book review FORMULAS FOR NOW, David Berridge

FORMULAS FOR NOW formulated by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Thames & Hudson 2008), ISBN 978-0-500-23850-9


Since 2006 the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has asked writers, artists, architects, scientists and mathematicians to contribute a "formula for the 21st century." A selection of responses to this request are gathered in this new book from Thames & Hudson, its purple cardboard covers and playful design straddling a boundary between art book, puzzle collection and - something about those thick covers, large type and color choice - toy bath book.

The result is a gathering of formulas by turns funny, frustrating, irritating and enlightening - and a little prone to that hinterland between profundity and the self-help book: "The solution is in the problem" reads the opening contribution. Formulas are presented in a range of styles - from the brief handwritten score to dense, expository prose, "genuine" and "mock" mathematics, and photographs. The book as a whole has a high octane visual design which sometimes seems intrinsic to the artists contribution, and sometimes seems the over zealous work of the books designer, seeking to counter some occasionally thin material.

Formulas by contemporary artists are interspersed with contributions which offer a kind of meta-commentary on the formula itself: such as an interview with Paul Elliman on his work on voice simulation, and the astonishing range of formulas needed to recreate a simple vowel sound. A reproduction of Albert Hoffman's scribbled LSD formula has a similar effect: prompting awareness of the social change stemming from such a casually scrawled formulation.

All of which offers some useful ballast to the A-list art ego on offer elsewhere. Brian Eno's careful, dry, diagrammatic formulation of Garrett Hardin's "Essay on Ethical Implications of Carrying Capacity" prompts all the negatives about stampeding over-eagerly into other disciplines, taking oneself and the form too seriously. Similarly, it's hard not to feel a qualitative distinction between those - such as Yona Friedman - for whom diagrammatic formulation has long been a vital part of their work, and contributers coming up with clever, funny, one-offs about their creative process. Although, having said that, perhaps none of this matters as long as long as the formula maker maintains a dexterous, shifting intelligence, whose gaps and contradictions often evoke the structures of the comic.

Obrist outlines the books lineage in the intricate drawings of Roger Penrose's Roads to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004). A productive - and much earlier - comparison could also be made to the Assembling anthologies supervised by Richard Kostelanetz, or Emmett Williams Anthology of Concrete Poetry, in which one finds a similar range of image-text combinations, often seeking to embody a range of information in a condensed, almost ideographic form. More specifically, the form of a page for some image-text combination evokes the fluxus score.

But this is also where the differences kick in. It's hard not to see this kind of project as an implied rebuke of fluxus as all game, lacking its own real social and intellectual connections to scientists, architects and mathematicians. But reading Formulas For Now posed some counter-arguments:

1. Scores left open future possibilities whilst formulas offer some summation by a Great Mind. Scores were a self-consciously marginal cultural activity, whilst Formulas are by those keen to be seen at the centre of cultural production.

2. The shift from scores to formulas suggest our model of cultural reception has become much less performative and participatory. There's a sub-text to the formulas that risks re-inventing a world of elitist, experts, something that certainly seems implied by Nancy Spero's amusing contribution which begins:


The main thing is that no one (or) no one shall (to be decided) does (or) do anything that would be detrimental to society either physically or mentally. There will be a huge number of scientists and psychiatrists that would monitor the world and Hans Ulrich would be Head Monitorist.(139)


That said, I think there might be another reason for my somewhat disgruntled response to this book: Formulas as contradictory and bad-tempered. If some are annoying for being overly casual, others become boring for being too dense. This perversity is part of their nature, at least when the formulas are aesthetic rather than mathematical. My favorites are those that recognize the formulaic quality of artistic work itself, and don't shift from that into mock-profundity - such as Rosmarie Trockel's handwritten fax that says "Think, pig!" or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's photo of an installation on which she has written TROPICALIZATION in large letters on the white wall.

Despite all these reservations Formulas for Now is still an exciting read, but to realize this I had to make a mental shift away from its contributer list as a map of Obrist's professional network. Like fluxus scores, formulas at their best demonstrate a particular form of intelligence, of processing and activating information, in a form that, through being both linguistic and visual, also becomes spatial, multi-dimensional, and, seemingly, instantaneous. It's a kind of thought that offers to remove these contradictions.

That it remains viable as an artistic strategy is perhaps best illustrated not by this book at all but by a another recent exploration of score and formula: no.w.here lab's Instructions For Films . This work, like Formulas for Now is at its best when engaging the exacting force field of the formula: between joke and mathematics; order and disorder; language and image; proposition, hint, realization.

Above Copied from: http://www.moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2008/10/booknotes-formulas-for-now.html

A Withholding Criticism: Susan Hiller’s Critical Practice of writing and Talking, David Berridge

Susan Hiller, The Provisional Texture of Reality: Selected Talks and Texts, 1977-2007, ed. Alexandra M.Kokoli (JRP Ringier, Zurich, & Les Presses du réel, Dijon, 2008). ISBN 978-3-905829-56-3.


There is a delicate balance throughout the thirty years of talks, catalogue essays, introductions and interviews that comprise The Provisional Texture of Reality. If Hiller demonstrates a verbal facility in regard both to her own work and broader structures and histories of art and thought, she is also acutely aware that if she could just talk or write about the issues involved then there wouldn't be any point making the art itself.

