... 0.0 <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:57:08 +0200 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover, Or, let's find a completely new art criticism For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the aesthetic. Let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, definitively. The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance. If that's the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing balance of a foreign culture? I'm sure you immediately see how difficult this is. Already in the past, it was hard enough to say that a particular aesthetic tradition and a particular state of the medium defined the leading edge, the point at which a rupture became interesting. Yet still there were times when all the painters seemed to flock to Rome, then later to Paris, then later to New York City; and so through the sheer aggregation of techniques and styles, the fiction of a leading edge could be maintained, at least by some. But in the face of a simultaneous splintering and decline of what used to be called "the West," and a correlative rise of some of "the Rest," who could seriously say that certain local, national or regional laws, customs, measures, mores and technical or organizational devices are really the most interesting ones to transgress or even break into pieces, in hopes of a better way of being? Or to be even cruder about it, and closer to the actual state of things: Who can seriously claim that the Euro-American forms of society are the benchmark against which change must be measured - even if those societies are still the most opulent and most developed and most heavily armed with all the nastiest of technological weapons? Let's face it, the task of a transnational critique for the new arts of living within, against and beyond the existing states of the world's societies is daunting to say the least. However, I think all is not lost in this domain, for three connected reasons. The first is that over the last, say, fifty years, and particularly over the last fifteen, we have seen the still very superficial but nonetheless real emergence of something like a world society. To put it another way, there is now some kind of connective tissue (call it the transnational economy, the transportation system and global English) that does bind our possibilities of life together, though without in any way reducing them to being identical. The second is that the vast proliferation of readily accessible archives (libraries, web pages, video banks, record collections, museums) offers at least some chance to rapidly sample all sorts of information and impressions about what kind of shape a particular society is in, and even what kinds of steps are being made to try and change it. And third, given the above and maybe a good translator too, what you can do is actually try to stage a dialogue with the people you are meeting, and hope that some of them respond, give you pointers, correct your mistakes, calm down your unconscious arrogance and add their own reflections and aesthetic productions into the mix - not only to obtain a better and more useful critique of their society, but also of yours. Which last, I might add, is something essential and desperately needed, particularly if you are a European or an American. The above is a theoretical program, but also just a reflection on some experiences as a critic and activist out in the wide world. The most recent of these experiences was particularly interesting: I was invited to participate in and to evaluate a project of artistic remembrance and envisioning, focused on the American military bases that are now (maybe) in the process of closing and moving out of the South Korean city of Dongducheon, and indeed of a range of sites around the DMZ, even as a new megabase is prepared further to the south in a place called Pyeongtaek. This was an incredible chance to get a first-hand look at what I think is the scourge of American and Western democracy, namely what Chalmers Johnson calls the "empire of bases." (And I happen to think that the first-hand look, however fleeting and superficial, is of tremendous importance whenever you really want to learn anything). As it turned out though, this was also an incredible chance to start getting to know a unique spot on the earth, South Korea, which for the worst of reasons has been particularly close to the U.S. over the last six decades, despite the fact that many many Koreans would really rather close that never-ending chapter called the Cold War on the Korean Peninsula. The trip was too short, but still amazing, and it got me to do some new things in criticism (maybe dubious ones), like using a pop song for starters rather than a quote from Foucault, and approaching street demonstrations via Korean feminists rather than Toni Negri. In the end I had to conclude that the old French saying, "Celui qui aime a toujours raison" (those who love something are always right), is in fact wrong, since we humans are capable of awful loves, and not only in aesthetics. That said, we're also uniquely capable of starting all over again, as y'all probably know in your intimate experience. And so let's ask the question: What would tomorrow look like without 750+ American military bases scattered across the earth? With a little help from some new friends, I tried to go further with that line of inquiry, as you can see right here: http://sunsetproject.wordpress.com And now the dialogue is open for whoever has inspiration. best, Brian 0.1 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Michael H Goldhaber nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 23 Jul 2008 09:32:17 -0700 Brian, I read your whole piece with interest, but I disagree with its two of its stated or inherent premises. First, art does not have to justify itself by offering a different way to live or to coexist. To put it most simply art justifies life; it is why we are here, or it can be. Second, while a visit to South Korea or any other host to our hundreds of bases can show what empire is like and what it does to its targets, to find the sources of the outlook that backs these bases, we have to look at American political life. A simple economic justification in terms of empire would be hard to demonstrate: China and India, which never had American bases, are far more important to us economically than countries that do have them. Likewise, Vietnam, which succeeded in throwing out our bases seems to be on a trajectory not terribly different from S. Korea or China. Nor is "cultural imperialism" strongly correlated with where the bases are. "Pirated" videos and music spread our culture far more effectively than does military occupation. Indian and Chinese immigrants with degrees in medicine, science or engineering increasingly fill occupational niches that Americans do not enter in enough strength, for whatever reason. So what does cause continued imperialism? For one thing, America's inward looking. Our politics is mostly localist and parochial, and yet politicians end up making decisions to sustain foreign involvements on the basis of little knowledge. It is always safer to view the outside world as menacing rather than benign. It is always safer to refer to the US as the greatest country and to assume that the world needs our armies and weapons rather than not.A pointless patriotism helps hold this disparate country together, much as India is partially held together by such means. And, as in the case of the British empire, what keeps ours going is mostly habit ? a bad habit, but hard to change ? perhaps addiction would be the better word. If the US is so inward looking, doesn't reporting such as yours from South Korea help create balance? Very little, I suspect. The internal "patriotic" reading would only be that some Koreans are "ingrates," who "don't know what's good for them," which implies they need our protection despite themselves. While "ingratitude" might be taken as a reason to leave, in practice it only seems to reinvigorate the myth of the necessity of staying, much as the American causalities so far in Iraq become, for the right at least, a reason not to leave. The possible difference there, as it was in Vietnam, and even in the Korean war, is really the threat of future casualties, but if these can be diminished, so will the pressure to pull out. This imperialism can only be changed, I think, if it either becomes unaffordable or if a really different US self-conception can take hold, for instance of our being simply one country that ought to be striving to live cooperatively with the rest of the world. I think we should take heart that the Iraq war has proved so unpopular despite no draft and despite the US death toll being far below Vietnam levels. I think a new "Iraq syndrome" will sharply reduce the tendencies towards such active military adventures for another generation. But dismantling the existing network of bases is another story. To give up the addiction to military spending and the idea that the military offers a good career for certain young people will be less rather than more easy if the US monetary economy keeps declining. The only hope I see is the rise of an utterly new sense of who we are. That , of course, will be intensely resisted. Best, Michael 0.2 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:18:35 +0200 Hello Michael - And first of all, thanks for your reading! Always interesting to hear your views. > First, art does not have to justify itself by offering a different way > to live or to coexist. To put it most simply art justifies life; it is > why we are here, or it can be. Well, art is also famously what people disagree about, which is OK by me. I offered a distinctly political definition of art, one which does not simplify or deny all the subtle potentials of form and metaphor and reference that I do appreciate, but instead suggests that all those qualities come into strongest relief and offer the greatest resonance in ourselves when they stand out against the background of a society and, rather than justifying life as it is, open up possibilities of becoming different. A definition which seems relevant to much good art these days, and could be interesting to disagree about too! > So what does cause continued imperialism? For one thing, America's > inward looking. Our politics is mostly localist and parochial, and yet > politicians end up making decisions to sustain foreign involvements on > the basis of little knowledge. It is always safer to view the outside > world as menacing rather than benign. It is always safer to refer to the > US as the greatest country and to assume that the world needs our armies > and weapons rather than not.A pointless patriotism helps hold this > disparate country together, much as India is partially held together by > such means. And, as in the case of the British empire, what keeps ours > going is mostly habit — a bad habit, but hard to change — perhaps > addiction would be the better word. This seems to me a little naive, Michael, if you can excuse me saying so. I think that "their" empire (I would never call it "ours") is upheld not just by our localist politics (of course that lets it go unchallenged, you are right) but above all because it is in the interest of certain people to uphold it. I do not believe that America went to Iraq out of parochialism or ignorance, but because the party of war, oil and engineering saw immense profits in setting up shop there. Similarly, I think that the army, air force and navy all stay in South Korea because the maintenance of that Cold War standoff helps justify, not just U.S. presence in that particular country, but on outposts all over the world. Arms production, engineering contracts and the maintenance of high-paying officer jobs associated with rank, privilege and amazing technology to play with are some of the benefits of prolonging Cold War conditions, which is why the Pentagon set about looking for a "near peer" right after 1989, and finally decided to accept a "long war against terrorism" instead. Beyond the direct military establishment, the free trade and free capital flows from which the United States has prospered so disproportionately since WWII are linked in the minds and strategies of the corporate and political elites to the regulatory presence of a world-spanning army, which has also been the reason that our huge debts have been shouldered by other countries such as Japan, since manufacturing exports declined in the 1970s. One of the most bald statements of this kind of "free trade guaranteed by the military" doctrine can be found in Thomas Barnett's recent books; but when you look closer at the intellectuals staffing the State Department over the last 60 years, the same doctrine is everywhere, from Kennan and Acheson on forward. That this is an addiction - to power, to profit, to oil, to big projects and machines - is something I would agree with. > If the US is so inward looking, doesn't reporting such as yours from > South Korea help create balance? Very little, I suspect. The internal > "patriotic" reading would only be that some Koreans are "ingrates," who > "don't know what's good for them," which implies they need our > protection despite themselves. Along these lines, even a cursory scan of the Internet will dredge up exactly those kinds of opinions from the largest group of Americans having anything to do with the two Koreas, namly, ex- and current servicemen. It is much as you say. And I definitely agree that finding ways of convincing these kinds of people is a real problem. Even Mark Gillem, the author of America Town and himself part of the air force, does not read as very convincing from the viewpoint that one finds on these Internet sites about Korea. > This imperialism can only be changed, I think, if it either becomes > unaffordable or if a really different US self-conception can take hold, > for instance of our being simply one country that ought to be striving > to live cooperatively with the rest of the world. I think we should take > heart that the Iraq war has proved so unpopular despite no draft and > despite the US death toll being far below Vietnam levels. I think a new > "Iraq syndrome" will sharply reduce the tendencies towards such active > military adventures for another generation. Yes, I think you are right and I also think it is interesting to add to that feeling of rejection. The low American profile after Vietnam was a good thing imho. > But dismantling the existing > network of bases is another story. To give up the addiction to military > spending and the idea that the military offers a good career for certain > young people will be less rather than more easy if the US monetary > economy keeps declining. The only hope I see is the rise of an utterly > new sense of who we are. That , of course, will be intensely resisted. Yes, I think that's where art can become so interesting as a force of change! If all of us want it to, anyway. There again is another reason that I chose the definition of art that I initially put forth. Thanks again, Michael, for your perspectives. best, BH 0.3 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Michael H Goldhaber nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:02:51 -0700 Brian, Rather than being naive, I think I was engaging in a kind of shorthand, leaving out intermediate reasons. Of course there is military-industrial complex which tries to perpetuate itself, but it is successful only because others at times believe its clumsy arguments. Also, oil companies may indeed profit from invasions such as of Iraq, but mostly because the threat of war helps increase the price of oil, which would probably have gone up anyway. The threat of instability in Nigeria, say, without any US intervention, increases the price as well. So the military costs incurred by invading Iraq, say, are unnecessary on that score. Even if the oil interests believed otherwise, they would not have been able to invade Iraq if the public were not convinced that reasons entirely unconnected with oil were at stake. As for the argument that America's place in the world economy depends on our having bases and a round-the -world military presence, I think the examples I gave of the value to us of India and China show that view is itself naive. Finally, countries like German and the Netherlands demonstrate that having an imperial presence is quite unnecessary for economic success. It could well be argued that US military expenditures drag down the US economy, as Seymour Melman used to argue, calling the result "Pentagon Capitalism." The counter-argument to that:military Keynesianism (mK) as a necessary economic stimulant to keep capitalism going internally. As I argued against Melman in the 80's, government spending on anything other than the military tends to compete with "private enterprise, " which is why we have military expenditures rather than say single-payer health care (which would drive insurance companies out of business). We could spend the money on , say, going to Mars, but it is too clear to too many people that we don't need to do that, while "defending our way of life" is, as I noted, harder to argue against. While "national security" provides some rationale for confining military expenditures to non-out-sourced industries and so does to some degree prop up the internal economy, there is now too much "leakage," so that mK now is not particularly effective. Even at its bloated levels, it is also probably too small to be of substantial effect, certainly not what is needed when the US monetary economy turns down. The world today cannot afford the level of destruction commensurate with WWII that would do a similar economic job today. (At least I hope that is off the table.) So today, Melman would probably be right. American imperialism is an irrational (and naive) addiction that only helps the most narrowly defined interests. Still, tapering off will not be easy. Some will suffer directly, and they will shout much louder than the much larger group of those who would benefit mildly and mostly indirectly. Best, Michael 0.4 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Ed Phillips nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 24 Jul 2008 10:50:43 -0700 > Of course there is military-industrial complex which tries to perpetuate > itself, but it is successful only because others at times believe its > clumsy arguments. There is indeed, Michael. Thanks for dialog-ing here about this about this matter of... If we are to seize the means of production of truth itself in cyberneticscapes, it actually behooves, I think to ask not only what clumsy arguments are believed, but rather why the sales job for a bizarre complex that is directed at more and more excessive, spectacular, even arbitrary displays of power that will never be used is so successful. Here the image comes to mind of jet fighters that rotate on a dime. Something so insanely exhorbitant in expenditure, flaming, flaring off, exploding in test after test. I ask myself what it serves to reassure in a body politic that is profoundly insecure. We promise "security", and a nice comfortable home, and an aggregate 10% return on your capital. Here our comrade Sloterdijk-Diogenes is really helpful: Quaro Homines As some kind of internet-cyberscape squatters I take us to be looking for the human agency in all this madness and circumstance. The question, the discussion now has a kind of squatter's right to lift up a lamp in the midday to enquire into how our personal political economy has actually siezed the means of the production of truth, the means by which a discourse listens to itself, the way "govermentality" understands itself in a kind of pidgin kynical nettime argot. To keith hart, a kind of storimasta, that entering into dialogue is going to look different than it is to you or Brian or I. Brian keeps making some very fundamental points that I do not see mentioned enough, and he is thinking "with" them: 1. Is to think in terms of geocapital and the nation states and Empire(s) as a complex interweaving, a totality. Here the agents of capital and the agents of nation states act in the mode of "on behalf of", in a kind of Empire that even as it exploits every new market, to excesses of gain and destructive creation, has to understand itself, to justify itself. Too much discourse is too focused on a "naive" nation state, too much the kid blown away by the display, by the spycraft, the operations, by the show, when the apologists openly discuss and attempt to liberalize, to understand the very global order that they cannot quite map themselves even as they hold the levers of power. Some of these agents view themselves as charged with maintaining regular prices and steady growth, to ensuring that world markets and economies are following along on their business cycling just fine act as they say. They fail spectacularly at times, and the prices reset. We are in a completely unprecedented world that has seen and is seeing huge shifts. Many of the institutions of the previous era of geoeconomics are registering a profound shift. The dramatic rise of the central banks with their portfolio rounding little offshoot sovereign wealth funds. The presence of China felt everywhere. The crisis in financialization is a child of surplus and a puncturing of cultural inflation (of a set of easy-debt inspired valuations) at the same time. Brian asked Keith about the "looters". My minds-eye flashed with a headline: Dutch Pensioneers Accused of Looting. Dutch pension fund (wrlds third largest) Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP, in a press release in which they mentioned their intent to move some of the 40% of their portfolio that was invested in debt instruments (still bow tie pension fund respectable banking investment) revealed that the reason the only lost 5% this last half year is that well they had 13% in those evil commodities and I think 9% in hedge funds, the kids with the naked shorts in the global pool. In the politics of global finance, the hedge funds are specialized, politically incorrect exploiters of new markets in financialization. There is something of a homologue to the excessive expenditure on the security state in the fact that the hedge fund niche emerged from portfolio security and risk management. What begins as a a way to hedge up or secure something, gets up on a monkeys paw and takes revenge on its creators, cronos eats his own children. Structured investment vehicles, originally mandated to hedge bank portfolios bring them down. The very same broker-dealers are shorted down by their own trading arms. The agile security state gets bogged down in a quagmire of its own making in afghanistan-pakistan-iraq-iran. What begins as Rummy's lite force removal of despotry becomes the greatest sign up and organization of feudal-peasant jihadis against global security state capital and the place where the security state discovers its own powerlessness. The power is eating itself in gruesome Goya fashion and here I cannot remove the image of Kronos slurping in the ripped carcass of one of his children from my eyes. In a game of endless deferral that is represented so perfectly by that still most stable investment in big central bank treasuries, debt rises as the perfect embodiment, even with its exessive self destroying aspects. Witness the gobbling up of treasuries by China and the petrodollar states in the last few months. Only a small percentage of their surplus goes to commando capital investment, a small but no less important percentage. And China piles up its own debt to its very bios. This is most likely no end point, but a way stage in which the prosthetic net kritik is called short, as stunned as the tourists were and are who both walked around the world trade center towers stunned by their sheer verticality and then even more stunned by their absence. The amero-european housing bubble is a crisis in the ideology of "Home Beautiful" and comfortable estrangement as our old friend Diogenes-Sloterdijk might say. Stunning in rise and fall. "You are blocking my Sun light" says the kritik to the Emperor..... 