dear all
The opening analysis by Domenico was very fruitful, I thought, and the subsequent commentaries helped me to think further about the subject of "collecting" (or selling, as Esther insisted so well, leading to Simon's comment on not necessarily wanting to sell but finding himself in an "oscillating" position between independent new media art practice and the mainstream art sector, its institutions, "systems", and discourses, and -- following Johannes Goebel's lovely provocation -- the commissioning/collecting policies of museums, and here one might also want to look at commissioning and producing policies of Performance Centers).
Admittedly, i have less to say now about curating, a role i only experimented with briefly for while, when a warehouse became available in Houston for the staging of both performances and exhibitions, but I would be interested in questioning/interrogating the need or justification for a particular "system" (around artists, and the example given here was Seghal) to enable sale/collection...
I thought that Pau was referring perhaps to a particularly clever way in which some entrepreneuring performance artists have generated interest or a system of interest, and Domenico mentions that it can take years (the case of John F. Simon Jr.?) to build "continuous support of a bunch of galleries, the effort to work out of the usual mind frames and to present [ ] work out of the usual circles...".
This building, of course, may not be so easy for (digital) performance artists or performers who work (as Martin John Callanan so wisely said) with all kinds of tools and of course their bodies. It's been a curious experience for me over the years (of performing and making dance works/installations and occasional dance films or conceptual things) to note how limited the newly emerging discourse on digital curation (not to mention collection, or preservation) has been on performance, and even though we see, increasingly, all kinds of animated events (did not Kraftwerk plays some gigs at MoMA, or was I hallucinating) in museums that (following the recent 'participatory" or performative" enactment turn),
it is rare that the discussion on new media curating develops a strong sensibility for performance art, and I regret that, as i think many performers i know have developed fascinating content and ideas in their work and used innovative hybrid scenographies and sound & movement (and movement-images/graphics) architectures through active and interactive software, wearables and other configurations involving performer bodies or audiences involvement/behavior.
I assumed therefore new dimensions from such work were opening different viewpoints on what constitures a digital object or a "choreographic object" (to use a work subtitle from William Forsysthe that was well placed, as a participatory structure, in the CHOREOGRAPHING YOU exhibit at the Hayward Gallery in London last year.
Would you wish to discuss this issue, how you collect installations or digital dramaturgies that require participant action or enactment? or specific wearables (for conscious bodies of performers who know how to wear them) and that may thus be relatively completely unstable in so far as its generative dimensions (e.g. the sound that is created in the interface) may change or be different in variable contexts or versions? Or would the point of "selling" the dramaturgy, say, online, be that you create a program that allows the interfacial responses to be more predictable (game like enjoyable) and actable? collectible and shareable? What, along these questions, would constitute "cultural and economic value here, recognized or accrued over time (as Domenico argued)?
I am tired of oscillating between not selling and not selling. Or should I rephrase? Having had opportunities to perform to audiences, i actually never had reason to complain, even if now, as I recently found out in my studio in Texas, all my old VHS and SVHS tapes of my work from the 80s and 90s are deteriorated, and some of my libretti are on some floppy disks that i do not know where to stick them.
regards
Johannes Birringer
dap-lab
http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap
Later I'll come back to
>post-hastism<
(see: http://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/kunst/hans-ulrich-obrist-in-china-besten-dank-hier-gibt-s-schon-zu-viele-geister-11818331.html)
The curator and trendsetter Hans Ulrich Obrist meets artists and art critics in Beijing, and encounters a surprisingly strong resistance. Is the globalization of the contemporary just a smoke screen?
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