So the writings here give rein to that analytical verve, but always hold back, maintaining a space for the art work itself to function. Re-phrase that as the balance between logic, reason and coherence alongside something more mysterious and unfathomable, and an argument could be made for this being the key subject of Hiller's artistic output as a whole since the 1970's.

This critical-reserve concerns both her own art work and that of the artists about whom Hiller talks and writes. The first section of this book, then, is comprised of explorations-cum-tributes concerning Tarkovsky, O'Keefe, Helio Oiticica, Yves Klein, Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock and Kurt Schwitters. Hiller's tone varies. Her Pollock piece is the closest she comes to art history, seeking to unfold a web of underappreciated artists and influences she saw as leading up to Pollock. The piece on Tarkovsky moves quickest from its ostensible subject to a broader web of ideas and her own practice. But perhaps that is itself a tribute to the astonishing relevance Hiller finds in Solaris: its existence, like the other work she reflects upon, as a kind of viral cultural contagion.

Often - as was no doubt expected by those inviting her to speak at numerous themed conferences and symposia - Hiller is weaving out from each artist's work into a broader web of cultural connections as a way of connecting to her own work. There is a sense throughout Provisional Texture of attaining some clear ground where the self, the work, and the broader culture are all held in balance, and prioritising one is more choice-in-the-moment than imperative. The opening of "O'Keefe As I See Her" states a method applicable to many of the essays in this collection:


In a way, this is a collection of detours around the subject, circling in on it. It's like a drawing, where the negative space is as important as the marks, and where individual marks don't mean much on their own. In the process, I've found my lines of thought converging or overlapping to define a tentative shape that may represent a sighting or wish for something that will emerge more clearly in the future. (33)


Hiller's balance and reserve doesn't stop her making astute critical points. In the O'Keefe essay she raises many issues that have preoccupied academic art historians, but always founded on that initial statement of ambulatory method. Her critical response comes from her ongoing attempt to think (inter-) contextually. So here is O'Keefe in relation to her paintings, in relation to lots of other painters, to her depiction in Stieglitz photos, in relation to Hiller's own biography of engagement with O'Keefe, to Linda Nochlin's gender focussed criticism, and so on and so on.

Essays on Oiticica and Klein focus on the difficulties of preserving anything like an accurate and authentic picture of their work. What we can access of Oiticica's work is "only a collapsed sign of the larger work he made available...relics of a dead past." Klein, by contrast, "took death into account when he made it explicit in his practice of deliberately creating works that were already 'only traces" (55). Hence " his relics do not seem to convey more to those who knew the artist personally than to those who didn't." (55)

Such concerns with the object and related processes of collecting, categorising, curatorship and the museological, relate to Hiller's background as an anthropologist. This emerges here as a biographical detail, an obvious influence on her intellectual approach, and a source of irritation to an artist often finding herself victim of, as she would see it, a lazy critical willingness to identify her works as exhibiting anthropological tendencies. If Hiller wanted to work within anthropological frameworks, her own impatient, somewhat irritated position seems to be, then she wouldn't have abandoned her original career plans.

This is to a degree somewhat disingenuous because Hiller, at least early on in her career, cultivates and depends upon the connection to anthropology as both a source of income and that through which the distinctiveness of her work can be articulated. Here Hiller reviews two exhibitions that, via content and context, weave a fraught amalgam of art and anthropology. In these essays - from 1979 and 1986 - Hiller is not accumulating a "collection of detours" that slowly circle in associatively on their subject. The ideas that lead to these exhibitions are colonial hangovers, and Hiller's aim is to highlight and skewer them with as much clarity as possible.

Thus her review of Sacred Circles: 2,000 Years of North American Art (Hayward Gallery, 7 Oct 1977- 16 Jan 1978) builds to where the show becomes - at least reading about it thirty years later - a kind of anti-credo for her work as a whole:


This exhibition, then, is really about using 'art' to cover up some historical truths; about using aesthetic judgements as a way of avoiding moral judgements; about expressing admiration for spiritual values while manifesting only materialistic ones; about admiring the 'work' while ignoring its meanings; about voiding symbols of their complexity by eliminating their context; and about valuing art objects more than societies.
To say that the purpose of the exhibition is 'that this art should at least be properly regarded for the sake of a better understanding among peoples', is, at the very least, an inadequate way to render justice to the peoples whose works are represented. (101)


Hiller's argument is all the more convincing for how - on the occasion of a review-essay for Studio International - she moves from condemnation towards demonstrating some practical alternatives. Several pages are given over to models of the kind of catalogue entry a non-colonial ethnography and curating would practice. Where an existing catalogue essay refers to "a wampum belt [that] served as a gift, also as a binding symbol of an agreement," Hiller appends to the beginning of the entry the note: "THE MAKING OF TREATIES WITH THE NATIVE AMERICANS WAS CONSIDERED PURELY GESTURAL BY THE WHITES." (96)

This efficacy throughout Hiller's counter-practice prevents many of the pieces in The Provisional Texture of Reality from being circumstance-bound musings. It also explains how Hiller negotiates the divide between artistic and academic, the creative and the theoretical - happily critiquing the later whilst holding to herself its authority.

