Monday, October 27, 2008

our vacuum cleaner made this


Saturday, October 25, 2008

field research (John Russell on "art and liberty")

This is a transcript from one of the Tate podcasts, this time from a conference in October 2006 to celebrate the bicentenary of John Stuart Mill. The conference was titled On Art and Liberty and included the following from British artist John Russell.

You've just got to love a man that can rant like this, even if eventually the sense of what is said is elusory. ...or maybe not. There is something here that niggles at me, the problem of dialectic, the critique of institutions, a sense of the loss of the potential of art, melancholy and rage. John Russell is introduced by Malcolm Quinn—

Malcolm Quinn: I’d now like to introduce our first speaker.

Our first speaker is John Russell. John Russell was a founding member of the art group Bank, and was responsible for exhibitions such as Zombie Golf, Cocaine Orgasm, Bank TV, Life/Live, and Bank Tabloid. Recent projects include 20 women play the drums topless, a performance staged at the South London Gallery, London and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and shortly to be staged at The Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto in Portugal in October 2007. He’s also produced the books Frozen Tears and Frozen Tears 2 which adopt the format of an 800 page Horror/Sci-Fi best-seller and include texts by Kathy Acker, Art & Language, Pierre Guyotat, Dennis Cooper, Jake Chapman, Michelle Foucault, Lucy McKenzie, Ulrike Mienhof and 40 other artists and writers. The Frozen Tears projects have included a series of related exhibitions, events in the UK and USA, including a solo show at the Cabinet Gallery in 2003, and in the US, launches at Starlight Books, Los Angeles, Maccarrone Incorporated in New York and the Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco, that’s all in 2004.

Forthcoming projects include Frozen Tears 3—no doubt eagerly awaited—and a solo exhibition at Matts Gallery and the Union Gallery in 2007, so we’re very lucky to have John here. Thank you John.

John Russell: I’m going to talk about this idea of liberty as tied to ideas of doing. The idea of liberty as doing as art. [ahem] The liberty to do as art. [ahem]. Obviously this would ideally require a theory of Doing, but I haven’t got time here to go into that, so I will...in its...I will...I’ll just conceptualise this talk by suggesting that what I’m going to talk about relates to the ongoing debates regarding the function of art, um [ahem]...The function of art...the political, aesthetic and social function of art, i.e. the sort of straight-forward question: what and how does art do stuff? It seems to me that doing is...I was trying to think of what liberty is and I...I suppose I’m translating the idea of liberty as the ability to be able to do things [ahem]...Anyway, I’ll continue, hopefully the idea of what I mean by doing will come out as I talk. In relation to these issues I’ll be roughly talking about the contemporary post-conceptual tradition or legacy of critical art - that might be a territory that you could locate this discussion in.

In a contemporary sense, critical art is most often [ahem]...critical art is most often talked about as something which has been lost or abandoned. Julian Stallabrass, in his book High Art Lite describes the YBA phenomenon in terms of its superficiality and conservatism whilst at the same time hinting at a golden age of criticality which supposedly occurred at some point—unspecified point, I might add—in the 1960s or 1970s [ahem]. In this context, rough context, the critical or political register is seen to have been deserted in favour of more commercially aligned activity. Similarly, in the introduction to the 800 page book which accompanied Documenta X, Catharine David, who is the chief curator, adopts a similar tone when she explains how she is intending to stage a Documenta which is not just another spectacular event but which is a moment of rearticulation for progressive thought.[ahem]. In extension from this, she explains how her understanding of progressive thought insists upon
a radical critique of mainstream ideologies, calling for an art which addresses the marginal and privileges complexity, a critical art which exists in direct opposition to both the spectacle and its adherence to the market, or capital.
J.J. Charlesworthy, the Art Monthly critic, comments on this: "typically this perceived decline in critical art activity is staged as a crisis, for instance, the supposed crisis in critical writing which is being written about in a wide range of contexts and locations at the moment..."

