Digital Archiving as an Art Practice, Dew Harrison

The idea of archiving as a form of practice within the field of art is not a new one. It has been an accepted activity since the mid 1960s and in evidence in the early twentieth century. The collages and photomontages of the 1920s, although not intended as art works but more as purveyors of social meaning, had an aesthetic, through being both pictorial and semantically-structured, which had a strong impact on later archival works. Benjamin Buchloch dismisses the influences of the earlier archives – ‘such projects share a condition of being unclassifiable within the typology and terminology of avant-garde art history'. He claims that ‘avant-garde history seems to have few, if any, precedents for artistic procedures that systematically organise knowledge as didactic models of display or as mnemonic devices' 1. However, it is not unusual for artists to look beyond their field for both material and content within their practice, and this was particularly so in the 1960s when artists were trapped within the confines of Modernist ideology concerning the autonomy of art, and began engaging with the outside world. Jeremy Deller's current ‘Folk Archive' is a clear example of a contemporary practice resting on earlier methods of archiving for social engagement and response.

Initial influences can be traced to Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg. Benjamin's ‘Passagenwerk' was a textual assemblage created in the late 1920s. This unfinished montage was an attempt to construct an analytical memory of collective experience in nineteenth-century Paris. Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29) was a monumental project, aiming to construct a model of Western European humanist culture from classical antiquity onwards. Warburg's work is text-free and consists of over 60 panels containing 1000 photographs in an attempt, according to Kurt Forster, to ‘redefine graphic montage as the construction of meanings rather than the arrangement of form' in a similar way to the work of Schwitters and Lissitsky.2 These two archives existed in parallel with the more politically-charged works of Weimar Dadaists such as Heartfield, Hocke and Rodchenko and the Surrealists, whose montage techniques were known to Benjamin, and whose collages were a random juxtaposition of found objects and images with a sense of fundamental cognitive and perceptual anomic. The Surrealists' work was later read as apolitical and anti-communicative, esoteric and aestheticist, resulting in a call for work with a dimension of narrative and instrumentalised logic within the structured organisation of the montage aesthetic.

These earlier archives were largely facilitated by new technological developments in print and photography, the latter identified by Benjamin as an emerging emancipatory technology containing the social promise of enabling collective interaction and subjecthood.3 Indeed Warburg conceived his Atlas as a model of the construction of social memory. Throughout the mid-60s structurally-similar photographic projects began to emerge in Europe from the accumulation of found or intentionally-produced photographs set in grid formations which were neither collage nor photomontage, not mere collections but art works. Although the German artist Gerhard Richter states that it was Rauschenberg's collage aesthetic rather than the Weimar Dadaists or Warburg that introduced him to the photomontage practice, 4 his ongoing Atlas project, begun in 1962, constitutes a massive repository of pictorial source material with motifs arranged by content and form rather than in chronological order. Richter states that ‘My Atlas is a deluge of images that I can control only by organising them and with no individual images left at all.' 5 According to Helmut Friedel ‘The breadth of ideas and sheer variety of forms and meanings the Atlas embodies is astonishing'. 6 The archive is evidence of the thinking that underlies Richter's paintings and he ensures that every time the Atlas is exhibited it is in compliance with his strict instructions for hanging, so that it is displayed differently each time.

The upheaval of conceptual art towards the end of the modernist period gave rise to an understanding of the organised archive as systemised collation and enabled new working methods for artists. The engagement of conceptual artists with systems theory, information theory, cybernetics and electronic technology had a real bearing on the ideological, political and social conflicts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Hans Haacke's interest in systems thinking concerned the structure of organisations and social systems. This led to his most controversial work Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971. This project held a massive collation of data including two maps, 142 photographs, 142 typewritten sheets, an explanatory sheet and six charts showing the complexity of connections between Shapolski's companies and his subsequent business machinations. The American artist Mary Kelly gives us another example of systemised collation in her obsessive record of the early development of a feminist's son in a patriarchal society. Her Post-Partum Document (1973-79) is a six-sectioned, 135-part, multimedia documentation of the first six years in this mother-child relationship.