Hiller herself explores all these issues in her still clear and powerful talk "Women, Language, and Truth", presented at a panel on 'Women's Practice in Art', organised by the Women's Free Art Alliance" in 1977. Hiller's central conviction is the impossibility of anybody or any-thing being fully represented by any available position. Noting how we are each "simultaneously the beneficiary of our cultural heritage and the victim of it" (115), Hiller goes on to observe that "It is always a question of following a thought, first incoherent, later more expressible, through its process of emergence out of and during the inconsistencies of experience, into language."

All this in the first two paragraphs. By the end of the talks two pages Hiller has offered, not a conclusion - "To sum up would be premature, obviously" - but three working proposals that clarify her non-positional and largely upper case free strategies:


1.all my ideas begin as part of the necessity for truth-telling in art practice;

2.not being entirely at home in the ordinary, dominant languages make this less than simple. At the same time, it gives me a wide range of options; and

3.the greatest self-betrayal for an artist is not indulging in anarchic or careless opposition to rational politics, but in fashioning acceptable SEMBLANCES of truth. (117)


Of course, over the time span and career of this book, there is the position of the Self to consider. Or, rather, such a career as Hiller's has to find its own way of not becoming a fixed position, whilst exploring a focussed range of themes, and meeting the professional and commercial pressures to make new work. Hiller herself articulates her anxieties over this in "An Incomplete Text on Commissions", a - perhaps tellingly - previously unpublished text from 2003. It also explains something of why From the Freud Museum has become so emblematic of Hiller's oeuvre.

Comprehensive as this collection is, it remains necessary to view it alongside Barabara Einzig's Thinking About Art: Conversations with Susan Hiller, which gives a sense of the different forms - and image-text relationships - Hiller's lectures have employed. Provisional Textures is poised between a Collected Writings and a snapshot of a writing and talking practice as a place for theorising, engagement and public address. Even though some texts - like Incomplete - gives a presence to Hiller's private writing, this is not a place for notes and other linguistic doodling - as collections of artists' writings often fetishise.

By the third section of this collection, however, I had begun to have a mental picture of Hiller, sifting through a wad of invitations to conferences on art and dreams, art and surrealism, art and anthropology, art and any paranormal phenomena you care to mention, trying to select those with enough of a space of difference to warrant the inevitable repetition. One that seems to warrant the effort is a conference on Body & Soul in Edinburgh in 2000. Hiller concludes her talk by noting, as the book began, her interest in "perspectives where figure-ground relationships can be allowed to shift" (249) and how "not editing-out and not forcing strange juxtapositions and unanswered questions to conform to theory is an aspect of my style, almost a signature."

But the talk also offers a chance to develop ideas around the body that are unarticulated elsewhere in this book. It suggests a motivation for these writings: let the flow of one's professional life as an artist, the opportunities that arise to talk and write, be a way of revitalising thinking and artistic practice itself. In her writing-talking about the body Hiller attempts a methodology that avoids becoming 'a position' - using one's knowledge and abilities, but always willing to start again, refusing certainties and obsessive originality, looking for clarity, the genuine engagement with the highly familiar:



The word 'body' seems very now, very contemporary. The word 'soul' sounds romantic and deeply unfashionable.

The word 'body' makes me very cross when used in connection with contemporary exhibitions, art of the body, the body in art, body art, etc., etc. In my opinion, body can be evoked but not represented. Pictures of bodies I don't think have much to do with 'body.'

Body is felt from the inside ... body is empathy. Body is communicated through touch and smell as much as sight. Body in art would be traces, stains, smears, sounds, not images. Body is blurry ... Handwriting is body. Voice is body.


Above copied from: http://moremilkyvette.blogspot.com/2009/05/withholding-criticism-susan-hillers.html

Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture, Elizabeth Seaton

Margaret Morse is well-known to students of media studies for her critically astute analyses of media culture. Articles such as "Talk, Talk, Talk: The Space of Discourse in TV News, Sportscasts, Talk Shows and Advertising" (1985); "The Television News Personality and Credibility: Reflections on the News in Transition" (1986); and "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television" (1990) are now considered "classics" of the field if, at the very least, their continued presence on course syllabuses is evidence of enduring value. It was Morse who provided an explanation of the crucial role of the TV news anchor as "the personality in the machine," that is, as the enunciator who breeches the "wall" of the television screen to build a subjective link to the viewer. And it was Morse who, long before most cultural studies and political economy were to catch on, undertook an analysis of the synergistic relations of television, freeways, and shopping malls as analogous media, interrelated in their de-realized mundaneness as machines for what Raymond Williams once termed "mobile privatization."

The above articles are included in this new collection of Morse's writings (published under Kathleen Woodward's Theories of Contemporary Culture series) along with other essays on video art and cyberculture. Morse publishes not only in academic venues, but in art and photography journals such as Afterimage or Art in America and exhibition catalogues, and this disciplinary breadth is evident in the essays assembled here. The book as a whole is indicative of a scholar involved in the interdisciplinary pursuits of media and cultural studies, moving from close examinations of different media and media forms to consider their wider cultural implications in a given historical moment. While an eclectic collection, the potential for confusion is tempered by a rigorous conceptual and theoretical structure.