As an example of this, maybe a slightly old example, there was a round table discussion in October magazine in 2002, which included contributions from the likes of Krauss, Buchloch, Foster etcetera etcetera...In this discussion their favourite bad objects are YBA (Young British Art), and contemporary art writing supposedly uninterested in critical debate, most specifically, the writer David Hickey, who, according to Hal Foster, has become successful through his development of a ...pop libertarian aesthetic very attuned to the market. This mourning of a lost criticality in a sense misses the point, although these criticisms of banality and Thatcherite commercialism may or may not—(I would say I don’t agree with that, those comments)—be valid, it is also true that the whole idea of criticality or political-ness in, or as, art has become itself co-opted—as co-opted, as commodified and contained as any of Damien Hirst’s taxidermy spectaculars.

It could be argued that critical art and writing now exists only to signal its criticality as style marked out as cultural capital along the lines suggested by Pierre Bourdieu. John Miller in fact suggests something of this sort in that same October round table discussion, when he writes quite amusingly, I think—
...of course art writers don’t write for cash, for there is none, it’s more the position in academia that’s secured by publishing, so the payoff isn’t the writer’s fee, it’s the mostly the prestige that comes from first establishing an apparently negative relationship to the market per se...as it accumulates, that symbolic capital can always be converted to real capital.
Certainly the subject matter or content of critical art (as we all know) and writing seems to have been easily and un-problematically accommodated within the mainstream discourses of the art world itself— subsumed as part of art-world orthodoxy, commodified as key texts, used routinely as the preferred subject matter of art works, catalogue essays, press releases, themes of exhibitions and taught routinely on contemporary curating and arts administration courses. (I can’t give you a list of all the particular things I’m talking about, but I think you probably know what I’m talking about...I should stop going off subject here. [ahem]). It seems that saying something political in the art world is not saying something political. In the same way as saying something feminist in the art world is not saying something feminist; or saying something post-colonial in the art world is not saying something post-colonial—these meanings have been co-opted by the general discourses of the institution. In this context, art—going along with Barthes’ idea of a mythology—art means things, but only within the strictly demarcated conditions within which any meaning is allowable, but means the same thing as everything else.

It can obviously be argued that critical art is continually transforming its practices and strategies to resist these institutionalising effects. James Mayer, in a recent article, points to developments of this kind when he describes two historical waves of institutional critique: the first wave, which he identifies with the practices from the late 1960s and early 1970s, was involved in a critique of the art museum and the gallery (well known examples are Michael Asher); In the second wave, from the 1980s onwards, the institutional critique has expanded to include the artists role, the subject performing the critique as institutionalised.

More recently, 2005, the artist/theorist Andrea Fraser has suggested a further transformation, following on from Benjamin Buchloch’s description of the historical moment of conceptual art as a movement from institutional critique and the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions, as is the title of his famous essay; Andrea Fraser extends this trajectory in her recent essay From the Critique of Institutions to the Institution of Critique to claim that a movement between an inside and an outside of the institution is no longer possible, as she writes
with each attempt to evade the limits of institutional determination, to embrace an outside, we expand our frame and bring more of the world into it, but we never escape it... and so the structures of the institution have become totally internalised
But it is not because the institution is perfectly closed, or exists as an apparatus in a totally administered society, it is because the institution is inside of us and, as she writes, we can’t get outside of ourselves (...that sounds vaguely sinister to me). We are the institution, she concludes, and so it is not a question of critique-ing the institution but rather, a question of creating critical institutions. What type of institutions do we want? What she terms institutions of critique, established through self-questioning and self-reflection, the institutions of art should also not be seen as an autonomous field, separate from the rest of the world in the same way as we are not separate from the institution. This is an interesting schizophrenic analysis and proposes a complex and slightly disorientating relationship between the ‘we’ of the critical institution that internalises the institutionalisation, and the other extra-institutional and perhaps uncritical 'we's that are integrated within the wider context of the politico-economic world system.

