Although I recognise that dispensing with taxonomies altogether would
be nearly if not completely impossible, I don't think that this then
means we should embrace the procedure without qualms as some on this
list would seem to do.
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Absolutely. Such practices should be met with great circumspection.
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If the archive is to be about the future and
not the past,
My position about this is that the archive is about the present's
context of the past and its consideration of preservation for the
future. This mainly comes from my contention that the past has a wide
degree of interpretations & contexts, it is far from stable, and the
future becomes more speculative as we go from the interstitial moment we
call the present. Therefore, the most concrete location of the archive
is actually in the present, while we fitfully try to contextualize the
past with our shifting theoretical (historiographical) models, and try
to do the best we can to preserve for an indeterminate future
(Ippolito's experience with Flavin shows this).
then we need to disentangle its representational power
from the requirements of (new media's) institutionalisation - or at
least contest any smooth translation between the two.
I think this is an admirable and tall order.
Even if we were
able to break down the 'bad' term 'new media' into its 'true' and
consensually agreed upon parts (which let's face it could never
happen, because there are too many interests riding on any and all
outcomes), would that better, more wholesome descriptor then do
anything to enhance the values apparently espoused within it
(interactivity, feedback, network etc.)? By which I mean, wouldn't it
simply make the whole (contested) area of artistic practice more
easily packageable and assimilable within the codes of museology?
Very possible.
Transmediale may be problematising this very process by throwing open
the selection of prize categories to the public, but only then to
recapture this 'radically' democratic moment within the hierarchical
system of selection, promotion, official recognition, award -
something that once again cuts out the truly
collective/anonymous/networked/feedbacked nature of creativity and
production. Isn't this just another instance of institutional
hypocrisy? Better to think how to use taxonomies to destabilise
(however momentarily) institutions and their entropic power (maybe
Duchamp's fountain was - briefly - such an instance?).
Perhaps. It's a very strange item, but I'm just wondering that the more
and more we writhe in our postmodern orbits, I'm beginning to feel that
we are caught even more tightly in the jaws of 21st Century modernism.
I don't think that this is a terrible thing; PoMo offers an invaluable
set of analytical tools, but has the 'dream' of modernism as ahistorical
and or progressive (despite protesting the contrary) enterprise truly
gone away or shattered?
I'm questioning this right now.
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