Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... […] On the other side, as an artist to write about one's project, it is to find a balance of getting an editor interested to either send someone, or to make the writer interested to suggest my works / projects to the editor. Some people frown upon the self-publicist. Within the New Media, Web etc environments some of the dependencies from editors can disappear. I can publish, but I won't get a fee. Here, writing itself - which is somewhat ephemeral to begin with - ephemeralizes itself and may become part of a discourse about the ephemeral. This is the writing about writing territory, I presume. […] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... the insignificant the singular the condition […] I have followed your unfolding thoughts and, although I wanted to contribute, I found myself facing the ongoing dilemma: 'is this time for making and messing or analysing and organising?' I will respond to some of the interesting issues discussed and propose some new ones. I have been working on various aspects of memory, time, representation since 99 in mediatised performances, and the writing becomes more and more creative and less analytic to the point that I can say that the medium of performance relays on the writing. Not script sort of writing, but words that make up extended titles, which eventually shrink into a short title, which might actually be used. It's very similar to a drawing process, where one looks for the essence, it's a thinking process. For whichever medium, its appropriate context is location for art, including the page. The cohesive element is a conceptual approach. There seems to be a method, but the problem with this is my inability to stop and write to analyse or describe from a set and fixed position - as much as in all my work, now dealing with the video delay, the subject is the deferral. 'You define the present as that which is, when it is simply what is happening. [ce qui se fait]. Nothing is less that the present moment, if you mean by that the indivisible limit that separates the past from the future'. When we think of this present as what ought to be [devant etre], it is no longer, and when we think of it as existing, it is already past?all perception is already memory' (Bergson *Mati&egrav;r et mémoire,*166-167 in Guerlac's 'Thinking In Time, An Introduction To Henry Bergson', Itaca and London Cornell University, 2006, p.148.) […] With a new performance at Manchester Museum in April and Glasgow International later the same month, I am now chewing cables... looking for that video image. The image is an overlapping of delayed live recordings to be used in the performances. […] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... [. . .] Too many lines of the discussion to respond to now... but here's a try. And here we could get some help from Wendy Chun: "What we must analyze, as we try to grasp a present that is always degenerating, is the ways in which ephemerality is made to endure." I've had the privilege to attend her lecture on "the enduring ephemeral" a couple of times now. Even though I can't say I have a total grasp of her argument, it basically deals with the conflation of storage and memory in von Neumann's cybernetic interpretation of the function of memory. If memory can essentially be seen as a re- and de-generative process - in digital computing, memory came to be made enduring, localized in a place of lasting storage. What is really exciting about Chun's argument is that she talks about how this principle come to guide how we for example look upon the internet as an archive, blinding us to precisely the ephemeral of media. […] Subject: Writing about the ephemeral... […] The original can never be found, can never be retrieved, and in fact, what is historiographically ethical is to assume that all archival materials will move forward and take on new lives within new contexts and uses. Therefore, as Kristoffer points outs, the issue of how to consider the "generative" and the "opening up of space for thought rather than a conclusive statement" is for all intents and purposes the function of the archival. When the archival is configured as a place where what is ephemeral becomes reduced to a holy, sanctified object that replicated some notion of the "authentic" and the "original", then the disruptive potential of the migratory inherent in the ephemeral is amputated. Stasis, fixed objects, fixity, narrativity, conclusive findings--these are the strategies of confinement. So this question of the ephemeral raises significant--and urgent, necessary, and compelling--questions of historiography. Instead of thinking of art works, ephemeral media, new media, even films, as fixed objects, we need to move more towards a notion of the migratory archive, where all works are in endless circulation, endlessly moving in and out of different social, economic, reception contexts. Verina mentioned in one of her posts the idea of "the plurality of audiences," and the differences between practitioners, artists, curators, writers, approaching these ephemeral texts. I agree with her, this issues of plurality is central--what is a radical intervention now is to refuse monologue, the monological, the fixed, and invoke pluralities. All of the above--practitioners, artists, curators, writers--contribute to this migratory zone for ephemeral works. […] Subject: Re: Writing about the ephemeral... Thanks Patricia for the great gathering of several lines running though the feb discussion so far and thanks for the elaborate posts... Maybe this diversity and "thickness" also points to the theme discussed, that only a poly-vocal approach can grasp any subject?! Rhizomatic. There is something I am wondering about though, and it has to do with the understanding of an "original" or something authentic as being almost something "negative", something that does not seem to fit in our culture that constantly claims flows, migration, crossings. I am wondering if the "original", understood as something that also gives ground to some degree, that has a stable (fixed?!) content, shape, linearity, place, can take on something valuable. In times where everything seems FLEETING I am interested in what resists these flows. Is there a residual? And what is it? […] I am thinking about Miwon Kwon's suggestion of the concept of "difference" that is already inscribed in capitalism. - Difference as a very product of capitalism. If the poly-vocal, the multilayered, and distribution of a "source" is demanded in contemporary culture, and conforms perhaps to this idea of difference --- what are its consequences for the archive and its discourse? Patricia suggested that the artefact as a "concept that migrates has RE-placed the artefact as a physical object that migrates - but can it be that the artefact as a physical object has actually been DIS-placed? I would like to think about the authentic, for example expressed by the artist's initial intention and per/forming of a work, as something that - as residue - certainly does in-form what comes after, or out of it. As a practising artist I might be concerned that the migratory effect can take over everything. […] In relation to the overall discussion Jacques Ranci&egrav;re's definition of the "distribution of the sensible" might be also worthwhile not to forget. having a voice, having no voice. who writes the text, who does not write the text. who is reading it, who does not read it ... Subject: Writing about the ephemeral... […] context isn't just the moment in which the event manifests but the events and experiences prior that both artist and audience bring to the work, in its making and in the experience of engaging with it. Again Verina noted the subjective perspective of the reviewer, the 'social conditions' and the cultural baggage he or she possesses which potentially effects his or her reading of a particular artwork. Isn't such baggage equally important when considering the making of the work, and how we read the work and potentially go on to write it. There is also the context in which the work is executed. Sorry to keep referencing you Verina, but you made a very valid example in Dan Graham. These works, placed into the 'non-art' context of various periodicals, mimic the format of the site of intervention, borrowing/contradicting/their house [sic] style. I want to think more about how these works function, or how we understand them post. Yes there is a plurality of audiences, probably greater after the event than at the time, but I find myself questioning, and more interested in the original instance, rather than the works secondary and art life. In the case of these works I am more interested in their timeliness, how the regular reader of a periodical stumbles across the intervention and how it does or doesn't trigger a response, whether it strikes him or her as incongruous or melds into the context - how it differs from the pages before and after, how it measures up to what was printed on the same pages in issues past. How does the critic re-imagine, typify the context and is this, I am going to stick my neck and argue this as being so, necessary to understand the work as originally conceived. - the authentic envisioning of the work as originally intended to be seen. […] |
|||