In some senses, Fraser’s analysis is in line with the move away from previous versions of institutional critique as anti-institutional, towards contemporary models based on ideas of negotiation and transformation [or; translation?]. And so, for instance, one of the people that Simon Sheikh might be referring to there [?] is the well known curator Nicholas Bourriaud, [who wrote the] influential book Relational Aesthetics. Within this book he sees a potential in artistic practice to exist as a context or laboratory for social experiment. In this context, the gallery space exists like a space partly protected from the uniformity of behavioural patterns. This concept of the institution as oasis is pitched against the world where human relations are no longer directly experienced (...seems familiar...tone to this...) but have become blurred in their spectacular representation. Within this context, the purpose of Relational Aesthetics as Bourriaud terms it, is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability for non-scripted social interaction. Within the context of the institution, Bouriaud claims, we can learn to inhabit the world in a better way. Instead of looking to future utopias this relational art sets up functioning microtopias in the present, and it is this D.I.Y microtopian ethos that Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of his ideas of relational aesthetics.

However, as I’m sure alot of you are aware, if you’ve been following this debate, the art historian Claire Bishop has some serious problems with Bourriaud’s ideas of politics and his conception of interaction in an essay she wrote in October magazine. She is unclear what the viewer is supposed to garner from such an experience of “creativity” which is essentially institutionalised studio activity to quote Clare Bishop. In extension, she suggests, that if Relational Art produces human relations, we should ask what types of relations are being produced, for whom and why. She claims that Bourriaud is suggesting that all relations that permit dialogue are automatically assumed to be democratic, and therefore good. As an alternative to Bourriaud’s diversion of democracy she proposes the concept of antagonism, a term drawn from the clapped out ideas of radical democracy (...sorry that was a subjective view in there [audience laughs]...) which suggests that democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased and therefore in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and bought into debate. This theory of democracy as antagonism, Clare Bishop suggests, is evident in the activities of the artists Thomas Hirschorn and Santiago Sierra...unfortunately, Bishop’s analysis seems to be even more tedious than Bourriaud’s original idea—(I haven’t got time to go into it, but that’s my basic, very précised reason why)—reinstating binaries, and replaying the old dialectics of art politics inside/outside politics etcetera, etcetera...Bishop takes us back to approximately 1970.

What is problematic here is, existing in this institutionalised sense that I have briefly described [ahem]... contained, managed and commodified, contemporary art seems to resemble an updated version of Christianity in line with Nietzsche’s account of the death of God in The Gay Science. Contemporary art presents itself as something like "The Good Conversation", by this I mean...[heckling from audience]...art as a forum, art as a debate, art as a space where ideas can be exchanged and discussed, art as a power for good—a talking shop for reasonable, well adjusted, civilised people. Obviously there are problems of class and race exclusion and so on, but these problems are solved by the inclusive critical theories in art.

This is an old story. It seems we continue to have faith in art, to believe in its redemptive power, or as Steve Rushton writes:
in the idea that it still provides us with moments of revelation about real life, a secularised form of transport or even that it could provide a critique of itself and by doing so, live on.
The promise of art’s redemptive possibilities continues to revisit us like a phantom pain, after the amputation, we still feel the limb in the space where it used to be. This kind of desperate optimism or hopeless hope seems to be the subject of an artwork by Martin Creed produced in 1999 which involved a neon sign fixed to the front of a half-derelict, neo-classical building in London which read EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE ALRIGHT. In fact Dave Beech, quite elegantly I think, in a piece in Art Monthly sums up...uh, describes the effect of that piece of work as [ahem]...a promise of happiness, contemporary art is not concerned with the summoning up of visions of alternative worlds to the ones we live in, but also...is not only concerned with that, but also...in performing a symbolic corrective moral function, as in the example of the holy lives of saints...

