to be the question what is sleep. We perceive that the sky exists only on earth. Evolution and human nature are mutually exclusive concepts. We’re in transition from the Industrial Age to the Cybernetic Age, characterized by many as the post-Industrial Age. But I’ve found the term “Paleocybernetic” valuable as a conceptual tool with which to grasp the significance of our present environment: combining the primitive potential associated with Paleolithic and the transcendental integrities of “practical utopianism” associated with Cybernetic. So I call it the Paleocybernetic Age: an image of a hairy, buckskinned, barefooted atomic physicist with a brain full of mescaline and logarithms, working out the heuristics of computer-generated holograms or krypton laser interferometry. It’s the dawn of man: for the first time in history we’ll soon be free enough to discover who we are.
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“Where is the Mehrwert?” – in English: the “payoff” – asks the person on the street. What he has in mind is not Karl Marx’s concept of “surplus value” (which is how Mehrwert is directly translated from the German), but an extra value, an added or additional value, or a bonus, to use a word that means the same thing in most languages. If in everyday parlance, Mehrwert is an additional value that can be realized in return for a special effort or in connection with an exceptional situation, for Marx, by contrast, Mehrwert is the daily bread and butter of the capitalist economy.
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A more accurate title for this essay would be “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems-Them and Us,” since the term “intelligent systems” refers not only to ourselves but also, or more precisely, to our computer environments. Although the art of the future could take any one of a number of directions, it seems to me that, with the steady evolution of information-processing techniques in our society, an increasing amount of thought will be given to the aesthetic relationship between our-selves and our computer environments-whether or not this relationship will eventually fall into the scope of the fine arts.
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The site of curatorial production has been expanded to include the space of the Internet and the focus of curatorial attention has been extended from the object to processes to dynamic network systems. As a result, curatorial work has become more widely distributed between multiple agents including technological networks and software. This book reflects on these changes and asserts that the practice of curating cannot be dissociated from social and technological developments. It is therefore concerned with the politics of curating – with how power relations and control are expressed in the contemporary forms that curating takes and offers in the context of network technologies.
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If the non-computer based art world hesitates to adopt computer-based art then the computer based art world should respond by starting to adopt non-computer based art. Saying that it does not matter anyway and that it is the non-computer based art world’s own fault – a point of view that was stated at a discussion on this topic during this year’s transmediale – is not exactly constructive. But more importantly, it fails to recognize the forces and advantages of the computer based art world; it is more flexible and less hierarchical; it can move faster and spread wider; it allows for collective and processual production on a whole new scale. Instead of practicing these forces and advantages within its own world it should use them to approach the non-computer based art world; turn them into a generous and open gesture.
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There is no need to do more than mention the obvious fact that a multiplicity of languages impedes cultural interchange between the peoples of the earth, and is a serious deterrent to international understanding. The present memorandum, assuming the validity and importance of this fact, contains some comments and suggestions bearing on the possibility of contributing at least something to the solution of the world-wide translation problem through the use of electronic computers of great capacity, flexibility, and speed. The suggestions of this memorandum will surely be incomplete and naïve, and may well be patently silly to an expert in the field—for the author is certainly not such.
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We’re not going to pull the death of the author on you again. No, not that again! No, we’re not going to say anything about it, nor speak in favor of therapeutic endeavor, nor on the possibility of cardiac massage or euthanasia. We’re going to approach the question from an entirely different perspective, which is that of processes of subjectivization and their relationship to power. The problem at the moment is not so much that of knowing whether the paradigm of the disc jockey may be extended to the situations of all contemporary creators, or whether any spectator/reader, sovereign by means of his or her zapping, short-lived attention, is comparable to any celebrated artist. The crisis, which must be spoken of, is vaster and no doubt older; it reached its height in the twentieth century but its convulsions are shaking us even today. We are speaking of the crisis of singularities.
