For a Revolutionary Judgment of Art, Guy Debord

1

Chatel’s article on Godard’s film [Breathless] in Socialisme ou Barbarie #31 can be characterized as film criticism dominated by revolutionary concerns. The analysis of the film assumes a revolutionary perspective on society, confirms that perspective, and concludes that certain tendencies of cinematic expression should be considered preferable to others in relation to the revolutionary project. It is obviously because Chatel’s critique thus sets out the question in all its fullness, instead of merely debating various questions of taste, that it is interesting and calls for discussion. Specifically, Chatel finds Breathless a “valuable example” supporting his thesis that an alteration of “the present forms of culture” depends on the production of works that offer people “a representation of their own existence.”


2

A revolutionary alteration of the present forms of culture can be nothing less than the supersession of all aspects of the aesthetic and technological apparatus that constitutes an aggregation of spectacles separated from life. It is not in its surface meanings that we should look for a spectacle’s relation to the problems of the society, but at the deepest level, at the level of its function as a spectacle. “The relation between authors and spectators is only a transposition of the fundamental relation between directors and executants. . . . The spectacle-spectator relation is in itself a staunch bearer of the capitalist order” (Preliminaries Toward Defining a Unitary Revolutionary Program).
One must not introduce reformist illusions about the spectacle, as if it could be eventually improved from within, ameliorated by its own specialists under the supposed control of a better-informed public opinion. To do so would be tantamount to giving revolutionaries’ approval to a tendency, or an appearance of a tendency, in a game that we absolutely must not play; a game that we must reject in its entirety in the name of the fundamental requirements of the revolutionary project, which can in no case produce an aesthetics because it is already entirely beyond the domain of aesthetics. The point is not to engage in some sort of revolutionary art-criticism, but to make a revolutionary critique of all art.


3

The connection between the predominance of the spectacle in social life and the predominance of a class of rulers (both being based on the contradictory need for passive adherence) is not a mere clever stylistic paradox. It is a factual correlation that objectively characterizes the modern world. It is here that the cultural critique issuing from the experience of the self-destruction of modern art meets up with the political critique issuing from the experience of the destruction of the workers movement by its own alienated organizations. If one really insists on finding something positive in modern culture, it must be said that its only positive aspect lies in its self-liquidation, its withering away, its witness against itself.
From a practical standpoint, what is at issue here is a revolutionary organization’s relation to artists. The deficiencies of bureaucratic organizations and their fellow travelers in the formulation and use of such a relationship are well known. But it seems that a completely conscious and coherent revolutionary politics must effectively unify these activities.


4

The greatest weakness of Chatel’s critique is precisely that he assumes from the start, without even alluding to the possibility of any debate on the subject, that there is the most extreme separation between the creator of any work of art and the political analysis that might be made of it. His analysis of Godard is a particularly striking example of this separation. Having taken for granted that Godard himself remains beyond any political judgment, Chatel never bothers to mention that Godard did not explicitly criticize “the cultural delirium in which we live” and did not deliberately intend to “confront people with their own lives.” Godard is treated like a natural phenomenon, a cultural artifact. One thinks no more about the possibility of Godard having political, philosophical or other positions than one does about investigating the ideology of a typhoon.
Such criticism fits right into the sphere of bourgeois culture — specifically within its “art criticism” sector — since it obviously participates in the “deluge of words that camouflages every single aspect of reality.” This criticism is one interpretation among many others of a work on which we have no hold. The critic assumes from the beginning that he knows better than the author himself what the author means. This apparent presumptuousness is in fact an extreme humility: the critic so completely accepts his separation from the artistic specialist in question that he despairs of ever being able to act on or with him (which would obviously require that he take into consideration what the artist was explicitly seeking).


5

Art criticism is a second-degree spectacle. The critic is someone who makes a spectacle out of his very condition as a spectator — a specialized and therefore ideal spectator, expressing his ideas and feelings about a work in which he does not really participate. He re-presents, restages, his own nonintervention in the spectacle. The weakness of random and largely arbitrary fragmentary judgments concerning spectacles that do not really concern us is imposed upon all of us in many banal discussions in private life. But the art critic makes a show of this kind of weakness, presenting it as exemplary.


6

Chatel thinks that if a portion of the population recognizes itself in a film, it will be able to “look at itself, admire itself, criticize itself or reject itself — in any case, to use the images that pass on the screen for its own needs.” Let us first of all note that there is a certain mystery in this notion of using such a flow of images to satisfy authentic needs. Just how they are to be used is not clear. It would first of all seem to be necessary to specify which needs are in question in order to determine whether those images can really serve as means to satisfy them. Furthermore, everything we know about the mechanism of the spectacle, even at the simplest cinematic level, absolutely contradicts this idyllic vision of people equally free to admire or criticize themselves by recognizing themselves in the characters of a film. But most fundamentally, it is impossible to accept this division of labor between uncontrollable specialists presenting a vision of people’s lives to them and audiences having to recognize themselves more or less clearly in those images. Attaining a certain accuracy in describing people’s behavior is not necessarily positive. Even if Godard presents people with an image of themselves in which they can undeniably recognize themselves more than in the films of Fernandel, he nevertheless presents them with a false image in which they recognize themselves falsely.


7

Revolution is not “showing” life to people, but bringing them to life. A revolutionary organization must always remember that its aim is not getting its adherents to listen to convincing talks by expert leaders, but getting them to speak for themselves, in order to achieve, or at least strive toward, an equal degree of participation. The cinematic spectacle is one of the forms of pseudocommunication (developed, in lieu of other possibilities, by the present class technology) in which this aim is radically unfeasible. Much more so, for example, than in a cultural form such as the university-style lecture with questions at the end, in which dialogue and audience participation, though subjected to rather unfavorable conditions, are not absolutely excluded.
Anyone who has ever seen a film-club debate has immediately noticed the dividing lines between the leader of the discussion, the aficionados who regularly speak up at every meeting, and the people who only occasionally express their viewpoints. These three categories are clearly separated by the degree to which they have mastered a specialized vocabulary that determines their place within this institutionalized discussion. Information and influence are transmitted unilaterally, from the top to the bottom, never from the bottom to the top. Nevertheless, these three categories are quite close to one another in their common confused powerlessness, as spectators making a show of themselves, in relation to the real dividing line between them and the people who actually make the films. The unilaterality of influence is still more strict in relation to this division. The considerable differences among the various spectators’ mastery of the conceptual tools of film-club debates are ultimately diminished by the fact that those tools are all equally ineffectual. A film-club debate is a subspectacle accompanying the projected film; it is more ephemeral than written criticism, but neither more nor less separated. In appearance a film-club discussion is an attempt at dialogue, at social encounter, at a time when individuals are increasingly isolated by the urban environment. But it is in fact the negation of such dialogue since these people have not come together to decide on anything, but in order to hold a discussion on a false pretext and with false means.


8

Leaving aside its external effects, the practice of this type of cinematic criticism immediately presents two risks to a revolutionary organization.
The first danger is that certain comrades might be led to formulate other criticisms expressing their different judgments of other films, or even of this one. Beginning from the same positions concerning the society as a whole, the number of different possible judgments of Breathless, though obviously not unlimited, is nevertheless fairly large. To give just one example, one could make a critique just as talented as Chatel’s, expressing exactly the same revolutionary politics, but which would attempt to expose Godard’s own participation in an entire sector of the dominant cultural mythology: that of the cinema itself (shots of the tête-à-tête with the photo of Humphrey Bogart, cut to the Café Napoléon). Belmondo — on the Champs-Élysées, at the Café Pergola, at the Rue Vavin intersection — could be considered as the image (largely unreal, of course, “ideologized”) that the microsociety of Cahiers du Cinéma editors (and not even the whole generation of French filmmakers who emerged in the fifties) projects of its own existence; with its paltry dreams of flaunted subspontaneity; with its tastes, its real ignorances, but also its cultural enthusiasms.
The other danger would be that the impression of arbitrariness given by Chatel’s exaltation of Godard’s revolutionary value might lead other comrades to oppose any discussion of cultural issues simply in order to avoid the risk of lacking in seriousness. On the contrary, the revolutionary movement must accord a central place to criticism of culture and everyday life. But any examination of these phenomena must first of all be disabused, not respectful toward the given modes of communication. The very foundations of existing cultural relations must be contested by the critique that the revolutionary movement needs to really bring to bear on all aspects of life and human relationships.

GUY DEBORD
1961



“Pour un jugement révolutionnaire de l’art,” written in February 1961, first appeared in Notes Critiques: bulletin de recherche et d’orientation révolutionnaires #3 (Bordeaux, 1962). This translation by Ken Knabb is from the Situationist International Anthology (Revised and Expanded Edition, 2006). No copyright.


above copied from: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/breathless.htm

The Future of Science...Is Art?, Jonah Lehrer

In the early 1920s, Niels Bohr was struggling to reimagine the structure of matter. Previous generations of physicists had thought the inner space of an atom looked like a miniature solar system with the atomic nucleus as the sun and the whirring electrons as planets in orbit. This was the classical model.

But Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Ordinary words couldn't capture the data.

Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.

Bohr's discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren't like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso's deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.

It's hard to believe that a work of abstract art might have actually affected the history of science. Cubism seems to have nothing in common with modern physics. When we think about the scientific process, a specific vocabulary comes to mind: objectivity, experiments, facts. In the passive tense of the scientific paper, we imagine a perfect reflection of the real world. Paintings can be profound, but they are always pretend.

This view of science as the sole mediator of everything depends upon one unstated assumption: While art cycles with the fashions, scientific knowledge is a linear ascent. The history of science is supposed to obey a simple equation: Time plus data equals understanding. One day, we believe, science will solve everything.

But the trajectory of science has proven to be a little more complicated. The more we know about reality—about its quantum mechanics and neural origins—the more palpable its paradoxes become. As Vladimir Nabokov, the novelist and lepidopterist, once put it, "The greater one's science, the deeper the sense of mystery."

Consider, for example, the history of physics. Once upon a time, and more than once, physicists thought they had the universe solved. Some obscure details remained, but the basic structure of the cosmos was understood. Out of this naïveté, relativity theory emerged, fundamentally altering classical notions about the relationship of time and space. Then came Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the surreal revelations of quantum physics. String theorists, in their attempts to reconcile ever widening theoretical gaps, started talking about eleven dimensions. Dark matter still makes no sense. Modern physics knows so much more about the universe, but there is still so much it doesn't understand. For the first time, some scientists are openly wondering if we, in fact, are incapable of figuring out the cosmos.

