Dear All,
It has been very interesting following the comments on the REFRESH
conference. Although I was not able to attend the conference, it
seems symptomatic of wider, and very welcome, development of what be
a tentative 'maturity' in the field of computational and networked
digital media as a variegated whole. Other currents that parallel it
to some extent might in the area of software/computing might be: the
increasing sophistication and details in the field of computing
history; the capacity for the cultural and social theorisation of
software to develop in close, rather than generalising,
inter-relation with its actual materiality - in the work of Adrian
Mackenzie for instance; the increase in different styles of writing
about software in the computing opinion industry - a field that has
opened up as a side effect of FLOSS; one could go on... so I think
there is a wider process of reflection going on in this field, with
which new / media /electronic art is inter-related.
The relationship to what is often somewhat resentfully configured as
contemporary art proper too is shifted as that field's own
essentially fractured nature is apparent. There are many art worlds,
each produced by different practices, groupings, currents and
universes of reference, a good deal of which transverse many such
categories - for instance, present in the show at Banff, the work of
Shu Lea Cheang which finds itself in a number of places, forms and
discursive fields.
It's in this spirit that I'd like to send to the list a text I wrote
for an event last year which attempted to mark, in a slightly awkward
way, ten years of 'new media art' in britain. Questions on this list
it refers to are the relations with contemporary arts and that of
which theoretical/historical tools might cross between them.
All the best,
Matthew
Conceptualism?
(For Conceptualism and New Media Panel)
1. To call this panel conceptualism and new media is to makes quite
a strong claim about the nature of the work. It situates it in
relation to a legitimate, recognisable and interesting kind of art
practice, one that is certainly also profoundly historified enough to
be undergoing a process of revisionism. But it also locates the work
labeled as 'new media art' as somehow able to be situated under the
sign of continuity. And not insignificantly with the most apparently
difficult and hence most 'autonomous' and inviting art practice.
But it also locates medial work synchronically with two recent
'revivals' or re-uses of conceptualism. Firstly, that of the rather
sloppy short-hand for art that somehow involves thought. They're
all conceptual nowadays. Secondly, the recognition through multiple
impetuses, not least the complex and often difficult genesis of art
as a globally articulated paradigm that there are many, unequal,
'conceptualisms'.
2. But it is perhaps possible to makes use of such a title. I want
to use it to establish a parallel between the way conceptuality, that
is the domain of reflexive thought, was used to gain entry to,
establish new dimensions to and throw out of whack, art systems.
(Crucially, when I'm talking about art systems, I don't mean the
system, but many interlocking, symbiotic or mutually disinterested
activities: the media ecologies of art, but also its means of going
about things, and the various imaginal, perceptual, technical and
social processes they are in relation to. Art systems include of
course the commercially internalist system of art represented by the
acquisitions committee in this organization, a particular operation
which does not even recognise the work discussed here. But they also
include many other patterns and kinds of activity using art methods
and approaches in other contexts.)
One of the things that interests me is how with the explosion
of art education over the last five decades we now have a vast amount
of art as a way of thinking going on in societies. As a subset of
such thinking there is also a great deal of art which invents new
dynamics for its development. Such development often means
assembling new ways of working, layering them in with existing ones,
or making breaks. And by doing so, subtly or fundamentally changing
the work that is being done.
In order to deal with the theme of this panel then, I want to suggest
how conceptualism might be read, not as a 'style', but as an
invention of a new dimension within art systems and then to go on and
see how it might have parallels in work using networked and
computational digital media.
3. Peter Osborne writing on Sol Lewitt, Joseph Kosuth, early Art &
Language, what he calls 'strong' conceptualism (with its roots in a
use of - rather than an absorbtion into - analytical philosophy)
states:
"Philosophy was the means for the usurption of critical power by a
new generation of artists: the means by which they could
simultaneously address the crisis of the ontology of the artwork
(through an art definitional concept of their practice) and achieve
social control of the meaning of their work."1
For these artists philosophy, and a particular kind, analytical
philosophy, was a means to wrest control from critics, or rather the
systems of representation, appearance and circulation of art and to
establish a new plane of activity or cultural field for art practice
which would insinuate itself into existing parts of art systems, but
would remain also rather detachable from them. Crucially, the kind
of philosophy used was distinct from that then predominating as a
means to name and structure the understanding of art.
The two kinds of work that philosophy did in Osbourne's account have
strong echoes in certain of the currents of art in digital and
computational networked media discussed here.
Firstly, the effect of the introduction of analytical philosophy as a
media is to
'address the crisis of the ontology of the artwork'
secondly it is to:
'achieve social control of the meaning of their work'
I suspect that these two aspects that Osborne recognizes in the work
he discusses belong more generally to much activity in art. The
development of artists spaces, the introduction of different media
systems, mail art, artists books, sound art, performance, community
art, uses of theory, can all be understood in relation to these terms
4. address the crisis of the ontology of the artwork (through an art
definitional concept of their practice)
One of the things that characterizes much art on the internet is
exactly this question. If ontology is the question of the
fundamental nature of the work: how are fundamental natures ascribed
to or generated by art work?