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According to an ancient etymology, the word “image” should be linked to the root “imitari”. Thus we find ourselves immediately at the heart of the most important problem facing the semiology of images: can analogical representation (the ‘copy’) produce true systems of signs and not merely simple agglutinations of symbols? Is it possible to conceive of an analogical ‘code’ (as opposed to a digital one)? We know that linguists refuse the status of language to all communication by analogy – from the ‘language’ of bees to the ‘language’ of gesture – the moment such communications are not doubly articulated, are not founded on a combinatory system of digital units as phonemes are. Nor are linguists the only ones to be suspicious as to the linguistic nature of the image; general opinion too has a vague conception of the image as an area of resistance to meaning – this in the name of a certain mythical idea of Life: the image is re-presentation, which is to say ultimately resurrection, and, as we know, the intelligible is reputed antipathetic to lived experience.
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Artists of the future may not know that they are artists. If the Internet continues to expand (and withstands the commercial impulse to convert it into interactive TV), collaborative and modular digital art practices will also grow. Many net users, gamers, musicians and programmers will produce cultural artifacts, software, digital accessories, game warez, and music warez that they share with each other both freely and for pay. Users will be cultural producers (artists) and consumers, readers and writers, and information filters and collectors: i.e. net curators. In describing “future” artists and curators, I also refer to present day artists and curators. Just as cyberpunk science fiction describes near future scenarios whose seeds are sown by present day conditions of increasing globalization, my future art scenarios are pixel-painted from the work of contemporary artists and netizens.
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In proposing this slightly odd question, I am conscious of the need for an explanation. To this day, the ‘author’ remains an open question both with respect to its general function within discourse and in my own writings; that is, this question permits me to return to certain aspects of my own work which now appear ill-advised and misleading. In this regard, I wish to propose a necessary criticism and reevaluation. For instance, my objective in “The Order of Things” had been to analyse verbal clusters as discursive layers which fall outside the familiar categories of a book, a work, or an author. But while I considered ‘natural history,’ the ‘analysis of wealth,’ and ‘political economy’ in general terms, I neglected a similar analysis of the author and his works; it is perhaps due to this omission that I employed the names of authors throughout this book in a naive and often crude fashion. I spoke of Buffon, Cuvier, Ricardo, and others as well, but failed to realize that I had allowed their names to function ambiguously. This has proved an embarrassment to me in that my oversight has served to raise two pertinent objections.
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What is the Crisis of Competence? For quite some time now Western societies have found themselves in a crisis of representation which manifests itself in art, politics and other fields. The rise of abstract art in the 20th century—which virtually severed all ties between the world of objects and their pictorial representation—became the visual symptom of this crisis. The crisis, in turn, was further aggravated by this exit from the picture-world. Art happenings and ambience, or object culture and installations, depart from the picture as their arena of action and, in its stead, have taken reality by storm: the real world itself becomes their stage or showcase of action. Media art, especially, avails itseif of the global information space. Nevertheless this phenomenon has not resolved the crisis of representation: rather, it is indicative of a more deeply situated crisis, namely, the crisis of competence, at the focal point of which is the question of legitimacy.
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During the time the exhibition “Formless: A User’s Guide” was in its planning stage at the Centre Georges Pompidou, a potentially competing project was announced by another Parisian institution under the title “From the Informe to the Abject,” a title that clearly stated a belief that if the informe has a destiny that reaches beyond its conceptualization in the 1920s to find its fulfillment and completion within contemporary artistic production, this is in the domain of what is now understood as “abjection.”
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Art is a social object. From the rise of a liberal market economy through the build-up and ubiquity of the “middle class,” art has matched and excused itself with the social conditions of its production. The rise of the “industrialized arts” gave way to lofty notions of art-after-object as late capitalism approached, all the while explaining itself as obligated to echo existing cultural conditions rather than move to shape them. Where are we left now? Art and arts pedagogy has become so inextricably linked with a variety of interpretations on the Conceptual art doxa that it would be impossible to argue against any artistic gesture being automatically tied to its reception and the language surrounding it. At least from a historical perspective, Conceptual art assured its own legacy by the overwhelming volume of language produced within and around it at a time when summary-through-language was the easiest means of disseminating an object (profoundly simpler, even, than reproducing a photograph).