Despite what appears to be the foregrounding of things technological in the title, Morse is predominately interested in pursuing the cultural relations of our cyber-age, or what she describes as "the far greater complexities of a postindustrial and postnational socio-political information economy" (p. 4). The path into this territory however begins at the television screen. As Morse's previous works have argued, the very success of television as a medium of social control is due to its expertise at subjective relations: its ability to establish a type of virtual interpersonal world with the viewer. Morse thus extends television's premise to examine how newer "cyber" technologies continue with such subjective relations in ever more sophisticated degrees. Television then represents an "interim phase" in a process in which machine-human relations become ever more personal and subjective. For Morse, it is "left to the genres of cyberculture to develop the full implications" (p. 4) of a form of social and cultural maintenance based not just upon subjective identification, but inhabitation and even embodiment. We, rather than the machines, become the cultural transmitters.

Lest one find Morse's thematic structure too teleological or characteristic of the emancipatory science fiction of computer marketing, what she examines throughout these articles are the contradictory processes of technological hegemony. This "evolution" itself is based upon a paradox: while our work and private lives are increasing characterized by impersonal relations with machines, these same machines become more refined and elaborate in their personal and subjective means of expression. In effect, our machines become more cultured. As Morse argues, information, which is impersonal and ephemeral, must be "reengaged with personality and information.": "[T]he more abstract and removed information has become from everyday life and the perceptual field, the more virtual the substitute context of subjectivity in a here-and-now at the foundation of cyberculture will be" (p. 6). Such virtual relationships--personal, subjective, and embodied--are the primary focus of Morse's book and act as the thread by which each essay is bound.

The book is divided into three sections, each of which is indicative of this overall concern. The first, "Virtualities as Fictions of Presence," establishes historical and conceptual premises for the book as a whole. Morse's fine introductory chapter offers the conceptual framework and the theoretical tools (theories of language and subjectivity) for understanding succeeding chapters. Her second chapter, "The News as Performance," expands upon ideas regarding social power and news discourse originally found in "The Television News Personality and Credibility." The second section, entitled "Immersion in Image Worlds: Virtuality and Everyday Life," is comprised of essays which examine technologies and technological spaces (or more aptly, non-spaces), which bear greatly upon the conduct of our daily lives but of which we have only a tangential awareness. The essay "An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television" is included in this section, as are two others which respectively concern the development of television graphics as a precursor to the imagery of virtual reality, and the perceptual relationships between culinary and cyber cultures. Section three, "Art and Media Environments," considers the analytic and exploratory work undertaken by artists using media technology, beginning with the older form of video installation and moving to a discussion of the construction of subjectivity in art which creates virtual environments.

As Morse reminds us in her introductory chapter, the "new" abilities of cyberculture (especially their "interactive" and "telematic" capacities), have radically altered our understanding of the function of images. Only a decade ago, under the scrutiny of a "politics of representation," an image was recognized as a discursive construction which conveys situated knowledges and powers. Today, images ferry not only a politics of meaning or place, but an ever-more-tangible "aspect of agency," in which the remote control of images (via telematics or telepresence) can be used to inflict immediate and potentially deadly change on the real world. An obvious case in point is the Gulf War, widely noted for the ways in which its mediation resembled a video game. What are the ethical costs of a war in which it is images, rather than flesh and blood people, which are the primary agents of destruction? What happens to a sense of social accountability or even humanness when telematic images allow one to be removed from the consequences of one's actions?

Virtuality is dematerialized--it exists in effect, but not in actuality. The composition of virtual worlds (such as the evil empire of Saddam Hussein) carries with it certain ontological insecurities which undermine our sense of reality and perhaps ultimately, empathy. The virtue of virtual reality is that no one really lives there. And thus, as Morse explains, the technological apparatuses of fiction and artifice used in the mediation and conflict of the Gulf War imparted a sense of distance which influenced the conduct of both bombing crews and the "moral remoteness" of Americans towards those who actually suffered from the effects of the war. One senses that the continuing air strikes by the U.S. against an already devastated Iraq, and the mute complicity of its and Canada's media and populace, are made possible by the conflict's mediation by virtual telematic technologies. As Morse writes, "'we' met the enemy and 'he' was not just dehumanized, he was a nonentity, for there was no one there" (p. 30).

The increasing presence of these machines in our everyday lives and the consequences of remoteness and disengagement which they convey also has its effects closer to home. If one is to judge by the promotional discourse of material culture, it appears as though security has become a pervasive concern within the lives of North Americans. Increasingly urged to protect ourselves against the threat of an unpredictable world, we are offered the defences of wired cars, cellular phones, "smart" houses, gated communities, private police forces, and the video surveillance of what remains of public space. Such consumer technologies invariably promise to help control a world which is said to be out of control, to fend off a reality which is felt to be more dangerous and difficult to manage. Paradoxically, the means towards this retreat involves the increasing technological engagement with, and mediation of, "reality." So, too, the concurrent growth of private enclosures which are worlds away from anxiety and fear: the theme parks, shopping malls, and mega-movie palaces which offer a separate and exclusive clientele the utopias or "no-places" of a virtual reality.