I think part of the moves made in this regard are to make such a
question difficult. The question is made difficult not because the
ontology of the work is made to refer back to a nebulous idea of the
artist. The difficulty is produced because the work is deliberately
generated through the mixing of different contexts, that it contains
multiple ontologies. I would say too that to talk of ontologies is
not to go in search of essences, but to engage in an experimental
politics of determining and productive powers.
5. A crisis is a moment when one particular kind of understanding or
way of doing things no longer matches with what is actually
occurring. It must be supplemented or broken, added to, layered or
subordinated. In such a condition, there is a need for the
recognition of the multiplicity of a reality. It is common that such
a crisis does not come from 'inside' art, but from those who
recognise that they also belong to other sets or conditions. Such
figures use arts terms, its apparatus, art systems, perhaps as one of
many sets of terms to describe and make what they do. That, in part,
is why it is necessary to talk about art systems in plural.
At such moments, art must think what it does not think. It must
imagine what it forbids, what it keeps itself from thinking, what it
has forgotten or what it is not yet thinking.
6. One of the things that is interesting here in relation to this
problem of broken or multiple ontologies is the particularly
suggestive nature of the internet. I would like to suggest here that
the internet, and more precisely the figure of the network which it
carries, whilst not performing in exactly the way Osborne suggests
analytical philosophy did for strong conceptualism provided the
opportunity for a comparable moment of crisis to be forged. Like
logical analysis or capital, it is partly a technology for the
abolition and recomposition of hierarchies.
On one level we can see its roots as a system designed to negotiate
chaotic ontologies, the proliferation of jargons, the overproduction
of knowledge in the post-second world war era. This level is the
view of the internet as seen presently by virtue of the rear-view of
its predominant usage, the world wide web, the idea of hypertext and
also in the variant use of the term ontology itself in the
developments grouped under term 'semantic web'.
7. The other concept that can be said in part to be technological is
that of the open system. That is, the interface to the system at the
scalar level of both hardware and software are available as publicly
available descriptions. They are designed to be platform independent
and to have no maximum number of participants. (That is, they take
the modularization of technologies typical of modernism but make it
not just internally coherent, but aware, in some sense, of its
outside.)
8. What is interesting though in this context is not this relatively
well worked-through pair of imaginaries of the nets of themselves,
but how they combine with other phenomena occurring in art systems.
If it were ever possible as a map of art, Alfred H. Barr Jr.'s
schematic diagram of Modern Art, with its thrusting trickle down from
the 1890s to 1935 is in many familiar ways no longer tenable. We
move from the genealogical flow chart, to the figure of the network.
9. It is the figure of the network which makes the title of this
symposium rather treacherous. I suspect that alongside many artists
I do not regard my work as being 'british'. One of the powers of art
is its refusal to have itself demarcated by the boundaries and
interfaces of states. In the title of this event, we have a kind of
art defined by an administrative boundary. Britain does not exist.
The empire has contracted like a leech sucking on lemon juice.
Britain does not exist, but it hangs on, a spasm. Art moves in and
out of this rictus of administration, in much the same way that
people stuck in Yarl's Wood or Campsfield2 removal centres for
refugees do not.
10. Open systems have a specific historical development in computer
science that dates back to the 70s, but they also have a history as
intentional cultural forms. This is something picked up for instance
by Craig Saper in his book Networked Art or in Umberto Eco's
pre-semiotic book, The Open Work. However, I want to suggest that
there is something more fundamental inherent to art that that can
not simply be mapped by collating two images of the network. And, it
is inherent in this idea of the crisis of ontology, the definition of
our practice is a definition of multiplicity. Multiplicity of course
has become a very contemporary virtue, like creativity or innovation.
It can mean nothing. But an ontological commitment to it can be
extremely significant, threatening of life.
It is stated in the most clear way by Pierre Klossowski in his book
on Nietzsche:
"A society believes itself to be morally justified through its
scientists and artists. Yet the very fact that they exist - and that
their creations exist - is evidence of the disintegrating malaise of
the society; and it is by no means clear that they will be the ones
to reintegrate the society, at least if they take their activity
seriously"3
And it is with this in mind that I turn to the next thematic:
11. How artists use emerging dynamics to achieve social control of
the meaning of their work
- Self-theorisation / Direct publication
- Collective practice
- Non-art context, not-just art
12. Self-theorisation
One can question whether - in the context of this symposium where the
length of time allotted to artists to discuss their work is a
fraction of that allocated to those whose work is to mediate,
organise and interpret such work - whether such a strategy has had
any success. The division of labour is clear. Show pictures
artists, tell anecdotes.
However, I think that this partition of the right to speech in this
event is relatively anomalous. Perhaps it indicates a change in
conditions, one characteristic of the museumification of work, of the
kind where the specificities of an art practice are simply slotted
into an eternal format rather than being used to rethink the museum,
as well as the practice. (I'm presuming here that such issues are
going to be raised more fully in the later panel on curating new
media.)