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There is a strain of net art referred to among its practitioners and those who follow it as “pro surfer” work. Characterized by a copy-and-paste aesthetic that revolves around the appropriation of web-based content in simultaneous celebration and critique of the internet and contemporary digital visual culture, this work—heavy on animated gifs, YouTube remixes, and an embrace of old-school “dirtstyle” web design aesthetics—is beginning to find a place in the art world. But it has yet to benefit from substantial critical analysis. My aim here is to outline ways in which the work of pro surfers holds up to the vocabulary given to us by studies of photography and cinematic montage. I see this work as bearing a surface resemblance to the use of found photography while lending itself to close reading along the lines of film formalism. Ultimately, I will argue that the work of pro surfers transcends the art of found photography insofar as the act of finding is elevated to a performance in its own right, and the ways in which the images are appropriated distinguishes this practice from one of quotation by taking them out of circulation and reinscribing them with new meaning and authority.
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In the computer, man has created notjust an inanimate tool but an intellectual and active creative partner that when fully exploited, could be used to produce wholly new art forms and possibly new aesthetic experiences. Digital computers are now being used to produce musical sounds and to generate artistic visual images. The artist or composer interacts directly with the computer through a console. This article explores the possibilities of the computer as an artistic medium and makes some predictions about the art of the future.
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Just as a tangent touches a circle lightly and at but one point, with this touch rather than with the point setting the law according to which it is to continue on its straight path to infinity, a translation touches the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux.
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Wie die Tangente den Kreis flüchtig und nur in einem Punkte berührt und wie ihr wohl diese Berührung, nicht aber der Punkt, das Gesetz vorschreibt, nach dem sie weiter ins Unendliche ihre gerade Bahn zieht, so berührt die Übersetzung flüchtig und nur in dem unendlich kleinen Punkte des Sinnes das Original, um nach dem Gesetze der Treue in der Freiheit der Sprachbewegung ihre eigenste Bahn zu verfolgen.
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One of the ways in which the Conceptual project in art has been most successful is in claiming new territory for practice. It’s a tendency that’s been almost too successful: today it seems that most of the work in the international art system positions itself as Conceptual to some degree, yielding the “Conceptual painter,” the “DJ and Conceptual artist,” or the “Conceptual web artist.” Let’s put aside the question of what makes a work Conceptual, recognizing, with some resignation, that the term can only gesture toward a thirty year-old historical moment. But it can’t be rejected entirely, as it has an evident charge for artists working today, even if they aren’t necessarily invested in the concerns of the classical moment, which included linguistics, analytic philosophy, and a pursuit of formal dematerialization. What does seem to hold true for today’s normative Conceptualism is that the project remains, in the words of Art and Language, “radically incomplete”: it does not necessarily stand against objects or painting, or for language as art; it does not need to stand against retinal art; it does not stand for anything certain, instead privileging framing and context, and constantly renegotiating its relationship to its audience.
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The formulation of diverse projects has now become the major preoccupation of contemporary man. These days, whatever endeavor one sets out to pursue in the economic, political or cultural field, one first has to formulate a fitting project in order to apply for official approval or funding of the project from one or several public authorities. Should this project in its original form be rejected, it is then modified in an attempt to improve its chances of being accepted. If the revised project is dismissed out of hand, one has no alternative but to propose an entirely new one in its place. In this manner, all members of our society are constantly preoccupied with devising, discussing and dismissing an endless series of projects. Appraisals are written, budgets meticulously calculated, commissions assembled, committees appointed and resolutions tabled. Not inconsiderable numbers of our contemporaries spend their time reading nothing but proposals, appraisals and budgets of this nature. Most of these projects remain forever unrealized. All it requires is one or another assessor to report that a project lacks promise, is difficult to finance, or is simply undesirable, and the entire labor invested in the project’s formulation has been a waste of time.
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