This brings me to the possible limitations of Morse's analysis. While Morse is committed to the cultural implications of cybertechnology--in particular its ramifications for human subjectivity and language--there is room for a more extended discussion about the political economy of these new machines and the cultural industries they support. One case in point concerns her conclusion to the chapter "The News as Performance," which incorporates much of the analytic thesis of the earlier "Television News Personality" article. In a discussion of "post-television," Morse sees the potential of a "public sphere" for cyberculture limited to a question of access: only 20% of people will be able to afford the requisite technology. And yet, what really inhibits the processes of a "public sphere" (the very term conveys an optimism I no longer have), is the privatization and/or corporatization of public space. Can virtual space ever be considered public space? Today, the erstwhile problem of access (the exclusion of women and slaves from the agora) is an effect of privatization. It is in this respect that Morse could delve deeper into the structural factors at work in the political economy of cyberculture. What, for instance, is the relationship between the growth of private, virtual worlds and a class structure in North America increasingly described as "feudal" or "oligarchical"? What bearing do the abstractions of finance capital have upon cultural expression (wherein money has now only speculative, rather than concrete value, and is mobile, rather than attached to a locus of production)?

Leaving these questions aside, the book is a careful and rigorous analysis of media both old and new, and is often stunning in its insights. Much previous writing on "cyberculture" has tended towards either simple-minded cheerleading or overly obtuse critiques laden with techno-jargon and self-important puffery. Morse's book offers an informed discussion about the practices and process of virtual machines from someone who clearly has experienced them firsthand, and who has the wisdom and critical distance to tackle the complexities and contradictions of such wondrous machines. One can only wish that the cheerleaders would take note.

References

Morse, Margaret. (1985). Talk, talk, talk: The space of discourse in TV news, sportscasts, talk shows and advertising. Screen, 26(2), 1-11.

Morse, Margaret. (1986). The television news personality and credibility: Reflections on the news in transition. In Tania Modleski (Ed.), Studies in entertainment: Critical approaches to mass culture (pp. 55-79). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Morse, Margaret. (1990). An ontology of everyday distraction: The freeway, the mall and television. In Patricia Mellancamp (Ed.), Logics of television: Essays in cultural criticism (pp. 193-221). Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

---Above copied from http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1103/1009

Bernadette Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory, Meredith Jones

(2006)

Cambridge and London: MIT Press. ISBN 0262232472.


Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media (1964) that 'the medium is the message', meaning not only that subject matter and technical form are intrinsically tied together but that, crucially, the mode of delivery has more importance than its content. Later he amended his famous sound bite to 'the medium is the massage', a variation that has been interpreted in many ways but is perhaps most interestingly understood as a distinctly corporeal notion about the ways bodies are touched and affected by media. Bernadette Wegenstein takes this relationship between media and bodies and expands it within her thesis that bodies and media are so profoundly interlinked in the contemporary world that they are interchangeable. The final chapter of her excellent book Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory is simply titled 'The Medium is the Body' -- by this stage of the argument an almost superfluous statement. She poses her key line of reasoning pace Merleau-Ponty, who declares that 'the medium that signifies the body, its representation, no longer is any different from the "raw material" of the body itself' (32). So the body is mediation, and mediation is the body.

Starting with this idea, the book works through a series of popular and philosophical understandings of the body that, at least since the sixteenth century, have swung between holism and fragmentation. By holism, Wegenstein means notions that see the body as a whole, as a system of inter-related psychic and physical parts that become less meaningful if separated. By fragmentation, she refers to the idea of the body-in-pieces, an anatomised and objectified body understood as a set of individual components. This fragmented body idea came to the fore in high modernity and maintains force in contemporary self-care practices such as exercise, dieting and cosmetic surgery, which posit the body as a controllable, owned project of which each part needs to be individually managed. And of course, women's bodies are understood far more in this fragmented context than men's bodies. Wegenstein notes, however, how notions of women's bodies have developed and morphed, and how female bodies in particular are currently multiple sites of potentiality, and essentially unstable, largely because they come into being with media:

No longer a place of exclusion and sexualization, female bodies (and I emphasize the plural) can now be described as the accumulation of different layers of media. In this model of subjectivity, identity is a process that never comes to a halt, as bodily layers can be taken off one by one and rearranged anew. (21)

Wegenstein carefully navigates between holism and fragmentation, suggesting that the body is not an intermediary or translator between world and subject, but rather something that unifies subjective wholeness and objective fragmentation. Thus, she claims that the history of the body needs to be understood as 'a gradual "unconcealment" -- to speak Heideggerese -- or revealing of the body as mediation' (35, italics in original). Part of this mediation is a continuing and irresolvable oscillation or dialogue between fragmentation and holism, which she argues are twinned both in history and in contemporary understandings of the body.