A particular region in the prefrontal cortex of the human brain, Brodmann Area 47, is engaged in trying to figure out what's going to happen next in a sequence of events manifested over time, in spoken language, signed language, music, etc. When expectations are met, these neural circuits are rewarded and reinforced. When expectations are violated, a different part of our brain, the anterior cingulated, becomes activated, focusing our attention on the unexpected sequence. The end of Dvořák's 7th Symphony is a wonderful artistic exploration of the delicate orchestration of neural responses that allows us to feel both surprised and rewarded by clever permutations of what we're accustomed to. We retrieve these perceptions from episodic memory traces the next time we hear a similar piece of music.

Or look at neuroscience. Only a few decades ago, scientists were putting forth confident conjectures about "the bridging principle," the neural event that would explain how the activity of our brain cells creates the subjective experience of consciousness. All sorts of bridges were proposed, from 40 Hz oscillations in the cerebral cortex to quantum coherence in microtubules. These were the biological processes that supposedly turned the water of the brain into the wine of the mind.

But scientists don't talk about these kinds of bridging principles these days. While neuroscience continues to make astonishing progress in learning about the details of the brain—we are a strange loop of kinase enzymes and synaptic chemistry—these details only highlight our enduring enigma, which is that we don't experience these cellular details. It is ironic, but true: The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.

The fundamental point is that modern science has made little progress toward any unified understanding of everything. Our unknowns have not dramatically receded. In many instances, the opposite has happened, so that our most fundamental sciences are bracketed by utter mystery. It's not that we don't have all the answers. It's that we don't even know the question.

This is particularly true for our most fundamental sciences, like physics and neuroscience. Physicists study the fabric of reality, the invisible laws and particles that define the material world. Neuroscientists study our perceptions of this world; they dissect the brain in order to understand the human animal. Together, these two sciences seek to solve the most ancient and epic of unknowns: What is everything? And who are we?

But before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need to find a place for the artist within the experimental process, to rediscover what Bohr observed when he looked at those cubist paintings. The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science's theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.

Since its inception in the early 20th century, neuroscience has succeeded in becoming intimate with the brain. Scientists have reduced our sensations to a set of discrete circuits. They have imaged our cortex as it thinks about itself, and calculated the shape of ion channels, which are machined to subatomic specifications.

And yet, despite this vast material knowledge, we remain strangely ignorant of what our matter creates. We know the synapse, but don't know ourselves. In fact, the logic of reductionism implies that our self-consciousness is really an elaborate illusion, an epiphenomenon generated by some electrical shudder in the frontal cortex. There is no ghost in the machine; there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not one of them is you, or knows or cares about you. In fact, you don't even exist. The brain is nothing but an infinite regress of matter, reducible to the callous laws of physics.

The problem with this method is that it denies the very mystery it needs to solve. Neuroscience excels at unraveling the mind from the bottom up. But our self-consciousness seems to require a top-down approach. As the novelist Richard Powers wrote, "If we knew the world only through synapses, how could we know the synapse?" The paradox of neuroscience is that its astonishing progress has exposed the limitations of its paradigm, as reductionism has failed to solve our emergent mind. Much of our experiences remain outside its range.

This world of human experience is the world of the arts. The novelist and the painter and the poet embrace those ephemeral aspects of the mind that cannot be reduced, or dissected, or translated into the activity of an acronym. They strive to capture life as it's lived. As Virginia Woolf put it, the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day...[tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." She tried to describe the mind from the inside.

Neuroscience has yet to capture this first-person perspective. Its reductionist approach has no place for the "I" at the center of everything. It struggles with the question of qualia. Artists like Woolf, however, have been studying such emergent phenomena for centuries, and have amassed a large body of knowledge about such mysterious aspects of the mind. They have constructed elegant models of human consciousness that manage to express the texture of our experience, distilling the details of real life into prose and plot. That's why their novels have endured: because they feel true. And they feel true because they capture a layer of reality that reductionism cannot.

By taking these artistic explorations seriously, neuroscientists can better understand the holistic properties they are trying to parse. Before you break something apart, it helps to know how it hangs together. In this sense, the arts are an incredibly rich data set, providing science with a glimpse into its blind spots. If neuroscience is ever going to discover the neural correlates of consciousness, or find the source of the self, or locate the cells of subjectivity—if it's ever going to get beyond a glossary of our cortical parts—then it has to develop an intimate understanding of these higher-order mental events. This is where the current methods of science reach their limit.

What neuroscience needs is a new method, one that's able to construct complex representations of the mind that aren't built from the bottom up. Sometimes, the whole is best understood in terms of the whole. William James, as usual, realized this first. The eight chapters that begin his epic 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, describe the mind in the conventional third-person terms of the experimental psychologist. Everything changes, however, with chapter nine. James starts this section, "The Stream of Thought," with a warning: "We now begin our study of the mind from within."

With that single sentence, as radical in sentiment as the modernist novel, James tried to shift the subject of psychology. He disavowed any scientific method that tried to dissect the mind into a set of elemental units, be it sensations or synapses. Such a reductionist view is the opposite of science, James argued, since it ignores our actual reality.

Modern science didn't follow James' lead. In the years after his textbook was published, a "New Psychology" was born, and this rigorous science had no need for Jamesian vagueness. It wanted to purge itself of anything that couldn't be measured. The study of experience was banished from the laboratory.

But artists continued creating their complex simulations of consciousness. They never gave up on the ineffable, or detoured around experience because it was too difficult. They plunged straight into the pandemonium. No one demonstrates this better than James Joyce. In Ulysses, Joyce attempted to capture the mind's present tense. Everything in the novel is seen not from the omniscient perspective of the author, but through the concave lenses of his imaginary characters. We eavesdrop on their internal soliloquies, as Bloom, Stephen, and Molly think about beauty, and death, and eggs in bed, and the number eight. This, Joyce says, is the broth of thought, the mind before punctuation, the stream of consciousness rendered on the page. Ulysses begins where William James left off.

Similarly, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, enchanted with opium, was writing poetry about the "the mind's self-experience in the act of thinking" long before there was even a science of the mind. Or look at the world of visual art. As the neuroscientist Semir Zeki notes, "Artists [painters] are in some sense neurologists, studying the brain with techniques that are unique to them." Monet's haystacks appeal to us, in part, because he had a practical understanding of color perception. The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock resonate precisely because they excite some peculiar circuit of cells in the visual cortex. These painters reverse-engineered the brain, discovering the laws of seeing in order to captivate the eye.

Of course, the standard response of science is that such art is too incoherent and imprecise for the scientific process. Beauty isn't truth; Monet got lucky. The novel is just a work of fiction, which is the opposite of experimental fact. If it can't be plotted on a line graph or condensed into variables, then it's not worth taking into account. But isn't such incoherence an essential aspect of the human mind? Isn't our inner experience full of gaps and non-sequiturs and inexplicable feelings? In this sense, the messiness of the novel and the abstraction of the painting is actually a mirror. As the poetry critic Randall Jarrell put it, "It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent us—as logical and methodical generalizations cannot—our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions."

No scientific model of the mind will be wholly complete unless it includes what can't be reduced. Science rightfully adheres to a strict methodology, relying on experimental data and testability, but this method could benefit from an additional set of inputs. The cultural hypotheses of artists can inspire the questions that stimulate important new scientific answers. Until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective—and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination—our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves.

Neuroscience, of course, believes that it has no inherent limitations. One day, a team of scientists may explain human consciousness. The bridging principle will be solved. The mystery of experience will turn out to be another trick of matter. Such scientific optimism might be right. Only time will tell. (It's worth noting that not every scientist is quite so optimistic. Noam Chomsky, for example, has declared that, "It is quite possible—overwhelmingly probable, one might guess—that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.") Regardless, it's clear that solving the deepest mysteries of the brain—what the philosopher David Chalmers calls "the hard questions of consciousness"—will require a new scientific approach, one that is able to incorporate the wisdom of the arts. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, but we are also just stuff. Neither truth, when seen alone, is our solution, for our reality exists in plural.

At first glance, physics seems particularly remote from the subjective sphere of the arts. Its theories are extracted from arcane equations and the subatomic debris of supercolliders. This science continually insists that our most basic intuitions about reality are actually illusions, a sad myth of the senses. Artists rely on the imagination, but modern physics exceeds the imagination. To paraphrase Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth—dark matter, quarks, black holes—than could ever be dreamt up. A universe this strange could only be discovered.

But the surreal nature of physics is precisely why it needs the help of artists. The science has progressed beyond our ability to understand it, at least in any literal sense. As Richard Feynman put it, "Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there." It's a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

As a result, the history of physics is littered with metaphorical leaps. Einstein grasped relativity while thinking about moving trains. Arthur Eddington compared the expansion of the universe to an inflated balloon. James Clerk Maxwell thought of magnetic fields as little whirlpools in space, which he called vortices. The Big Bang was just a cosmic firecracker. Schrödinger's cat, trapped in a cosmic purgatory, helped illustrate the paradoxes of quantum mechanics. It's hard to imagine string theory without its garden hose.

These scientific similes might seem like quaint oversimplifications, but they actually perform a much more profound function. As the physicist and novelist Alan Lightman writes, "Metaphor in science serves not just as a pedagogical device, but also as an aid to scientific discovery. In doing science, even though words and equations are used with the intention of having precise meaning, it is almost impossible not to reason by physical analogy, not to form mental pictures, not to imagine balls bouncing and pendulums swinging." The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations. The world of our ideas is framed by the only world we know.

But relying on metaphor can also be dangerous, since every metaphor is necessarily imperfect. (As Thomas Pynchon put it, "The act of metaphor is a thrust at truth and a lie, depending on where you are.") The strings of the universe might be like a garden hose, but they are not a garden hose. The cosmos isn't a plastic balloon. When we chain our theories to ordinary language, we are trespassing on the purity of the equation. To think in terms of analogies is to walk a tightrope of accuracy.

This is why modern physics needs the arts. Once we accept the importance of metaphor to the scientific process, we can start thinking about how we can make those metaphors better. Poets, of course, are masters of metaphor: The power of their art depends on the compression of meaning into meter; vague feelings are translated into visceral images. It's not a coincidence that many of the greatest physicists of the 20th century—eminent figures like Einstein, Feynman, and Bohr—were known for their distinctly romantic method of thinking. These eminent scientists depended on their ability to use metaphor to see what no one else had ever seen, so that the railroad became a metaphor for relativity, and a drop of liquid helped symbolize the atomic nucleus. Poets can speed this scientific process along, helping physicists to invent new metaphors and improve their old ones. Perhaps we can do better than a garden hose. Maybe a simile will help unlock the secret of dark matter. As the string theorist Brian Greene recently wrote, the arts have the ability to "give a vigorous shake to our sense of what's real," jarring the scientific imagination into imagining new things.