Suhil Malik discusses this issue in his essay Why Contemporary Art is so Disappointing. As he suggests, the conditions and ambitions of liberal democracy underlie what goes on in and as contemporary art, namely, the open diversity of art practices and their criticality, the way that they make a difference and/or show something besides the dominant and conventional way of doing things. Making reference to Richard Rorty’s book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Malik discusses how a liberal society is defined as one whose ideals can only be fulfilled "by persuasion rather than force, by reform rather than revolution", and he then goes on to suggest how even if these liberal societies cannot fulfil their liberal aspirations and ideals, in many ways contemporary art can do so. And so, contemporary art, in its politcality and it’s affirmation of something else than the dominant order—even if this is by dis-affirmation or critique— seems only to be concerned with showing the current social and cultural order that it does not match up to it’s own self image because of certain endemic inequalities and exploitations in, and as, capitalism. In return, art is affirmed by liberal society for providing this display of something that is closer to liberal society’s dream or ideal of liberal society than liberal society itself can achieve. Finally, Malik describes how this example cannot be accompanied by action, he suggests that, intrinsic to being liberal is the willingness to recognise that your beliefs are historically formed and held only on a personal basis, they are precisely not universal. This what Rorty calls liberal irony— it is to have a conviction about the individuality and non-universality of your personal beliefs, that is, you must have the very strong conviction that you can’t have a very strong conviction, and as such, presumably the conviction that your convictions can never be acted upon with any real conviction. [audience laugh] This is very funny, obviously. [John chuckles]...("This is obviously very funny",...I actually wrote that, it wasn’t an ad-lib)...and reminiscent of Habermas’ 40-year-old discussion of the legitimation crisis. As such, The Good Conversation, as I have characterised it, with all its disaffirmation and critical nuance, can never reach its conclusion, and in fact this is its purpose or its institutional remit. The Good Conversation must continue to allow for the continued existence of the space in which the conversation is staged. The Good Conversation flows seamlessly like the flow of capital and the continuation of The Good Conversation suits the administrators of it. It may make a few marginalised figures temporally visible on the platform, but to quote Peggy Phelan, if representational visibility equals power, then almost-naked white young women would be running western culture’. Again, a very funny quote, that.

And so, to conclude this in relation to my title of The Crisis of Limits— (or, perhaps a Trauma of Limits would be more accurate) the anxiety regarding boundaries and the dialectic between located and unlocated-ness that is what is contained and what is excluded by the institution, what is allowed and what is censored; for instance, if an artist maintains a critically located position the critical or political content or performance of the work is inevitably staged within the structures of that which it is critical of, but which it relies upon for its visibility. This is a kind of critical not-belonging-ness, or disaffirmation, or antagonism. The question here is, unfortunately, what or how these antagonistic or dis-affirmative stagings actually do except to signal their presence as antagonistic or dis-affirmative to a receptive, but fairly limited audience for this type of critical art product?

However, if this type of art is pitched at a wider, perhaps 'non-art' audience, then it risks losing its art-status and visibility as art and its differentiation from the chaos of other 'non-art' messages. In this context it risks losing itself within the infinity of extra-institutional social relations. In this respect, the move towards the possibility of an infinitely expanded institution leaves open problems of indeterminacy, both in relation to the status of art and to how this indeterminacy as ‘non-art’ might operate.

Take, for example, J.J. King’s criticism of Michael Landy’s installation Breakdown in his 2001 article Landy’s (Failed) Gesture and the General Intellect. Landy’s project involved the staging of he destruction of all his material possessions in a disused central London C&A department store. As J.J. King writes, the project had no political impact, except perhaps, to demonstrate how commodifiable political impact is. King points to the futility of staging resistance on the plains of the material and the symbolic, he claims Landy’s failure is roughly equivalent to the failure that many perceive in the anti-globalisation or anti-capitalist scene to constitute any real opposition to the processes of global capital. What is significant here is not so much the failure or otherwise Landy’s project, but the lack of any clear criteria by which King feels Landy has failed. What exactly does King want from art, or from anti-capitalism and anti-globalisation protest? What does he believe constitutes failure or victory? Or is this just an instance of ‘bad faith’ criticism?...Yes.