Chapter one, 'Making Room for the Body' offers a very thorough theoretical and historical review of relevant literature, covering image theory, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, philosophy, corporeal feminism, and media theory. Wegenstein argues that the disciplines of media criticism and body criticism are inextricably linked, and supports her assertion by deploying analyses of new media art. The example-laden approach that she takes throughout the book implicitly backs up one of her arguments, which is that postmodern or posthuman bodies can only be understood if we ask 'concrete questions concerning concrete bodies' (17). These 'concrete questions' are ones that address the coevolution humans share with technologies. They are questions such as, 'What is physical?', 'What is digital?', 'How do these two concepts intersect in our media-saturated world, especially when that world is bulging with images of human bodies and body parts?', and 'Has the body itself become a medium, or was it always one?'. The idea that our 'meat' may eventually be left behind as we upload our consciousnesses is carefully dismissed, as are humanist notions that are suspicious of new communication technologies because of their disembodying capabilities. Wegenstein argues instead that in a postmodern environment where bodies continually 'enter' flat screens and where subjects invest deeply in surfaces, 'body and medium reemerge as one flesh' (148, italics in original).

Chapter two, 'Body Performances from 1960s Wounds to 1990s Extensions' focuses on performance art, and traces this form through its collapse into the body to its extension of the body. For example, the artist Günter Brus declared in 1965 that he was 'no longer content to paint on canvas and thus lays hands on himself. So he besmears himself, simultaneously hinting at self-mutilation. . .' (39). This sometimes-abusive turning-in on the body by avant garde artists gradually gave way to 1990s performance art that extended into the digital realm. In this art, real bodies were substitutes for -- or subsumed by -- their digital representations, and Wegenstein suggests that Australian performance artist Stelarc, who began in the 1960s with hook-and-skin suspensions, demonstrates this development perfectly. Stelarc now merges his body with technology: his art is often controlled by internet-facilitated activities. Rather than bringing art into the body, as the 1960s wound artists did, 1990s extension artists such as Stelarc flatten their bodies, dispersing them into the digital realm or extending them with a range of prosthetics. Wegenstein argues that through the latter part of the twentieth century artists gradually became more aware of processes of mediation and hence began to conflate environment, materiality and content in their works. Importantly, in both 'wound' and 'extension' art forms the human body became a canvas itself, rather than that which is merely represented. What she traces in this chapter is the ways in which the body, in body or performance art, moved from being artistic raw material to being something understandable mainly through media technologies. She thus argues that 'corporeality and mediality have not only been staged together, but have revealed themselves as indistinguishable' (64).

Chapter three, 'How Faces Have become Obsolete' was the most interesting chapter for me, tracing, pace Deleuze & Guattari, how faces are no longer the 'window to the soul'. She shows how faces have been replaced by any number of other body parts, each of which may become a free-floating indicator of essential being: 'any body part, big or small, interior or exterior, can attain dominance over the rest of the body with fluidity characteristic of the synecdoche' (85). This is demonstrated through close readings of several contemporary print advertisements: a health insurance company uses a breast to represent 'fertility, nurturing, reliability' and a cosmetics firm uses a headless body to sell a skin product. They both support Wegenstein's thesis that we have moved into a representational paradigm in which 'it is not necessarily behind faces that we expect the person to be revealed. Faces are becoming obsolete' (89). Even parts of the internal body -- blood, tissue, organs, and DNA -- once hidden and mysterious, now indicate identity, a concept explored through analyses of the Visible Human Project, the Human Genome Project, and the plasticated body work of anatomist Gunther von Hagens. Any body part can now operate as a signifier of the whole body, which is why we so rarely see classical facial portrait-style images in contemporary advertising. And further, in a brilliant insight, she notes that when the head and face are featured in popular culture, they are often figured much like accessories: one German fashion advertisement even has its model declaring that her head is her 'favourite fashion accessory' (93). This indicates what Wegenstein calls the 'postfacial' era, in which heads and faces crown bodies only as chosen or modified extras because the self is expressed so easily via any body part.

While the face may have become obsolete as a signifier of the self, if any organ can be said to dominate representations of bodies in popular culture, it is surely the skin. There is an intriguing section in this chapter called 'Sur-face', which shows that 'skin can now cover anything of importance' (97). Wegenstein points out that a generation brought up on movies featuring serial killers making 'skin-suits' from their victims is readily positioned to accept the notion that skin can be 'separated from its natural body-environment, that is, from its function of surfacing a body' (104). The argument is strongly supported by reference to advertisements, contemporary art and speculative architecture. She shows just how extensive skin has become: indeed, by noting how each of her examples works with skin and its literal or metaphorical connections to non-skin (watches, sculpture, room interiors), she demonstrates how skin is no longer seen as a barrier between inner and outer body, but is now a connection between self and other: 'the surface of the skin is both endogenous and exogenous' (97). One memorably spooky example comes from new media artists Aziz + Cucher. Their 'Interior Study #3' is a digital room with geometric surfaces made of what looks like living human skin, pores and all. This work perhaps most succinctly supports Wegenstein's argument that the ways we engage with skin in contemporary culture indicate that interiority and exteriority have merged. One of the main strengths of this book is the abundance of ingenious and fascinating examples to back up what could otherwise be rather esoteric claims.

