[Just thought I should post the below again now that my membership's
been updated - I'm really enjoying this debate and am keen to hear the
answers to Murphy's question about artists working with New Urbanism,
which I take as meaning what we Brits call 'urban regeneration'. An
interesting example, tho' disturbingly blank and parodic, of an artist
working in the context of regen is Nils Norman's contribution to
Visionary Thurrock - part of the forthcoming Thames Gateway nightmarish
housing-hutch expansion:
http://www.visionarythurrock.org.uk/docs/artists/nilsnorman/]
Just a quick point in response to Simon Biggs' discussion of permanence
or not in land/media art. One thing I remember reading somewhere is that
the Spiral Jetty, like other conceptual/land art, was actually conceived
of as existing more substantially (i.e. pervasively and in more
permanent form) in the space of the photographs and the films that were
taken of it before its swift and fully predicted disappearance. In other
words, the work's impermanence shouldn't be over stated. Likewise one
can say of certain net art pieces that the existence of the work is now
more in the shape of the data trail it left at the time; an after image.
For instance, Rachel Baker's Clubcard TM piece had to be taken offline
for legal reasons, but the work (whose conceptualisation was a
'becoming', and happened, not for once and all, but in relation to
events occuring over a particular time span) became more about the trail
it left in the legal administrative process - physicalletters then
archived on the net. You could argue then that media works often end up
existing more as an after-image in other (still medial) indexes of their
prior existence. Some kind of meta-medial permanence, referring back to
a now non-existent origin.
Josie
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