But there's another way that artists can bring something to the cosmic conversation: they can help make the scientific metaphors tangible. When the metaphysical equation is turned into a physical object, physicists can explore the meaning of the mathematics from a different perspective. Look, for example, at a Richard Serra sculpture. His labyrinths of bent metal let us participate in the theoretical, so that we might imagine the strange curves of space-time in an entirely new way. The fragmented shapes of cubism, which engaged in such a fruitful dialogue with the avant-garde physics of its time, served a similar purpose. Picasso never understood the equations—he picked up non-Euclidian geometry via the zeitgeist—but he was determined to represent this new way of thinking about space in his paintings. A century later, physicists are still using his shattered still lifes as a potent symbol of their science. Abstract art lets us comprehend, at least a little bit, the incomprehensible.

It's time for the dialogue between our two cultures to become a standard part of the scientific method. (Our universities could begin by offering a "Poetry for Physicists" class.) But it's also crucial to take our scientific metaphors beyond the realm of the metaphorical, so we can better understand the consequences of our theories. Art galleries should be filled with disorienting evocations of string theory and the EPR paradox. Every theoretical physics department should support an artist-in-residence. Too often, modern physics seems remote and irrelevant, its suppositions so strange they're meaningless. The arts can help us reattach physics to the world we experience.

Neuroscience can also benefit from the reactions of artists. Novelists can simulate the latest theory of consciousness in their fiction. If a theory can't inspire characters that feel true, then it probably isn't true itself. (Woolf, for example, was an early critic of Freudian theory, dismissing the way it turned all of her "characters into cases.") Painters can explore new theories about the visual cortex. Dancers can help untangle the mysterious connection between the body and emotion. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science extends to art the invitation to participate in its conversation and the opportunity to add science to its repertoire. And by, in turn, interpreting scientific ideas and theories, the arts offers science a new lens through which to see itself.

C.P. Snow, the essayist who coined the "two culture" cliché, proposed a simple solution to the problem of divided cultures. He argued that we needed a "third culture," which would close the "communications gap" between scientists and artists. Each side, Snow said, would benefit from an understanding of the other, as writers learned about the second law of thermodynamics and scientists read Shakespeare.

There is currently a nascent third culture, but it strays from Snow's conception. While his third culture was based upon dialogue, our current third culture consists, almost entirely, of scientists talking directly to the general public. As John Brockman, the founder of this new third culture, wrote: "What traditionally has been called 'science' has today become 'public culture'...Science is the only news." There is, of course, much to be said for scientists cutting out "the middleman" and translating their data for the masses. Many of the scientists that make up this third culture have greatly increased the public's understanding of the scientific avant-garde. From Richard Dawkins to Brian Greene, from Steven Pinker to E.O. Wilson, these figures not only do important scientific research, they write in elegant prose. In doing so, they are teaching us much.

But what of the collaboration between science and the arts? Are we really prepared to live with a permanent cultural schism? If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement—perhaps a fourth culture—is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new works of art and so on. Instead of ignoring each other, or competing, or co-opting each other in naïve or superficial ways, science and the arts will truly impact each other. The old intellectual boundaries will disappear. Neuroscience will gain new tools with which to confront the mystery of consciousness and modern physics will improve its metaphors. Art will become a crucial source of scientific ideas.

This will ultimately lead us to take a broader view of truth. Right now, science is widely considered our sole source of Truth, with a capital "T." Everything that can't be stated in the language of acronyms and equations risks being disregarded as a pretty fiction, which is the opposite of scientific fact.

But the epic questions that modern science must answer cannot be solved by science alone. Bringing our two cultures together will allow us to judge our knowledge not by its origins, but in terms of its usefulness. What does this novel or experiment or poem teach us about ourselves? How does it help us understand who we are, or what the universe is made of? What long-standing problem has it engaged, perhaps even solved? If we are open-minded in our answers to these questions, we will discover that poems and paintings can help advance our experiments and theories. Art can make science better.

But before any of this can happen, our two existing cultures must modify their habits. First of all, the humanities must sincerely engage with the sciences. Henry James defined the writer as someone on whom nothing is lost; artists must heed his call, and not ignore science's inspiring descriptions of reality.

At the same time, the sciences must recognize that their truths are not the only truths. No single area of knowledge has a monopoly on knowledge. As Karl Popper, an eminent defender of science wrote, "It is imperative that we give up the idea of ultimate sources of knowledge, and admit that all knowledge is human; that it is mixed with our errors, our prejudices, our dreams, and our hopes; that all we can do is to grope for truth even though it is beyond our reach." The struggle for scientific truth is long and hard and never ending. If we want to get an answer to our deepest questions—the questions of who we are and what everything is—we will need to draw from both science and art, so that each completes the other.

above copied from: http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/01/the_future_of_scienceis_art.php

Aesthetical Issues of Sound Art, Paul Panhuysen

Introduction

Convention tends to demarcate: a painting is a painting, an opera is an opera; a visual artist is a visual artist, not a musician or a composer... It works like a wall surrounding a closed system - fencing in, fencing out. Embracing this concept means turning one's back to reality as it is: a tangle of circumstances, events and developments; a perpetual state of madness [in which] people have always striven to find a system...
-Paul Panhuysen

Composers write scores, give instructions to performers who perform these instructions, usually in concerts. Sculptors create or assemble objects which are displayed, usually in galleries or museums. What can be said of sculptors who work with sounds, or composers who work with objects? Are they merely anomolies of the accepted plastic arts and performing arts? Is there a large enough body of this work to justify a new genre specifically for these artists? The opinion presented in this paper is that not only does a community of artists creating sculptural/musical work exist; that community requires unique venues for presentation and unique languages with which to approach their work. A sound artist, then, is an artist whose materials include physical media, sound, and environments. A sound artist creates all of these, not taking any of them for granted. To a sound artist, the gallery in which her work is shown is part of her subject; the instrument used to create the sounds heard in a concert hall is her subject-including its sound, including its appearance, and including the actions required to make the instrument sound. Sound artists tend to be poorly represented by the modes of discourse that seem satisfactory for "pure" musical or visual art; they are poorly represented by the forms of presentation available (i.e. concert halls and galleries). The concerns of the sound artist differ from those of the composer, performer, sculptor or painter. This paper is a discussion of these concerns, and a survey of some sound artists' works responding to those concerns through their use of technology.

Artists have unique ways of creating, of interacting with their chosen materials in the creative process. Many sound artists feel most comfortable working with their sound physically, allowing the visceral contact with materials to influence their choices. Their work is a dialogue between the creation of physical objects and the sound generated by those objects. Musician's are trained to work with sound largely as an abstraction. Music theory is developed almost entirely from abstract systems of organizing pitch and rhythm. These concepts of pitch and rhythm are generalized, idealized. The composer's materials are not physical materials, they are physical phenomena. The act of composing, except in the case of improvisation, is the act of instructing people how to create a phenomenon.

Other disciplines require vastly different approaches, as composer Richard Lerman discovered when he began working at a film school: "I noticed that the way people worked with materials [in film school] was altogether different from the way musicians work when they write down notes. These people attacked materials physically, with the hands. Burning things, hammering things. Actions. Hands. And boy, I really liked that." (p. 27, Van Peer) Because sound art falls between musical and visual realms, approaches to the materials often incorporate what the artist desires from either tradition. Johan Goedhart has created installations using large amounts of computer printers which were continuously printing. In addition to spitting out reams of paper which was eventually fed back through the printers, the sounds generated were processed and made audible again through various media. The choice of documents to be printed in such an installation then becomes a compromise between the visual and audible output from the printers. The sound is a direct result of the artist's choice of physical materials.

An aspect which is common to both visual and musical arts while seldom directly addressed by either is the composition of dynamic space. While music seems to activate a space in an abstract manner, sculpture creates a palpably present but static and unresponsive space. Sound artists attempt to create environments as a sculptor might, but which are animated with sound. Some of them create sound sources which highlight architectural features, some deal with concepts of room acoustics. Horst Rickel, who creates installations of self-playing organ pipes, discusses his work in which spaces are animated by sounds: "I built an instrument which I called Organum Instabilum, which created lots of standing waves ... causing wild sonic moments in the space-a phenomenon which I have been exploring since then. Somehow my work always seems to boil down to movement." (Van Peer, p. 66) His work draws attention to normal spaces in which we live, revealing their volatility.

In addition to altering aspects of physical spaces which we inhabit, some sound artists present sounds from foreign spaces where we have never been; these may be imaginary, created spaces or spaces inside objects and bodies. Alvin Lucier's Music for Solo Performer amplifies brain waves, John Cage and David Tudor amplified a variety of internal sounds from plants and machines. Richard Lerman also has created a large body of work dealing with internal sounds of unexpected objects, like bridges, plants and thatch roofs. They are exploring and exploding concepts of the transmission of sound through different media. While we naturally think of sound being transmitted to our ears through the air, the contact microphone captures the sounds carried through other materials, allowing them to be transmitted through the air.

One of the most interesting traits sound artists share is a drastically different relationship to their audiences than either composers or sculptors. While they often create concert works or installations which are unresponsive to viewers, each sound artist discussed here has not only created works which incorporate some degree of interaction, they all express strong desires to hand the control of their works over to audiences in unique ways. Christina Kubisch describes her work in this way: "I organize everything beforehand, and the person who listens to my installation puts it together. It's like a puzzle - I give them the single pieces, and then they can make their own composition with them, by the way they're moving." (Kubisch, p. 91) Paul Panhuysen participates with viewers in his Situasies: "As I consider the audience to be artists too, I aimed at their participation. In that sense the Situasies were not just a metaphor of reality, they were metaphor and reality at the same time. In a good Situasie art unlocked the inhibitions of the audience." (Van Peer, p. 131) Sound art seems an optimal media for a non-hierarchical, participatory mode. It has a visceral, physical presence, yet often requires actions from individuals to produce sounds. It breaks down the distinctions between artist and audience via hybridization of the presentation.

It is perhaps this "hybrid" nature of sound art that is it's most attractive. Each of these discussed traits exists singly in the forms of expression with which we are all familiar. A sound art work can be any of many combinations of these qualities. This combinatoriality of features is not artificial; it seems more likely that the segregation of them into realms protected from each other which is artificial. The tendency to blur the boundaries between the realms is one of sound art's greatest strengths. The works discussed below all engender a collection of these traits: interactivity; dynamic, palpable and volatile spaces; new, unfamiliar, and impossible spaces. They are all individual expressions, the results of artists interacting with their chosen materials in unique ways. In these works, objects and their sounds are linked in and with space.

above copied from: http://eamusic.dartmouth.edu/~kov/soundArt/PaperIntro.html

What is Liminality? Charles La Shure, 2005

Liminality is obviously a very important concept to me, and I did not choose it as the name of this site without serious consideration. That being the case, I thought it only proper that I should offer an in-depth discussion of the concept—something that I have had a hard time finding on the internet. The following essay is divided into two parts: the first part, Turner and Liminality, is an academic discussion of the early work of Victor Turner and his conception of liminality, while the second part, Liminality Applied, is a more informal treatment of my own personal theory of liminality and how it applies to my own life and experiences (I also discuss the trickster figure, the study of which first introduced me to the concept of liminality). You could skip straight to the second part if you are only interested in hearing my thoughts on the subject, but the second part does build on the first. For best results, I would recommend reading the whole essay.

