Hi Melinda (and all),

What is getting called "flatness" here I might call "bakedness."
Bakedness is the opposite of "the performative." There is an approach
to art (even non-"performance" art), that is nonetheless
"performataive." When an artist takes a "performative" approach to
her media, she constructs it so that it is somehow purposefully left
open to the lived and immanent moment when a person encounters the
art. "Baked" media does the opposite -- it is an archive of some
noetworthy past event, frozen in amber. Baked media intentionally
kills any possible slippage that might "accidentally" occur in the
immanent moment, all with the goal of "preserving" whatever
"original" slippage (once removed) happened back at some previous
event. (Then there are artists like Robert Smithson who intentionally
play with the difference between these two extremes.)

Even Greenbergian arguments advocating "the paint itself" could be
construed as arguments against "baked" media. A .jpg of a Pollock is
obviously not the same as a "live" Pollock. Pollock's approach to
"paint" as media is performative. Arguably, even Van Gough and Monet
paint in a way that open their work up to the present moment when one
encounters their paintings. Performativity is a purposeful approach
to media that is less mimetic/baked and more
event-centric/performative. Performative media is like institutional
critique -- it purposefully opens out onto its surrounding context,
invites it in, hijacks it, and recontextualizes it. Some live
performances of John Cage's music are still able to do this today,
decades after their composition, because Cage built such open-ness
into the pieces. Such "performativity" is only obliquely related to
Benjamin's "aura." Performativity vs. bakedness is not directly
reducible to "post-object" vs. "object." Some objects are
performative and some are baked. Some non-object media is
performative and some is baked.

The performative approach is possible with video: Stan Brakhage, Tony
Conrad, even Parajanov's colors, Vertov's jump cuts, Audrey Hepburn's
face (according to Barthes). Even with digital video, Netochka
Nezvanova used to make these downloadable .mov files that would
intentionally overwrite the video buffer of your local machine,
causing stray pixels to spill out beyond the border of the .mov frame
and onto your desktop background. When you quit the quicktime
software, the stray pixels still remained. Quite thrilling.

The youTube videos in the Guggenheim show seem baked. I was talking
to Constant Dullart about Paik's "Zen For Film" and its youTube
instantiation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8z1sOsIrshU ). I
lamented that, unlike the original film, the youTube version would
never deteriorate with multiple playings, so the performative
artifacts which were so important to Paik's concept get lost. Dullart
said this was true, but he proposed that the ever-changing comments,
advertisements, and sidebar menus surrounding the youTube
instantiation were like a new version of present-time "noise" that
got added to the video.

But it seems that even these kinds of "performative" online
chartjunk/border elements are stripped from the videos in the
Guggenheim show. So the curators are left to introduce their own
last-mile live slippage at the point/time of encounter. Whether or
not they succeed at this, I can't say; I haven't seen the gallery
show. I would be curious to hear from someone who went to the opening.

++++++++++++++

Some applicable thoughts from different articles I've written:

http://lab404.com/glitch/
(the section called, "Invite the Immanent In")

http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf
(pp. 4-6, the section called, "Institutional Production of the
Interactive Subject")

http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No2_radical_cloninger.html
(the whole thing)

+++++++++++++++

Best,
Curt



At 4:56 PM +1030 10/22/10, Melinda Rackham wrote:
>hi all,
>as a gallery interventionist and a network-taught curator im
>fascinated in whats evolving tangentially in this months discussion
>about space and control.
>
>Ele's comment about the web flattening cinematic space jolted me out
>of lurking..:
>"Forgive me for being old-school, but art museums are 3D collective spaces
>and not individually viewed laptops....
>YouTube spatially flattens our viewing of moving images"
>
>Is it even older skool to think that the web is a collective
>sculptural space bursting with multi-dimensional potentiality,
> and that it has been limited, underutilized and conceptually eroded
>since its inception by 2d thinking?
> flattened by the ubiquitous web page, and hijacked by the many
>static and streaming derivatives of cinema..
>and the inability of a brick and mortar mindset to inhabit the
>infinitesimal space that is available?
>
>the emergence of glitch and its parallel discussion this month is stupendous--
> - glitch eats into the flattened, clean, cinematic, controlled
>curatorial content and intent,
>revealing layers, codecs, ugly, messy, unresolved, non narratives,
>with no money shot..
>as if youve smashed up plaster board walls, leaving exposed broken
>beams and dangling wires sparking,
>at last - something is about to happen...
>
>youve just got to admit --- it is a little bit exciting !
>
>
>warm regards,
> Melinda