0.5 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:54:57 +0200 Ed Phillips asked: > why the sales job for a bizarre complex > that is directed at more and more excessive, spectacular, even arbitrary > displays of power that will never be used is so successful. Here the image > comes to mind of jet fighters that rotate on a dime. Something so insanely > exhorbitant in expenditure, flaming, flaring off, exploding in test after > test. I was wondering about exactly this today, as I read in the New York Times about four air force generals seeking $16 million in public monies to build two-room designer-appointed "comfort capsules" for their personal transport through the imperial skies. But then my curiosity only mounted higher as my eye moved further down the page, where I read about the Bush administration plans to use $230 million of "counter-terrorism" money to upgrade Pakistan's F-16s. "The officials... said the timing was driven by deadlines of the American contractor, Lockheed Martin." No further comment about those deadlines then ensued... > Brian keeps making some very fundamental points that I do not see mentioned > enough, and he is thinking "with" them: > > 1. Is to think in terms of geocapital and the nation states and Empire(s) > as a complex interweaving, a totality. Thanks for noticing that, Ed. One of the real interesting things that became concrete for me in South Korea (though I already understood it theoretically) was the way that Fordist and military-industrial development has been driven, in both countries, by the deliberate maintenance of red-alert status at the 38th parallel. Far-off sites of conflict that Americans only see in the movies serve as pretexts for the development of the most sophisticated weapons imaginable (never forget that the US military budget is now as big as the rest of the world's combined). Meanwhile on the soil of that far-off site something different has been happening: build-up of heavy industry under dictatorial discipline until from 1960 to 1988, then rapid neoliberalization peaking with the 1997 Asian crisis to throw the country open to outside capital looking to feed on educated labor. The complex interweaving produces very different political and cultural outlooks as part of one internally differentiated system. Yet I would agree with Keith that this does not make "totality," not even the totality of something called kapitalism. The imperial interweave is a system of power, it's dominant, it imposes its militarist will in staggeringly violent and absurd ways, yet there is so much else to life under the sun and the stars and the electric streetlamps. No less important than the act of looking into the eye of power is the act of looking away. best, BH 0.6 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Ed Phillips nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 25 Jul 2008 11:28:43 -0700 > complex interweaving produces very different political and cultural > outlooks as part of one internally differentiated system. Yet I would > agree with Keith that this does not make "totality," not even the > totality of something called kapitalism. The imperial interweave is a > system of power, it's dominant, it imposes its militarist will in > staggeringly violent and absurd ways, yet there is so much else to life > under the sun and the stars and the electric streetlamps. No less > important than the act of looking into the eye of power is the act of > looking away. Yes. Exactly, Brian. One system, human made, human struggled over which is something that I think that our squatting here on nettime is about. Another way to look at power is at its insecurity, it's vulnerability. Not only is it not total in a deterministic sense, our sense of determinism being the index of a collective passivity, it is profoundly insecure and in need of constant reassurance. Empire has always been so. When I first saw Velasquez's portrait of that grandly dominant despot, Felipe el Segundo, I could see as clearly as I see the profound weakness and insecurity and even pathos of our "fearless" pygmy leaders, felipe's profound insecurity before the gaze and the brush of the artist, of the other. The insecurity before the gaze of those who wield the means of the production of representation or vorstellung. The despot feels that profound insecurity because he has a first person seated view of the hallucinations, of the hallucinated reinvestment in old dead fig leafs, old dead emblems and magical insignia of a power that never was. The very form that power takes is of a reinvestment in what one hopes must have been a reassuring hallucination at some previous time by some prior regime of power. Power, and here I mean very particular people acting as agents of power, hallucinates and reinvests in outmoded hallucinations first and then samples and tests and adapts as best it can it's very clumsy and unwieldy hallucinations and representations. Prosthetic power is even more insecure as it adapts itself also to the technical apparatus and machine ontology that is coming into being even as the multitude is coming into being. 0.7 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Ed Phillips nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:38:51 -0700 > Empire has always been so. When I first saw Velasquez's portrait of that > grandly dominant despot, Felipe el Segundo, I could see as clearly as I see > the profound weakness and insecurity and even pathos of our "fearless" > pygmy leaders, felipe's profound insecurity before the gaze and the brush > of the artist, of the other. It's funny how as I typed that up, I replaced, in a kind of slip, Felipe el cuarto with el segundo, his dead ancestor, in comparison to which el cuarto came off as some kind of dandyish pygmy, even as Bush II is to his father. The state as Empire grows in power as it decays in form and representation. Velazquez's realism is a kind of leading, testing edge of a regime deeply committed to hallucination and counter-reformation. It needs the labyrinth of a tentative, delayed realism to keep alive the obscenity of its hallucination. Velazquez plays with and represents that labyrinth of representation in which the ghostly sovereign appears in a glass darkly. <...> 0.15 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Eric Kluitenberg nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:34:22 +0200 Thank you Brian for a challenging and stimulating set of ideas and suggestions! Also for your report from Korea. A minor contribution here on two points you are making, some comments more than a criticism. On Jul 22, 2008, at 23:57, Brian Holmes wrote: > For most of the twentieth century, art was judged with respect to the > previously existing state of the medium. What mattered was the kind of > rupture it made, the unexpected formal or semiotic elements that it > brought into play, the way it displaced the conventions of the genre or > the tradition. The prize at the end of the evaluative process was a > different sense of what art could be, a new realm of possibility for the > aesthetic. Let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed, > definitively. As I have come to understand this is that rupture is part of process of negation, a negative dialectics as some have called it (Adorno / Lyotard), in the case of the visual arts a 'negative dialectics of the image'. Now the point of negation is not the replacement of one mode of the visual by another, alternative one. Much rather the object of negation is to 'break' the image, to show its disfunctionality, to expose that every image hides more than it reveals. This negation then opens up an experiential void, a non-space and a non-time (Lyotard has discussed at length how Kant had already described this as a "UnForm" (non-form) in his analytic of the sublime). In critical aesthetics this idea has been expanded and transformed further: In the experiential void opened up by the negation of the visual no imagination or life is possible. It is the very threat of the end of life as such. To put the threat to life at bay new modes of the visual are (immediately) put in place. Perhaps our brains are hard-wired to do this. But in this moment of negation, the breaking of the image, of the visual, an infinity is opened up, an infinity of possible modes of the visual, an infinite range of alternatives, one of which has to be (temporarily) adopted. The real point of the negation and this negative dialectics as it was emblematically embodied by the bold quest of the avant-gardes, was not to find a somehow "better" alternative for that which was negated (perspective, unity of space, unity of time, surface, support, material, medium, etc etc...) but much rather to reveal the infinity of possibilities, the infinite space of alternatives. Now what has changed and where I would follow you in most of your analysis is that the context in which art, criticism, and critical cultural production operate, has diversified to the point where multiplicity has replaced revolt. The second important change is that I think that the kind of practices that were previously labelled as avant-garde have long been supplanted and taken over by actors in non-art contexts, stimulated and accelerated by the expansion of the digitised media infrastructures. The negation of symbolic structures now plays out and articulates itself in a much wider social and political domain, which makes your next remarks al the more prescient: > The backdrop against which art stands out now is a particular state of > society. What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated > representation can do with its formal, affective and semiotic means is to > mark out a possible or effective shift with respect to the laws, the > customs, the measures, the mores, the technical and organizational > devices that define how we must behave and how we can relate to each > other at a given time and in a given place. What you look for in art is > a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence. Anything less is > just the seduction of novelty - the hedonism of insignificance. > > If that's the case (if the axiom really holds), then a number of > fascinating questions arise - for the artist, of course, but also for the > critic. Where the critic is concerned, one good question is this: How do > you address yourself to artists or publics or potential peers across the > dividing lines that separate entire societies? How do you evaluate what > counts as a positive or at least a promising change in the existing > balance of a foreign culture? Adopting the formula outlined above I would say that the negation of dominant modes of symbolisation serves not just to point out and develop alternatives, but first of all to show that an infinite range of alternatives exists in which every possible mode of symbolisation (image, sound, text) hides more than it reveals (about actual social realities on the ground). This is where I see the real significance of such 'symbol-hacking' practices, which can of course never stand on their own. They becomes a force for change when there is a local application and the material means to bring them further - but then we get into the discussion of strategies and tactics. Here I wanted first to comment on the theoretical proposition you made. How this then works for activists, artists, critics in oractice is the next step. ---------- The second comment relates to the use of the concept of Empire. I wonder if the concept of Empire is really productive here to address your question of finding "a different way to live, a fresh chance at coexistence", which I read as a call for pluralism and multiplicity. Empire, however, suggest the rise of a hegemonic and more or less unitary form of social and economic/political organisation (along with its military extensions). Of course in Negri and Hardt's vision there are many internal struggles and conflicting actors within the body of Empire, but still they seem guided by a similar organisational logic and set of (hegemonic) objectives. If, however, I look somewhat naively at geopolitical developments around me, I see much more of a fractallisation of Empire at the moment, i.e. the emergence of a multitude of self-similar, but self-contained empires. Importantly, these factal-empires also contest and counter-act each other to the point where their objectives and strategies become so heterogeneous that I wonder how productive the rather monolithic concept of Empire still is to analyse, let alone do something useful with this heterogeneity. Much rather I would opt for an approach focused on a simultaneous localisation and multiplication of alternatives to such hegemonic forces and leave the concept of Empire behind. --------- Finally, on the reduction of American bases and how this plays out locally, in the case of your report in S-Korea, highly fascinating! In such a localised address to a shift in 'hegemonic domination', I see the most productive approach to a new form of social and cultural critique. It will be very difficult to build that critique convincingly, given the lingual, cultural, material, economic and social rifts that separate the various actors that would need to be included in this, and also given the reliance on a global pigeon-English that many of us are struggling with..., but still this could be truly productive. A problem that worries me on a more day to day basis and that follows directly from your account of the reduction and shifts of foreign US military basis is the question of the demilitarisation of society, and the technology and research sector in particular. It seems to me that there is a continuing legacy of the cold war era in which the military / industrial complex attempts to hold its ground, not just in the US, but also in the Russian Federation and many of the post-Soviet and other 'Western' powers, in terms of contracts, jobs, positions, production-infrastructures, international market-shares, entrenched financial positions. I.e. this is now a completely post-ideological space of political action. Especially the domain of technological research and development has become so deeply militarised (fuelled even further by the 'war on terror' discourse) that it becomes difficult to imagine how to get rid of this condition. A reliable inside source told me years ago that even a relatively 'civil'-looking institution such as the MIT Media-Lab was at the time supported for more than 65 percent by military funding, carrying out projects that are conducted in utter secrecy, about which we can safely assume that they exist, but about which we cannot get any reliable information as to what they are and what they aim for. Stuff that you will never see on their public web pages. No doubt this percentage has only grown since, and it is presumably even worse in many other technological R&D centres. How do "we" as cultural producers, critics, artists, deal with such realities if we are so prominently working in and with the products of this technological domain? How to bring this back to the civil domain? Some 'help' might be expected from the apparent economic demise of the US, making it increasingly difficult to provide for the upkeep for the world's largest army (hence the reduction and re-alignment of foreign US military bases). In effect, the upkeep is currently mostly financed by China. This is, however, certainly not a problem of the US alone, and it plays out very differently in different contexts. The shared problem faced is how to turn this trend around (without a complete collapse), how to civilise the technological domain? This is one area where the search for alternatives seems highly urgent, and it will require more than a process of mere 'negation' - A process of negation of dominant symbolic modes of hegemonic domination only serves to show that an infinity of other worlds is possible, I would say. Well anyway, just some thought on a damp Sunday afternoon (it's hot and wet in Amsterdam). bests, Eric 0.16 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 27 Jul 2008 21:54:26 +0200 Concerning the concept of artistic rupture, Eric Kluitenberg wrote: > As I have come to understand this... rupture is part of process of > negation, a negative dialectics as some have called it (Adorno / Lyotard), > in the case of the visual arts a 'negative dialectics of the image'. Now > the point of negation is not the replacement of one mode of the visual by > another, alternative one. Much rather the object of negation is to 'break' > the image, to show its disfunctionality, to expose that every image hides > more than it reveals. ... > The real point of the negation and this negative dialectics as it was > emblematically embodied by the bold quest of the avant-gardes, was not to > find a somehow "better" alternative for that which was negated > (perspective, unity of space, unity of time, surface, support, material, > medium, etc etc...) but much rather to reveal the infinity of > possibilities, the infinite space of alternatives. > > Now what has changed and where I would follow you in most of your analysis > is that the context in which art, criticism, and critical cultural > production operate, has diversified to the point where multiplicity has > replaced revolt. This way of thinking, developed from Adorno to Lyotard among many others, is one of the more powerful and compelling stories that can be told about the vanguard "overcoming of art," and my thanks to Eric for bringing in this precise theoretical level of conversation. When I said, "let's take it as axiomatic that all that has changed," I was indeed thinking of the end of any transcendence of artistic representation, and therefore of any reason or art to go on referring to art alone, to its sequential evolutions and/or ruptures. Of course, the idea that there is one single story of the avant-gardes in the 20th century is itself totally dubious, but I think that many of the stories which have been elaborated lead to the point art serves as some sort of ever-changing mediation between an active multiplicity and an existing context of social reality. How that kind of mediation works is, I think, the subject for a micropolitical aesthetics - but I'd like to touch on that in a later reply to Snafu's excellent post on productivism. As Eric says hee, > How this then works for activists, artists, critics in practice > is the next step. Concerning the "existing context of social reality" which forms the backdrop to any next step, that is definitely where geopolitical thinking becomes an issue. How to name the context? Is there any overarching structure? If so, how to avoid supporting it with one's own conceptual activity? > The second comment relates to the use of the concept of Empire. I wonder > if the concept of Empire is really productive here to address your > question of finding "a different way to live, a fresh chance at > coexistence", which I read as a call for pluralism and multiplicity. > Empire, however, suggest the rise of a hegemonic and more or less unitary > form of social and economic/political organisation (along with its > military extensions). Of course in Negri and Hardt's vision there are many > internal struggles and conflicting actors within the body of Empire, but > still they seem guided by a similar organisational logic and set of > (hegemonic) objectives. Well, what I am talking about is first of all best approached as classical imperialism, not Empire in Hardt and Negri's sense of a centerless, networked imperium -- because what we have seen in the past five years, with the Iraq war, is clearly an attempt to project a specifically American sovereignty onto a resource-rich country. Beyond the war, I think the case for American hegemony is very strong and tends to be understated, if only because people on the left would understandably like to see other alternatives. However, lucidity is also important. The acts of the Bush administration have forced me, as a responsible citizen, to look at the consequences of US military bases all over the world, military domination of space, financial domination through the continuing status of the dollar as international reserve currency, techoscientific domination through the fruits of military R&D spending, cultural domination through global English and the benchmark status of American universities, etc. etc. All of this is, to be sure, in decline, and that is probably why it has gotten so ugly in recent years. But decline can go on for a long time... and in the meantime, unfortunately, this whole construct of military-industrial imperialism continues