I should also note that this is a work in progress, as my conception of liminality continues to evolve the more I study and experience in life. Any changes will be noted at the end of the essay.

Turner and Liminality

You will not find the term “liminality” in many dictionaries. In fact, it is not in the Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does, however, have an entry for “liminal,” the adjectival form, which it lists as a rare usage: “Of or pertaining to the threshold or initial stage of a process.” Both liminal and liminality are derived from the Latin “limen,” which means “threshold”—that is, the bottom part of a doorway that must be crossed when entering a building.
The OED notes that “liminal” first appears in publication in the field of psychology in 1884, but the idea was introduced to the field of anthropology in 1909 by Arnold Van Gennep in his seminal work, Les rites de passage. Van Gennep described rites of passage such as coming-of-age rituals and marriage as having the following three-part structure:

separation

liminal period

reassimilation

The initiate (that is, the person undergoing the ritual) is first stripped of the social status that he or she possessed before the ritual, inducted into the liminal period of transition, and finally given his or her new status and reassimilated into society.
It was not until the second half of the 20th century, though, that the terms “liminal” and “liminality” gained popularity through the writings of Victor Turner. Turner borrowed and expanded upon Van Gennep’s concept of liminality, ensuring widespread usage of the concept not only in anthropology but other fields as well. Various authors in a number of fields have written about liminality, but not only would it be impossible to cover everything here, it would also probably only confuse the issue. In addition, all proceeding studies of liminality are based at least in part on Turner’s theories, so I will focus on Turner’s early work for the remainder of this article.

Turner first formulated his theory of liminality in the late 1960s, and it continued to be a central theme in his work until his death in 1983. Here I will deal primarily with his first three studies on liminality: “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” from The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (1967), “Liminality and Communitas,” from The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (1969), and “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas,” from Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974). Citations from these texts will be referenced by year and page number.
Turner first introduced his interpretation of liminality in 1967, drawing heavily on Van Gennep’s three-part structure for rites of passage mentioned above. He focuses entirely on the middle stage of rites of passage—the transitional or liminal stage. He notes that “the subject of passage ritual is, in the liminal period, structurally, if not physically, ‘invisible’” (1967: 95). That is, the status of liminal individuals is socially and structurally ambiguous. He develops this idea further in a concise definition of liminality that will inform his future writings: “Liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions, but as in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that, as a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (1967: 97).

Turner also points out, with reference to Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger, that liminal individuals are polluting, and thus dangerous, to those who have not gone through the liminal period. In addition, liminal individuals have nothing: “no status, insignia, secular clothing, rank, kinship position, nothing to demarcate them structurally from their fellows” (1967: 98). The group of liminal individuals is not a typical social hierarchy but a communal group in which all are equal.

In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner begins by defining liminal individuals or entities as “neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony” (1969: 95). He then goes on to name the non-structure or anti-structure that he continuously refers to in “Betwixt and Between” through such concepts as the “realm of pure possibility” and structural invisibility. He chooses the Latin term “communitas” to express this idea of anti-structure, and refers to social structure and communitas as “two major ‘models’ for human interrelatedness.” These models are defined as follows:

The first is of society as a structured, differentiated, and often hierarchical system of politico-legal-economic positions with many types of evaluation, separating men in terms of “more” or “less.” The second, which emerges recognizably in the liminal period, is of society as an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and relatively undifferentiated comitatus, community, or even communion of equal individuals who submit together to the general authority of the ritual elders. (1969: 96)
This second model of human interrelatedness, communitas, has a number of cultural manifestations, of which liminality is only one. The two other manifestations that Turner mentions are marginality and inferiority. To express the relationship of these manifestations to social structure in spatial terms, they are in between (liminality), on the edges (marginality), and beneath (inferiority). As an example of communitas in modern Western society, he cites the “beat generation,” the “hippies,” and the “teeny-boppers.” According to Turner, these have opted out of the social structure and chosen to manifest communitas through inferiority. For example, the hippy attitude toward sex is that it is an instrument of communitas rather than a means of forming structural bonds (that is, through marriage).

“Passages, Margins, and Poverty” is mainly concerned with providing a clearer definition of communitas and showing its dialectical relationship with social structure, but since liminality is a cultural manifestation of communitas, what Turner says here bears directly on the subject at hand. He first rewords his three-fold division of the manifestations of communitas; these manifestations are now liminality, outsiderhood, and structural inferiority. Liminality and inferiority have remained more or less untouched, but an important development has been made in his perception of “the edges” of social structure. Turner now uses the term marginality to define the state of simultaneously belonging to two or more social or cultural groups (expatriates would be one example of a marginal group) and insists that marginality should not be confused with true outsiderhood (that is, being outside of the social structure). Examples of outsiders are: “shamans, diviners, medium, priests, those in monastic seclusion, hippies, hoboes, and gypsies” (1974: 233).

Marginals, in turn, are also to be distinguished from liminal entities (or what he calls here “liminars”): “Marginals like liminars are also betwixt and between, but unlike ritual liminars they have no cultural assurance of a final stable resolution of their ambiguity” (1974: 233). Turner makes it clear that marginality can and should not be conflated with any of the other cultural manifestations of communitas, but he does not make it clear whether marginality is a manifestation of communitas or not. If it is, it is not clear where it fits into his formulation, and if it is not, it is not clear why it is excluded. He does clearly define his three manifestations in relation to social structure, though:

...liminality represents the midpoint of transition in a status-sequence between two positions, outsiderhood refers to actions and relationships which do not flow from a recognized social status but originate outside it, while lowermost status refers to the lowest rung in a system of social stratification in which unequal rewards are accorded to functionality differentiated positions. (1974:237)

In the remainder of the paper, Turner continues his discussion of the relationship between communitas and social structure, but he does specifically discuss liminality at various points, and these comments will allow us to broaden our understanding of what Turner meant by the concept. He notes that liminality in ritual societies is “institutionalized and preordained,” while modern communitas movements such as the hippies are “spontaneously generated in a situation of radical structural change” (1974: 248). He also says, “it is the analysis of culture into factors and their free recombination in any and every possible pattern, however weird, that is most characteristic of liminality” (1974: 255). Using Sartre’s terminology, he states: “I see liminality as a phase in social life in which this confrontation between ‘activity which has no structure’ and its ‘structured results’ produces in men their highest pitch of self-consciousness” (1974: 255).

Before proceeding, let us summarize Turner’s thoughts on liminality. For Turner, liminality is one of the three cultural manifestations of communitas—it is one of the most visible expressions of anti-structure in society. Yet even as it is the antithesis of structure, dissolving structure and being perceived as dangerous by those in charge of maintaining structure, it is also the source of structure. Just as chaos is the source of order, liminality represents the unlimited possibilities from which social structure emerges. While in the liminal state, human beings are stripped of anything that might differentiate them from their fellow human beings—they are in between the social structure, temporarily fallen through the cracks, so to speak, and it is in these cracks, in the interstices of social structure, that they are most aware of themselves. Yet liminality is a midpoint between a starting point and an ending point, and as such it is a temporary state that ends when the initiate is reincorporated into the social structure.

This is, in a nutshell, Turner’s definition of liminality. Although he went on to apply this concept to modern society, it originated with his work on ritual society. He lived with the Ndembu tribe of Zambia for five years, studying their society, and much of his early work relies heavily on his experiences with and study of ritual society. This is why Turner perceives liminality as a “midpoint of transition... between two positions” and as a temporary phase rather than a permanent state. He does recognize this limitation, though, as noted above in his comparison of liminality in ritual societies and modern communitas movements. He notes that these movements “try to create a communitas and a style of life that is permanently contained within liminality. ... Instead of the liminal being a passage, it seemed to be coming to be regarded as a state...” (1974: 261). Yet for him, true liminality will always have its roots in ritual society, and in his later discussions of liminality in art he introduces the term “liminoid,” which is the “successor of the liminal in complex large-scale societies, where individuality and optation in art have in theory supplanted collective and obligatory ritual performances” (The Anthropology of Performance, 1987: 29).

Another point that must be raised is the ambiguity of Turner’s three-part division of the cultural manifestations of communitas. It is a human impulse to categorize and organize, and such categorization is especially helpful in studying all sorts of phenomena. As a rule, though, the stricter the individual categories become, the less useful they are in organizing the various elements of an entire system. That is, categories with strict definitions tend to cover less ground, and thus there are generally holes in their coverage. Conversely, looser categories cover more ground but are ultimately less useful in defining the specific elements. Thus, scholars are always trying to strike the right balance. In Turner’s case, it is possible that he has erred on the side of looser categories—there seems to be quite a bit of overlap and ambiguity between the three categories he defines. Liminality is the most solid of the three categories, but that is only because Turner ties it directly to the experience of initiates undergoing rites of passage in ritual societies. If we acknowledge, as Turner does, that liminality can exist outside of this scope, the boundaries of liminality as well become blurred.

Let us look at one example of blurred boundaries. Turner often refers to the hippies in his late 1960s-early 1970s work. In “Liminality and Communitas,” Turner states that the hippies (as well as their predecessors and successors) have chosen inferiority by identifying with those of inferior status, that is, the poor and lower classes (such as hoboes). Yet in a passage from “Passages, Margins, and Poverty” quoted above, he refers to both hippies and hoboes as outsiders. Perhaps the only difference between the two groups is that the outsiders have “opted out,” while the inferior have no choice in the matter. If that is the case, then the standard for division is not an imagined spatial relationship in terms of social structure, but whether or not the subject has any choice in his or her position.

For argument’s sake, let us accept this premise for the time being. What about liminality? How is liminality differentiated from outsiderhood and social inferiority? If we move beyond the strict ritual meaning of liminality, the difference is not readily apparent. Even Turner seems to become confused at times. In “Liminality and Communitas,” he refers to the liminal nature of the Christian existence, in that Christians believe they are merely passing through this world on the way to the next (indeed, this idea is not unique to Christianity). Yet in “Passages, Margins, and Poverty,” again from the passage quoted above, “those in monastic seclusion” are listed among the outsiders. Are they outsiders simply because they have opted out of the normal social order? What about their liminal nature as Christians? Are they then liminal outsiders? And if the ritual obligation of liminality is removed, is there even a difference anymore?