The need to engage with social systems caused a general movement out of the studio and into the streets. This gave rise to a critique of the encounter between galleries, museums and conceptual art which resulted in interrogations of museology and the institutional archive. Informed by André Malraux's idea of ‘le musée imaginaire', the museum without walls, where he anticipated that the reduction of historical context and social function would leave a purely aesthetic experience, Marcel Broodthaers showed his Musée d'Art Modern, Département des Aigles at Documenta V in 1972. This was an eclectic range of objects, photographs, books and films begun in 1968, representing the eagle and the complex cultural myths surrounding the bird as a symbol for a nation, of fortitude, of perception, of strength and power. This work was a second order representation of a classification system at work and deconstructed the museum with wit and humour saving the archive from seriousness by verging on the arbitrary. The French artist Christian Boltanski continues to use the museum archive structure for his mixed-media installations. However, in order to create mementos of ‘fictive' identities using collections of poor-quality family photos in order to intimate a common bourgeois life, his installations may include biscuit tins and other household items. An example of such is his Reserve of the Dead Swiss (1990), a cabinet-like tower of tin boxes, each with a photograph of an anonymous person, piles of fabric and lamps. This work evokes the Holocaust as successfully as any museum exhibit but with false evidence.

From the examples of archival activities within art practice given above, two forms of art work are prominent and still have resonance within contemporary practice:

Collective memory/memorial (A contemporary example of this work is Winifred Agricola de Cologne's vast multimedia Virtual Memorial project at: < http://www.a-virtual-memorial.org >) (Accessed 5 April 2007)
Museological methods (Contemporary examples of this work are Susan Hiller's Freud Museum, or Damien Hirst's cabinets of medical instruments and sea shells)
Having given some insight into these two reasons for archiving we will now explore a third, ‘complexity' which, in contemporary practice, may now embrace new technologies beyond photography for reportage and documentation.
Complexity management – or the collation of separate elements in order to make sense of a whole body of work as an ‘holisitic gestalt' for analysis, interrogation and meaning. (Christopher Williams, Art & Language)
In 1991 Christopher Williams exhibited a highly complex installation entitled Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo, a piece which combines sentiment with the almost clinical objectivity apparent in past conceptual art works. The work not only pays homage to the two conceptual artists mentioned in the title, but also refers to humanitarian feelings for the world's injustice and to personal loss. Williams is interested in how photographs influence our reality, and his central subject matter has long been the archive, the intersection between photographic trace, knowledge and power. Bouquet is a continuation of a previous piece entitled Angola to Vietnam (1989). The topic is political murder and involves the viewer in an analysis of information and power. Angola to Vietnam consists of 27 photographs of plants taken from the Harvard University collection of glass replicas of botanical specimens. These glass flowers have their own history, not divulged in the botanical and photographic information that accompanies the black and white photographs. Each plant pictured represents a country named in the 1985 Amnesty International Report. This report documents countries where political disappearances have taken place. The piece draws an analogy between the fragile and irreplaceable glass flowers and the human victims of torture and abuse on behalf of whom Amnesty campaigns. The strict symmetry of the images and text is broken by a single image entitled Brasil, an image also used for the front cover of the French magazine, Elle.

Brasil features the smiling faces of five multi-ethnic models along with a number of hats. The eight hats are each labelled with a different country name, referring to the Amnesty list. The image may be interpreted as a global map matching consumption with repression. Williams used this list of countries to inform his botanical mapping of the world and generated a group of eight flower species, one for each hat. The flowers were arranged in a loose bouquet laid across a white damask cloth and photographed. This photograph, in colour, was hung on an installed section of wall. The piece also incorporates a monochrome print of the archives maintained by the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities. The aura of institutional morbidity shifts to one of actual human loss through the dedication of the installation to the two conceptual artists who took their own lives. The references within Bouquet to the work of Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo are numerous 7.

