Post by Tim on Apr 26, 2007 16:32:25 GMT -5
Here's some theory that has been percolating for a few weeks and after today's long, productive and very decisive discussion...!!feel free to amend, delete, re-write, add, chew or spit
Graduation Show
If the purpose of the exhibition is clear, the deadline fixed and the outcome more or less determined, the difficulty in producing a show is all behind the scenes. Yet, what is behind the façade of any show – especially of the white cube variety – is more than any one process can absorb. Behind the mechanics of the pristine is the overspill of the competing instincts for promotion and destruction, the funded and the marginalised, the acolytes and outsiders, in other words: polarity as a structure.
A better description for this may be the continuum, as it is often a dynamic degradation to entropy as well as the ecstasies of either a transcendent ego or subverted catharsis that offer a journey from one to the other.
If the language of success is utilised, then this very instrumentality is the self-same trend of cultural policy that funds the ‘marginal’, promotes an ‘inclusive agenda’, ‘regenerates’ through the major financing of architecture the minor side- effects of social renewal and now, can even be accused of ‘the artificial generation of an audience for participatory work’ . That is, whilst allowing the private purse strings to draw up those iconic moments of apparent liberation from the systematised culture industry. If the gradation is between the unknown creative accident to the entrepreneurial social event on which part of the scale is success able to be placed?
If the previous trade of ‘image maker’ is as much about fortitude and craft as the continuing demarcations of disciplines continue to assume then nothing really changes in this illusory mode of the autonomous art sphere. The context that dictates as much of the image content is as co-present in every sign as the form in which these images are struggling to escape. The industrial scales of image production and the incorporation of irony, self-reference and bathos leave little room for the outside of the outside, the ‘other of the other’ . It is self-evident that Devlieg and Suteu can both place the ‘commodification and consumption’ of images beyond the power of the artist but then elevate the artist into this very same opportunity for ‘media-powerful’ roles . One success does not however make an opportunity.
If we are to find a route through these contrasts, a flow chart that neither resolves into one linear route or the chaos of total multiplicity and contingent connections, then this must be a different type of route. As artistic multi-disciplinarity goes hand-in-hand with the inundation of the everyday what we are then mapping becomes a kind of phenomenological ‘joycian experiment’ a range of ‘think-feel-map modalities’. The ‘Rhumb line’ in Lawrence Weiner’s current show goes further in that it is the maritime route that is neither flat i.e. able to be mapped in a cartesian sense, nor the most direct i.e. defining a fixed teleological narrative. This complicates the notional structure of the two fixed points between which journeys take place. ‘Inherent in the rhumb line is a power structure, whereby one of the end points takes an unequal amount from the other.’
It is, necessarily, a flexible, adaptable negotiation, a suspended decision. An activity that works alongside but is never subsumed by, the metaphorical. ‘What does it mean to draw attention to this contracting and expanding structure of understanding?’ If the language of art is becoming increasingly fragmented through the sectionalised interests of different groups, then the notion of the individual, or ‘in-group’, artist/s, that create a path must also be radically altered.
We might have an apparently integrated ‘site’ in which a graduation of chaos is intimately connected to the ‘white cube’ exhibition - which is in itself a variety of interior and decorative architecture. The formless opens onto objects and objects allow a transaction, an interaction and a performance, between which other paradigms, of the ‘between’ and the ‘indeterminate’ can also find their niche...
However, taking the gallery space as a hegemonic structure leads to the same notion of the studio. What then of the ambivalent relationship between the work and the studio itself? The element of studio practise that most concerns artists, prior to an exhibition, is often miscalled ‘studio time’ as if this is the most precious of the artist’s resources. It is no doubt important, and sometimes becomes synonymous after the exhibitory moment with a search for ‘studio space’ and often the ‘community’ that goes with that. I would like to suggest the notion of the space itself, the nothing around which things form, and events take place, as being more vital. This is neither quantifiable nor limited to any straightforward economics: ‘Translating economics into culture is both irrational and logical’. Neither is this space the context itself that re-presents all relational expanded arts practices as teetering on the edge of utter contingency. It is not exclusively a social, extraverted, space. It is a space of absence, which does not necessarily precede presence, but is at least equally coterminous with any art appearing as art at all and to anyone that may, or may not, notice it.
p.s. all the footnotes are missing and it reads better as a word document so I'll stick it on the noticeboard...
pps no word from the scaffolders yet...now we might not need em.