Removing the ritual obligation from liminality also causes the distinction between marginality and liminality to break down, as the only thing distinguishing the two is the fact that marginality does not promise resolution, whereas liminality does. If liminality is no longer a midpoint in a rite of passage, then there is no reason why it cannot describe the condition of marginality. This is not to say that all of these categories can be conflated—there are certainly differences between the various groups of people that Turner uses as examples for each of his categories. However, the differences are not always clear-cut, and there will inevitably be some overlap.

Liminality Applied

Ultimately, liminality proves to be a very slippery concept when it is taken out of the ritual context in which it was first conceived. Until now I have focused on Turner’s conception of liminality, adding my own thoughts and criticisms along the way, but now I would like to offer my definition of liminality, along with my explanation of how it differs from marginality and outsiderhood. For me, although I appreciate the ritual origin of the concept of liminality, liminality is not tied to the ritual context. I agree with Turner that liminality is a state of being “betwixt and between,” but I do not find the temporal aspect of liminality to be of much use. Take Turner’s claim that Christians are liminal figures because they believe they are temporary residents of the world. For Christians, this liminal state only ends with death, and thus the liminal state lasts for their entire lives on earth. This is, in my mind, stretching the idea of liminality as a temporary state a bit too far—if you are going to admit that someone can be in a temporary state for his or her entire life, why bother insisting that the state is temporary (religious conceptions of life as fleeting and evanescent aside, of course)?

For me, then, the temporal relationship is irrelevant and the spatial relationship is the only one that matters. Still, that is enough to clearly define liminality in relation to the other states and conditions Turner mentions. Marginality, for example, is just that: to be on the margins of something. The terms “marginal” and “marginalized” are too well established in social studies to be redefined at this point. Someone who has been marginalized has been pushed to the edges of society and out of position of power or influence. In social terms, there is not much difference between a marginal figure and an inferior figure. The only difference, really, is the standard by which they are excluded: the inferior figure is almost always economically inferior, whereas the marginal figure is generally pushed to the edges for social reasons (race, creed, etc.). In real life, these standards are not always mutually exclusive, and I personally do not find it that useful to draw a distinction between marginality and inferiority. Both refer to a position of powerlessness, and those in this position have no choice in the matter.

Outsiders, on the other hand, do have a choice. They may choose economic inferiority or social marginality, but the important point is that they choose their position. As Turner described it, they have opted out of the system (social structure), sometimes as a form of protest against the system in an attempt to change it, other times simply because they do not believe the system will ever change and thus refuse to function within it. Outsiders can also choose to rejoin the system at any time, and most, in fact, do. Take one of Turner’s favorite examples, the hippies: the hippie-turned-corporate-cog is such a common theme that it has become cliché. More often than not, it seems to be religious outsiders rather than political or social outsiders who remain outside the system.

So where does that leave liminality? Exactly where it started: betwixt and between. It is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. In describing my own conception of liminality, it is impossible for me to remain objective, as it is my own life experience that has shaped this conception. The second part of this essay, then, will be less theoretical and objective and more empirical and subjective. In other words, I will be talking more about my own experience with and conception of liminality.

On the About page of this site, I list in brief three ways that I feel liminality applies to my own life. The first of those is the fact that I am a Westerner living in Asia, suspended betwixt and between two cultures. Turner would have defined me as a marginal rather than a liminal, because my situation promises no resolution. Although I rebel against that thought, I know in my heart that he was right, and there can be no resolution for me. No matter what I may do with the rest of my life, there is too much of both cultures in me now for me to ever just walk away from one of them. Even if I should return to my native land, I will still be suspended between two cultures. Intellectual acceptance of this fact was a big step in my development as a human being; emotional acceptance is going to take a bit longer, I think.

Still, this does not mean that I agree with Turner’s distinction between marginality and liminality. As I said above, the temporal aspect is irrelevant; only the spatial aspect matters. In concrete terms, the spatial aspect can be described in terms of my relationship to Korean society. When I first came to Korea, I was indeed a marginal. I was marginalized by my ignorance of the Korean culture and language; in other words, I could not communicate with Koreans either culturally (that is, cultural differences prevented mutual understanding) or linguistically. As I became more familiar with both the culture and language, though, I moved into a liminal position. I am now part of Korean society to some extent, no longer fully liminal, but I will never be fully assimilated. I could return to my native land and be readily accepted there, but I doubt if I could ever fully accept my native land like I did before I left. I am betwixt and between.

There is another important point I want to make about liminality, and that is the mobility, or freedom of movement, that comes with liminality. By freedom of movement I mean the freedom to move back and forth between states and areas. Going back to Van Gennep’s original formulation, liminality is the ambiguous phase where the initiate is outside of society but preparing to reenter society. There is very little freedom of movement due to the strict nature of the ritual process. When we apply the idea of liminality to other realms—such as the realm of art and literature—though, liminal characters possess a freedom of movement that non-liminal characters do not. This is especially true of mythical characters, as these characters have consistent personalities. Their personalities do not change or develop over the course of a tale, and the focus of the tale is not on how outside forces influence that character to change, as is often the case in modern literature, but on how the character’s consistent personality allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.

For liminal mythic characters, like the trickster, liminality is their original state. Since liminality is betwixt and between the social structure, their existence in liminality allows them access to the social structure at any number of points, much like a sewer dweller would have access to a city at any number of points. The trickster may flit across the borders at any time, penetrating the social structure at will, but he cannot stay there. He must return to that state of betwixt and between in order to manifest his powers. One good example is the Winnebago Trickster Cycle, as recorded by Paul Radin. The cycle begins with the story of a chief preparing to go on the warpath, yet Radin informs us in a note that Winnebago tribal chiefs are not allowed to go on the warpath. The chief prepares a feast and breaks taboo after taboo. When he finally leaves on the warpath, he destroys his boat, his warbundle (a leather bundle containing sacred items intended to give a warrior power in battle), and his quiver—all vital items to any warrior. With the destruction of each object, more of his warriors abandon him, until he is finally left alone. It is only then that the narrator refers to him as Trickster.

Trickster’s original status as the chief of the tribe shows that he is able to not only penetrate the social structure but to dominate it as well. Yet he cannot stay in this exalted position, and only by breaking every taboo imaginable and becoming an outcast can he return to his element—that is, liminality. As a liminal character, it is not possible for him to remain static within the social structure.

This liminal nature of the trickster is something that is only possible in literature, and mythic literature at that. The trickster in mythic literature represents an inversion of reality. In reality, liminality of this magnitude is almost always a temporary phenomenon. That is not to say that the temporal nature of liminality should be one of its defining characteristics. Rather, human nature being the way it is means that liminality cannot be permanent. Either we are absorbed into the social structure or we shun it all together—we cannot remain betwixt and between. In my own experience in Korea, there was probably a brief time where I was in a liminal state. But most human beings adapt to their environments, and thus it becomes impossible to maintain that childlike naiveté of the social structure. I still feel like I am between two worlds, but I am no longer in a liminal state.

It is not only the trickster’s nature as a mythic character that allows him to remain in liminality; it is also the mythic world that he inhabits that makes this possible. As I mentioned above, mythic characters like the trickster impose their will on the world around them. In the modern era, though, the individual struggles against a much more powerful world, one that will not tolerate the imposition of will, at least not to the same extent. Thus it is interesting to see what happens to this mythic archetype when it is transplanted into a modern world.

A good example of the modern trickster figure is Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in the movie Catch Me If You Can, a young man by the name of Frank Abegnale. He is a con artist who poses as a schoolteacher, an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer, and he supports himself in rather luxurious fashion through check fraud. He is pursued by a tenacious FBI agent, Carl Hanratty, and his adventures lead him around the United States and eventually to Europe. The fact that it is based on a true story is interesting but ultimately irrelevant, as the whole point of modern Realist narratives is that they could ostensibly be taken from real life. For our purposes, it is just like any other work of modern Realist fiction. (Note: the following discussion contains plot spoilers for the movie.)

Much of the film, of course, focuses on Frank’s exploits as he deceives and outwits people for his own benefit. Unlike the mythic trickster, though, he falls in love, and this attachment almost leads to his capture. Fortunately for him (and for the story), his cleverness prevails. He abandons his love and chooses to remain outside the social structure. Throughout the movie he is the quintessential liminal character, flitting in and out of the social structure and refusing to be pinned down. In the modern world, though, such a lifestyle comes with a price. Refusing to be pinned down means that he cannot stay in any one place for any length of time, and part of the enjoyment of the movie comes from the sense that the law (that is, the social structure) is always just one step behind. One false move and the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
The house of cards does ultimately collapse—as it must in a modern world—when Hanratty catches up with Frank in France. He is imprisoned by the police there, but Hanratty eventually secures his release and arranges for his extradition to the United States. While he is in prison there, Hanratty approaches him with an offer: stay behind bars or help the FBI catch a check forger. Not surprisingly, Frank chooses to help the FBI, and he ends up working to maintain the social structure he had once tried so hard to escape. He does consider running away again, and he puts on his pilot’s uniform and heads to the airport. Hanratty catches up with him there, but instead of apprehending him or trying to convince him to stay, he simply says, “No one’s chasing you anymore”—implying that there is no need for him to run if no one is chasing him. The message is that he has already been absorbed by the social structure and has thus lost his liminal nature, and he predictably returns to the fold.

Some reviews I have read criticize the moral ambiguity of the film. Frank apparently feels no remorse for his crimes or the people he hurt or put in danger. Perhaps the real Frank Abagnale felt no remorse for his actions either. He is a sociopathic character, and that is precisely what a trickster is—a sociopath. The trickster cares only for himself and abuses the social structure for his own good. As discussed above, though, the mythic trickster’s world is tolerant of this imposition of will, while the modern world is intolerant. In the mythic world, the trickster’s liminal nature gives him an incredible freedom of movement. In the modern world, though (as we can see in Catch Me If You Can), this same freedom can become a liability. In the trickster’s case, his mockery of and attacks on the social structure cannot be tolerated, so the very thing that allows him to make these attacks—his liminality—is taken away.

Even if one does not pose a threat to the establishment, liminality can still be a liability on an individual level. Viewed in a positive light, liminality provides freedom of movement, but the flip side of that coin is a lack of stability. Being betwixt and between means that you don’t belong anywhere. As social animals, few humans can survive for long without belonging somewhere, at least to some extent. When I first arrived in Korea, I was still on the move. In my first few years here I traveled to Japan briefly and to Mongolia for a longer period of time. The more stationary I became, though, the more I was integrated into the social structure, and the more I lost my liminality. In return, though, I gained stability. I suppose it’s all a matter of perspective, but even though I do look back fondly on my days of freedom, I would never trade the stability I have now to go back to those days.

Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.

This has by no means been an exhaustive discussion of the concept of liminality, but hopefully it has been a good start at answering the question, what is liminality? If you have any comments or questions on this subject, please feel free to contact me.
♦
The following information may be used for citation purposes.

Title: “What is Liminality?”
Author: Charles La Shure
Date: 18 October, 2005 (first version)
URL: http://www.liminality.org/about/whatisliminality/

The Whitney Museum and the Shaping of Video Art: An Interview with John Hanhardt, Marita Sturken

May 1983, Afterimage

John Hanhardt is curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He is responsible for the initial inclusion and further integration of video into the Whitney’s exhibition program, as well as its program in independent film. The video shown at the Whitney has comprised an internationally diverse program of narrative, performance, documentary, and image-processed work, as well as installations.

There is little doubt that Hanhardt is, at present, the most influential American curator in video. His program at the Whitney is the most visible in this country for two reasons: first, video is included in the Museum’s Biennial, providing recognition by exhibiting video with established art forms; second, Hanhardt has been successful in producing certain large exhibitions at the Whitney-most recently, the Nam June Paik retrospective which he curated last year.

The text printed here represents an edited transcript of three interviews conducted in February and March, 1983. It includes Hanhardt’s additions and corrections.

Marita Sturken: What did you do before you came to the Whitney?
John Hanhardt: I completed graduate work at New York University’s Department of Cinema Studies. Film had been a sort of hobby through college. Rochester’s my home town, and I used to spend a lot of time at the George Eastman House looking at films. George Pratt and James Card are good friends. I ran the film society at the University of Rochester and wrote reviews for the college newspaper, but my academic work as an undergraduate and graduate student was in linguistics and psychology. I later decided to transfer to film studies in graduate school because, like video, it’s an area that is open to interpretation and analysis. I was interested in applying my interests in linguistics to film. It is such a multi-disciplinary medium-moving image, recorded sound, narrative, nonnarrative-and it confronts so many issues of artmaking.
I was fortunate at NYU to receive a curatorial internship in the Museum of Modem Art’s department of film. The internship didn’t continue because of funding problems, but it was ideal in chat Willard Van Dyke (then director of MOMA’s department of film) gave me the opportunity to work in all areas of the department-the Film Study Center, the Film Stills Archive, and the film archive itself. I began the “What’s Happening” documentary series with Van Dyke, and we co-authored a report on short film production, distribution, and exhibition for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I also became active in the Flaherty Film Seminar.
Then, in 1972, I was offered a position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as film coordinator, where I established the film department and began the film study collection. There was a precedent for a film program, but I was given the opportunity to fully develop and place the program in a larger context. I went from the Walker to the Whitney as curator and head of the department in 1974. That means I’ve been associated with three major, contemporary modern art institutions, and three very different ones-the large Museum of Modern Art, which had set the precedent of bringing photography, film, and architectural design into a museum; the Walker, which is highly innovative under its director (Martin Friedman), where I was able to learn about working within a smaller institution and developing a program; and the Whitney, where I inherited a very strong situation. David Bienstock had already established the film department here-“The New American Filmmaker Series”-and made it an important, visible, and unique program.
I came here a year after his death in 1 974 a move both both interesting and challenging. You can really focus on the history of an art form in such a situation. I introduced an emphasis on the avant-garde, documentary, and narrative programs. My goals were to integrate the department more fully, curatorially and in terms of exhibitions info the museum, to keep its identity but to develop a situation where it wouldn’t be seen as somehow separate. One of the things I could build on, which David had started, was week-long exhibitions of film that gave maximum exposure to a program as a theatrical run. When I decided to move into video, I wanted to show it in the same fashion, with appropriate seating arrangements. I realized that with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, which gave us the funding to get the initial hardware and to rewire the theater, I could bring to video what we had in film. For video to work as a medium and to show installation work, it needs in-house museum support. You need a video technician maintaining the equipment, so that the notion of technology as things that break down will be overcome. That meant convincing the museum to do for video what it did for painting and sculpture in the installation of work. The preparation of exhibitions, program notes, advertising, and payment of artists’ fees created a supportive situation. I firmly believe in a program having a point of view, being selective, and staking an interest-not making film and video conform to the other arts but changing one’s definition of art by putting new forms and ideas within a larger, historical and critical context.
MS: What was the first video exhibition at the Whitney?
JH: David Bienstock did a program in 1971 called “A Special Videotape Show.” It was very important for the Whitney, and also for New York museums.
MS: The first Biennial to include video was in 1975?
JH: That was the first to include a comprehensive selection of video, but in the 1973 Biennial there were seven videotapes and one installation, selected by the curators of painting and sculpture. It was important that video was represented in the 1973 Biennial-certainly very important for my efforts-but it wasn’t recognized fully until 1975. In the 1977 Biennial we had video, and then in 1979 we showed both film and video.
MS: How was it that video was accepted into the Biennial before film?
JH: Video, as it emerged, had particular ties to the art world - with Richard Serra, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, and other artists. There was a perception of video as a medium that conceptual artists and performance artists used. Film, of course, had a much longer history-not that it didn’t touch the other arts, but it wasn’t as easily placed in that context. I think that one of my most important moves here was to bring both video and film into the Biennial.
MS: After the Biennial, your first big show was “Projected Video,” in June 1975.
JH: That was actually a project that my predecessor, David Bienstock, and his associate curator, Bruce Rubin, had been thinking about. In the selection of tapes and the program notes I tried to address the issue of the projected format and its relationship to the monitor, the feeling being that any projected system changed the perception of a work created for the monitor. I chose work that would be suitable for projection. I wanted to raise the issue of the limitations of projection.
MS: I suppose there weren’t many projection systems around in 1975.
JH: It was not that common. We used the Advent projection system. There was a lot of interest in it-Newsweek wrote an article on it. Now we use projection only when it’s the artist’s intention that the work be shown that way. For instance, we presented Vito Acconci’s The Red Tapes in projection because it was created for that format.
MS: What were the other big shows you did before the Paik retrospective?
JH: A very important show was “Re-Vision: Projects and Proposals in Film and Video” in 1979, when we organized for the first time-I believe it was the first time in New York-a large museum exhibition devoted to film and video as installation forms. It took up the entire third floor of the museum. Though the film/video gallery is a flexible space where we can present all different types of video and film; we propose installations and exhibitions for the other spaces in the museum.
MS: Subject to approval by whom?
JH: It is presented for general curatorial review, in our weekly meetings.
MS: You must have a receptive situation.
JH: The staff has been supportive. I should add that for the museum, which was founded for and has remained committed to contemporary art, the film and video department does represent a commitment to vanguard developments in the visual arts. One lays the groundwork for that. Video has been supported by Tom Armstrong, the director. Mrs. Flora Biddle, the president of the Whitney, was very active in the establishment of the film department in 1970, as was Marcia Tucker, who was painting and sculpture curator here before she became the director of the New Museum.
MS: So the “Re-Visions” show was the first exhibition, beside the Biennials, where video was presented outside its regular gallery space?
JH: Yes. It was a serious show. I’m proud of if because it looked at the issue of representation-how the recording medium of film works as opposed to that of video. The film installations were by Michael Snow, Morgan Fisher, and William Anastasi. All the video was closed circuit. Except for Snow’s installation, all the pieces were site-specific. Buky Schwartz did Videoconstruction, in which the camera was positioned near the ceiling and pointed into a gallery space where there was a painted area you could walk on. What you saw on the monitor was a yellow triangle, so from the point of view of the camera-closed-circuit, real-time-the two-dimensional properties of the medium flattened the three-dimensional space of the gallery into an object visible only on the monitor. Only when you were in the gallery could you see what was happening.
Another video piece was Rumored Innuendo, by Bill Bierne, which used four closed-circuit surveillance cameras in different locations in the museum. There was one in the restaurant, one in a curator’s office, one in the lobby, and one on the stairway. All-of these were non-exhibition, public spaces. The camera was not visible, but the area that the camera covered was marked, and there was a label. There were also four microphones-in the lobby, in a stairwell, in my office, and near the phones. The area picked up by each microphone was marked out and labeled. You could see and hear this on the second floor, but you could never see yourself because the camera was always somewhere else. Bierne had performers regularly come in and act like the public. One camera was above an associate curator’s desk, and every now and then Bierne would mail a photograph or something which the curator would put in his IN box. Who was performing or what was performed was at issue, as well as how an area became visible as a performance space by the placement of a camera and microphone.
The third video piece was Cloud Music, by Bob Watts, David Behrman, and Bob Diamond. The camera was pointed at the sky through the window on the third floor, and there was a video synthesizer and audio analyzer. There were black marks -sensitizers-on the screen, which could be moved by the artist, and became a score. As the light intensity changed at these marks, it set off an harmonic change that filled the room with sound. The clouds and the sky composed and generated the sound. People would sit there for hours.
Between the “Re-Visions” show and the Paik show, there was one other installation-the large Walt Disney animation show, “Disney Animations and Animators.”
MS: Was the impetus for the Paik show his work or the desire to have a major retrospective?
JH: The desire was to represent Paik’s work and the only way to do so comprehensively and effectively was in a large exhibition.
MS: So it had to be a show of that magnitude?
JH: I felt that was in order. I felt what was central to his work was the full range of his objects, from the Fluxus robot to the large installation pieces, and that we would be uniquely suited to do it on our fourth floor.
MS: Did you think of the show as establishing a new historical perspective for video, in that it had reached the stage where a major retrospective of one artist was possible?
JH: Well, we’d already demonstrated that video art was a serious art form and that we could organize exhibitions. So it was time for a major show. My argument was that Paik was clearly the artist whose achievement deserved such an exhibition. One of the gratifying things about the show was that a lot of people who didn’t know his work or didn’t know video art came out enjoying it. It also demonstrated how influential Paik is and what extraordinary range his work has.
MS: Wasn’t it supposed to travel?
JH: It traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and we were hoping that it would travel to Europe and to other sites in the U.S., but we ran into problems. The dates for Europe fell through at the last minute and it affected our whole schedule.
MS: Is it an expensive show to travel?
JH: Yes. So when it fell apart in Europe it was difficult to reassemble a tour in the U.S. But we’re very pleased with the way it turned out in Chicago.
MS: If we look at the work that has been shown at the Whitney as reflecting the major issues video has been concerned with, could you define what those issues were and have become? For instance, what were the major issues in the 1975 Biennial as compared to the 1983 Biennial?
