Subject: Writing about the ephemeral... Theme Feb 08 Beyond issues of physical preservation, the written record, document or press review is particularly important for ephemeral, live or broadcast works. But how does one write about/criticise something that's never the same twice? What are the modes curators use for the documentation of new media art? Re-imagination; information; writing that in one way or the other transmits the various experiences of the work? Can it be argued that the life of a work consists precisely in the ways it departs from its initial point/source or concept? And if it does so how do the different afterlives, critiques and vocabularies associated with media contribute to or resist the work? What framing systems emerge with forms of writing other than the traditional single-authored critical text (e.g. dialogue based, blogging, hypertext)? What framing systems are becoming more peripheral (e.g. traditional art criticism)? Does a particular work/practice need a particular mode of text to be understood or re-enacted? Can a live work be re-imagined by certain modes of preserving it? Does the archive, the re-broadcast, or the re-enactment then become more important than the work? This Feb theme leads up to the exhibition Broadcast Yourself, co-curated by Sarah Cook and Kathy Rae Huffman, which includes several works that document artist-led live broadcast events. (such as: Van Gogh TV; Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole in Space, 1980; Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope's co-curated project TV Swansong, 2002; Alistair Gentry's Nowhere Planes, 2004). The exhibition takes place at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, February 28 - April 5 as part of the AV festival. This spring CRUMB also welcomes New York based new media art curator, archivist and writer, Caitlin Jones for research and an event as part of The Inspiring Internationalists programme. Caitlin's focus will be on issues of documentation in relation to electronic and ephemeral artworks. At her workshop in Newcastle on March 5, she will discuss practicalities, tools and policies that emerge with the fast increasing number of 'storage systems'. Invited respondents: [Elena Cologni, Maeve Connolly, Jorn Ebner, Charlotte Frost, Kristoffer Gansing, Jean Gagnon, Marc Garrett & Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield), Adrian George, Michael Gibbs, Matthew Hearn, Kerstin Mey, Marcia Tanner, Maria X (aka Chatzichristodoulou), Patricia Zimmermann] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the conditional […] The artist text versus the descriptive text (e.g. used on a label in an exhibition space) versus the critical text? But where does the criticality take place? In the differences of the texts that talk about the work? In the gaps between these different texts? In the gaps of the text? Liam [Gillick in Proxemics. Selected Writings (1988-2006)] says Subject: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the conditional […] Some of the works I'm writing about have been widely distributed but others circulate within the gallery system so as I view these DVDs in my own space (as opposed to in an archive) I am acutely aware of two issues. The first is my economic and social relation to these works, which varies greatly, and the second is the distance between the original experience and that of re-viewing. […] I haven't read Liam Gillick's intro to Proxemics but his comments - on being both too close to and too distant from the main protagonists - seem to describe aspects of my own experience of writing catalogue essays. I've occasionally written texts that involve a kind of speculative projection about the form the work might take, rather than conventional description or contextualisation. This type of writing seems characterised by 'closeness' - it often involves an investigation the artist's ideas and interests as well as process. But perhaps it also produces a certain distance for the reader because it draws upon but doesn't openly state the conditions of the exchange between artist and writer... Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the condition […] Catching on to the original post, mentioning the "press review" in the list of things "particularly important for ephemeral, live or broadcast works" - I'd like to try and build on this in relation to a work I've just shown in an exhibition at the National Gallery in Denmark. This is a work in which I take part as an artist rather than a curator, but which consists of a work which is typical for new media work in that it in itself is generative and tries to set up a space for thought rather than a conclusive statement. The tricky part is that it tries to set up this "ephemeral" space through a very concrete calculating operation, and this immediately confounds critics and spectators. The work is functional, but this function is at the same time an aesthetical act which points to the virtuality of what is being calculated. […] What I'd like to focus on is how the Danish "business" media reacted to this piece. Having caught on to the results of the calculation they proceeded to publish a number of articles, stating the depressing state of the Danish side of the SL economy. Obviously, there were a lot of Danish SL entrepreneurs who objected to this, and started to comment on the online editions of the articles. In retrospect, I wonder what was lost in this treatment of the work, which was meant to project an image of control and the virtuality of capital flow, rather than an instrumental tool for monitoring the actual amount of earned money. Of course, statistics in some way always "lie" and the official statistics of Linden Lab could probably be read and critically analysed in a number of alternative ways. Yet, what is more at stake here is the aesthetical value of such online information and the political implications of creating a generative work out of this data - connecting imagined locality (the national state of Denmark and its virtual "Danmark") with global business and service providers (SL). […] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the condition […] The ephemeral here would not as such be related to the material/non-material/im-material, but be understood as a concept (virtual-actual?) which I find interesting especially in relation to "media work" which has often been discussed in relation to the immaterial, and, importantly, to money. Does this perspective shift the discourse from the material to the conceptual ---- and from art to business/economies? [ ] I imagine that the actual processing of the numbers, the sound of the machine, and the abstraction that takes place at the site, at particular moments, is also what brings the work back to the idea of the ephemeral as something that in its aesthetic value of the disappearing and fleeting and the "never the same" escapes certain logics of growth, and labour. (well, labour in a different sense) […] In relation to this theme I have been thinking about a serial work by American artist Dan Graham, which uses an art journal as object and as the site of intervention. In 1966 ARTS MAGAZINE published the two-pages photo-text layout Homes for America. This intervention is part of Graham's early "works for magazines". Homes for America is an investigation in the 'over-all magazine article lay-out' (Graham) which also addresses, the artist notes, the 'present-time (timeliness)' of a magazine. As one of its most important aspects, and partly deriving from this timeliness, Graham emphasises that the work made no claim for itself as a work of art. The page of the magazine, a site of non-art, functions as an underlying grid-like, schematic, coded system. There is a lot more to say about this work, but I thought this might be interesting in relation to an "artwork" as a critique of (mass) media - in this case print media - and its self-critique. […] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the condition […] It seems to me that there's a definite interest at the moment in issues of economic exchange amongst critics and artists that might seem particularly concerned with the conceptual and the immaterial (an example would be the work of the PoCA group [now micropolitics.wordpress.com] as well as earlier discussions around immaterial labour (in publications such as Multitudes). But the 'material' persists in interesting ways in some writing about artists (such as Pierre Huyghe) who treat the ephemeral and the temporal as their material. I'm thinking in particular here of Tom McDonough's article 'No Ghost', in October 110, Fall 2004, which takes issue with Nicolas Bourriaud's ideas of both temporality and labour in relation to production and consumption. With regard to the Dan Graham's exploration of timeliness and his exploration of the page as site, I wonder how the notion of an 'intervention' in a publication can be reconfigured now, with a proliferation of artists' publications exploring various forms of ephemerality, temporality, spatiality etc and the establishment of the artists' page as a convention, even institution. Clearly, the 'timeliness' of the art magazine and the status of the page as site have both changed radically because physical pages are now supplemented/shadowed by web pages. […] |
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