Hans Haacke and his Shapolsky et al project is another fine example of a piece held together by an interlacing of complicated cross-referencing. More complex and literal cross-referencing may be witnessed in the Indexes of Art & Language (1972-74). The Art & Language collective was foremost among those who established the theoretical conditions of conceptual art and their Indexes are systems concerning art as philosophy, structured through language. The materials they processed were the terms and conditions of their own conversations and arguments and their intention was to analyse the internal intellectual structures and relations of Art & Language. The ultimate aim was to produce a system in which decisions were taken (often represented diagrammatically) concerning the connectivity there might be between various texts. The Documenta V Index of 1972 took the form of a filing system holding an index of over 350 text items previously published and circulated by Art & Language members. Each item was read in relation to the others resulting in 122,500 cross-references. The walls surrounding the filing cabinets were papered with the listed index of texts, interrelated according to three possible categories:

a relation of compatibility = orthodox (Art & Language)
a relation of incompatibility = unorthodox
a relation of incomparability = relatively eccentric
The work is an attempt to map a conversation, to find a representation of a place where meanings could be made. The research-like character of Art & Language could be presented in the gallery context only in token form and it was accepted that the hiatus between ‘research-like' activity and artistic presentation had been successfully resolved in this particular Index. How much easier this would have been using the hypertext systems being developed in parallel to the Indexes in the realm of information technology.

Art-and-Technology, being largely concerned with visually aesthetic experimentation in the1950s and 1960s, was anathema to hardcore conceptualists. The conceptualists acknowledged Duchamp's intent of establishing the artist as intellectual rather than skilled craftsman, where the value of the idea predominated over the visual engagement with the art object. Art & Language had little or no interest in hardware and software as tools of production. Charles Harrison, the critic, art historian and prominent articulator of Art & Language, made this quite clear by stating that the ‘legacies of Pop-Art-and-Technology were never a part of the Art & Language agenda.' 8 Without employing hypermedia technology further indexing could still take forms other than printed texts and filing cabinets. The Indexes were understood as a means of ‘mapping' to represent relations within the conversational world of Art & Language itself, the goal of Art & Language being to map the vast territory of modern culture with art at its core, ‘even though a conceptual definition, in the sense of being able to reveal or show the essence of art seemed destined to fail, a map of the relationships, devices and situation in which art unfolded nevertheless seemed plausible.' 9

Art & Language were aware of research outside the art field into similar areas of mapping memory and narrative forms. According to Harrison:

‘Analogues for the indexing project are to be found along the borderline between the study of Artificial Intelligence and the theorisation of mind and memory which has enlarged into a distinct field of research since the 1970s. In typical work in this field, forms of knowledge are represented in terms of such devices as “semantic nets” and “frames” – which are a kind of index.'10

The later forms of indexing, made as self-referential conceptual maps from the 1970s to the present include paintings with text such as the Hostage and Incidents in a Museum series multimedia constructions such as Mother, Father, Monday (2001-2). This is a table-top arrangement composed of juxtaposed texts from Art & Language conversations and interviews printed onto different-sized, rectangular pieces of coloured canvas. An integral part of the ongoing interrogation of art by Art & Language deals with its specified mediums. Although they began by articulating this with language and text, Art & Language have had to come to terms with, and so return to, painting. More recently it has become necessary for them to engage with digital media. Their methods of indexing and archiving in order to make sense of their discourse has now brought them into the range of digital technologies and they have produced a DVD in order to enable a comprehensive totality of their work to date.