Graduation Show
If the purpose of the exhibition is clear, the deadline fixed and the outcome more or less determined, the difficulty in producing a show is all behind the scenes. Yet, what is behind the façade of any show – especially of the white cube variety – is more than any one process can absorb. Behind the mechanics of the pristine is the overspill of the competing instincts for promotion and destruction, the funded and the marginalised, the acolytes and outsiders, in other words: polarity as a structure.
A better description for this may be the continuum, as it is often a dynamic degradation to entropy as well as the ecstasies of either a transcendent ego or subverted catharsis that offer a journey from one to the other.
If the language of success is utilised, then this very instrumentality is the self-same trend of cultural policy that funds the ‘marginal’, promotes an ‘inclusive agenda’, ‘regenerates’ through the major financing of architecture the minor side- effects of social renewal and now, can even be accused of ‘the artificial generation of an audience for participatory work’ . That is, whilst allowing the private purse strings to draw up those iconic moments of apparent liberation from the systematised culture industry. If the gradation is between the unknown creative accident to the entrepreneurial social event on which part of the scale is success able to be placed?
If the previous trade of ‘image maker’ is as much about fortitude and craft as the continuing demarcations of disciplines continue to assume then nothing really changes in this illusory mode of the autonomous art sphere. The context that dictates as much of the image content is as co-present in every sign as the form in which these images are struggling to escape. The industrial scales of image production and the incorporation of irony, self-reference and bathos leave little room for the outside of the outside, the ‘other of the other’ . It is self-evident that Devlieg and Suteu can both place the ‘commodification and consumption’ of images beyond the power of the artist but then elevate the artist into this very same opportunity for ‘media-powerful’ roles . One success does not however make an opportunity.
If we are to find a route through these contrasts, a flow chart that neither resolves into one linear route or the chaos of total multiplicity and contingent connections, then this must be a different type of route. As artistic multi-disciplinarity goes hand-in-hand with the inundation of the everyday what we are then mapping becomes a kind of phenomenological ‘joycian experiment’ a range of ‘think-feel-map modalities’. The ‘Rhumb line’ in Lawrence Weiner’s current show goes further in that it is the maritime route that is neither flat i.e. able to be mapped in a cartesian sense, nor the most direct i.e. defining a fixed teleological narrative. This complicates the notional structure of the two fixed points between which journeys take place. ‘Inherent in the rhumb line is a power structure, whereby one of the end points takes an unequal amount from the other.’
It is, necessarily, a flexible, adaptable negotiation, a suspended decision. An activity that works alongside but is never subsumed by, the metaphorical. ‘What does it mean to draw attention to this contracting and expanding structure of understanding?’ If the language of art is becoming increasingly fragmented through the sectionalised interests of different groups, then the notion of the individual, or ‘in-group’, artist/s, that create a path must also be radically altered.
We might have an apparently integrated ‘site’ in which a graduation of chaos is intimately connected to the ‘white cube’ exhibition - which is in itself a variety of interior and decorative architecture. The formless opens onto objects and objects allow a transaction, an interaction and a performance, between which other paradigms, of the ‘between’ and the ‘indeterminate’ can also find their niche...
However, taking the gallery space as a hegemonic structure leads to the same notion of the studio. What then of the ambivalent relationship between the work and the studio itself? The element of studio practise that most concerns artists, prior to an exhibition, is often miscalled ‘studio time’ as if this is the most precious of the artist’s resources. It is no doubt important, and sometimes becomes synonymous after the exhibitory moment with a search for ‘studio space’ and often the ‘community’ that goes with that. I would like to suggest the notion of the space itself, the nothing around which things form, and events take place, as being more vital. This is neither quantifiable nor limited to any straightforward economics: ‘Translating economics into culture is both irrational and logical’. Neither is this space the context itself that re-presents all relational expanded arts practices as teetering on the edge of utter contingency. It is not exclusively a social, extraverted, space. It is a space of absence, which does not necessarily precede presence, but is at least equally coterminous with any art appearing as art at all and to anyone that may, or may not, notice it.
p.s. all the footnotes are missing and it reads better as a word document so I'll stick it on the noticeboard...
pps no word from the scaffolders yet...now we might not need em.