to furnish the basic definitions of what is good in life, including the canonical measures of economic growth and prosperity inherited from the Fordist/Cold War era, which still hold sway among all the official bodies and orient, for the worst, the development of the EU in particular (not to mention China). The really obscene victory of US hegemony is making everyone desire and love this bloated form of overdevelopment. Now, I definitely do not have a one-dimensional view of all this, because the geopoliical study that I have carried on within the Continental Drift project definitely suggests that regional bloc-formation and the increasing sovereignty of countries that already have a continental scale (China, India, Russia) is the wave of the future. I see two likely scenarios over the next 20 years. Either continued American decline will allow other major actors to literally "buy in" to the American hegemony, eventually achieving a true intra-imperial distribution of power and consequent tempering of the US capacity to go lashing out with its military when the other major players do not agree -- and then we will really reach the state that Hardt and Negri described in Empire. Or, the existence of any worldwide hegemony will gradually fade, and much greater power will accrue to the continental ensembles, giving rise to some kind of truly multi-polar world. In the best of cases this could lead to the "fractalization" you suggest, with interesting roles for multiple kinds of plurality in the system (not that there isn't plurality already, but this would be quantitatively and qualitatively different, more heterogeneous). Or, in the worst of cases, we could easily get rivalries between blocs, resource wars, etc. The obvious thing that keeps these scenarios at a distance is the gigantic disproportion between the US military and all the rest. But it may be that popular resistance of all kinds will finally prove that to be an "ineffective disproportion" -- finally answering Madeleine Albright's famous question by showing that having such a great army really is useless, and thus opening up the possibility, at least, of more positive scenarios. This is the geopolitical reason why I am antimilitarist. The other reason is unreflected and immediate: I don' think men with guns is the way to solve any problem. > Much rather I would opt for an approach focused on a simultaneous > localisation and multiplication of alternatives to such hegemonic forces > and leave the concept of Empire behind. It can be a very good philosophical approach and also the right one, I think, to base alternative strategies on (including aesthetic strategies). However the trick is keeping reality enough in mind that you can actually hope to change it, i.e. leave the military-industrial pimp behind and find some better lover. > --------- > > Finally, on the reduction of American bases and how this plays out locally, > in the case of your report in S-Korea, highly fascinating! > > In such a localised address to a shift in 'hegemonic domination', I see > the most productive approach to a new form of social and cultural > critique. It will be very difficult to build that critique convincingly, > given the lingual, cultural, material, economic and social rifts that > separate the various actors that would need to be included in this, and > also given the reliance on a global pigeon-English that many of us are > struggling with..., but still this could be truly productive. Yes, to the extent that we have a world society, we do need a cultural critique that can work through global divides, with all the quite fascinating and, I think, rewarding difficulties that you mention. In my opinion, this kind of dialogical exchange is one of the ways to leave behind the imperial tendency to oppressive hegemony, but without falling back into essentialism and identity-thinking. > A problem that worries me on a more day to day basis and that follows > directly from your account of the reduction and shifts of foreign US > military basis is the question of the demilitarisation of society, and the > technology and research sector in particular. It seems to me that there is > a continuing legacy of the cold war era in which the military / industrial > complex attempts to hold its ground, not just in the US, but also in the > Russian Federation and many of the post-Soviet and other 'Western' powers, > in terms of contracts, jobs, positions, production-infrastructures, > international market-shares, entrenched financial positions. I.e. this is > now a completely post-ideological space of political action. You are so right. The vampires are keeping the cold warbody "alive" so that they can maintain the dead-end mode of production that has been put in place since, or rather by, the Second World War. > Especially the domain of technological research and development has become > so deeply militarised (fuelled even further by the 'war on terror' > discourse) that it becomes difficult to imagine how to get rid of this > condition. A reliable inside source told me years ago that even a > relatively 'civil'-looking institution such as the MIT Media-Lab was at > the time supported for more than 65 percent by military funding, carrying > out projects that are conducted in utter secrecy, about which we can > safely assume that they exist, but about which we cannot get any reliable > information as to what they are and what they aim for. Stuff that you will > never see on their public web pages. No doubt this percentage has only > grown since, and it is presumably even worse in many other technological > R&D centres. > > How do "we" as cultural producers, critics, artists, deal with such > realities if we are so prominently working in and with the products of > this technological domain? How to bring this back to the civil domain? I think this remains the key question. In my reading, for instance, A Thousand Plateaus is entirely about this question, it's about subverting and derailing the warmachine of the state, mostly from within, through the undermining of what they call "royal science." It is true that one always works largely on the state's domain (that's the very definition of hegemony, it sets the terrain for everyone). So the question you raise is really the central problem, culturally as well as politically. > Some 'help' might be expected from the apparent economic demise of the US, > making it increasingly difficult to provide for the upkeep for the world's > largest army (hence the reduction and re-alignment of foreign US military > bases). In effect, the upkeep is currently mostly financed by China. Actually, Japanese capital remains tremendously important as well... Along with Middle Eastern and European money, the genius of empires has always been to get others paying tribute. Basically because they want the protection of -- or are frankly afraid of -- the empire's military. However, this seems to be headed for a change. A collapse of the dollar, a real run on the dollar, would signify a radical change. We will see... I am not betting on it as I think that everyone is afraid of such a violent turnabout. I think the strategy of the other world powers is to hollow the US out from the inside, and then just wait and see what can be done about the hard core of the military, wait and see whether it will really decline along with the middle class and the old bridges and levees and so on. The strategy of the US, as Brzezinski said flat out in The Grand Chessboard, is to hold on to hegemony as long as possible. > This > is, however, certainly not a problem of the US alone, and it plays out > very differently in different contexts. The shared problem faced is how to > turn this trend around (without a complete collapse), how to civilise the > technological domain? Thanks, Eric, it is great to see that we can finally ask a big question again. All that tactical shyness was kinda buggin' me... > This is one area where the search for alternatives seems highly urgent, > and it will require more than a process of mere 'negation' - A process of > negation of dominant symbolic modes of hegemonic domination only serves to > show that an infinity of other worlds is possible, I would say. Indeed, the continued return to avant-garde negation is pointless. I think it is intimately bound up with the tautological self-reference of art to itself alone, which is strangely persistent, mainly because it was institutionalized as the definition of modern art (another zombie category as Ulrich Beck puts it). My off-the-cuff manifesto was meant to say that self-reference and radical negation ought to be things of the past for art - stages which have truly been overcome - so I heartily agree with the above! > Well anyway, just some thought on a damp Sunday afternoon (it's hot and > wet in Amsterdam). Hmm, can we hope for more such reflective weather in the future? It's pretty hot in Paris but it only rains at night! > bests, > Eric my best to all as well, Brian 0.16 Re: <nettime> 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover Michael Gurstein nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 27 Jul 2008 08:04:56 -0700 I happened to be in Seoul at what was I guess, roughly the same time as Brian and had some parallel thoughts on developments there that might be of interest... (I was attending, as a Civil Society representative, an OECD Ministerial meeting on the Future of the Internet Economy... (This is taken from a somewhat longer trip report... 2. Canada and the OECD Ministerial Canada hosted the first event in this series in Ottawa in 1998 and much was made at various points particularly in the beginning about the Seoul event being somehow linked to the Ottawa event. Unfortunately for Canada the comparison between Canada in the Internet economy in 1998 and in 2008 is something of an embarrassment. Where in 1998 Canada was an active innovator in a wide range of areas concerning the Internet Economy and (not incidentally) Society, in 2008 it was clear that Canada had either been more or less stagnant in the interim period (and thus slipping behind its international competitors in whatever tables concerning the Internet Economy one might wish to focus on). Where other countries notably in this instance Korea but also the EU had chosen to provide significant support for infrastructure development and R&D, Canada had (currently governed by Neo-Liberal ideologues) pretty much withdrawn from any public involvement in these areas. And where Canada in 1998 had had a very progressive/inclusive national policy approach to extending participation (and the related benefits of the Internet--Economy and Society) to all, this had by 2008 disappeared from the public agenda. The benefits of a public policy approach to broad Internet inclusion are manifestly obvious in Korea where some 90 per cent of the populations is Internet connected almost all, with very fast broadband connectivity. This has proven to be a tremendous spur to various aspects of the Internet economy including the ever-receding grail of innovation but also to overall appropriation of the Internet into all aspects of both commercial life and daily life. Canada by losing sight of the social goals of the extension of Internet access and use has seemingly as a consequence allowed itself to drift backwards in those areas. Michael Gurstein 1.0 <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Geert Lovink nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 11 May 2009 21:29:14 +0200 On the event of the Montevideo/Netherlands Media Art Institute 30th anniversary, departing curator Susanne Jaschko put together a one day symposium entitled Positions in Flux. Régine Debatty at We Make Money Not Art blogged about it. Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the morning session. The event on May 8 2009 took place in Trouw Amsterdam, the followup of Club 11. From what I heard, Positions at Flux had a critical take towards the common media art discourse and asked relevant questions. It was a relief to see that the attention was, for once, not focused on history, preservation and conservation. Cultural heritage has already taken over way too much attention space– in part because this is one of the few areas where there is still plenty of funding. Sigh. Just for one day, no celebration of “medium religion” or “art meets science”. Director Heiner Holtappels opened by noticing that new media art is not easily accepted by fine art. Traditional art has become eclecticism. According to Heiner, all art is technology based. The subject of the symposium was a visible break with the video art heritage that Montevideo has been known for. Politics topics, a courageous step? “Is there a future for us?” is a question not many institutions dare to ask. In the Dutch daily De Volkskrant of that day, ex-Montevideo curator Bart Rutten (now Stedelijk Museum) took up the role of expressing the ambivalent feelings of the Dutch art establishment towards the new but no longer young art form. Whereas he praised Montevideo’s work, he himself had moved on. “You can ask yourself if Montevideo should continue to show only media art works. In this way they preserve their specialism. It was my main reason to leave.” In Zero Comments I mapped the current challenges for new media arts. While society at large is inundated with (new) media, the art branch that deals with the digital moved itself in a ghetto. While this analysis still holds up, many in the sector openly admitted the shortcomings and are now putting in place strategies to escape the dead end street. Technology has lost its original fascination, while spreading even faster in society. Is this a reason enough to abandon the field? While experimentation with electronics and the digital might have lost its aura and the spirit of curiosity has somewhat fained, the field of new media arts at large is still growing, despite institutional setbacks here and there. What most participants shared was the feeling that, despite the intimidating institutional violence of the large players, museums will die or become a zoo if they do not deal with the Digital. Some say new media arts lacks the timeliness and the depth. Whereas ICA London closed its media lab, Laboral in the North of Spain, which opened in 2007, is now a large exhibition space, devoted to media art. Chairman Chris Keulemans emphasized that new media arts was always at it best when it criticized the media itself, with its codes and nodes. Each of the three presentations in the morning session gave a different answer to the question how relevant political work could be produced. The Iraqi-American artist Wafaa Bilal is known from his installation Domestic Tension, in which the artist lived in a gallery space for a month, pointed at by paint ball gun operated by web users. Shoot an Iraqi had 80 million visitors and, according to Bilal, was a “strange mix of aesthetic pain and pleasure.” What made the work so popular was the power of viral connections, in particular through chatrooms and video he put online. What happened here was a confrontation between conflict zone and comfort zone, disengagement and engagement, virtual versus physical platform — both in the case of the artwork and war in Iraq itself. Bilal concluded that the body has its own language that is not in sync with the electronic reality. Bilal made a distinction between interactive works, in which the end-states is already determined, and dynamic pieces that are open ended. A lot of the old school new media art is interactive. Increased user participated was illustrated in Bilal’s story of the ‘virtual human shield’, a group of people that gathered to protect the artist from being shot at. Dog or Iraqi was a month long online debate who gets waterboarded: a dog or an Iraqi? Bilal also briefly discussed his modded version of a 2003 US shooting game that he renamed into Virtual Jihadi. Instead of killing Sadam the user can now hunt GW Bush. This and other projects were documented in Wafaa Bilal, Shoot an Iraqi (City Light Books, San Francisco, 2008). Former Etoy Hans Bernard of Uebermorgen.com didn’t show projects but read a text concerning the role of “European techno fine art avant garde.” I am great fan of Uebermorgen. It’s in fact becoming impossible to list all their interventions and hacks. Uebermorgen is all about “surreal outcomes”, not bound by any medium. “The transformation from digital to physical is important. The work is not pop art, it is rock art. We are not activists, we are actionists.” For a while seeking large audiences was a thrill, but that’s no longer the main motivation. There is a new strategy for each new project. Bernard did his best to prove that Uebermorgen’s intentions were neither political nor ideological. The aim should be Art, not Politics. Communication is the 9-5 job, but that not the passion. Bernard’s insistence on the non-political status didn’t convince. Uebermorgen’s claim, not to have any political agenda, refers to an ancient, rigid definition that was already problematic in the late seventies when I studied political science. Maybe in Austria politics is still associated with corrupt parties and fat, ugly politicians but elsewhere in the world people use a much broader definition of “the political”. His insistence on artistic freedom is amiable but the idea that once art becomes political it turns into politics and seizes to be art, simply doesn’t hold. His separation between the private opinion of the artist as a citizen and the Artist as a public figure is problematic for the same reasons. Bernard’s insistence that “perception and production need to separated” sounds good–but we all know that visual arts no longer operates outside “perception management.” Autonomy, at least in the Dutch context, is the official state religion. We all anticipate aesthetic impact, even if we reject the categories of the day and undermine the dominant visual logic. Hans, there are no commissars anymore that control the ateliers. If there is any censor it’s probably the Politically Correct Self. So, if we state, “in production we need to be free,” there is no one who will stop us — but ourselves. Knowbotic Research, teaching and working in Zurich, was the third presenter. Their translocal distributed temporary works avoid–and seek– the Political in yet another manner. Christian Huebler showcased the Blackbenz Race project between Prishtina and Zurich, a city marketing proposal that was refused because of its negative image of the proper Swiss finance capital. The broader idea was to play with the Kosovo- Albanian-Swiss people that hover in-between places. Code words are fog, smoke, blurred spaces and multiple identities. The self-built stealth boat project has a similar intention. The micro audiences become actors here. Activism doesn’t need more exposure and transparency. Art doesn’t need moral outcry. The celebrity industry took over this role. Art questions and creates new spaces for reflection. What’s required are slow spaces. All three projects showed that new media art “doesn’t need to be a monade, merely celebrating itself.” (Huebler) This is the age of entering other contexts, times and spaces–assisted by production houses that have in-house knowledge about the specificity, and the Eigenartigkeit, of digital technologies. 