Interestingly however, King’s account suggests that inadvertently the success of Landy’s failed project is the way in which it points towards a privileged freedom from materiality allowed for, perversely, by the structures of capital which constitute themselves around immaterial labour and the general intellect. And therefore can be considered, to use newer terminology, that’s King’s terminology, properly virtual. King concludes by asking
...could this putative, privileged detachment from property, possession and possessiveness be the potential predicate for a useful sort of nomadism, a levity and a freedom which might allow in the future, or even now, the general intellect to begin to act for itself, for the people rather than for capital?
Again, the argument folds back on itself. This is reminiscent of Fraser’s schizophrenic conception of the art institution/ non-art-institution split personality. The idea that as art—determinate, finite and institutionalised—Landy’s art is impotent and facile, but inadvertently, in its suggestion of an indeterminate, infinite and extra-institutional dimension it is potentially potent, but unknown. In a sense this presents an institutional version of the sublime, where the art world is presented in a variety of different ways with an experience of the terror of the infinity of the outside or unlocated. This is the same sublime that Robert Smithson humorously pointed to in his juxtaposition of the finitude of the art world with the infinity of other systems —eg: the juxtaposition of the time of the art world and geological time in various art works he did. In this sense, Buren’s 1960s discourse of limits is replayed as a trauma of limits. If you were able to escape or invalidate institutional boundaries, what would you do?, what would art do, and how would it do it?

What might be useful here is Derrida’s conception of the parergon, that is, his conception of the frame as that which is outside of the work, (ergon: external to it), yet undeniably and unalterably part of it. As he describes it, using the well known example that he used of a picture in a frame, draperies around a nude statue etcetera...or the columns that frame a Greek temple—within this context it is clear that the frame is not a boundary but rather that which opens the art work to the world outside. Indeed, the frame, however it is thought (or institutional limits, as suggested earlier) operates as much as a connector in this respect; the parergon therefore is the structure of the limit, or more exactly the structure of the double limit or double edge, both in internal and external. This proposes...I’m really précising here, this proposes a dynamic connectivity as an alternative to the repressive apparatus of representation which seeks to divide and categorise and ultimately to limit. This is, after all, the source of the institution. This idea proposes the interrelation of different categories of subject relations suggesting, relations between an art object, a ton of coal, a cd player, a scientific experiment, and/or perhaps that hand eye coordination diagram of a crab to quote somebody else’s idea, which I...[ahem].

Rather than re-performing the territorialised categories of resistance of critical art practices which imply or necessitate a kind of totalised, normative, repressive enemy, and an unhelpfully totalised notion of capitalism, and/or a kind of authenticity of subversive response—that is, a relatively stable signifying quality of authentic subjects of resistance. Deluze and Guattari point to this possibility when they suggest advanced capitalism is reaching a new global or trans-national level that necessitates a dissolution of old identities and territories and the unleashing of objects, images and information having far more mobility and combinatory power than ever before. As always, this de-territorialisation is affected only in order to make possible a future re-territorialisation on an even grander and more glorious stage of world-wide capital reborn. In the mean time—as Brian Massumi proposes, in a now quite well known article he wrote about simulation—a breech has opened and the challenge is assume this new world of simulation and take it one step farther, to the point of no return, to raise it to a positive simulation of the highest degree by marshalling all our powers of the false towards the shattering of the grid of representation once and for all.

So I would suggest that as [ahem] my final conclusion that what this requires that we start forgetting things in the same that that Deluze asks for a philosophy that has forgotten dialectics in his book on Nietzsche...a philosophy that has forgotten dialectics as a way of escaping dialectical thought without that escape being dialectically reincorporated as dialectics. In his case, he is concerned with this project because he’s trying to think of a way of thinking or doing that would allow difference and contradiction and various other Delusion themes. If, in the same way, art works are confined politically, theoretically and materially by their prefigured relationship to the structures of the institution—whether this is aesthetic, critical or conceptual, or whichever category you want to use—and if doing as art is also prefigured and contained in the same way, it is possible that we could start forgetting some things. We could start forgetting about critical art, forget about art and forget about politics, and that’s it. The end. Thanks very much. [ahem]

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field research (the appearance of heidegger's philosophy in young adult literature, and other contexts)

"I don't like that knife," Iorek said. [...] "...With it you can do strange things. What you don't know is what the knife does on its own. Your intentions may be good. The knife has intentions too."

"How can that be?" said Will.