JH: The 1975 Biennial was one of the first major showings of Bill Viola’s work, a piece called Information which dealt with a destruction of the image-a pure snow image which was disintegrating. We also showed James Byrne and Terry Fox. There were a couple of things going on then-the kind of work that is almost epistemological in terms of dealing with the nature of the medium, and the performance-oriented, stripped-down narrative work, like the John Baldessari, Ed Henderson, and William Wegman work I showed in 1976. There’s also the work which responded to television itself, like the Telethon tapes by Billy Adler and John Margolies. Their work was very important then, and it’s historically important now. There were political works, such as performance oriented works by Allan Sekula, Francesc Torres, and Brian Connell. There was also narrative work, such as Kathy Acker and Alan Sondheim’s Untitled.
In 1977, the stated purpose of the Biennial was to review the art of the 70s and to identify some of its leading participants. That selection goes from Acconci to Paik, to Nancy Holt, Joan Jonas, and Alan Kaprow. It was an interesting survey. In our tenth anniversary we had a Peter Campus retrospective, selections from Paik, Mitchell Kriegman’s Telephone Stories-which was the department’s first audio piece-Chris Burden, and Bruce Nauman. We showed Beryl Korot’s Dachau and Text and Commentary, which was a historical show to bring back two important earlier works. You can chart all kinds of shifts, and many issues stay right through. This year we had Joan Jonas, who was shown very early on, coming back with her latest performance work, He Saw Her Burning.
One of the major changes between 1973 and 1975 was how the individual artist changed. Barbara Buckner, Shalom Gorewitz, and Bob Snyder’s image-processing work now is both affected by technology and also responsive to a setting where one can be at ease with the technology as one is exploring imagemaking. Early work was very conscious of that technology.
But I don’t look at this history in a linear way. I don’t look back at these early programs and say “Wow, that’s what they thought video was.” I think that work was important then and is important now. I don’t see growth in the field as a linear progression of improvement. What has grown is that there are more people working in video.
MS: It is interesting to note that many of those artists are no longer working in video.
JH: Those artists produced a body of work which we still haven’t fully dealt with. I feel that Nauman’s and Acconci’s work is of great importance. I don’t think it means anything that many of them are no longer actively engaged in video. When we look back we often see artists move into different media and materials. Serra will still occasionally produce a tape, as will Nancy Holt and Vito Acconci. I think we should recognize that video is here to stay.
MS: Do you feel like you’re straddling a fence between video and film?
JH: I really want both to share the program and I have always maintained that there’s a basic, ontological distinction between the two-how they function, and their history. There are limitations, in terms of time, in how much one can present in an exhibition year. Both film and video represent an enormous range of styles and genres in installation/sculpture/performance/telecast, single-channel, and theatrical film forms. I do see lots of changes happening in the moving-image media-how film is going to function, what both film and video are going to become. They’re going to change dramatically; the question is how. It’s very complex in terms of distribution. It’s not just a utopian idea that things are going to be better. The changes in film and video are not isolated from other social, economic, and cultural changes.
MS: Because you’re in a museum setting, do you feel an obligation to show installation work in order to integrate video with other art forms?
JH: I try to balance single-channel and installation work, because I think they inform each other. Artists do both, and some of the principles that are involved in a single-channel work are expanded in an installation. Even a documentary idea can be expanded in a multi-media installation, like Bill Stephen’s Fire Walls Four. One of the most important roles that museums have played in video is showing single-channel videotapes in a quality presentation. The home viewer was never really made aware of how to control color, sound, and other variables on the TV set. The quality of the presentation of a videotape, and the context, changes the viewer’s relationship to the television, and indicates that it might be different.
MS: Do you receive a lot of unsolicited proposals and work, or do you solicit work?
JH: Both. Work comes in, proposals are submitted. Work is recommended. I jury and I’m on panels a lot, so I see work that way. If I lecture at a school, I look at what the students are doing. But there’s a tremendous backlog of work to review. That’s why Callie Angell is now the assistant curator; she looks at work too. I try to be responsible to the field as a whole by speaking out on what it is and by being on panels. I am also writing a book on film and video installation forms, called Expanded Form in Film and Video, which ought to be done late this spring.
MS: Do you have specific criteria for the work you select?
JH: When I look at a piece-if it’s by an artist with a body of work behind him or her-one set of criteria comes into play. How does it work? Does it explore an area that X hasn’t done before? If it’s a new artist, I see the work against a larger context. Does it repeat what I’ve seen someone else do? Is it redoing what Nauman did 10 years ago-which is often the case. What puts this work on the edge? If it’s a narrative film, an animation, a synthesized videotape or whatever, I see it against the history of those genres. What is it borrowing? - though that doesn’t mean everything has to be different. Work can enrich a tradition as much as expanding it. I like to think that there are a lot of factors impacting on the decision process. I’m looking for work that isn’t just conforming to a tradition that’s already exhausted itself. That has been a problem with documentary in recent years. It was more exciting in the past. It’s a problem with some narrative and synthesizer work.
MS: There seems to be about a two-year period before you show the same artist again.
JH: That’s true. I am not going to keep showing the same person after they’ve had a few shows, but if they have a powerful new work I will. I’ve shown Frank Gillette before-he has been in a Biennial and he did an installation-but he has this extraordinary new work that is really advancing his ideas and the idea of installations, so I am going to show it this spring. The same with the two telecast pieces that Doug Davis developed.
It’s very important that a museum have a point of view in terms of history. I think we’ll be doing a lot more historical shows.
MS: What kind of historical shows?
JH: Showing artists’ earlier work in one-artist and group show formats, like I showed Beryl Korot’s Dachau and Text and Commentary two years ago. They’d been shown before, at Castelli, but they hadn’t been seen in years. There is a lot of interesting installation work in video that one refers to and sees illustrated but that hasn’t been seen in years. I plan to do at least one historical view every season.
MS: Do you plan to do more audio?
JH: Sound is something that I’m very interested in. I selected the Max Neuhaus piece for the Biennial, and Alvin Lucier is working on a proposal for a sound piece for next season. I’m not changing the title of the program to “Film, Video, and Sound,” but I definitely want to address sound because it works in the context of the department. Sound pieces are nothing new to the museum, but I think there are areas of sound sculpture and environments that we could do more with. We could also explore records, recordings, and distribution. The future also holds that we will do more with the idea of distributing video.
This year, we’ll circulate the Biennial selection for both film and video through the AFA (the American Federation for the Arts). They’ve distributed our film program before, and now they will include the videotapes, though not the installations. I’m very interested in the ides of opening up another institution to video. We could probably handle the distribution, but why not have the AFA begin to handle it? Then maybe through our own resources we can do it, as we did with the Paik show. However, I am curating a touring show of video and films installation forms for the AFA.
MS: I noticed that your program notes and announcements have changed drastically over the years. Is that a reflection of changes in the program?
JH: When this program began, announcements, flyers, and calendars were very important. They had to identify the department, since independent film and video weren’t showcased much. The past 10 years have seen an incredible change; independent film is now opening in theaters. Now our program notes are a permanent publication. We’re going to produce a birder so that they will constitute an ever-expanding catalogue.
MS: How are things going to change with the Whitney’s new expansion?
JH: The Whitney wants to provide more exhibition space for its permanent collection and for temporary exhibitions. Right now we’ve given over the entire third floor to the permanent collection, so it’s not available for the Biennial this year. There’s a major fund-raising effort to expand. Michael Graves is the architect who will be drawing up a proposal for expansion next door. This museum, when it was designed, didn’t have a film department and a lot of the other departments that it has now. It outgrew itself very quickly. Ideally, we will have a better situation theatrically for viewing film, and a gallery for film/video installations.
MS: You would have one space for single-channel work and one for installations?
JH: Yes. However, single-channel work is going to change. I wouldn’t want to rely on projection, because I don’t know what projection is going to be. You can’t show a lot of earlier work that way. It has to be shown on monitors, and that will probably become an historic function of a museum, like showing nitrate film. Showing videotapes on a television set wilt probably become the most important thing that we’ll do, because the cathode ray tube as we know it is going to change. If the resolution of the image improves, it could mean that the work will be seen differently than when it was made; we are going to have to preserve the way it was originally made and shown. That will fall on the museum in its function as a preserver and interpreter of our cultural history.
I am trying to get the Whitney to establish a collection in film and video and a study center, which I consider very important. We don’t now collect, except for installations. We acquired Paik’s Vyramid and there are other installations that we are going to collect, but I would like to be involved in the preservation of American film and video. We should realize our full function and not only be an exhibition department. It is going to take some convincing.
MS: Will it be similar to the film study center at the Museum of Modern Art?
JH: Yes, but it will be American work. I don’t expect it to be as large but I think we can do something important that is not being done in other institutions like Anthology Film Archives or the Modern. Exhibition facilities are less an issue to me than the collecting and the study center. It would deal with the issues of preserving film and video, integrating those art forms further within the Museum’s programs by making them part of a collecting program. It would also preserve secondary print material on artists-their notes, sketches, and plans which exist for the most part in artists’ lofts and which could be lost or destroyed. The trustees have to decide, and I am hoping their decision will be favorable, but it’s a new medium, and even with the expansion our space will be limited. For instance, the Whitney doesn’t collect photography. Our offices will be better, and we will have a screening room, but the issue is arguing the expansion of the department in a philosophical way. It would strengthen the department, I think, and make it more viable in terms of fundraising. The Whitney has to decide that it can physically and economically support film and video because the traditional sources of support that exist for painting and sculpture don’t exist yet for film and video. Witness any film and video department’s deficit problems.
MS: I know that the museum absorbs a lot of costs of this department, but what are your other sources of funding?
JH: The National Endowment for the Art and the New York State Council on the Arts, of course. Through the development office of the museum we do fundraising from private individuals. For specific exhibitions there may be corporate or other foundation funding. We organize benefits-for instance we had the world premiere of Manhattan as a benefit for the department. I work with trustees who seek out funding and projects to raise funds.
MS: Will you have to deal with decreased public funding?
JH: The ballgame is definitely changing. It affects this department in the sense that we always have to seek out new sources of support. There aren’t that many sources of support for new media and new art forms. It is very important to stress the importance of funding like the NEA, NYSCA, and the Rockefeller Foundation. That’s why video is so strong in this state. And that’s what these agencies should be doing funding work that doesn’t have other sources of support. Television wouldn’t be changing the way ii is now, and video wouldn’t be what it is now without those forms of support.
MS: How do you think the role of the museum is going to change?
JH: It will depend on the technology, but it also depends on the direction of museums. There is a lot of museum construction going on now in America, but are they constructing something open to the future or are they celebrating what’s already happened? That’s the question. Are they going to use channels of distribution effectively as artists increasingly turn to new technology for imagery?
MS: In light of the contemporary outlets that we have-galleries, museums, cable, alternative spaces, low-power broadcasting, public television-what is the museum’s real function?