1.1 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis jo van der spek nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 13 May 2009 17:27:22 +0200 <citaat van="Geert Lovink"> >Activism doesn't need more exposure and transparency. I agree, the obsession with media by activists is killing activism and (re)producing mirrors of narcism, aka transparency.... >Art doesn't need moral outcry. It does not NEED it, but some kinda passion is imho an important generator. This passion can be questioned, exposed or reflected on. That is why I agree with you that > Art questions and creates new spaces for reflection. > What's required are slow spaces. Yes, but why not also new confrontations, new dynamics, tactics, etc? And indeed, why not reflect on morality as well? Jo van der Spek m2m.streamtime.org 1.2 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 14 May 2009 22:28:59 +0200 On Monday, May 11 2009, 21:29 (+0200), Geert Lovink wrote: > While society at large is inundated with (new) media, the art branch > that deals with the digital moved itself in a ghetto. This is too true, and that branch has to reinvent itself from scratch or it will collapse very soon (if it isn't already collapsing). But it goes for the entire "new media" field, including academic new media studies which have used up their credit within the humanities. It's already happening in arts education where famous media art schools have been rolled back or integrated into Fine Art courses. It's not even a question of too narrow technological focus, but one of perceived artistic quality. Historically, "media art" has been a tactical alliance between radical artists from Nam June Paik to ubermorgen.com and high tech academic research lab art that has no whatsoever contemporary art credits. From the late 60s to today, one hand washed the other - the former brought the artistic credibility, the latter the money and infrastructure. Festivals like STRP or ars electronica perfectly illustrate it. However, the research lab art, particularly in the form of "interactive installations", has always dominated the field in sheer mass, quantity and visibility. A visitor who would visit an arbitrary new media festival with an interest in contemporary art would see, first and most of all, preposterous machine parks. Or, in friendlier terms, it's the kind of art that rather belonged, as an educational or aesthetic gimmick, into a museum of technology than into a contemporary art discourse. However, I find it hard to get past a certain attachment to the "media art" ghetto because it tends to combine the very worst (even painfully, unspeakably stupid and monstrously worst) with - IMO - the very best to be found in contemporary art. Ubermorgen are an excellent example, needless to drop further names here. And I'm afraid that abandoning that ghetto, although it's theoretically the right thing to do, will in the end result in even greater collateral damage. Since the 1990s, the so-called Fine Arts do provide no really desirable environment either, likely they're even worse. It is telling enough that the term "Fine Art" suddenly has become a universally accepted standard while, not a long time ago, any self-respecting contemporary artist would have fiercely rejected if not opposed it. In the past ten years of reading contemporary art magazines or visiting art biennales and Documentas, I've been flabbergasted by the lack of vision and radicalism in this field. It has morphed, somewhat comparable to New (composed) Music after the 1960s, into an academic discourse ruled by a neo-bourgeois jet set of hipster curators posing as cultural theorists on the basis of a not-even-half-baked knowledge and recycling of postmodern philosophy and cultural studies. The system consists of artists who have been academically trained to produce works - along with non-understood theory lingo - that fit the required curatorial buzz. Along with this development, the paradigm of the white cube and art works as good-looking exhibition objects has become stronger than ever before and rules out any art practice not fitting this format. All the while, the system thrives on the delusion that it still represents visual art as a whole although, unlike, for example, in film where 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' still coexist, its popular forms like comic books, tattoos, fantasy figurines, t-shirt illustrations, wildlife paintings... have long been excluded from its system. I dare to claim that under "saner" conditions, no Documenta and no Biennale curator would get around artists like ubermorgen or the Yes Men, just like no Documenta curator got around Beuys in the 1970s and 80s. Instead, we get artists like Mike Kelley all over the art world in whose work I'm either not getting something or indeed seeing the Emperor's new clothes. ("Review" babble like http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tomorrow_never_comes1/ affirms the suspicion that the art world has no clue either.) > Director Heiner Holtappels opened by noticing that new media art > is not easily accepted by fine art. Traditional art has become > eclecticism. According to Heiner, all art is technology based. This is true, yet contemporary art has mostly given up on reflecting its media. [I can almost hear an iPhone-wearing curator saying that reflecting one's media is outmoded modernism.] It's most obvious in the way video installations have become its mainstream format, in the form of video loops shown in booths inside exhibition spaces. Video is just taken as a documentary TV or wannabe-cinematic format, as if radical video art from Paik to Infermental had never happened. (It seems as if most contemporary artists actually don't know it anymore which is comparable to painters no longer knowing about abstract painting.) One should perhaps advise Montevideo just not to leave its video art roots behind. -F -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl 1.3 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Matze Schmidt nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 15 May 2009 17:23:12 +0200 Thursday, May 14, 2009, 10:28:59 PM, one wrote: > On Monday, May 11 2009, 21:29 (+0200), Geert Lovink wrote: >> While society at large is inundated with (new) media, the art >> branch that deals with the digital moved itself in a ghetto. > This is too true, and that branch has to reinvent itself from > scratch or it will collapse very soon (if it isn't already > collapsing). Mh, so let it be killing itself, the Reinvent Yourself-Discourse is a line from the Pet Shop Boys from the 90s and says nothing than "Nobody knows the trouble I've seen" in a 'modern' reinvented (sic!) way. But I cannot see the trouble of this hard front line between a Paik and a Ubermorgen. For example the "1001 Songs of eBay" of uebermorgen is just a funny funny project I can implement over the weekend dealing with online politics sex. And this confused and disoriented waiting for the new-old avantgarde like "Let's do many Paiks" is boring and does not have anything to do with the real world in which electronics are the basis of the doings. What was really radical in a Paik? Fucking the Porta Pack with Alternative TV-Ideas or the TV-Sets with a magnet? Were the neo-dada fluxus guys radical anyway or just radical? > as if radical video art from Paik to Infermental had never happened. > (It seems as if most contemporary artists actually don't know it > anymore which is comparable to painters no longer knowing about > abstract painting.) One should perhaps advise Montevideo just not to > leave its video art roots behind. I'd like to point out at this point that institutions like Montevideo are revolutionizers of money, e.g. they payed Jaromil for working on dynebolican stuff and by this means they are able to rescue the middle-class fantasies of a free arty market of software on the basis of electronics, a market without too much money and with lower prices, with all effects of an open source software"z" driven by the mediate support of the state. But while talking to them some years ago the Montevideo people turned out to be very naive in political questions. They have no idea about economy and no idea of what is going on out of their field. That's okay, as long as they incorporate all folklore and avantgarde at the sam time, because it is their mandate and mission. Matze Schmidt 1.4 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis jaromil nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 14:05:54 +0200 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 re all, first of all thanks Matze for your consideration of my activity, but let me warn you are overestimating the benefits of my collaboration with Montevideo / Time Based Arts ... which is now called Nederlands Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMK, BTW): it takes more to be "rescuing the middle-class fantasies of a free arty market of software" as you say, if we speak of a national institute that started in a squat in Amsterdam 30 years ago and has seen a constant flow of contributions by various people through all these years, most of them really worth considering. On Fri, May 15, 2009 at 05:23:12PM +0200, Matze Schmidt wrote: > I'd like to point out at this point that institutions like > Montevideo are revolutionizers of money, e.g. they payed Jaromil for > working on dynebolican stuff if it would be just the action of redistribution of wealth, then it wouldn't be revolutionary at all. Some artists produced and distributed by Montevideo did became rich, but for them Montevideo mostly contributed to the production quality of their artworks rather than direct funding. just consider that if my lifestyle would be "middle-class fantasy" i could not afford to sustainably live in Amsterdam relying on my current employment, but lucky me i'm not a yuppie :) and i'm fine like that. for the minimum support i get, needed as i care to support me and my extended family when needed, i have to do much more than just developing "my own projects", but still all results can be free to the public,: that shouldn't be special for a public institution, right? i believe this is the good signal NIMK gives - not such a revolutionary one, but pretty honest: there are often various degrees of corruption leading public institutions to play commercially with public resources. other than that, we can call "progressive attitude" - rather than revolutionary" - when institutions are keen to interact with liminal contexts, with dwellers on the dystopian hearth pulsating in every metropolis of our "Free Western World". This kind of interaction (and the respect for the uncommon ground in between) is indeed part of the heritage of a city like Mokum A - unfortunately decaying rapidly as Europe is turning into a Fortress for the privileged and their fears of the disinherited children of the welfare mirage. at last about the interaction i mention here: i'm not sure how to define it, its likely not a negotiation nor a compromise, i'm just sure it is necessary in any case: whether we accept the upcoming institutionalised "Reinvent Yourself" strategy or not. I would recommend a case-by-case analysis in this regards, rather than thinking universally... like institutions often do ;^) regarding your vague critiques let me reply: > with all effects of an open source software"z" driven by the mediate > support of the state. dyne.org development is not driven by any state, corporation or institution rather than by the many problems these power structures generate. we dedicate most of our free time to peer reviewed free software development in socially relevant contexts (please note "development", not provision of services) and as hackers we operate pragmatically, on-line as well in various different on-site contexts. > But while talking to them some years ago the Montevideo people > turned out to be very naive in political questions. They have no > idea about economy and no idea of what is going on out of their > field. That's okay, as long as they incorporate all folklore and > avantgarde at the sam time, because it is their mandate and mission. i'd be curious to know what you consider "naive in political questions": myself i've felt enriched by the past 4 and more years spent in Amsterdam, by my colleagues at NIMK (which is not so uniformed in its composition BTW) as well by the squatters in A'dam, from De Bierkoning to the Waag Society. backing my objection, i'll point you out some coverage on NIMK's 30 years symposium (just happened last week): http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2009/05/the-netherlands-media-art-inst.php pasting you here the transcription of my intervention at this symposium, let it be also a contribution to this interesting discussion thread: ------------ At the NIMK's symposium "Positions in Flux" I've taken the occasion to share thoughts on the current perception of Free Software and Open Source philosophy in art, along with some overdue criticism of the Creative Commons hollow hype, as well of the Creative Industries and their systematised processing of art for the global market. Even if not obvious, I believe the dynamics of these two phenomenons are related; among the quoted in the intervention are Benjamin Mako Hill's "Towards a Standard of Freedom: CreativeCommons and the Free Software Movement"[1] and Florian Cramer's post on nettime "The Creative Common Misunderstanding"[2], while the vigorous critique of the Creative Industries stands on Rana Dasgupta's essay "The Next Idea of the Artist (Art, music and the present threat of creativity)"[3] Here below a short transcript: "Open Source" doesn't mean free access, nor open space or open air; it presumes a seamful[4] approach to design as a response to the increasing reliance on technology and its accessibility; it is interactive without prescribed boundaries, following a combinatorial, generative approachto development; it is peer to peer as no producer can control further interaction patterns; it is grassroot as creations are born out of initiative and cohesion based on needs felt and understood in first person by community members. About Creative Commons, its motto "Some rights reserved." is a relatively hollow call: the slogan factually reverses the Free Software and Open Source philosophy of reserving rights to users, not copyright owners, in order to allow the former to become producers themselves. The dis/appropriating loop of creativity must be recursive to be fruitful: not only productionmeans belong to the people using them, further creations should be free to be recombined. rights must be granted focusing on people interacting, not just those providing the interactive infrastructure. Unfortunately there is a diffuse lack of perception for alternatives offered by the Open Source and Free Software approach over current profit models. As a present problem, also deriving from the lack of understanding of the importance of grass-root creativity, top-down cultural management is patronising art production: massmedia aesthetics of an entirely sanitised and efficient creativity, of the sort that will not rely on unstable people and can therefore be globally rationalised. That the great artists of modern Western culture managed to produce what they did, despitethe danger and intensity of their effort, was due in large part to improvised social forms built around close-knit networks where thought and affect circulated with high velocity, andwhere it was possible to try out forms of non-conventional human relationships that would not destroy, nor be destroyed by, a life of art. Seen from an historical perspective, In the second half of the twentieth century many of the functions of creative networks were already taken over in Europe by institutions (government funding bodies, universities, museums, etc) and much of their excessive feeling wasneutralised. This was only a small part of a general process of the time: the absorption of human emotion into bureaucratic channels, and the emergence of a social coolness, anefficiency of feeling. At this stage in the twenty-first century, we are in the middle of another large-scale restructuring of ideas of creativity and culture. As one of the most significant generators of image and value, creativity now has become a critical resource for the global economic engine. What creativity is, and how it can be systematised and circulated, are therefore urgent questions of contemporary capitalist organisation. As cultural producers are thrust into the full intensity of globally dispersed, just-in-time production, new images of creative inspiration and output are required that sit tidily within the systematised processes of the global market. Creativity must be rendered comprehensible, transparent and rational: there can be none of the destructive excesses evident in the lives of many of the greatest artists of European history. Creativity must circulate cleanly and quickly, and it should leave no dirty remainder. For what interests Hollywood, and the market in general, is not creativity as a complex human process, weighed down in bodies and relationships and empty days, but creativity as an abstraction, free of irrationality and pain, and light enough to hover like a great logo above the continents. Perhaps, as the logic of systematised production occupies the terrain of human creativitymore completely, we will reach a stage where we surrender all knowledge about this troubling domain, and it will become entirely alien to us. Perhaps one day we will be terrified of what explosive dangers might rise up from the creativity of human beings. [1] http://mako.cc/writing/toward_a_standard_of_freedom.html [2] http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0610/msg00025.html [3] http://ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp?text_id=45 [4] http://www.themobilecity.nl/2008/01/05/designing-for-locative-media-seamless-or-seamful-experiences/ - -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.org GPG: 779F E8B5 47C7 3A89 4112 64D0 7B64 3184 B534 0B5E 1.5 Re: <nettime> Media Mutations - Life | Registration | Simulation (was: Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis) xname nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 15:40:16 +0200 (CEST) > jaromil said: > Montevideo / Time Based Arts ... which is now called Nederlands > Instituut voor Mediakunst (NIMK, BTW) > if we speak of a national institute that started in a squat in > Amsterdam 30 years ago Hello. I did not remember that the 'Nimk' was started in a squat: isn't this the story of Paradiso and Melkweg? As far as I know the 'Netherlands Media Art Institute' was born when 'Monte Video' and 'Time Based Arts' merged (1993). Monte Video was founded by René Coelho in 1978, and initially operated from his house in Amsterdam. (was that squatted? I tend to doubt.) Monte Video focused on video art and provided equipment for producing works and space to show them (soon collecting and distributing... video-tapes!). Time Based Arts was founded in 1983 by the Association of Video Artists, so it was an artists run association creating a network for distribution; it was more performance oriented than Monte Video, according to the story that was narrated to me, and which I deduced from the collection. (Can anyone confirm this, please?) Were they squatting? But they were getting funding... I am somewhat curious. Maybe other people on this list know more. There is a page of history on the nimk.nl, but i saw no wikipedia entry on this topic. I find the *story of this institute quite beautiful and paradigmatic in the development of the (non-linear) chain of media mutations (which could off course be expanded): happening/performance (art=life) electronic art video-art (art=registration) media-art, software-art (art=simulation) I paste it below. Best, Eleonora === **History** 1978 Monte Video is founded by René Coelho. From his home on the Singel in Amsterdam he makes equipment and documentation available, and furnishes one room as a gallery. The first video artist whose work is shown here on the Singel was Livinus van de Bundt, Coelho's inspiration. Other artists, such as Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Shelly Silver and Gabor Body, soon make contact. It is not long before Monte Video has a large selection of works available for rental. 1983 Thanks to government funding Monte Video is able to move to Amsterdam North. There is now sufficient space to offer regular presentations. Not only Dutch artists, but also those from other countries are given a chance to show their videos or installations. 1986 Government funding received by Monte Video is cut back to almost nothing. Monte Video does receive several small transitional grants from the city of Amsterdam. Time Based Arts, which had been founded in 1983 by the Association of Video Artists, is fast becoming well-known as a distributor of video art, and continues receiving government funding. 1986-1993 René Coelho continues on his own. Monte Video moves back to his home on the Singel. The acquisition of production facilities, distribution, documentation and promotion goes on, financed from his own income and by organizing large projects. One of these, as an example, was 'Imago', an exhibition of Dutch video installations which toured worldwide for five years beginning in 1990. There were also plans laid for the first conservation programs for video art. The chairman of Time Based Arts, Aart van Barneveld, died; his death was followed by many conflicts within the organization. In the early 1990s Time Based Arts also lost its subsidies and threatened to go under. Monte Video and Time Based Arts decide to provide a joint art program for Amsterdam cable TV, Channel Zero. 1993 Time Based Arts merges with Monte Video. Their work is continued under the new name of Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts. This fusion does free up national funding. In both 1997 and 2001 the grants are expanded and converted into a structural subsidy for four years. 1993-2002 The Netherlands Media Art Institute moves twice, in 1994 to the Spuistraat and in 1997 to its present location on the Keizersgracht. The Institute continues to grow through these years, and adopts the following mission statement: The Netherlands Media Art Institute supports media art in three core areas: presentation, research and conservation. At the same time, through its facilities it offers extensive services for artists and art institutions. Among these services are educational programs, to be developed to accompany all activities. and **History of the Collection** The collection of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/Time Based Arts reflects the turbulent history of the Institute. In addition to the collection of Monte Video, the predecessor of the Netherlands Media Art Institute, the Institute administers the collections of four institutions: the Lijnbaan Center (1970-1982), Time Based Arts (1983-1994), De Appel (1975-1983) and the Institute Collection Netherlands. This combination of artists' initiatives (Time Based Arts, De Appel and the Lijnbaan Center) and more formal institutions (Institute Collection Netherlands and the present Netherlands Media Art Institute) affords the collection a surprising diversity. In addition to renowned artists like Bill Viola, Nam June Paik and Gary Hill (who were represented in the collection as far back as the 1970s), there are internationally known Dutch artists who experimented with the medium for only a short period in the 1970s, such as Marinus Boezem, Jan van Munster and Pieter Engels. Before any institutions at all had yet been created for the purpose of collecting small centers were set up in various parts of The Netherlands which facilitated and promoted the use of video by and for artists. The earliest examples of this were Agora Studios in Maastricht, the Lijnbaan Center in Rotterdam (itself a merger of the studio of Venster in Rotterdam and the video studio which was set up for the Sonsbeek exhibition in 1971 in Arnhem), and a couple of individuals such as the artists Miguel-Ángel Cárdenas and Jack Moore in Amsterdam, who made their cameras available for other artists. Many of the works which were made in this earliest period of Dutch video art only surfaced from oblivion in the course of the 1990s. Surprising discoveries among them are the works of Dennis Oppenheim, Terry Fox, Wim Gijzen, Nan Hoover and Tajiri. With the arrival of the collection of De Appel an enormously rich collection of video records of performances was added. De Appel flourished in the 1970s as one of the most progressive international work sites for performance art. The collection of this institution contained unique works by Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Gina Pane, Carolee Schneemann and others. But in addition to records of events in her own gallery, Wies Smalls, the founder of De Appel, also built up a collection of international video art in order to enable the Dutch public to become acquainted with what was happening internationally, including work by Douglas Davis, Ulrike Rosenbach, Joan Jonas and Alison Knowles. In the early 1980s, with De Appel as its base, efforts were begun to establish an association for video artists, which later created the Time Based Arts Foundation. The collection of this artists' association, in addition to works by artists based in The Netherlands, such as Abramovic/Ulay, Hooykaas/Stansfield, Ben