13. Every new media, practice, or approach that brings itself into
being in relation to art systems is accompanied by and produced
through its theorisation. Usually, for the first cycle or
generation of such an introduction, such writing, including
statements, manifestoes, performance scripts, flyers, mailing lists,
reviews, interviews and so on, is made by artists or those working
with them. Art work is very closely allied to its public, polemical,
thinking through. A key to the work of those artists that Osborne
discusses is that this practice is absolutely conjoined. The
claiming or indeed making of critical territory is the work here.
Such texts make it a precondition of access to certain work that
particular aspects of it are taken into account. The relations of
dimensionality to a practice, object or process are signposted,
declared or given as a simple statement, or act of wishful thinking.
Partly this is done through necessity, to draw and shape attention to
the work. It is done to lodge an indigestible lode in the archive.
And importantly, it is done simply to make certain kinds of work
possible. Without the work of thinking it through in the space of
text certain kinds of work does not exist. But, more than that, it
is characteristic of much that is interesting in recent work that it
includes theoretical activity in the expanded domain of media
practices as part of the work. That is, in relation to a project
that might use the media systems of the gallery, the internet, art
media re-representation, theoretical work is also used as another
dimensionality, another kind of activity that has its own
idiosyncracies, sets of potential or blockage and capacities for
production.
14. work in explicit collectivities
All the artists on this panel4, make, in one way or another, a
reflection on the conditions of their agency part of their work.
And I would like to suggest that this is true within art activity in
networked and computational digital media more widely. This is not
to make a particularly strong claim. Rather, I just want to list out
some of the ways in which it is useful to acknowledge.
15. On a technical level, the range, number and specialization of
the tasks involved often mean that work has to be shared. This means
that the engagement with technical aspects of a project is to some
extent brought into the pattern of work itself rather than hived off
to a separate party.
16. Equally, at a wider scale, the materiality of the media is
integrated into the work. Reflection on the technicity and
particular natures of networked and computational digital media
involves an acknowledgement, and a testing of the social construction
of the media. Hence for instance the currents of work engaging with
software.
17. It is important to recognise the ways in which artists organize
to explicitly mark their position within multiplicities. Often this
has been in the practice of artists interviewing each other, the
public guessing at or making of ideas; in the production of events
which use a relatively open and scalable format for work to be made
manifest and available; the use of mailing lists, archives and
repositories in which work is debated, reviewed and published or
fought over.
In relation to other events and processes covering this area over the
last decade it is useful to provide pointers to the sheer number of
people involved. I started to make a list of the names of all the
artists I knew of who were busy in some of the subsets marked by the
theme of this symposium. There are tens and tens of people, perhaps
hundreds eventually. I think one of the thing this symposium should
mark is that formats for debate and documentation of such work need
to find ways of recognizing work that is around, that is crucial but
not named in the blurb here. (Additionally, one should recognize the
exclusory nature of pricing an event at a third of a week's income
for someone qualifying for a concessionary rate!)
This however is not to say that such art conflates a recognition of
collectivity with conformism, that the artists are habituated to
recycling the same water of the same small puddle. But perhaps it is
to say that it is emphatically necessary to see on both the
microscopic and macroscopic levels the relations one is embedded in
and working through, but also to see the possibility for the
recognition of many kinds of affiliation as productive powers and to
tend to make those explicit in the work, the way it is named, and in
the contexts and means by which its circulates.
Work in digital media with its mixtures of formal and natural
languages, logic and excess, standard objects and systemization
interacting with livid deregulation often makes such connections
massively and profoundly palpable.
18. -not just art
This bring us to the last characteristic to discuss, that what is
often developed here is a social aesthetics as well as a medial one.
For much of the work that is significant in this area, there is a
refusal to be detached from non-art contexts. Music, politics,
different kinds of activity, different intensifiers of life, energy
and materials, all provide a background and context for this work.
What makes it art is the capacity of reflection it draws upon, the
commitment to lived experiment without a control. Such art requires
a dose of carefulness or courage to make things strange, to risk life
rather than the certain death of business as usual.
Thus I do not want to talk about an equally administered aesthetics
of paternalistic personal growth, industrial creativity or
instrumental 'art as police referral'. This is simply shifting
subjects from one databasing system to another, simply applying
cultural rather than control interrogatives and filters. This is a
social aesthetics, not a socialised one. And it is in its
negotiation and invention of medial life that it commands attention.
-
19. So in short, yes, there are potential parallels to
conceptualism, as if this were a marker of anything particularly
significant, but as a question of understanding the particular
conditions and capacities of art systems and the particular
historical conditions in which a crisis of multiplicity might be
made. On such a basis we can, not recapitulate stylistics, but, make
art.
Talk notes for Tate Britain
3rd April 2004
'British new media art' symposium
1 Peter Osborne, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, Routledge, London, 2000, p.88
2 http://www.closecampsfield.org.uk/ http://www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk/
Maryam Namazie , Shut Yarl's Wood Down, February 18, 2002,
International Federation of Iranian Refugees,
http://www.hambastegi.org/english/selectedarticles/editor118.htm/
3 Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle, p.5
4 John Thompson and Alison Craighead, and Carey Young also
participated in this panel
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