JH: ft’s an institution that is there to select and pass judgments of quality. It is a non-profit, non-commercial role. It’s not a box-office mentality. What’s important about a museum is recognizing that art can be defined by other criteria than the unique object, that a museum is not only one which recognizes the Fairfield Porters and the Edward Hoppers but also critically and seriously interprets and studies all of the traditions of American art. Video art is part of what a museum is recognizing as a vital and unique part of our culture and society. That perception, an institution which defines itself as traditionally as the Whitney does, is very important to the field.
MS: Do you have a sense of your audience at the Whitney?
JH: It’s broad because it combines the audience of the museum as a whole and the people who specifically follow our program, who read reviews and articles and follow what we are doing.
MS: I’d like to know what kind of impact it has for an artist to be shown in this program. My impression is that it carries more weight to be shown in this program-at least in the Biennial-compared to the Modern or the Walker or at Long Beach. Do you see yourself as a spokesman?
JH: I think we’ve achieved a particularly strong position in terms of video because we’ve committed resources to it and have a permanent, well equipped and maintained gallery space. In exhibitions like the Biennial, work is under consideration with other developments in contemporary art. It expresses a commitment of the Institution as a whole, by locating video not as peripheral but as an integral part of its exhibition program. I think that perception, both on the part of the artist and on the part of the public, is important in terms of public recognition and understanding. I don’t want to be the only show in town, because video’s success will be that it’s incorporated into as many institutions as possible. That’s why I welcome what may be developing at the Modern in terms of Barbara London’s (London is curator of video at MOMA) efforts to give video a larger place. By a larger place, I mean what is appropriate to the medium in terms of viewing space, lighting conditions, soundproofing, and everything else that’s what I mean by support and recognition. It’s important for the field that it’s happening all over. I’m looking to the efforts of David Ross, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. I’m interested to see what Kathy Huffman, in a smaller institution, is doing at the Long Beach Museum of Art to set up a model of what video can be with cable in a museum.
I am very concerned about how museums in general are going to affect the work in the future, about whether the museum is going to serve the function it has shown itself capable of in terms of presenting new media. If it is going to function as an on-going, cultural institution, it has to respond to cultural changes. If it is only going to define itself as a modernist institution up until the’80s, closing around film and video at a certain point, then it’s not going to be a vital institution in terms of an intellectual engagement within the culture as a whole. Otherwise, it will only be a historical institution.
MS: Do you mean changes in the way art is made?
JH: ... and what art is, the way it’s exhibited. If you look at the major collections of American art around the country, they’re all very much the same, except that some have more masterpieces by certain artists than others. They should incorporate film and video. Institutions of this kind should be doing what the Modern did for film in the ‘30s, preserving its early history and showing it. The organizers of exhibitions have a responsibility to identify what creative work is, what the idea of the artist is, and to be in an active dialogue with artists. You have to go out on the line, saying what you think-that you don’t like the work or you do like it. There has to be a real selection process going on that fits into the point of view that an institution, and a department, can have. I like to think that this exhibition program is deliberately providing a point of view of the history of contemporary work in video.
I look critically at the field. I think a lot more institutions should be dealing with video. Technology is changing in our lives and way of living. The idea of how people go to movies, how people watch TV, how people go to museums, how people use their living space, how people shop, how people get information, how people transmit information-it’s all going to change. Artists’ ideas are also going to change. Just as it was a vanguard thing for the Modern to be dealing with film in the ‘30s and ‘40s, we find ourselves in a vanguard situation dealing with video, because we’re giving time and space to it, and we’re a leading New York institution. That doesn’t mean that exciting things aren’t being done around the country, but there is a certain visibility here. It’s a gradual process because the press is extremely conservative and hardly equipped to respond to this work successfully. We need more critical response in the press. We are living in a time when neo-conservative institutions like The New York Times, enjoy extraordinary power. A lot of people tie success to how that newspaper responds. It’s preposterous. When in the past would one look to a major newspaper of the time as being the place to reflect on the major art work of the period? New York is increasingly becoming a place for the rich, though it’s still a vital center. It could very well become like Paris in terms of living in the past.
MS: I know that the Paik show attracted an enormous amount of press, but in terms of the work that you show on a regular basis, how important is that press? How much do you get?
JH: We get a fair amount, and it is important. It’s important to the artist, so it’s important to us. I think that the general condition of the art press is not very strong and that this is reflected in video criticism. The problem with criticism is not so much a question of whether somebody likes a particular exhibition, but how they respond critically. That’s why an important part of our program is the lecture series. I am less interested in anecdotal kinds of presentations-artists talking about their work-than situations where people are invited to present papers and to focus on a particular issue.
We’re going to be doing more of that. I want to do a conference on feminist media criticism and theory, in both film and video, because I think it has been the most important body of theory that has emerged in the past 10 years, and so much good work has been done in this country.
MS: Has your programming of women and minority artists been conscious? Do you seek out that work?
JH: It’s a conscious effort on my part, and I’m still not doing enough. I feel I should be showing more women, and more minorities. It’s a problem. I can show Bill Stephens, who did that remarkable Fire Walls Four installation, but there are fewer minority artists working in the vanguard in film. I think we’ll see more in video, because it’s less expensive. I do feel that I’ve been consciously trying to represent it, and by no means is that work anything but as good as anything else. But we should do more. We should have a black curator here. It’s a tough issue. I think we should look to what’s being done around the issues of neighborhood-oriented programs, and the films and videotapes that they’re showing. I probably should be giving more attention .to that.
MS: How do you see the role of alternative spaces in relation to museums?
JH: I think an alternative space can, in a certain sense, do more, because it’s much more flexible. Any exhibition we organize is a long process of working it out with the artist, identifying the artists we want to show, what they’re going to do, and how they’re going to do it. That’s what an establishment institution is about. I go to alternative spaces to see work. They are a resource, so we go to Artists Space or The Kitchen, Franklin Furnace, or P.S. 1. I first saw many of the works I’ve shown here in one of those spaces.
You know, when we talk about the possibilities as the field changes, we have to be realistic. We’re in a time of tremendous federal cutbacks. We need more grass roots organization. We need more people in the field responding to and cooperating with each other. I’m concerned about those vital smaller institutions, like alternative spaces. We have to support each other, and set up mechanisms to do that.
MS: How does a museum support smaller institutions?
JH: It can’t support them financially, but we can-and we do-support legislation and decisions that affect the entire field. We also have to nurture individuals in the field. We have to find new sources of support. We’re going to have to be vigilant for the kinds of censorship that have been occurring in Washington, both from funders and from the government as a whole in terms of legislation. Actions like the Justice Department calling some Canadian films “propaganda”, bizarre as that may seem, can indicate larger issues. I’m optimistic but I also want to be realistic.
MS: Do you think it’s too early to start dealing with video historically?
JH: No. It has to be written about and challenged, and whatever is written will be changed. Issues that Walter Benjamin raised in the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the 1930s about photography in the nineteenth century have not yet been fully dealt with, so why should video suddenly have a full-blown critical discourse and historiography? It doesn’t, but it will. Video is an important ingredient for museums and art history courses to be dealing with, because it’s making us rethink painting and sculpture. Video isn’t just coming of age. It isn’t like it’s suddenly growing up. There are mature, serious works that I don’t think we have come to grips with, like Nauman’s work, or Acconci’s. I like to think of it as a constant process of evaluation.
MS: Like the way early film is now being reevaluated?
JH: The same thing is going to happen in video. That’s a point of contention for me-to look at early video as being imitative of the other visual arts. It was feeding back imagery to those other arts, too. It’s wrong to call that work boring, uninteresting, or amateurish. Sure, a lot of it now looks unsophisticated, but you have to look at it as a whole. There are strengths and weaknesses at any particular point in history. We have to identify what the strengths were and not jump at the weaknesses. There were a lot of bad tapes made, but there were a hell of a lot of bad paintings made, and lousy books and plays.
You know, the situation in criticism in all of the visual arts is not very developed. There is a lot of interesting work going on in philosophy and literature, which is what I read, and in linguistics and communications, that hasn’t penetrated the visual arts in terms of art history or criticism. Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, and many areas of philosophy that are emerging from feminism are things that artists refer to when they are making their work. That’s the critics’ and the art historians’ job, too, if they are going to deal with this art. They’ll have to know this material because it is shaping a lot of new video, image-painting, and all art forms. When you look at the teaching of art history in America today, there are very few schools that teach art past the ‘30s and ‘40s.
MS: When you think about the acceptance of the camera arts in general in art history, it’s worse.
JH: Well, it’s the precious, unique object. Duchamp challenged a lot of that, and we still haven’t fully digested his work, which was central to the ‘60s in terms of land art and installation art. One can collect videotapes and installations. There are reasons for doing it, because they are going to deteriorate, but one shouldn’t try to make video conform to a concept of what an art object is. One of the problems of traditional kinds of support, like those in painting and sculpture, is that they are based on the whole dialectic of investment and value. That doesn’t invalidate video-look at haw things changed with the invention of the printing press. I think that video technology is analogous to the invention of the printing press and the industrial revolution. One of the big changes that has taken place from the early days of art technology is that artists’ ideas then were in advance of what the technology could do. There used to be all kinds of difficulties for artists in realizing their ideas through those early technologies. Now the technology is moving ahead quickly and the artist has to keep up. It’s an important change, and the support should come from those industries and those businesses that produce that technology.
MS: When people talk about new outlets and new technology there is a real tendency to make analogies-that tapes are going to be distributed like books, or records. I wonder if we aren’t being a little simplistic.
JH: I agree. Such models ignore how pervasive and profound the charges are going to be with new technologies. We are always going to have books, but clearly the printed text is also going to be part of television and the home computer. How we distribute music and how we use radio will both be tied to the ways television develops and how new forms of records (by laser) are introduced. Video is very important in the music industry now. That’s a huge shift. Radio is going to change dramatically.
I’ve been speaking with David Bermont, who is an owner of shopping malls. He’s tried to introduce kinetic sculpture into the public awareness, so he collects work to show in his shopping malls. Paik’s Participation TV has been part of a shopping mall in upstate New York for years. One of Bermont’s basic arguments is that such works have increased business in his shopping centers: He’s done studies of what the impact has been on the shops, and the retailers renting his space, who were dubious at first, are now very excited.
What is mass distribution of art anyway? How many people consciously select fine art for their homes, or even inexpensive art? It’s a small number. What I keep saying is that video will be seen as taking on from film the issues of how art can change. For the first time since the industrial revolution, there’s an art which is changing the very premises of society. That’s the big picture we should address.

above copied from: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=31&page=1