d'Armagnac, Christine Chiffrun and Lydia Schouten, also included work by international artists like Mona Hatoum and General Idea. Time Based Arts maintained an active collection policy, in which any artist who worked with video could try to have his or her work included in the collection. As it grew the collection became enormously diverse and afforded a good overview of the various ways that video could be employed in the visual arts. Through in to the 1990s Time Based Arts played an important role in the collection, distribution and support of video art until, in 1994, under pressure from the municipal authorities of Amsterdam, it entered into a merger with Monte Video. René Coelho began his video gallery Monte Video in 1978, and in doing so laid the foundation for the present Institute. Monte Video was a gallery which specialized in electronic art and especially in video art that sought out the creative possibilities and qualities of the medium itself. An important impetus for establishing the institution was the work of the Dutch video pioneer Livinus van de Bundt. He was therefore the first artist to be shown in the gallery. Later the Vasulkas, Bert Schutter, Peter Bogers, Matthew Schlanger and many others followed. In addition to the works that were to be seen in the gallery, Monte Video began to be active in collecting and distributing work. Bill Viola, Gary Hill, Shelly Silver and Gabor Body were for instance artists who 'stabled' their work with Monte Video. The gallery owed its international success chiefly to this. When in the 1990s the conservation of video works became a pressing problem, the then merged Montevideo/Time Based Arts established itself as the goad and later as the center of technical expertise for carrying out the Conservation of Dutch Video Art project. As well as the collections described above, there was integral cooperation with museums that over the course of time had also collected video work. In addition to much technical research, the conservation efforts also prompted considerable recording work and research into content. Among questions dealt with were the status of the vehicle, the significance of the material chosen and establishing the boundary conditions for proper exhibition. Because of the differences in approach among the institutions from which they came, considerable time was spent integrating the collections with one another, and getting the possibilities for the use of the works coordinated with one another. But now, with the end of the conservation project in sight, the gaps between the collections appear to be closing ever more, and we can proudly present our multi-faceted collection to the public, as we do here. 1.6 Re: <nettime> Media Mutations - Life | Registration | Simulation (was: Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis) Matze Schmidt nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 18 May 2009 11:22:02 +0200 >> [...] Arts > what art > True, art In short: No money (as one of the forms of profit) without art, no art without politics. This is a simple formula and any Baudrillard would have secretly subcribed this, even in an epoch of ended (Hegel and followers) or never realized (Debord and followers) art. The fact is, we* don't need art as art, but -- and someone like jaromil shows this to us** -- we need other conditions, as painting, code or video or diy-cooking if you like, I don't care -- changing media is always good. But we are not able to produce the conditions 'now' -- like someone like jaromil is may thinking -- because the conditions produce us, alienate us; they will allways produce us (products produce consumption and vice versa), but these conditions are (straightforward now) have to be uncaged from ruling modes of production, in the meant sector reproduced by national institutions (ZKM in Germany, Ex-Montevideo in NL, your personal MTV at home). The New Media Arts Crisis is not my crisis, It's just the crisis of the middle-class (Yuppie or not, fallen programmer or rising video-installer) in form of some arts with newer or older media, may it a t-shirt or an lcd. So there is no aftermath here but the effects of a mixed up (I love this status and condition) highbrow, baby! elite meshed with an alternative "green" and independent buisness party with no idea of real coding out there (forget networks, they are roped parties). __________ * and ** Me, I and you as the readers who follows this text. M 1.4 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Renee Turner nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 15 May 2009 18:07:37 +0200 Hi Florian, You point towards a classic issue, the relevance of context. What do different registers (fine art, media art, design, activism, popular culture etc.) give to a particular work and what does a categorization exclude, meaning what does it make *impossible*. Every register influences interpretation, (in)visibility, production and funding. > Since the 1990s, the so-called Fine Arts do provide no really > desirable environment either, likely they're even worse. It is > telling enough that the term "Fine Art" suddenly has become a > universally accepted standard while, not a long time ago, any > self-respecting contemporary artist would have fiercely rejected > if not opposed it. In the past ten years of reading contemporary > art magazines or visiting art biennales and Documentas, I've been > flabbergasted by the lack of vision and radicalism in this field. It > has morphed, somewhat comparable to New (composed) Music after the > 1960s, into an academic discourse ruled by a neo-bourgeois jet set > of hipster curators posing as cultural theorists on the basis of a > not-even-half-baked knowledge and recycling of postmodern philosophy > and cultural studies. The system consists of artists who have been > academically trained to produce works - along with non-understood > theory lingo - that fit the required curatorial buzz. Can you speak more specifically about which curators, what art educational programs, which artists and what practices? For a constructive debate, it's important to avoid caricatures, otherwise there's a risk of creating false enemies, or missing out on how to best counter the real ones. And as an aside, I have to admit when I read "not-even-half-baked knowledge" and "non-understood, I caught myself wondering who are the guardians of proper interpretation when it comes to theory. (not to mention, which theories) After all, couldn't theory be mutable in different contexts or even hackable? In other words, can it too be practiced, tested and changed once it hits the ground or encounters a specific situation or discipline? > Along with this development, the paradigm of the white cube and art > works as good-looking exhibition objects has become stronger than > ever before and rules out any art practice not fitting this format. It's true the white cube is a dominant force to be reckoned with (or not, depending on what art world you dwell in ;-), but interventionists/social/political practices have also continued.... (both of the digital and analog sort). You mention UBERMORGEN, and I would add The Temporary Travel Office, SubRosa, Mongrel, AUDC, Jorge Blasco's Cultures of the Archive, Marcelo Exposito's various projects, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Beatriz da Costa and others... Maybe "tactical" is a red thread through these works? > All the while, the system thrives on the delusion that it still > represents visual art as a whole although, unlike, for example, in > film where 'highbrow' and 'lowbrow' still coexist, its popular forms > like comic books, tattoos, fantasy figurines, t-shirt illustrations, > wildlife paintings... have long been excluded from its system. > hmmmm....not sure about this, having worked as a hybrid artist/ designer/curator/media artist/collaborator for some time now, again I reiterate that there are many different artworlds (and for that matter artists/inhabitants/vagrants). Sometimes they intersect, rub next to each other, come into agitation or simply run on parallel tracks. (Not too disimilar from the so-called new media world.) Think of open source practitioners, the Max/Flash folk, and those that poach the web's detritus for their own purposes, they're all a part of new media arts, but each tend to dwell in different corners of the digital universe (or maybe not, if you're one of those cross-pollinators :-) > Instead, we get artists like Mike Kelley all over the art > world in whose work I'm either not getting something or indeed > seeing the Emperor's new clothes. ("Review" babble like > http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/tomorrow_never_comes1/ affirms > the suspicion that the art world has no clue either.) I haven't seen this particular work so hesitate to judge. I do however find it a little problematic to make sweeping statements about the Emperor's New Clothes and the "art world's" cluelessness based on one review and one artist. >> Director Heiner Holtappels opened by noticing that new media art >> is not easily accepted by fine art. Traditional art has become >> eclecticism. According to Heiner, all art is technology based. > > This is true, yet contemporary art has mostly given up on reflecting > its media. [I can almost hear an iPhone-wearing curator saying that > reflecting one's media is outmoded modernism.] ouch, how stereotypes do prevail. I wonder if there would be a paradigm shift if he/she had been envisioned with a pre-paid nokia. ;-) Renee http://www.geuzen.org/ http://www.fudgethefacts.com/ http://www.geuzen.org/female_icons/ 1.5 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 23 May 2009 02:05:03 +0200 Hey Renee, > You point towards a classic issue, the relevance of context. What do > different registers (fine art, media art, design, activism, popular > culture etc.) give to a particular work and what does a categorization > exclude, meaning what does it make *impossible*. Every register > influences interpretation, (in)visibility, production and funding. Yeah, and inevitably, these registers are not just different chosen perspectives we have on particular works, but also institutional and disciplinary contexts in which workers have to put their work and whose written and unwritten rules they can't avoid abiding. > Can you speak more specifically about which curators, what art > educational programs, which artists and what practices? I was really thinking of the contemporary art system as it has been described by its own protagonists, for example in Isabelle Graw's 2008 book "Der grosse Preis", or has been analyzed, with means that really deserve the term "artistic research", by Hans Haacke as early as in the 1970s in such pieces as "The Chocolate Master". And many people have criticized that system from within, from Henry Flynt in the 1960s to the writer and "Thing Hamburg"-blogger Michel Chevalier today. I think it is legitimate to make a sweepingly general critique of the contemporary art system just as it is legitimate to generally criticize and attack the music industry and contemporary popular music system for example. That doesn't mean that there would be absolutely no good music coming out of that system. But unlike other culture industries, the contemporary (Fine) Art system often falsely believes in its own autonomy. And it's my general experience and opinion that the art I'm more interested in is more often than not to be found in places outside that system. In the 1960s, this was true for Fluxus and Situationism, in the 1970s and 1980s for the Mail Art Network and postpunk, and in the 1990s for Net.art, the Luther Blissett project or the alternative pornography movement. Today, to speak in terms of our both hometown Rotterdam, I'm finding the interesting contemporary arts at places like WORM and De Player and only rarely at Witte de With, for example. > For a constructive debate, it's important to avoid caricatures, > otherwise there's a risk of creating false enemies, or missing out > on how to best counter the real ones. Well, this is true, and I admit that my posting was polemical - and emotional. My gripes with the contemporary art system are also based on bad personal experience and confrontations such as the one with the "Just Do It" exhibition <http://www.mail-archive.com/nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net/msg02876.html>. > hmmmm....not sure about this, having worked as a hybrid artist/ > designer/curator/media artist/collaborator for some time now, again > I reiterate that there are many different artworlds (and for that > matter artists/inhabitants/vagrants). Indeed. It's just that the particular art world I mentioned above - and which can be roughly described as the art world of the many biennials, the Documenta, contemporary art spaces like PS.1 and KW, contemporary art journals like October, Texte zur Kunst, Springerin and Metropolis M, too often monopolizes the term "art" for the art that it represents. Admittedly, its system can be permissive and include 'outside' practices, particularly when a curatorial subject requires it. However, it would be possible to map the institutions mentioned above just by the overlap of the people they involve, and come up with a fairly good representation of what makes up contemporary art. They same is true, no doubt, if you take ars electronica, transmediale and ISEA, plus Leonardo, Neural, Rhizome and Nettime, ZKM and ICC Tokyo, and pin down the system "media art". But just as that latter system is now being - deservedly - questioned and undergoing a huge if not terminal structural crisis, I think it is as legitimate to question the contemporary Fine Art system, and the Western concept of autonomous art. So, going back to Geert's initial report about the discussion about the crisis of "Media Art" at Montevideo Amsterdam, I think that it can't be a solution to integrate a very questionable "media art" system into an equally questionable contemporary art system. [As it is now happening, in education, too, for example in the Zurich art school media department where Felix Stalder teaches, and where the media programme has been rolled back into Fine Art on the Master level.] > Sometimes they intersect, rub next to each other, come into > agitation or simply run on parallel tracks. (Not too disimilar from > the so-called new media world.) Think of open source practitioners, > the Max/Flash folk, and those that poach the web's detritus for > their own purposes, they're all a part of new media arts, but each > tend to dwell in different corners of the digital notion universe > (or maybe not, if you're one of those cross-pollinators :-) Yep, only that what you describe above is really declining and may not see much art funding or support in the future. The writing is on the wall. > >> Director Heiner Holtappels opened by noticing that new media art > >> is not easily accepted by fine art. Traditional art has become > >> eclecticism. According to Heiner, all art is technology based. > > > > This is true, yet contemporary art has mostly given up on > > reflecting its media. [I can almost hear an iPhone-wearing curator > > saying that reflecting one's media is outmoded modernism.] > > ouch, how stereotypes do prevail. I wonder if there would be a > paradigm shift if he/she had been envisioned with a pre-paid nokia. > ;-) I should have told that the above example was taken from a real life experience, although it's admittedly a deliberate caricature when I I blew it out of proportion as above. I agree very much with Brian that artistic practices (to put it as broadly) are deeply intertwined in culture and communication. There's a good chance, and I really mean this, that I am getting old - in punk terms: a boring old fart - who's insisting on outmoded viewpoints. But I think that critiques of modernism, as legitimate as they are, become problematic when they're used to legitimize and maintain the status quo. [An extreme example is the contemporary art gallery scene and private collections in Berlin and their intrinsic links to the German discourse of "Neue Bürgerlichkeit" ("new bourgeoisie") <http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neue_Bürgerlichkeit>.] The current economic, political and social developments should render all notions of posthistoire and non-rupture in the fabric of culture and communication, and hence also in the arts, all the more obsolete. They also question the bourgeois insistence on artistic practice as a product of individual subjectivity. And finally, the contemporary art field has been much ahead of the media art system in postcolonialism; however, if this reflection is serious, it should not exclude the notion and system of art itself. Well, anyway, since the Geuzen collective of which you're a member operates in its own carefully chosen grey zone between art, activism, design, media, research and education, I actually think that our standpoints are quite similar, just that our points of departure regarding the usefulness of the contemporary art system might differ. For me, the projects of De Geuzen are a very good example for a post-autonomous artistic practice. Again, although I'm no friend of the media art system, I'm quite sure that it would be practices like those of the Geuzen that would suffer and struggle to find institutional support once the "media art" system will have vanished and been replaced with the existing contemporary art system (particularly the more cut-throat kind of the USA, Germany and England, with people who are anxious not to pollute Fine Art with applied or sociocultural practices they hate and detest as non-artistic [1].). Florian [1] a good example would be Berlin's Künstlerhaus Bethanien, a renown contemporary arts space, whose director Christoph Tannert bitterly fights a group of squatters and their sociocultural center in his own building. -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl 1.6 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Renee Turner nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 25 May 2009 13:37:41 +0200 Hi Florian, My apologies for a slightly delayed response. I completely agree that there are aspects within the art world which need critical scrutiny. I was simply asking for specificity, and I appreciate that you've taken the time to clarify. > But unlike other culture industries, the contemporary (Fine) Art > system often falsely believes in its own autonomy. I wonder if this is true. Feminist/post colonial practices have often argued the opposite and with much efficacy. Think of Jean Fisher's critical texts, Adrian Piper's work and Lucy Lippard's writing and curatorial projects and even the recent educational department at Goldsmiths of Irit Rogoff; all of these practices seem to point to an art world/system which is political, embodied and implicated. > And it's my general experience and opinion that the art I'm > more interested in is more often than not to be found in places > outside that system. In the 1960s, this was true for Fluxus and > Situationism, in the 1970s and 1980s for the Mail Art Network and > postpunk, and in the 1990s for Net.art, the Luther Blissett project > or the alternative pornography movement. I'm also interested these movements, practices, antics/pranktics, but unlike you, I see them as a part of a complex and multifaceted art world (not outside of it). I find it problematic to define the system as only popular art mags, the market and large institutions when there's so much other interesting work going on. (not to mention, how would you classify those of us involved in art education?) > Today, to speak in terms of our both hometown Rotterdam, I'm finding > the interesting contemporary arts at places like WORM and De Player > and only rarely at Witte de With, for example. Yes, here we can look into specific curatorial approaches and talk about who these various institutions and orgs are addressing. (this takes more time than I have now... but I'm nonetheless interested in exploring this further at a later juncture) >> > Indeed. It's just that the particular art world I mentioned above > - and which can be roughly described as the art world of the many > biennials, the Documenta, contemporary art spaces like PS.1 and KW, > contemporary art journals like October, Texte zur Kunst, Springerin > and Metropolis M, too often monopolizes the term "art" for the art > that it represents. Admittedly, its system can be permissive and > include 'outside' practices, particularly when a curatorial subject > requires it. However, it would be possible to map the institutions > mentioned above just by the overlap of the people they involve, > and come up with a fairly good representation of what makes up > contemporary art. I agree, this *is* truly the crux. It's crucial to map the overlap of people/institutions and ask ourselves who's setting the agenda, who's controlling the funding and whose *corner* of art world is being represented, and moreover, what do these representations make impossible, meaning what do they render invisible. > They same is true, no doubt, if you take ars electronica, > transmediale and ISEA, plus Leonardo, Neural, Rhizome and Nettime, > ZKM and ICC Tokyo, and pin down the system "media art". But just > as that latter system is now being - deservedly - questioned and > undergoing a huge if not terminal structural crisis, I think it is > as legitimate to question the contemporary Fine Art system, and the > Western concept of autonomous art. It's absolutely legitimate to question art's autonomy, and it's been happening for some time now. Besides the previous examples listed above, recently there has been much debate about the proliferation of biennials how art feeds into a neoliberal agenda. > So, going back to Geert's initial report about the discussion about > the crisis of "Media Art" at Montevideo Amsterdam, I think that it > can't be a solution to integrate a very questionable "media art" > system into an equally questionable contemporary art system. [As it > is now happening, in education, too, for example in the Zurich art > school media department where Felix Stalder teaches, and where the > media programme has been rolled back into Fine Art on the Master > level.] In many respects this cycle has happened to photography (remember when John Tagg wrote that no history of art photography could be written without taking