so much to think about in all this discussion, but I wanted to take
up this thread of Janet's that passed by a while ago
On Apr 2, 2008, at 4:15 PM, Janet Hawtin wrote:
> I guess I see it as being at a point in time where we are moving from
> the broadcaster and recipient to
> a model where there is more work being done on a peer2peer basis.
> This is interesting for art because it has often been thought of as a
> niche broadcast kind of project?
Personally I've been thinking of art more in this way for a while,
trying to experiment with and imagine structures that are less like a
broadcast model. I know there are a lot of curators and artists on
this list and I'm curious how much you are all seeing experiments of
this kind. For instance the early experiments with net art seemed to
be very much inspired by programming and code. I feel like one shift
we're seeing now is more work that is inspired by the social aspect
of the internet. Interactivity run by algorithms is shifting towards
social participation. Collaborations between close friends are
shifting towards collaborations among strangers.
Of course this isn't completely new - it's exactly how mail art
communities have always been structured. I still remember the thrill
of finding out that I could participate in a mail art project and
what I would get back was *the mailing list of all the participants*
- wow. Or book/zine type projects where you could send in a sticker
or a stamp and you'd get back the book with everyone's stickers and
stamps. They would make up exactly as many books as there were
participants. I've been thinking about how mail art, of all the art
movements of recent times, seems to remain the most outside of art
world structures. I think I've really only ever seen one mail-art
show in a big museum and that was a single-artist show (Ray Johnson)
organized around the usual genius model. Is it the radical
egalitarianism of mail art that has kept it underground? Its lack of
financial value? One thing that is striking about a mail art show is
that the show overall is generally much more interesting than any
single contribution - mail art shows make meaning in emergent,
collective ways.
I'd be really interested in hearing from the curators on the list
about how they are thinking about these social, emergent kinds of
works today.
One curating example that comes to mind is Andrea Grover's show
Phantom Captain at Apex Art where she gathered work that functions by
"crowdsourcing" - gathering the creative contributions of amateurs.
She says, "crowdsourcing as a method of artistic production appears
to be heir to the throne of 1960s and 70s happenings and
participatory art. These artists are less interested in sole
authorship and visibility--they are phantom captains2--and more in
distributed creativity, gift economies, and other models that disrupt
how we think about and assign value to art."
http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/grover.htm
-- Sal
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Sal Randolph
salrandolph [at] gmail [dot] com
http://salrandolph.com
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