Art & Language have produced an archive of their body of work in one format – a DVD. This idea of self-archiving a body of work for critical examination in order to further an artist's own understanding and practice is not a new one. Evidence of a similar but less methodical activity was apparent at a much earlier date, for example in the Large Glass 11 of Marcel Duchamp, constructed between 1915 and 1923 but left as an incomplete project together with its accompanying collection of notes, drawings, diagrams and pictures in ‘green and white boxes'. Duchamp took a more obvious approach to self-archiving with his miniature portable museum, the Boîte-en-valisé described by Thierry de Duve as ‘a monograph of Duchamp's oeuvre in its totality'. 12 However, the Large Glass may be understood as the culmination of his earlier work, informed by his previous ideas. In turn, the Large Glass informed his final work Étant Donnés. According to Octavio Paz ‘Everything Duchamp has done is summed up in the Large Glass, which was finally unfinished in 1923.' 13

The bride and her bachelors depicted in the Large Glass have their own narrative contained by the elements seen within the upright glass plates, but they also refer to other issues: relations between female and male; culture and technology; and the condition of the art object. The subject of the piece is the machinery of sexual desire but this is difficult to understand if the Large Glass is viewed in isolation. Only by following Duchamp's notes are the stages of the erotic encounter between the bride and the bachelors made apparent. The work is a balanced combination of verbal and visual concepts to be approached with humour, in the comic spirit intended by this ‘hilarious picture'. The notes in the ‘boxes' are not clear instructions or explanations of the Large Glass and are often opaque and indecipherable. Some however, are fairly stable descriptions, such as the identifiable objects that populate the picture space. These confusing depictions together with the ‘boxes' of notes are densely interrelated and cross-referenced into a work which always remains open to interpretation.

Within my own research, to achieve a closer understanding of the origins of conceptual art, I undertook a re-reading of Duchamp, by attempting to cross-reference his ideas and outcomes into a semantic multimedia web of his mind. The work StarGlass is an outcome of this research. It is a hypermedia system of the Large Glass, inter-connected through the semantic associations between itself and the notes from the ‘boxes' together with Duchamp's other works: the paintings, objects, ‘readymades', texts and interviews informing and surrounding it. The transposition of his work into digital multimedia form achieved a unification enabling it to be seen at once as a single piece, hypermedia being a useful structuring and cross-referencing tool for managing complexity. Looking back it is evident that what was actually created through this transposition into a new technological form was an archive of Duchamp's thoughts, works and ideas, enabling new understandings. This unification of ideas could not have been achieved with the technology available at the time it was created. In a similar exercise to that carried out by the Art & Language DVD, my archive used a digital format to exemplify the cross-referencing that holds a body of work together.

Another form of a digital contemporary art archive is evidenced in a curatorial activity undertaken in 2001. Around 200 artworks were displayed in an online exhibition at the Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, entitled Net_Working. 14 This activity may also be understood as practice rather than curation. A theme was set and artists were invited to contribute in order for the curator to interlink their separate works into a whole, in this case an exhibition. Previous to this, within my Duchampian research, I had used similar methods to produce a piece called 4D Duchamp where 25 artists were selected to create a website in response to one of the identified items in the Large Glass. These websites were then interlinked into a complete holistic version of the piece. The Net_Working exhibition remains on its dedicated server hosted by the Watershed and stands as a collation of born digital work from all over the globe. It is a testament to the variety of approaches to using new media at that time. The exhibition shows early work by artists who are now well-known internationally. The screen-based interface to these works was problematic in that methods of categorising data and the organisation of metadata had to be devised for accessibility by the end user, the exhibition viewer. Such activity is paralleled with database design and is now proving useful in informing a project currently being researched at Gray's, Archiving the LabCulture Sessions: a new form of database for the arts and academic community.

This project is a further example of explorations into the digital archiving of digital artworks, this time not a curated exhibition but a ready-made archive transposed into an online database accessible from a website. The archived LabCulture sessions will be readily available for analysis and critical investigation to further identify and inform contemporary practice. The archive will contain outcomes of week-long mediaLab residencies run by PVA mediaLab, a UK artist-led arts organisation registered under LabCulture Ltd. This organisation has been running such events for up to ten artists at a time for almost as many years. The archived works cover a variety of practices – social engagement, painting, writing, performance, sound etc., from artists at different ages and stages in their career, many are well known in the UK and internationally. The unifying and unique factor is that the works constitute a set of new media experiments conducted in the same lab conditions. (Although the technical equipment may vary in that it is tailored to the artists' 'proposal' needs e.g. PVA ran a sonic LabCulture session at the Roundhouse in London in 2005). Within a Lab residency the selected artists live and work together with 5 artist-facilitators to further ideas in new media technology which they may or may not have used before. For these events PVA partners host organisations from all over the UK and have now moved into the international circuit with a Lab in Singapore in July 2005 and another in Croatia in spring 2006.