"The intentions of a tool are what it does. A hammer intends to strike, a vice intends to hold fast, a lever intends to lift. They are what it is made for. But sometimes a tool may have other uses that you don't know. Sometimes in doing what you intend, you also do what the knife intends, without knowing. Can you see the sharpest edge of that knife?"

"No," said Will, for it was true: the edge diminished to a thinness so fine that the eye could not reach it.

"Then how can you know everything it does?"

from The Amber Spyglass, Philip Pullman
Scholastic Children's Books, 2000

I was thinking about this scene in 'The Amber Spyglass' this morning as I brushed my teeth, it seems to echo what I understand Heidegger is saying in The Origin of the Work of Art—(that bit about the 'intention' of a tool)—that objects in the world are in some sense hidden (or not entirely revealed) until we are able to allow them to reveal themselves to us, and they reveal themselves when we relinquish our common sense and allow ourselves to approach a thing unencumbered by habits of ideology and use.

I was thinking about this following breakfast, when I had been listening to a podcast of a talk at Tate Modern called "On art and liberty" wherein John Russell describes how the 'clapped out ideas of radical democracy' are put to use by Clare Bishop to critique Nicholas Bourriaud's writings on Relational Aesthetics, an exercise which is 'even more tedious than Bourriaud's original idea'...'rehashing art world dichotomies of inside and outside'.

So, I had been thinking about the abuse of philosophy - primarily in the way that it can often be put to the use of entrenching ideologically strong positions, fortifying ways of being that are already narrow and inflexible, common sense as opposed to critical or independent thinking.

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Sunday, October 05, 2008

field research (handbooks)



Janet Frame's gorgeous, luminous, poetic guide to living in the 'bloody plain' of existence & a book of Australian wildflowers found recently in a second-hand book shop.

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Saturday, October 04, 2008

thesis



I made this sign and took this photo whilst my love was overseas for an extended period of time; it was a way of trying to get at something, an idea. Or maybe it was an idea trying to get at me.

Over a year ago, I began a Masters degree. My research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics. Everyone was very pleased about this.

There's been some tussles over definition of terms, and the proper way to conduct collaboration within the university environment, which has lead to an extended period of nothing much. I've been on leave for the last year & I've started to feel that it is not so much a question of defining, researching and conducting collaboration and ethics in a universal 'everyone agrees' kind of a way as it is a question of something much more personal, local, egocentric. In the same way that my intent in writing a sentence like my research will be concerned with collaboration and ethics was kind of like putting up a sign-post collaboration indicating one direction, ethics indicating another, at a random point in uncharted land. My research will proceed in these two general directions, what we will find out there, nobody knows. Which no doubt contributed to the problem with definitions, leaving everyone involved a bit hemmed in too early in the piece and a bit too uncomfortable.

This sign points me somewhere a bit more definite. As it's not so much a question of who owns what, or who gives consent for one person to do something to another person or with another person and how informed that person is about what they are doing, it turns the idea around from collaboration and ethics to an ethic of collaboration.

Maybe this will point generally somewhere in the direction of 1) practice as learning (an improvement of the self); 2) in the mode of something like a conversation (with one's peers, history, the past of one's own practice, with specialists in other fields) as opposed to an isolated and singular pursuit; 3) the idea of art as something other than original, always indebted to the past, something that is the result of a conversation with one's context, a process of co-creation, or a continuum of creative activity; 4) how art makes a picture of itself, shows the trace of its own coming about: i.e. bears the marks of more than one's own hand or mind; the concept of the mise en abyme; 5) how an artist might promote the conversation as a method for making work, and by extension, how an artist in the academy pursues conversation as a research methodology as opposed to other methods promoted and made available through the academy; 6) how conversations are initiated, acknowledged and documented, & 7) the history of such practices in the field of the visual arts. (one might also consider how documentation has become incorporated into the economy of the arts as product and fetish); 8) the relation of the viewer to the work, the relation of the artist to the viewer through the work, generosity as a trope in the visual arts; 9) explicitly, the art work as a way of thinking about you, the viewer, collaborator in the making of meaning, audience.

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