into account, pornography, daguerreotypes, propaganda and family snapshots.) Or video's roots in activism, home videos, street journalism (Martha Rosler's essay: Shedding the Utopian Moment).... there's much to learn from these histories of assimilation. It's important to look at how institutionalization "tames" media...disciplines the discipline. But while questioning the systems of Fine Art, Media Art etc, I think as producers, viewers, educators and implicated accomplices, it's imperative to ask what do we want to see happen or change. As a graduate student in the eighties, I was taught by Harmony Hammond, a painter and co-founder of Heresies. In her painting class, she reserved time to present her personal collection of artists' works she felt were under-represented by the mainstream art world. It was a small but extremely powerful gesture. Eventually, in 2000 the collection was published under the title, Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History. I learned much from Harmony, but the most influential part of her teaching was watching her practice *otherwise*. So in this context, I'm asking myself how can I/we practice *otherwise* and how might that *doing* nudge or broaden the scope of dominant discourses and visual regimes. best, Renee http://www.geuzen.org/ http://www.fudgethefacts.com/ 1.7 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis carlos katastrofsky nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 10:59:58 +0200 what i am always wondering about is why the media arts field is so concerned with its media. is dealing with "new media" or "old media" an excuse for making good or bad art? IMO defining art by its media is on the same level as defining art by its subject. not getting over these definitions will result in a ghetto-situation sooner or later. the problem -IMHO- is not that media art is not recognized by the fine art world but that the fine art world is dealing with other subjects. when was the last big exhibition dealing solely with "painting" or "sculpture" you've seen? ars electronica and the others are doing that every year: "new media art" with changing subtitles. the same problem persists when new media artists and theorists insist on "politicalness" and "radicality". those terms don't say anything about certain works either, no matter which media is used in it. they only say that they may be recognised as "political" in a certain time in a certain context. but that doesn't say anything about it's "artness" either. "art doesn't become art by having specific characteristics but by a specific kind of processual reference to it." (J. Rebentisch, Aesthetik der Installation) and -please hit me hard if i'm wrong- the "fine art world" questions such things. this "eclecticism" and "cluelesness" some are claiming exist, but despite the ugly quest for the next blockbuster there is a lively scene developing things further without thinking about making "political art" or "painting". seen from this point of view i think that hans' claim "The aim should be Art, not Politics." is totally right, even if it is harshly critisized by geert. to put it bluntly: if i want to learn something about politics i would read a book with proper information about it and not go to see art that repeats the common sense that there are bad things existing in our world. i want to see art. neither new media nor politics. carlos -- http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net http://cont3xt.net 1.8 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Rama Hoetzlein nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 11:48:02 -0700 i agree.. i'm new to nettime, but following it silently until now, and have been doing research in this area. here are a few earlier notes i've made on this topic: http://www.rchoetzlein.com/theory/ in my view, the problem is that new media theory - the theory side anyway (not the art) - is largely defined by what we read from new media theorists, such as lev manovich and baudrillard. yet these philosophers do their primary work in "media theory" itself, that is the anthropological study of how media influences culture. thus, their central message is that media has meaning, and meaning changes culture: "True, art is on the periphery for me. I don't really identify with it. I would even say that I have the same negative prejudice towards art that I do toward culture in general. My point of view is anthropological. From this perspective, art no longer seems to have a vital function; it is afflicted by the same fate that extinguishes value, by the same loss of transcendence." - Jean Baudrillard i do not deny their contributions to media theory of course, but despite the fact that they may be open about their field of study (as this quote shows), the new media arts has not moved to define itself as an "art form", but rather defines itself in terms of media. of course, as an artist, i disagree about defining media art in such post-modernist terms (that is, purely as an outgrowth of culture). contrast the view of art above with this one: "The activity of art is based on the fact that one, receiving through his or her sense of hearing or sight another's expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the one who expressed it." - Leo Tolstoy New media art should be defined from an art-philosophical perspective. In this view, meaning is present in all works, to varying degrees, regardless of how they might be appropriated by culture. At what time is history was art not appropriated by culture? None the less, people continued to create art. The process of art-making is one of creating meaning, and this relation between the artist and the work is not changed despite how the object is ultimately appreciated, used, or abused by culture. -rama hoetzlein 1.9 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 23:32:13 +0200 Rama Hoetzlein wrote: > New media art should be defined from an art-philosophical > perspective. In this view, meaning is present in all works, to > varying degrees, regardless of how they might be appropriated > by culture. At what time in history was art not appropriated by > culture? None the less, people continued to create art. The process > of art-making is one of creating meaning, and this relation between > the artist and the work is not changed despite how the object is > ultimately appreciated, used, or abused by culture. It's great to read such a fundamental comment. I shall add something. My viewpoint includes both Tolstoy's and Baudrillard's. I find that informatic art (my own off-the-cuff term, but surely better than new media) is compelling precisely when it places subjective expression within the most strongly coercive social arena of our time, namely the digital networks. Your idea that there is an art-philosophical perspective that could exclude or bypass social determinism seems, begging your pardon, somewhat naive. What is more, I think all the interest of art itself disappears when it is shorn from the contexts of power and held up as a pure conductor of subjectivity. Approached in that way, the art work tends to become no more than a mirror for our own emotions and fantasies -- far from any state of empathy, Einfuhlung or whatever one chooses to call it. So I am not surprised that you move from Tolstoy's fascinating quote (reproduced below) to the "relation between the artist and the work." I guess I am more interested in, well, media: the way the work relates the artist to others. However, your observation about new media theory (Kittler and McLuhan were recently mentioned here) is spot on. What we are given from the podium, over and over again, are lessons about the power of technoscientific systems. The predicament of the human singularity, caught within the net of determinisms yet resisting, creating another reality and expressing this rather fantastic adventure through whatever kind of material or semiotic medium has been chosen, is left out of the story, which thereby becomes a monument to the crushing regularity of the status quo. The same thing, of course, happens to resistant political action in the hands of the sociologists and the Heideggerean philosophers of an essential, "historial" alienation. Both ethics and aesthetics take it on the chin. In my view, the great inspiration for new media theory has come from hackers themselves, who create alternative possibilities for existence within the overwhelmingly powerful networked environment. This is why, in essays which are inseparably about art and technics, I tend to use concepts like "reverse imagineering" or "escaping the overcode." Expression, for me, is the rupture of code, an excess which does not abolish the labyrinth in which we are caught, but at least opens up a possible new path through it. That's one approach. There could be many others. The problem, as you point out, is that usually there are not, because the theory very rarely meets any actual practice. The necessary discussion of technological power holds the center stage. Of course that is easier for the whole "new media" social circuit, because then you don't have to think very much, or feel very much, or try very hard to find out what might be at stake in a particular work. This list, I guess, is about the best place to talk about how to approach media art. Thanks to all for starting the conversation. I'm ready for more. Let the thousand info-aesthetics bloom! best, BH 1.10 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Rama Hoetzlein nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 17 May 2009 17:24:51 -0700 Brian, thanks for your reply. In general, i'm glad to see that we're mostly in agreement. Based on my observations of nettime-l, disagreement is often the norm, so I'm glad to see that there is some consensus between us that the new media theorists are currently the only option we've been given, and that we really need some alternatives.. Now, for some responses. > Your idea that there is an art-philosophical perspective that could > exclude or bypass social determinism seems, begging your pardon, > somewhat naive. I'm not suggesting that art-philosophy can bypass social determinism. I have no illusions about the difficulty the artist faces in creating any real social change, since my view of art does not negate any of the real research done by the media theorists. My own view is that the idea of art-for-social-change is long outdated. You suggest that hackers are the source of real inspiration in new media theory because they alone are able to transform the media itself, and thus undermine the system toward some possible escape path. Yet, there is no reason to believe that even if the media itself changes, that society will too. In my view, the only way we could overcome the current technoscientific system would be due to a deep, fundamental transformation in all individuals - and while I believe art is capable of doing this one person at a time, I don't think any one artwork, hacker or otherwise, is capable of really altering the technoscientific system we find ourselves in on a global level. Thus, all social change we talk about now is still part of that system. This is the media theorist perspective, of course - which i agree with - but as an artist, its incomplete. The reason I advocate art-philosophy is for the sake of the individual, and the field of art itself. While i just said the artist is powerless to transform culture, perhaps to a degree greater than most would like, the artist is _not_ powerless to transform him or herself, and others which that person touches through the art.. Despite whatever the technoscientific system may do, to create art is an intentional act by an individual, and thus has an immutable meaning just by virtue of being "created". We get to choose what is created (this does not make it good art necessarily). That meaning is present in all work "to varying degrees". By this, i mean that we each have a unique relationship to our artwork. For some, it is a mirror of personal emotions and fantasies (and probably my own work most of the time), while others may be able to communicate more.. So, I'm not evaluating art. Some is good, some is not. However, having an art-philosophical does not automatically reduce our works to emotional fantasies. In fact, it is more likely to result in genuinely empathetic works since it creates a solid foundation for art based on a philosophy in which art is encouraged to be empathetic, rather than responsive to a system. I'm simply stating -- which I think we perhaps both agree with here -- that so far we have not been given any other alternative view of new media art other than that proposed by the new media theorists. The way out of this problem is, I believe, through a philosophy of art whereby the artist has full awareness of the problems of society (hopefully), yet continues to create works of art despite this. It is possible to have no illusions about the inability of art to bring about explicit social change, but understand that it can bring implicit change through individual communication. -rama 1.11 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis ben . craggs nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 18 May 2009 08:42:05 +0100 > what i am always wondering about is why the media arts field is so > concerned with its media. is dealing with "new media" or "old media" > an excuse for making good or bad art? IMO defining art by its media > is on the same level as defining art by its subject. not getting > over these definitions will result in a ghetto-situation sooner or > later. the problem -IMHO- is not that media art is not recognized > by the fine art world but that the fine art world is dealing with > other subjects. when was the last big exhibition dealing solely > with "painting" or "sculpture" you've seen? ars electronica and the > others are doing that every year: "new media art" with changing > subtitles. <...> An interesting addition to this would be the emergence of 'New, new media arts'. I am thinking here, of practices in the field currently defining itself as bioart. Here the medium that is being manipulated is a form of living or sem-living matter, or tissue. Bioartist, Eduardo Kac and curator Jens Hauser have sought to specifically identify this new art practice, expressly on the basis of the medium itself. Bioarts, they argue, are most definitely are not those works that take bios or a form of life, as a subject, but manipulate it as a medium. That said, the manipulation of living tissue can be executed through a number of divergent practices, specific technologies, and it is these that seem to be defined by some as the media, not the living tissue they manipulate. I guess a somewhat simplistic comparison would be between with identification of various 'digital media' in abstraction from the advances in computer technology on which they are based. My current work in the field of bioart is increasingly pushing me towards a frustration at the distinction between art/science/media/technology/old/new that recurs in the majority of literature, and if I am not wrong seems to predicate this current discussion. In the light of these new practices I have been working towards re-imagining what art and media are in themselves, as technologies and processes not as distinct practices - the specific media or declared purpose seem less relevant from this perspective. So I wonder whether 'meaning is present in all works, to varying degrees, regardless of how they might be appropriated by culture' could be extended beyond a simple valorisation of art. It also seems that those new media theorists, such as Manovich and Baudrillard are somewhat restricted in their approach in that new media is perceived in a somewhat teleological sense, newness for the sake of newness, with new theories to match new media - without asking what is actually recurring in new media. IMO it seems that most new media, are really just old media anyway, particularly so in bioart. Is the creative growth of tissue not what we do continually as part of our natural bodily processes? Would it be facetious then to ask whether all media be considered from this originary perspective, negating the discussions about relative newness or cultural categorization (ie i's art, it's science, it's technology, it's media). Ben 1.12 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis carlos katastrofsky nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 18 May 2009 16:11:26 +0200 > The way out of this problem is, I believe, through a philosophy of > art whereby the artist has full awareness of the problems of society > (hopefully), yet continues to create works of art despite this. > It is possible to have no illusions about the inability of art to > bring about explicit social change, but understand that it can bring > implicit change through individual communication. > but can "change" be a parameter for art? what is to be changed through art? i agree that a "change" in whatever direction is possible but IMHO art mustn't be reduced to it. to me art is also someting i can admire without thinking of having to change something. in fact even if i see some really good "political art" the first step is to admire it (wow, great work) and then to think about consequences. art is something autonomous. to me such an approach would free it from being a mere form of communication, a medium, or "new media art". but at the same time it can be all of that. best, carlos -- http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net http://cont3xt.net 1.13 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Rama Hoetzlein nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 18 May 2009 10:11:25 -0700 exactly.. even if we are fully unconcerned with political art, when you say "wow, great work", thats just and only what i mean by implicit change (you are changed).. art is autonomous here because, while the work may or may not be political, this implicit change defines only the meaning-relation between the artist, the work, and the viewer. And that relationship is established independent of the impact of media on society, i.e. politics. A philosophy of art should provide a foundation for complete autonomy, and this is done by observing that the basis of art is creating and appreciating.. keeping in mind that theory only gets you so far as an artist. rama 1.14 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 19 May 2009 15:44:02 +0200 carlos katastrofsky wrote: > if i see some really good "political art" the first step is to admire > it (wow, great work) and then to think about consequences. art is > something autonomous. to me such an approach would free it from being > a mere form of communication, a medium, or "new media art". but at the > same time it can be all of that. What does one admire a piece of art? What is its autonomy? And what could be its consequences? I have asked myself these questions for years. Like most thinking people, I have come to a few conclusions. And since I like the idea that art can be "all of that" - a form of communication, a medium, new media art - I would like to share these conclusions with you. Humans are excessively complex by nature, and inherently social. We are defined by the surfeit of symbolic activity that goes on in our brains and indeed, in our full sensorium, and that comes out not only from our mouths but in all sorts of gestures and postures and practices directed toward the senses and symbolizing activities of others. A long anthropological tradition running from Sapir through Levi-Strauss to Sahlins holds that so-called "primitive" societies are no less complex than modern ones: their languages show comparable range and variety, but are (according to Levi-Strauss) oriented differently, more concrete in one case, more abstracted in the other. There is so much going on in any human being and between any group of human beings that just ordering or harmonizing all this excessive symbolization - I mean, excessive over what the utilitarians think of as the simple quest for satisfaction or corporeal pleasure - becomes a problem in itself. Because madness always lurks on the edges of our reeling imaginations, and then there is also depression, or anger, or jealousy, or prejudice or extreme paranoia, indeed a great number of obscure problems that can disrupt the life of the one and of the many. Religion has been the great social technique for bringing all this roiling thought, expression and sensation into some kind of predictable pattern and harmony, constituting entire narrative and figural universes, with their built environments, rituals, music, poetry, smells, tastes, etc, all associated and carefully correlated with orders of kinship, canons of sexuality, responsibilities of care, expressions of tenderness, commandments, prohibitions and the like. What we now call art, as it gradually detached itself from religion and became a series of aesthetic traditions interpretable and modifiable by individuals - as it became autonomous in other words - seems to have taken on the role of being the sensuous and ideational mirror of the individual's proper "fit" with society; it became a way of continuing the vast and mostly imaginary conversation about the ways that the one relates to the many, and vice-versa. However, this conversation was no longer necessarily about harmony: because depending on the very particular context, the proper "fit" could have aspects of a "misfit," and the quest for an idealized harmony could involve extreme disruptions of the status quo, disruptions appearing both in art and in life itself. Just think about the Antigone of Sophocles and you will see that this kind of problematic was not invented with the romantics, it goes back quite a ways. Clearly it gets particularly intense in modern democracies, where we are all brought up to conceive ourselves as both legislators and revolutionaries. Now, amusingly, one of the reasons I ever even bothered to think about such complex and excessive things, so far from "direct political action" and what have you, is that for many years I have found myself with a certain nagging problem of getting up in the morning. Perhaps others have experienced this? It so happens that on certain mornings I may spend as much as an hour just thinking about a certain constellation of things: a group of people, an artwork, a political issue, a