The database is rapidly becoming the new archival form for holding a body of art-work up for critique and response. The conceptual art of the mid-twentieth century, a practice placed within a period of major international political events alongside technological and communication innovations, set the foundations for today's global society. It has now evolved into an art practice where the development of a more culturally, socially and politically responsive art has become paramount. From the complexities of the contemporary conceptual artist's breadth of content and highly-structured methods of presenting it, archiving has emerged and now engages with new digital tools for managing discourse and ideas – vast amounts of information and cross-referenced material.

The international archiving workshop held in Hong Kong in 2004 by the Asian Art Archive was testament to the current ubiquity of the archive. Its application ranges from the institutional to the personal and encompasses the ongoing understanding of, for example, archiving as live art, and in particular the digital database archive. According to Lev Manovich the idea of collating and storing has been accelerating in tandem with the rise of the Internet and the use of multimedia desktop PCs – ‘The rise of the Web, this gigantic and always changing data corpus, gave millions of people a new hobby or profession: data indexing. There is hardly a Web site which does not feature at least a dozen links to other sites, therefore every site is a type of database.' 15 The idea of personal archiving is embedded in our present culture now that it can be supported electronically through continuing developments in technology. It is open to the common man, as accessible as stamp-collecting and as comfortable as the older technologies of print and photography to the present-day artist. Digital archiving is an activity which will continue to develop within current art practice but may be recognised as such only retrospectively for a while longer.

November 2005

Notes

1. Buchloh, B.H.D., (1999) ‘Gerhard Richter's Atlas: The Anomic Archive', October, 88, p.118.

2. Forster, K., (1991) ‘Die Hamburg Amerika Linie oder Warburg's Kunstwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten' in Aby Warburg: Akten des Internationalen Symposiums, Bredekamp, H., Diers, M., and Schoell-Glass, C., (eds.), Weinhein: Acta Humaniora, pp.11-37.

3. Benjamin, W., (1931) ‘Short History of Photography', Die Literarische Welt, 38, p. 3-4; 39, p. 3-4; 40, p. 7-8.

4. Richter, G., (1995) The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-93 , London: Thames and Hudson, pp.132-140.

5. Richter, G., (1995) The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings and Interviews 1962-93, London: Thames and Hudson, p.199.

6. Friedel, F., (1997) ‘The Atlas 1962-1997' in Gerhard Richter Atlas, London: Anthony d'Offay; New York: Marian Goodman, pp.5 –7.

7. Crowe, T., (1996) Modern Art in the Common Culture, New Haven/London: Yale University Press, pp.219-227.

8. Harrison, C., (2001) Essays on Art & Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.17.

9. Cereceda, M., (2004) Art & Language in 10 Concepts, exhibition catalogue, CAC Malaga, p.103.

10. Harrison, C., (2001) Essays on Art & Language, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p.72.

11. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, méme' or ‘The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even'.

12. de Duve, T., (1996) Kant After Duchamp, October, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, p.417.

