Hi Neal, Charlie, and all,
Regarding the difference between the artist-intended "real-time"
performance speed of a piece and the once-removed, institutionally
archived "memory-time" of a piece, something like William Pope L.'s
"The Black Factory" ( http://www.theblackfactory.com ) is wonderfully
and intentionally problematic. The project intentionally
self-sabotages its own eventual/inevitable recontextualization as an
archived art object. The project is basically a mobile performance
factory that takes "black" objects submitted by people and physically
converts them into other objects. So the project is a machine that
modulates the "aura" of a discrete/singular object. There's no easy
way for the project itself to be archived as an object (although it
is technically an object [a mobile home] that generates residual
objects). A machine that transforms objects (The Black Factory) can't
itself be transformed into an object (an institutional archive of The
Black Factory) without throwing a boot into the institutional machine
that wishes to transform it into an object. In the archiving process,
the institutional machine is immediately revealed for what it is (A
Memory Factory? A Culture Factory? A sterilization factory?). The
Black Factory is thus properly multi-dromological.
Regarding the mystique of "real-time" -- might real-time be to
"time-based art" what Benjamin's aura was to the "original art
object?" Aura as ontological object-essence; real-time as
phenomenological event-essence.
psycho-archival texts likeSchwenger's "The Tears of Things:
Melancholy and Physical Objects" and Carey's "Observatory Mansions"
become relevant.
Best,
Curt
At 11:08 PM +0100 9/11/09, Neal White wrote:
>If we then consider the museum or archive as a space which sets out
>to preserve objects, artefacts , codes etc, (death drive or
>cryogenics...) we can also say that the archivist understands the
>need to reduce the time-base of each object/item to their own
>time-base - that is institutional time. This arrest is not
>specifically problematic, but indicates issues relating to archives
>and events, part of the the real problem at hand. You may ask
>yourself why certain kinds of event based work have encountered
>resistance not only in the galleries, but within the archive of the
>museum itself to the extent it should be present, and then to
>examine the time-base of technologies, situations, contexts upon
>which it relies, to realise these are awkward at best, if not
>completely incompatible at worst. If nothing else these works made
>in one context would be at the mercy of another entirely, that is
>the event structure of the institutional practices of a collection,
>its overheads and relevance. For me, the loss of work to the
>real-time of its context should be balanced against its incidental
>potential (otherwise known as a 'unit of attention') both
>immediately and within the broader time-base of society.
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