In chapter four, 'The Medium Is the Body', Wegenstein argues that body criticism must be part of media criticism because of the 'mutual dependence upon and influence of body and mediation' (121). This notion is supported by numerous examples from contemporary architectural practice, after first tracing a history of the relation between inside and outside through twentieth century architecture. In modernity, buildings actively considered the outside environment in order to inform the inside; in postmodernity, distinctions between outside and inside were famously described by Jameson as lost, causing spatial bewilderment. But Wegenstein suggests that contemporary cutting edge architectures 'propose something even beyond the collapse of inside and outside' (130). Buildings have become bodies, and inside and outside are symbiotically merged, or folded together. A striking example is Diller + Scofidio's Blur Building, demonstrating what she calls 'deep surface architecture'. This 'building' is a body of mist hovering above a lake, approached by a bridge -- exactly when one has entered it isn't clear, and its borders and density are constantly changing, according to current weather conditions. As an immersive, living, wet atmosphere this architecture is as organic as its human inhabitants, and body and medium have merged. Architecture here is conceived as 'a continued or extended embodiment. . .as primordial mediation' (160).

Wegenstein's textual analysis of images and objects is refreshing in a field that is so often full of general statements sitting peacefully unbothered by meaningful examples. Although many of her arguments are very broad, indeed paradigmatic, each point is backed up with an interesting illustration from the real world, analysed and examined in line with her arguments. This is a dense book, packed with theoretical references and ideas-within-ideas. Sometimes the prose is hard to read -- this writing style would be a challenge for undergraduates -- but it is well worth persevering with. There is plenty of clarification, and various theories are very well explained, particularly in the first chapter. The argument that discussions and histories of the body are only meaningful in context of analyses of the media that comprise embodiment -- in other words, that media theory and theories of the body must work together -- could (and should) have a powerful ripple effect in academia where these two disciplines are still very often separated.

Relations between real and virtual have been utterly problematised, and boundaries between digital and physical are increasingly hazy. This book is a real attempt to explain how these arenas intersect, and indeed how they create each other. This first chapter is an essential addition to corporeal feminism, although I was disappointed that the focus on women's bodies wasn't returned to in the conclusion. Perhaps other writers will be inspired to fill that gap. Each of the other chapters works well by itself and could be set for a variety of graduate classes examining media and embodiment. Finally, this book indeed got under my skin, clarifying for me the knowledge that body theory and media theory must become linked, because embodiment is always experienced through media, and the body itself is a medium. The skin doesn't just act as a barrier but extends into the world, connecting our bodies to the bodies of others and to the multitude of screens and various other environments we are one with.

References
McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.

McLuhan, M., and Fiore, Q. with Agel, J. (1967) The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.

Meredith Jones is a lecturer in digital media and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. Her book, Skintight: An Anatomy of Cosmetic Surgery, will be published by Berg in February 2008. She is currently working on a book about Container Technologies.

Above copied from: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/161/142

Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, Midori Yoshimoto, Mika Eglinton

Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York, Midori Yoshimoto

(New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2005)

This book, which derives from Midori Yoshimoto’s doctoral dissertation submitted to Rutgers University in 2002, insightfully documents and historicises the long-time underrated and overlooked works and lives of five Japanese women artists involved in the New York avant-garde movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s: Yayoi Kusama, Yôko Ono, Takako Saito, Mieko Shiomi and Shigeko Kubota. According to the author, this is the first in-depth comparative examination of these artists to fill the gaps in both American and Japanese contemporary art history and illuminate the underrepresented intercultural dialogue between East and West in this revolutionary era for performance art.

Given the prolific body of work that these female artists’ produced, spanning nearly half a century, it is astonishing to discover that their achievements in performance and intermedia arts had been neglected in scholarship until Yoshimoto’s comprehensive thesis from a feminist perspective finally appeared in 2005. While Kusama, Ono and Kubota gained recognition from the late 1980s onwards, mostly through media exposure and international exhibitions, Yoshimoto’s monographs on Saito and Shiomi were the first substantial literature about the two artists to be published.

Even though performance art itself has had a position on the periphery of canonical art history until recently, there is a much more noticeable delay in the assessment of female artists over male artists from the 1960s onwards. Yoshimoto’s narration reminds us that it is impossible to discuss arts and academia without bringing issues of gender and race into scrutiny. It is certain that Yoshimoto is aware of the politics and performance or peformativities of gender and race, and also that she realises the danger of essentialism inherent in grouping and analysing individual artists based on gender and race. In effect, some female artists like Kusama and Kubota show reluctance and sometimes repulsion to feminist interpretations. Although the historical background to why feminism was negatively received even by female artists would have benefited from a more detailed explanation, I still agree with her application of a feminist reading.