line from a song, a concept, a phrase from a book, an image, a rhythm. Without showing any particular signs of anxiety, insanity, delirium, fever, swine flu or whatever, I still found it necessary to bring such constellations of ideas and sensations into some kind of dynamic pattern that would lend a spring to my step, a direction to my speech, an effectiveness to my gestures. Being a bit of a misfit - according to the aforementioned tradition in the democratic societies - I had to work on this question of how to fit all this in, nonetheless: how to fit into my own overflowing symbolic and sensate world, first of all, and how to fit that world into the multitude of others with whom daily activity brings me into contact. Thus I began to think that what is pleasing, satisfying, attractive, intriguing, inspiring, shocking, repellent, etc in the formal allure of artworks is also somehow the result of other people's struggles with the excess of symbolization in which they are embroiled, and that the "success" of the artwork (wow, great work) is always some variation on the "infinite theme of the artist(s) trying to break out of one universe and "fit into another - whether we're talking about a purely abstract universe "of chromatism or rhythm, or some Hegelian quandry of historical "dialectics, or the current discussion about cap and trade, or the latest "dispute over the coolest tattoos in the punk or heavy-metal circle that "encloses your secret passion. An aesthetic form doesn't directly solve any "of the weighty social problems - but it helps get a world together, it "helps structure a pattern and a dynamic and an enthusiasm, which is always "a good start. So how 'bout the politics then? Well, according to my little theory, the personal is clearly both aesthetic and political, because if you can't get out of bed you are definitely not going to make it to the office, the march, the meeting, the voting booth, the library, or wherever your activity is going to have some consequences in terms of organizing social relations. What is more, this is not just my little theory, because going back to Plato's Republic or maybe the Rig Vedas, social thinkers have been very conscious of the influence of things like music on the order and harmony of the community, the city, state or whatever. Indeed, not long ago we saw with dazzled and almost disbelieving eyes that a great nation-state like China could put a significant fraction of its resources into organizing an aesthetic display which was not just supposed to knock everybody out, American style, with its overwhelming show of wealth, but also and above all to enact and celebrate an ideal of harmony and societal coordination which, from my anarcho-individualist viewpoint, was at once vastly impressive and also frankly terrifying, because here I could see an intensive use of all the latest, hypercomplex aesthetic techniques to knit together an order that could power a vast authoritarian economic machine and infuse it with the enthusiam and belief of the many - which is a lot, when we're talking China. So you want new media? Replay your avi file of the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics. What I am trying to get at with all of this is that art is essentially media, it is not merely but essentially about communication, only what is communicated is not just a phrase or a slogan or a piece of information, but a problematic attempt to reconfigure a world on every level of sensate and imaginary experience. That can be an attempt to fit in or to stick out, to harmonize or to disrupt, to smash the current relation of self and society or to conserve it or to invent another one; but insofar as art is expression, it always projects this struggle over the shape and balance of a world towards the ears and eyes and excessive imaginations of others. When we say that art is autonomous, we situate it in the long democratic tradition where the self, autos, tries to help establish the law, nomos, accordingly which it can freely develop in the company of fellow human beings. Now, the problems of this attempt at autonomy are almost infinite, they are sexual, technical, ecological, emotional, mystical, contractual, material, they involve philosophy, science, babies, great art and also the plumbing. And they always involve the relations of individuals and groups to others whose worlds they do not understand, whose rhythms they do not feel pulsing in their own veins, whose tacit concepts of harmony and disruption are not expressed by the same patterns and shapes and colors and combinations of tones. So when I say, Wow, great art - as I often do, just the way people in the new media arts circles have done for years at festivals sponsored by Philips and Microsoft and Sony and the like - the first consequence for me is to inquire into the world from which that art arises and to which it points, and eventually to see how I fit into or desire to break out of that world. This means that a deep and searching criticism can never just be criticism of the work, it always has to look further back, into the world from which it sprang, and ahead to the consequences of a potential change in the worlds we share, or at least to the consequences of a change in the way that *I* or *we* will relate to other worlds in the future. Finally, it seems to me, in my anarcho-democratic world, that to say Wow, great art, without inquiring into the consequences, is one of the closest things one can do to never getting out of bed, i.e. it's close to sleepwalking. Because at best, you would then be just letting the great art fit into your own great dream, or letting it be the colorful and striking tattoo that will fit you into your small chosen circle. That's at best - because in the present world of biopower and noopower, just admiring a work in itself and for itself can mean accepting without question the world that it mediates, which in the case of the networked technologies sold by Sony and Microsoft Philips and abused by a vast array of corporations and governments, can be an extremely predatory world, configured precisely in order to capture your consciousness and extract some value or utility out of your passions and dreams. Value that can ultimately be devastating for the collectivity (as in the debt-fueld consumption boom of this decade), utility that can make you into the most terrible of instruments (like the voters lured by nationalist rhetoric into supporting our proliferating wars). It has been years since I read Lev Manovich, so what follows may be totally unjust to his work, but as I recall, what always irritated me in his writing was a kind of smug insistence that the new media were essentially defined by a certain kind of rhythm, a certain multiplication of screens, a certain connection to databases, etc. - in other words, that the new media were essentially defined by the dominant trends of contemporary capitalist society. For me this seemed like a total abdication of criticism itself, and it also seemed to be a sort of cheerful, "I'm on the winning side" version of the dark technological determinism and philosophical doomsaying promoted by the post-Leftist thinkers in the wake of Baudrillard. What I missed was the very question of autonomy, and some recognition of its quasi-infinite complexities as they've been ceaselessly developing from the Neolithic to now, in the long and discontinuous series of messages passed from human world to human world. Imho, the poverty of new media art - its "crisis" - has intrinsically to do with the poverty of media critique tout court. It is the failure to see how the cultural politics of individuals and groups are mediated in the work, how they are expressed at every level of their ineluctable complexity and excess over the "mere communication" of what already exists. best, Brian 1.15 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Michael H Goldhaber nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 19 May 2009 12:30:11 -0700 Thanks for some beautiful and thought-provoking statements, especially Brian’s and Carlos’s. I would add that to me the real medium of all art is attention, attention the viewer or reader or listener must pay, feels consciously drawn to pay, in a deepening and all encompassing way. That attention amounts to a transformation of self — into the mind and body of the artist, as it were. The rest of the world falls away for that moment, and so does time —the moment might be a long one —and,a s Brian suggests will recur later on, in recollection and reflection. If that is art, it is always political, because it always takes the attention payer out of the “system,” whatever it might be and however much the managers of the system in fact solicited the artist or the work to begin with. The huge abstract paintings of the 1950’s cold only fit on the walls of the rich, but nonetheless, as long as they were there, they took over those walls, and made the space different from what the collector might have intended, and the same goes for Renaissance art and art of other periods. The reason different media come in is that the artist has an on-going problem as to how to capture attention as distractions and competition multiply. In some way, to be really focussed on, art must avoid being too easy to experience, for then it can become just the background, just decoration or elevator music, or something that can always be attended to “later” — I.e., usually never. This is a serious and significant problem for new media as well, including much Internet art. Expressly political art can only succeed, it seems to me, if it comes from the inner depths. For instance, I just finished reading Istvan Kertesz’s “Fatelessness;” I don’t think it is intentionally political but it certainly made me boil with anger at the human mistreatment and neglect of others. Such art brings what was already there inside us and adds to its centrality. But that doesn’t happen often. In my experience most political art is superficial and therefore bad, just as likely to turn off sympathetic feelings in the viewer as the opposite. Incidentally, I don’t know that good art necessarily causes us to think “Wow! I admire that.” But it doesn't easily let go of us. Best, Michael 1.16 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis eyescratch nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 23 May 2009 10:30:31 -0400 On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 9:44 AM, Brian Holmes <brian.holmes {AT} wanadoo.fr> wrote: > So you want new media? Replay your avi file of the opening > ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics. > > What I am trying to get at with all of this is that art is > essentially media, it is not merely but essentially about > communication, only what is communicated is not just a phrase or > a slogan or a piece of information, but a problematic attempt > to reconfigure a world on every level of sensate and imaginary > experience. Much of media studies is obsessed with witnessing an existence that is part of mediality, to borrow a term from the previous discussion, by placing great emphasis on inserting the observer into the equation. Nevertheless these studies formulate a distinction to preserve some authorship role. What this kind of representational relationship ignores is that it precludes any kind of intervention in favor of a conservation. If the art cannot be conserved because it is conceptual or a piece of code, the identity of the author is preserved and celebrated. This is because a piece of media arrives at its monetary value by being bundled with products that claim to correct the injustices, needs, or ailments being described in that piece of media. The media is monetized either for its value of showing a certain lack or showing the idealized completion that a product might fulfill. An authorship identity, it turns out, can fulfill this marketing function nicely for the lack of any particular object that might or might not exist or lacks monetary value, culminating it seems these days in a guarded wikipedia entry. Turns out, while searching for a word to describe the process of entering into communication via media I looked up mediated. There is plenty of secondary literature on McLuhan using this word to capture the processes McLuhan describes, but he himself only uses the word mediated with the original definition to describe the arbitration that happens in a conflict. Using the term mediated in the sense that a form of communication is performed via media, still implies that there is an exchange occurring where each party must sacrifice some of their preconceptions in a productive process that is manufacturing representation. Otherwise this representation veers very quickly towards the ideological. hTTp://eyescratch.tk 1.19 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Florian Cramer nettime-l@kein.org Mon, 18 May 2009 23:04:49 +0200 On Sunday, May 17 2009, 10:59 (+0200), carlos katastrofsky wrote: > what i am always wondering about is why the media arts field is so > concerned with its media. is dealing with "new media" or "old media" > an excuse for making good or bad art? IMO defining art by its media > is on the same level as defining art by its subject. not getting > over these definitions will result in a ghetto-situation sooner or > later. I am not so sure whether I agree. It all depends on your definition of "media". The problem is that the word "media" means quite different things in different contexts: In the arts, it traditionally refers to the material means of expression from which artworks are created [painting, sculpture, photography, video, performance - that were also the media meant with such terms as "intermedia", "mixed media" and "multimedia" since the 1960s]. In communication studies, "media" is practically synonymous with mass media and refers to an apparatus and system of communication, including newspapers, radio, TV, Internet. In other humanities, there is a notion of media as any symbolic or semiotic carrier. For example, in the contemporary art (but not media art) world, there just has been a series of exhibitions on pornography, from "BodyPoliticx" in Rotterdam to "The Porn Identity" in Vienna. One could call pornography a medium and thus say that these exhibitions were curated from a media perspective. After all, the ars electronica did almost the same thing with its "Next Sex" theme in 2000. Or, a random example taken from just having browsed the Tate Modern site and its blurb on the current exhibition "Stutter": "The onomatopoeic word 'Stutter' refers to an act of speech interrupted by agitated, spasmodic, or involuntary repetitions. As the title for this exhibition, it suggests a metaphor for questions of disruption and discontinuity in processes of thought, systems of communications or conceptions of knowledge." Again, this is pretty close if not identical to curatorship from a media and communications viewpoint. > the problem -IMHO- is not that media art is not recognized by the > fine art world but that the fine art world is dealing with other > subjects. If I take, for example, the subjects of the last nine transmediale festivals ("Do It Yourself", "Go Public", "Play Global", "Fly Utopia", "Basics", "Reality Addicts", "Unfinish", "Conspire", "Deep North"), they could just as well have been the names of contemporary art exhibitions at PS.1 in New York, KW in Berlin, Witte de With in Rotterdam, or any other contemporary art space. > when was the last big exhibition dealing solely with "painting" or > "sculpture" you've seen? ars electronica and the others are doing > that every year: "new media art" with changing subtitles. One could just as well say that contemporary art deals with "white cube installation art" with changing subtitles. > the same problem persists when new media artists and theorists > insist on "politicalness" and "radicality". The same terms abound in the contemporary art discourse if you read, for example, "October" or "Texte zur Kunst". > those terms don't say anything about certain works either, no matter > which media is used in it. they only say that they may be recognised > as "political" in a certain time in a certain context. IMO art is, like any public expression, always political. Art that claims not to be political being all the more political as a matter of fact (with symbolist l'art-pour-l'art being a prime example). What I would describe as the political-artistic quality in the art of, for example, ubermorgen is that unlike 'actual' politics, it can be willfully and even criminally irresponsible. One could admittedly dismiss this as a romanticist argument, but it has nevertheless a lot going for it, not just if we look at gothic aesthetics and Bataille's aesthetics of evil, but also at more recent artistic practices like Otto Muehl's commune and Eastern European art since the 1980s. > but that doesn't say anything about it's "artness" either. "art > doesn't become art by having specific characteristics but by a > specific kind of processual reference to it." (J. Rebentisch, > Aesthetik der Installation) Not knowing the full context of this quote, I nevertheless find such systemic definitions of art quite risky. If the basic quality of art - in the sense of 'Fine Art' - lies in its self-reference to its own system, then it would be something very narrow and ultimately boring, and something already exhausted by Duchamp in the 20th century. It would pay a high price for having, since the 19th century, rid itself from more popular forms of visual culture. Such a definition does not even apply to the arguably most elitist forms of other contemporary arts such as poetry and contemporary classical music, since poetry can still be defined outside its own system as highly condensed/conjugated language and new music as highly organized sound. - On top of that, it is an exclusively Western concept of art which blatantly contradicts the post-1990s efforts of integrating postcolonial considerations into contemporary art. Remarkable enough, these integrations never question the concept of "art" itself - although the concept of autonomous art only exists in Western cultures or as a Western cultural import in, for example, Asian countries (which traditionally do not separate art from craft). > if i want to learn something about politics i would read a book with > proper information about it and not go to see art that repeats the > common sense that there are bad things existing in our world. True. Only that exhibitions like Documenta XI have been haunted by this concept of art. -F -- blog: http://en.pleintekst.nl homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70 gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl 1.20 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis carlos katastrofsky nettime-l@kein.org Tue, 19 May 2009 15:14:35 +0200 > I am not so sure whether I agree. It all depends on your definition of > "media". The problem is that the word "media" means quite different things > in different contexts: i agree. but exactly this is the point: media theory is swallowing everything, but where are its boundaries? what i am trying to find as artist (neither theorist nor philosopher) is a definition for art that goes beyond a mere definition as "media" in whatever sense. that is why i am aiming on the much-maligned term of "autonomy" (and i'm following here the previous mentioned philosophy of j. rebentisch). to me this doesn't mean art is somewhat apolotical or dealing solely with itself (l' art pour l'art - i guess you had this in mind when stating "[...] If the basic quality of art - in the sense of 'Fine Art' - lies in its self-reference to its own system, then it would be something very narrow and ultimately boring, [...]"). art is made to be seen/heard/whatever - to be experienced. and this experience is what defines art and not media. it can change in time -we quite surely don't experience cave paintings in the same way the ones did who made them- but i'm not sure if "the media" does, no matter if it's read as "painting/drawing" or as "hunting scene". what i am hoping to find by this is a possibility to think about "art" and neither media nor porn or politics. these are -let's say- "themes" that can be interpreted, but i hope that art goes beyond being a good designed set of political opinions. i mean, what political context is reflected in leonardo's "last supper"? we surely can speculate but do we know? these are things that are bound to their time and context but nevertheless we still percieve it as "art". > If I take, for example, the subjects of the last nine transmediale > festivals ("Do It Yourself", [...] > One could just as well say that contemporary art deals with "white cube > installation art" with changing subtitles. [...] > The same terms abound in the contemporary art discourse if you read, for > example, "October" or "Texte zur Kunst". yep, exactly. and this what the "art world" makes as boring as "new media art". what i had in mind when saying that the "fine art world is dealing with other subjects" was not the (i would like to call it nonexistent) contemporary discourse. what can be seen in the fine arts field (but not in the big biz -documenta, ps1, kw, ...) is an inclusion of possibilities in expression and perception which i never saw in any media-art discourse (though i have to admit i am far from following everything in that area). > Not knowing the full context of this quote, I nevertheless find such > systemic definitions of art quite risky. If the basic quality of art > - in the sense of 'Fine Art' - lies in its self-reference to its own > system, i'm sorry if this comes through that way, i'm not the best in formulating things. i never wanted to present art as solely self-referential system. if autonomy is read as autonomy of the object (l'art pour l'art) i would agree totally with you. but seen from the viewpoint that "art" may not lie in an object but somewhere between the object and the observer (experience, perception) an autonomy of art is essential. thank you all for your replies :-) best, carlos -- http://katastrofsky.cont3xt.net http://cont3xt.net 1.21 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis Station Rose nettime-l@kein.org Sun, 24 May 2009 13:52:26 +0200 On Sunday, May 17 2009, 10:59 (+0200), florian cramer wrote: >If I take, for example, the subjects of the last nine