Hi Eleanor , Jon and all:
i enjoyed reading this discussion and learning from it, and probably lively debate
will follow, as many of you might be more directly invested in curating art / new media art\
or making exhibitable objects which, i would venture to argue, are never only about
their operationality or interactive nature....
>> (jon suggested)
So I'm sorry to hear that we now "expect" not to be able to touch works that were originally all about participation,
and that indeed we still think in terms of "the original" when it comes to media art.
>>
although I am quite prepared to dig deeper into this and worry more about expectations in the current cultural contexts of shows such as the one at the Hayward Gallery in Southbank : "MOVE: Choreographing You"....
(also, I'm just reading a fascinating catalog on kinetic art, titled Lo[s]- cinetético[s], about
a show at the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in 2007, and an essay by Miguel Angel Garcia Hernández - "Eppur si muove!" - struck my attention as it goes a long way towards interpreting all kinds of layers, metaphorical, mythic, symbolic, cultural and perceptional regarding how a "viewer" or interactor looks at and respond to toys and, say, Calder's mobiles) and begin to sort out some questions i had asked msyelf about
current research on dance / dance preservation in digital terms (e.g. the "Synchronous Object" project by William Forysthe and OSU) or in physical terms (movement and movement empathy, kinaesthetics, emotional affect, etc).
I was struck that the curator at the Hayward did choose a peripheral installation by Forsythe ("The Fact of Matter") which engaged audiences physically ("choerographing" you, in a mundane way of supplying implicit "instructions" on how you might move through the rings of the lord and find out about how strong or athletic you might be to clamber through the suspended rings ...) but refrained from any references to Fosrythe's complex dance choreographies or what he suggests to do with "Synchronous Objects" or the whole (ambivalent) notion of the "choreographic object". Further into MOVE, almost hidden by the massive stairwell, is a 3D digital work by OpenEnded Group in collaboration with Wayne McGregor, titled "Stairwell (2010) and created in situ (filmed in 3D) and then exhibited in situ, which was largely overlooked but it was in fact the only digital exhibition in the whole show (apart from the archive upstairs which holds slides and mini video clips of many works by performance artists and choreographers, excluding Nam Jun Paik).
Most of the rest of the exhibit was a participatory playground, with some absurd contextualizations, if that is what they were, e.g. Mike Kelley's “Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses” (1999-2010) -- you note the date given is odd, there was apparently an "original" construction. So, this peculiar current "set" was accompanied by a video projection showing the original display, enclosed in a metal cage where some “dancers” pop up wearing monkey costumes and moving as if in a Martha Graham mythodrama. At the Hayward, some visitors lustily hacked away with baseball bats at the rubber punching balls, apparently enjoying the exercise of emotional abreaction or probing into their own exhibitionism, they "choreographed" themselves, which may or may not be the work's original or current expectation. Naturally, i was able to compare current set with set in video, and noted that the current version has suffered a bit from abuse, things broken off here and there.
Since the entire show was meant to be 'participatory", i noted that downstairs on one side they had Franz Erhard Walther’s fabric elements (reproductions of “1. Werksatz”, 1967), and one of two docents were there to help you into them, allow two visitors (or one and the docent) to hold each other’s balance as they lean backward with the stretched canvas wrapped around them.
A photo on the wall showed the "original" action that Walther had done with them.
On a floor pedestal, the (supposed) original was displayed, and then there were the reproductions that were handed to the audience. Whereupon I noted that kids, on the weekend, took it for granted that it was all playground, and they lifted up the supposed original, sending the docents and guards into apoplectic fits.
this is funny, ain't it?
regards
Johannes Birringer
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