Dear all,
Firstly, please welcome our newest confirmed respondent, Craig Saper.
Craig Saper is Director of the Language, Literacy, & Culture Doctoral Program and The Bearman Foundation Chair of Entrepreneurship at UMBC in Baltimore.
http://www.readies.org
Many of you will know Craig's work and so I am very happy we can benefit from his input. Thanks for joining us, Craig.
Secondly, thanks also to Clive, Ken, Dorothee and Marc for opening our discussion. The field of discourse within which to curate 'The Eternal Network' after globalisation is a contested space, at once a ‘battleground’ and ‘collage’ as Dorothee puts it.
I have two slightly reframed questions which may help invited respondents and interested subscribers address different aspects of this terrain.
• If the network-as-artwork attempts to bypass institutionalised curatorial spaces, how does its increased migration onto online platforms impact upon its potential as critical arts practice in a ‘post-avant garde’ (as Clive puts it) phase?
This might lead to critical-theoretical discourse intertwining aesthetic, anthropological, ethical, ethnological, political, social and technological debate: a discussion of ‘concepts’, perhaps.
• Assuming critique of institutional curatorial spaces is relevant and useful, what tactics and strategies have been employed by artists, activists, curators in respect of the network-as-artwork’s media of production, means of distribution and experience of reception?
This might lead to sharing knowledge, references, links to artistic and curatorial models (the beginning of a inventory of network-as-artworks?) that might shape thinking around future projects: a discussion of ‘mechanics’, mainly.
I also appreciate that not everyone on the list will be so familiar with Filliou's work. My experience was that he was always so much better known in Francophone than Anglophone circles. It also seems that the institutional art world is catching up with him now, which is an interesting co-incidence with my research.
His work is already held in the Centre Pompidou, Paris (http://mediation.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-filliou/index.html) and there is a forthcoming retrospective, entitled 'The Institute of Endless Possibilities' at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (http://www.henry-moore.org/hmf/press/press-information/henry-moore-institute-leeds/2012/robert-filliou). I was also interested to see that some of his work featured in transmediale 06 (http://archive.transmediale.de/page/exhibition/exhibition.0.1.3.html)
Filliou was always 'doing research' as practice. He said, “Everytime we are turning our attention to something that we do not know - we are doing research.” This is the methodology of my own research. He was the prototype artist-researcher in practice from my point of view.
It’s worth re-posting the excerpt from 'Porta Filliou' - co-produced and introduced already by Clive already – of Filliou discussing his 'Research on The Eternal Network' (or in non-equivalent French, La Fête Permanente) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgOfsG7J0Q.
Further details of the tape can be found here: http://front.nfshost.com/research/archive/435 and from this you can see evidence of his other research projects: 'La Cédille qui Sourit', 'Principles of Poetical Economy', 'Galerie Légitime', 'Permanent Creation', 'The Poïpoïdrome', 'la République Géniale', 'Research on the Origin', 'Research on Pre-Biology', 'The Speed of Art', 'Built in vs. Built Upon'. There are others too such as 'Artists-in-Space / Art-of-Peace', etc. etc. ....
To have a sense of the background against which Brecht and Filliou co-created 'The Eternal Network', you might want to look at Natilee Harren's essay on 'La Cédille Qui Sourit' here: http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/la-cedille-qui-ne-finit-pas-robert-filliou-george-brecht-and-fluxus-in-villefranche/.
While Filliou is fundamental to my research, I really want to emphasise the importance of 'The Eternal Network' as a starting point particularly, a reference in space and time to discuss the network-as-artwork more broadly. The question is having established what 'The Eternal Network' is, how we do can we approaching curating this and other networks-as-artworks after globalisation. As wide a range of examples of practices and projects, historical and current, whether are welcome.
Many thanks all
Best wishes
Roddy
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