transmediale >festivals ("Do It Yourself", "Go Public", "Play Global", "Fly >Utopia", "Basics", "Reality Addicts", "Unfinish", "Conspire", "Deep >North"), they could just as well have been the names of contemporary >art exhibitions at PS.1 in New York, KW in Berlin, Witte de With in >Rotterdam, or any other contemporary art space. but it wasnt like that cause it was happening ONLY in a festival . <ghetto> situation . as I see it, many art people are not going to events like transmediale, cause its not seen as an important place for art. I dont go, besides when we are actively part of it. looks like media art is not sexy enough. the exhibits, as part of festivals, are often too prudish. everything sensual seems forbidden, too often it s needs written explanations to understand the (political) work. I do not believe - and I say that as an artist- that the written word is necessary to <understand> a piece of art.it can help and make details transparent, but its not necessary in advance. my own experience with Station Rose media art projects-like recently LogInCabin in MAK Vienna- is : they are recognized & seen in art spaces, museums by the art scene, but not as much in a so called media art context as festivals are. basically my impression is that as long as a dicussion like that one goes on, it makes clear that the art world is something and the media art scene is out of it. -- ---------------------------------------------------- Station Rose digital_audio - visual art http://www.stationrose.com .................... Gary Danner & Elisa Rose Frankfurt - Cyberspace - Vienna. * recent project: 20 Digital Years. "LogInCabin" mediascultpure at MAK Vienna_sold * new: "Interstellar Overdrive CD" Japan release (2.09) 1.26 Re: <nettime> Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts Crisis John Hopkins nettime-l@kein.org Wed, 20 May 2009 17:01:58 -0600 carlos katastrofsky wrote: > what i am always wondering about is why the media arts field is so > concerned with its media. is dealing with "new media" or "old media" exactly Carlos... this revolves around the common (still, ongoing, & perhaps permanent!) problem of identifying creative impulses by their materialized remains (media, mediated forms). There are precisely identical histories of the rise of (materially) specialized festivals, research centers, art school departments, workshop venues, etc etc -- photography, for example. Where are all the institutions and organizations and events that swirled around that particular material result of creative impulse? They are gone, gone, gone. Abd the ones who remain -- does anyone think they are center for radical creative experimentation? Most people don't even remember them. the Rencontres Internationale de la Photographie and the Ecole Nationale de la Photographie in Arles, etc etc, huh, who cares? when there is this material obsession, it is bound to be outmoded simply because things aren't IT, looking at the world as a bunch of things doesn't reveal the phenomenal nature of life: another words, focusing on the detritus that is left, dead, after the creative forces have altered the local universe -- well it's simply a death cult and is a dead end. <<yawn>> why ponder on it? Better to skip the material categorization process altogether 'cause it IS a dead end... jh 2.0 <nettime> open letter to art critics Geert Lovink nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:03:18 +0200 (Written in response to the lack of debate during last weekend's Creative Time conference in NYC. I think art criticism is important source of inspiration and reference (or not) for net critique. The letter also refers to the ongoing, almost funny neglect by the 'art world' of 'new media'. /geert) An open letter to critics writing about political art - Stephen Duncombe & Steve Lambert Last weekend Creative Time held their fourth annual summit on the current state of artistic activism. Over two days, scores of political artists from around the world gave short presentations and organized longer workshops. Hundreds of people participated. The critical response, so far, has been underwhelming: few critics attended and those that did had little substantive to say. It would be easy to account for the overall silence and dismiss the surface commentary with some snarky criticism of our own about a bullshit art world with their head up their ass who can't recognize that something important is happening right in front of them. And while this may be self-righteously satisfying, it is not very helpful. We want to help. How this event was -- and wasn't -- covered is indicative of the state of criticism when it comes to political art. The problem is not necessarily lazy criticism, but the fact that we don't have a developed vocabulary with which to understand, and criteria with which to evaluate, political art and activist artists. In an effort to develop a language and criteria with which artistic activism can be usefully criticized, we offer the following seven questions for the critic to consider: 1. Does it work? Art about politics is not necessarily political art. The function of political art is to challenge and change the world. This should be obvious, but there is plenty of "political art" which uses social injustice and political struggle as mere subject matter: making these forces objects for contemplation and, perversely, appreciation. The point of political art is not to represent the world but to act within it. Thus, the first question to ask of political art is: Does it Work? We don't mean: does it work aesthetically? but does it work politically. This entails asking more questions. Questions like: What does the artist want to achieve with their work? What change do they see happening through their work? How will this change happen? Who is affected, what affect will the work have on them, and what actions will these people take? We're not suggesting that there's one criterion of efficacy for political art, nor is there one goal that all political arts should move towards. What we are saying is that political artists, if they want to change the world, need to think about what they want their work to do. And critics, if they want to seriously interrogate and evaluate this work, have to both examine those political aims and ask whether the artist has succeeded. It is hard to truly succeed as a political artist. Many times, an artist aims short and sets out to "intervene" and "raise awareness" about a social problem or political issue. This is the low hanging fruit of political art. Other work sets out to have a direct impact in a discernible way. Using art to defeat a pending policy, or elect a politician. This is more ambitious on the part of the artist, and easier -- if not boring -- for the critic of political art to judge. Much harder, much more ambitious, and therefor much more difficult to evaluate, is art that intends to change the very way we see, act and make sense of our world -- including what we understand to be politics itself. It is hard to measure the long term total victory of a shift in the culture. 2. Who is the audience? The art critic is the audience for most art, and therefor it's quite valid for the critic to write from his or her own perspective. The audience for political art is quite different. Political art, by it's very name, has the "polis" as its audience and this constitutes a much broader demographic -- one in which the art critic is confronted with readings of art radically different than their own. As diverse as we'd like to imagine the audience for most art to be it draws from a very narrow population, one in which the art critic is at home. But when the audience is a wider public, the tried and true perspective of the veteran art critic comes up short. The critic of political art needs to place themselves in the minds of very different people. This takes humility. It may even require taking the radical step of talking to the audience, asking them what they see, what they think. These are basic techniques of journalism and ethnography that an art critic may not be accustomed to. 3. What is the relevant tradition? The tradition that serves conventional art criticism doesn't often work when it comes to political art. Drawing together art's historical and theoretical connections, while impressive to the writer's erudite readership, and possibly entertaining, is largely irrelevant. There are connections to be drawn, to be certain, but the valid ones here are more likely to be found in histories of social movements and textbooks in the fields of marketing, advertising, and public relations. Theories in human cognition and decision making, for example, are far more applicable, useful, and insightful into the work of the artistic activist than discussion of its relation to the newest aesthetic or Albers' color theory. The training most critics have is not sufficient for fully understanding this work. Indeed, knowledge of sociology, community organizing, or rhetoric lends crucial insight into what political artists are doing, and whether they are doing it well. You are not alone in your ignorance. We readily admit that many artists are in dire need of this knowledge as well. 4. What medium and why? For art critics, medium is important. It situates the work within an historical canon, provides context and meaning, and a sense of continuity. For the artistic activist medium is important too, but as a means: the instrument through which one reaches the audience to effect change. Therefor, discussions about means are dependent on political considerations, such as who is the audience, how they are most effectively reached, and so on. To privilege one medium over another in the absence of a discussion of efficacy is to miss the point. A good political artist's practice is promiscuous when it comes to medium. Critical Art Ensemble said it best with four words. The artistic activist works: "by any media necessary." A good critic, therefor, judges the political artist on the mastery of the medium they choose for the task at hand. 5. What kind of mastery is required? Fine artists are often rewarded for the degree of control and mastery over their medium. We valorize artists who can transform materials to fully express their vision without compromise. Political art, however, is engaged in the world. The world is messy. It has a lot of moving parts. This material is impossible to fully control or master -- and shouldn't be (unless you have fascist ambitions). Whereas compromise for the traditional artist means diluting their vision, compromise for the political artist is the very essence of democratic engagement. The venue for the traditional artist is galleries and museums -- controlled spaces where the art itself does not need to speak very loudly because all attention is focused on it. Political art has a dauntingly large venue: the street, the marketplace, the mass media. This is an out-of-control space where one competes with the cacophony rather than retreating into silence and solitude. Political art, responding to this space, is often brash and loud. Subtlety is sometimes not its strong point. But we shouldn't fault a creative activist practice for what's inherently required of it. Indeed, it should be judged on how well it opens up a space, is read, and understood within this arena. Some art lovers may be turned off by this focus on the practical and tactical, but for creative activists these concerns are essential. We are not, however, arguing that the informed art critic should simply be judging political art on how effective it is in communicating a message. Aesthetics matter -- but they needn't be seen in opposition to efficacy. If one's goal is to affect change, form serves function. Art that succeeds aesthetically also has a better chance of succeeding politically. Beautiful art is art that people are drawn towards. The power of art lies in its ability to open up a space to ask questions rather than deliver answers. We think this makes for good politics too. 6. What am I missing? The "art world" is truly a world all its own, with separate cultural spaces, communities, and languages. The detachment of fine arts from popular culture is the norm. Alternatively, for creative activists, popular culture is their briar patch. Whereas in fine art, engaging in this terrain is read as pandering, ironic, "critical," and at all times, exceptional, for political artists it is the rule. In order to reach everyday people one must speak in a language they understand. This can be interpreted as dumbing things down. It is not. In order to convey complex radical ideas in a vernacular largely developed for and oriented toward consumer sales and crass manipulation requires a great deal of intelligence and skill. And the better you do it, the more likely it is to be overlooked. Within the fine art world to stand out and be noticed is a clear sign of success. In the practice of artistic activism you are more successful the more your art weaves into the fabric of popular culture -- lost to the art world. The entire effort is shrouded in camouflage. Critics are forgiven for passing over the best of this work in the past, but let's all begin to look more carefully, ok? 7. What's my role as a critic? The relationship between artists and critics is often a fraught one. Critics can be lauded for how well they skillfully and cleverly demolish and denigrate artists' work. This aligns with the dominate competitive logic of the commercial art world. This is the paradigm, in part, that political art is trying to change. Despite this cannibalistic tendency, we all know that makers and critics live in symbiosis. This is especially true when the art operates in the broader society and the function of the work is not to be a unique and valuable object but to effect the world. In this realm, the art critic is part of the team, with everyone working towards the big win of a better world. Being a good team member for artists means making powerful work. Being a good team member for the critic means offering insightful, relevant, and instructive criticism. Art critics raise questions. Questions are good. But questions for what purpose? If you're a political artist, and you're primarily showing people how smart and clever you are, you're not producing good political work. The energy is misdirected. The same goes for critics. If you're writing primarily as a demonstration of how smart and clever you are, you have lost the soul of being a critic. The critic might want to ask themselves, why am I writing this? Am I clarifying and illuminating the work? Am I instructing the artist and the audience so that better work is produced. Or am I "problematizing" as a demonstration of my prowess as a thinker. ("Problematizing" is too often used as a cheap substitute for understanding, analyzing and aiding.) Being a critic, like being an artist, involves some degree of selflessness. There is a larger purpose. The critic, through their attention and analysis of the work, provides a helpful service. Of course we all know this, but it's easy to get off track. It's bigger than you and it's bigger than the art. Modern art is rooted in the belief that the artists' individual expression is important. In turn, the individual critic's opinions about said artists and art are important. Think Pollock and Greenberg. With political art a bigger game is being played. There are still individual artists and individual critics, but the stakes are not about the reputations of artists and critics. What's at stake is the transformation of the entire society. If this sounds grandiose, you may be in the wrong business. We don't train people to be good political artists in our art schools. Most institutions are slow to adapt and are, at best, fighting the old myth of the lone genius artist expressing their vision in spite of society, rather than moving forward towards a world in which artists work collectively in an embedded engagement with society. Call us optimists, but we assume anyone producing creative work to affect power is doing it from a sincere and passionate place. If it's not working, it's not because they don't care enough or aren't committed. It's because we haven't developed a critical tradition that helps artistic activists strengthen their work. Political art needs help. This is why we need you. Because we're all in this together. -- See also: http://artisticactivism.org/2012/10/an-open-letter-to-crtitcs-writing-about-political-art/an-open-letter-to-art-critics/ The Center for Artistic Activism: artisticactivism.org Steve Lambert: visitsteve.com Stephen Duncombe: stephenduncombe.com 2.1 Re: <nettime> open letter to art critics Brian Holmes nettime-l@kein.org Thu, 25 Oct 2012 15:14:35 -0500 An open letter to critics writing about political art - Stephen Duncombe & Steve Lambert 2.2 Re: <nettime> open letter to art critics Flick Harrison nettime-l@kein.org Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:44:07 -0700 When I read a sentence like this: "Much harder, much more ambitious, and therefore much more difficult to evaluate, is art that intends to change the very way we see, act and make sense of our world -- including what we understand to be politics itself." I see my life story unfolding in a single problem. This kind of subtle, provocative or ontologically-challenging work means, for one thing, an audience limited to those interested in both art and politics simultaneously. I would add, however, that the words "art" and "politics" could be swapped in that sentence, with equal truth. When engaging with activists there is a demand for practical political art; agitprop, posters, propaganda, fundraising videos, etc. When the artist strays from dogma, they become useless, if not dangerous, to movements. Meanwhile, engaging the art world with politicized art brings the spectre of partisanship (with its threat to state funding & rich donors) if not simple disinterest or politically-motivated rejection. Therefore at the same time as you call for more critical consideration of political art, I'd call for more political consideration of it as well. I'm currently in a collective doing what's called here "publicly engaged" art; that is, artist residencies in community centres etc where the act of bringing people together to make art is seen as a positive political action. The content of the art is irrelevant to that - except insofar as the content must emerge from the participants, rather than from above. It's important to push for high-quality final product, to create a dedicated team, etc, but the politics is contained in the form of the project rather than in the results. Here's our website: http://somethingcollective.ca/ Critical reception for this kind of art, as far as I can tell, is pretty slim. It's not considered "good enough" to warrant proper critical review, sort of like community theatre, and the political process contained in the work isn't relevant to art theory, or something. Headlines Theatre is another group that does this kind of work in a different way - they do Boal-based Theatre of the Oppressed projects, i.e. interactive forum theatre with audience members getting on stage to try to work out the characters' problems. The theatre critics often don't really consider it proper theatre, though there is the occasional review. This one is from Jerry Wasserman, who is the head of the UBC Theatre and FIlm Department, which I suppose is as legit as it gets, although UBC is more production- than theory-oriented: http://www.vancouverplays.com/theatre/reviews/review_after_homelessness_09.shtml In any case, my latest work is this video I created with an anonymous activist group in Newfoundland, who took advantage of my residency at Black Bag Media Collective to get me on board their anti-pesticide campaign. I'd love to hear any critical reaction to it. http://youtu.be/QEoZJWmcBjk -Flick -- * WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD? http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison * FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com 2.3 Re: <nettime> open letter to art critics Margaret Morse nettime-l@kein.org Sat, 27 Oct 2012 09:52:48 -0700 Dear Flick, I agree with you and Geert that publicly engaged art is important and that it gets little critical attention. What struck me about the theater review from Vancouver-- http://www.vancouverplays.com/theatre/reviews/review_after_homelessness_09.shtml -- is that it provided a valuable description of the remarkable performance as well as the reviewer's despair about the eventual prospects for success of this emerging form of theater in actually providing actionable ideas for social change. The Vancouver play offers the audience the delicious opportunity to see some audience members actually intervene in the performance and take the unfolding narrative in another direction again and again. Furthermore, we have a life/art connection of the actors and the audience who have experienced difficult and demoralizing life events and lived. What failed for the critic was the reception by the audience, particularly in the focus discussion afterwards. However, the stakes here are far more fundamental. Why not think about this as a matter of practice and cultivation? Why should a public be good at this when they have so few opportunities to develop their critical capacities? For me, this genre takes off from Bertolt Brecht's ideas and pushes them further along. Brecht's performance practices aim at activating critical faculties that lead to action in the world--the audience should be able to see unfolding dramatic events in the life course as far from inevitable. That entails a number of performance practices typical of a Brecht play:-for instance, the actors don't embody or identify with their roles; the narrative is constantly being interrupted with moments for reflection; dramatic events are put within a larger socio-political context and discourse. We critics of publicly engaged art also need more practice in writing on such performances. We also need to create a space and an audience with which we can engage and hone our abilities. I regret having had to put down my pencil for several years after co-convening a very successful conference on The Art of Collaboration held at UC Santa Cruz in 2008. Word did not get out about the conference contributions, to my regret. All the best, Margaret