In order to describe the style of Japanese female artists who employ their own bodies and actions and those of their audiences as means of expression and communication, Yoshimoto uses the term performance, along with its derivative forms coined by J. L. Austin and then applied by Kristine Stiles and Judith Butler, performative and perfomativities. Although the term ‘performance art’ actually did not achieve recognition until the late 1970s, Yoshimoto intends to use the words retroactively to refer to a form that appeared in the early twentieth century and reappeared in the 1960s. She also adopts the word intermedia in a similar way to Fluxus Artist, Dick Higgins: dissolution and transgression of the barrier between art and life, on the supposition that these five artists are always working in the very intermedia that avoids the possibility of categorisation in one existent medium. These new types of media freed the artists not only from hierarchically bound Japanese traditional art forms and their associations, such as Japanese-style painting and Western-style painting, and also the conventional lifestyle for women within the molds of ‘Good Wives and Wise Mothers.’
In the introduction to Into Performance, Yoshimoto’s main intentions are explained as follows:

I consider that performance helped the five artists to free themselves from existing preconceptions about art as well as from their culturally constructed behaviours. Into Performance also refers to the transformation of these artists’ lifestyle [sic] from that of traditionally confined Japanese women to that of internationally active artists. In its expanded definition, performance here suggests the five artists’ self-empowerment through the acquisition of their artistic language and their ability to articulate that language. Through tracing these artists’ transformations, this study aims to illuminate their experimental sprit. (2)

In order to describe the unwritten history of the Japanese female artists, Yoshimoto poignantly interweaves numerous facts drawn from her research material including interviews with the artists and valuable photographs, and then divides the whole into six units. In particular, she illuminates the artists’ formative periods in Japan and the transitional period from their homeland to New York, an area that has lacked critical scrutiny so far. By so doing, Yoshimoto intends to present socio-cultural issues surrounding Japanese women in the postwar era.

In Chapter 1, titled ‘Historical Background and Common Issues,’ Yoshimoto situates Kusama, Ono, Saito, Shiomi and Kubota in domestic, educational and social contexts, and depicts the problems and challenges that these female artists had in common. Using this method, Yoshimoto reads private lives as political ones in order to analyse their performances/live-art. As such, the subsequent chapters, which are case studies dedicated to the five artists with a consistent focus on their identity, performance art and lives as Japanese female artists, are effectively presented.

As a result, both the common aspects that these women share as well as their inter-relationships and peculiarities are addressed. Having relatively wealthy backgrounds and high levels of education, they aspired to build independent positions as artists. They rebuked female submissive attitudes in the conservative Japanese art world and patriarchal society in general, and thus left the homeland for New York to explore their originality and creativity. In New York they experienced the explosion of New Music, Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art and Minimalism. Inhaling the air of free expression in the wave of counter-culture, they were active not only in creating and showing their art works but also in international performance scenes by connecting the avant-garde art streams in New York and Tokyo. Their work was instrumental in the development and dissemination of performance art. However, their contribution was often disregarded by fellow artists and critics, who were mostly white men, at that time. As Yoshimoto points out by quoting a note by Sally Banes, several famous male artists involved in Pop Art such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselmann used female bodies merely as sexual objects to be consumed by the male gazes of their follower critics. This was a very serious dilemma for these risk-takers who flew to a ‘liberal’ New York, in the so-called land of freedom and the nation of immigrants, only to find themselves trapped in more complicated webs of discrimination and marginalisation. To make matters worse, the memory of World War Two, particularly the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, as well as the widely spread stereotypical Orientalist illusion of passive yet sexually promiscuous and available Japanese women, tended to cast a dark shadow over the recognition of Japanese female artists in the United States. Although their minority status and exoticism occasionally attracted the attention of the American media, just as in Japan where the art world paid attention to a select few female artists, female and moreover non-white artists were rarely regarded as equal to their white male peers.

These Japanese female artists often struggle with being ‘foreigners’ or ‘outsiders’ in both Japan and the United States and their mainstream art industries. But despite this adversity, they tried to turn the disadvantages into advantages by exploiting their bodies and circumstances as alternative and subversive sites of performance. Moreover, the artists share introspective and contemplative tendencies using self-reflective objects such as mirrors, water, portraits, and video images. The sense of outsider often allows one to have more objective observations of the self and others.
In the epilogue, Yoshimoto aptly quotes the words of Ono in conversation with David Ross, in conjunction with the exhibition Yes Yôko Ono at the Japan Society:

I’ve always felt like an outsider, that people did not understand me. In a way, I created a power as an outsider. I mean, being an outsider is an incredible power, actually. I always think that you should never be in the center. Center is a blind spot because you can’t see anybody. You are being seen, but you can’t see anybody. (195)

It is not a coincidence that this radical revelation and re-evaluation of Japanese female artists, which boldly revises the accepted narrative in the historiography of the avant-garde art of the 1950s and beyond, was conceived by a Japanese female scholar who underwent a similar experience to the thematic figures she portrays. The author, currently working as an assistant professor of art history and director at New Jersey City University, moved to the United States after graduating from Osaka University in Japan with a BA Degree in order to conduct postgraduate study at Rutgers University. Even though there is a generation gap between her and the five artists studied here, Yoshimoto is still very aware of the restrictions and frustrations of life that continue to exist in Japanese male-centred society today. In addition, she has the experience of living outside of Japan; the sense of freedom and possibilities that it brings, but also the knowledge of the burden of being an outsider. In this sense her personal position adds a unique and fundamental depth to her feminist reading of the work of these five Japanese female artists and paves the way for future scholarship on women’s history.

above copied from: http://www.foraysforyou.com/public/performanceparadigm/journal/issue-2/bookreviews/into-performance-japanese-women-artists-in-new-york-midori-yoshimoto/