13. Paz, O., (1978) Marcel Duchamp: Appearance Stripped Bare, London: Lund Humphries, p.43.

14. The exhibiting of these works is covered fully in project 4 of ‘Digital Art (on) the Line', Digital Art History: A Subject in Transition, Computers and the History of Art Vol. 1, Bentowska-Kaffel, A., Cashen, T., Gardiner, H., (eds), Bristol UK: Intellect. pp.69-74. The exhibition may be viewed at: http://www.dshed.net/networking (O7-11-2005)

15. Manovich, L., Database as Symbolic Form. http://www.manovich.net (04-11-2005)

above is copied from: http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2005/papers/harrison.html

Interview with Christian Marclay, Jonathan Seliger

Jonathan Seliger: You perform music and use sound as a subject for your art; were you a musician or a visual artist first?
Christian Marclay: I started as a visual artist. I studied art in Switzerland where I grew up and came to the United States in 1977, to the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. That is where I began to get interested in performance art, and it was through this interest that I started to play music.

Seliger: What was the performance art coming out of?

Marclay: People like Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, and Laurie Anderson, but more directly from Punk Rock. There were a lot of bands, everybody started a band. In New York, a lot of this music experimentation, like No Wave music and Punk Rock, was taking place in clubs and had a strong influence on the art world. Art people would be directly connected to the music, and a lot of bands came out of art schools. At the time there was a lot happening in clubs, and it was more interesting to me than what was happening in the galleries. Right now that symbiosis between music and art doesn't exist anymore; throughout the 1980s the galleries became powerful and things got very commercial, people were in the art business to make money, and that kind of killed live art. People gave up performances and went back to the studios. I feel now there's a possibility of a return to more ephemeral activities. Maybe it's in times of economic crisis, like the one we're experiencing right now, that people find more innovative and daring ways to make art. In the late 1970s and early 1980s the experimentation was really happening in clubs like the Pyramid or 8BC, where tons of things were taking place every night. At the time I was not showing in galleries, I was only performing.

Seliger: Were you performing by yourself?

Marclay: By myself or with a band called Mon Ton Son. I was also starting to work with John Zorn, in his big game pieces based on improvised music. For a few months John Zorn had a storefront called The Saint, where we would play with many different improvisers. There was also a club called The Chandelier.

Seliger: How did the visual art that you were doing relate to all this?

Marclay: I made very little art throughout that period except for drawings and record collages often used in my performances. I would mix the records on turntables, so they were used as sound objects. I cut up various vinyl records and glued them back together in different configurations. As they were played, the needle would sample from different fragments of records. The music was loud and gritty.

Seliger: Would it just play or would you manipulate it further as it went?

Marclay: Yes, I would manipulate it. I was interested in the interaction of the performer with the recorded sound, very much in the fashion of a hip hop DJ, although I was doing it before I knew anything about hip hop. This was before it became popular. I wasn't making dance music, I was influenced more by people like John Cage and the musique concrete. I started using records because I didn't know how to play an instrument, but I wanted to perform. I started as a singer, using my voice with minimal lyrics, kind of talking, singing or screaming. That was with my band, The Bachelors Even, a duo using a guitar, voices, and background tapes. When I made the tapes I would use records, skipping records and things like that. Later, instead of using tapes, I started to use the actual records. I used them like an instrument, and could adapt my playing to a live situation, it allowed for a lot more freedom and spontaneity than tapes.

Seliger: It seems that from the start your work has always had a lot to do with collage, both in performance and with the objects.

Marclay: Yes. I've always used found objects, images and sounds, and collaged them together, and tried to create something new and different with what was available. To be totally original and start from scratch always seemed futile. I was more interested in taking something that existed and was part of my surroundings, to cut it up, twist it, turn it into something different; appropriating it and making it mine through manipulations and juxtapositions.

Seliger: Would you say that's more related to a Fluxus attitude or an appropriation strategy that became dominant in the 1980s?

Marclay: I think that sensitivity came from early on, even before I was interested in Fluxus artists and others using found objects. I've always been very interested in Duchamp and his idea of the ready-made and using mundane things. It didn't come from the appropriation strategy of the 1980s. In a way I think that when appropriation hit the art world, it was also very strong in the music world because of hip hop. That parallel interested me. Richard Prince and GrandMaster Flash were doing the same thing in the early eighties, but with different media. Appropriation is now such a standard thing in music with digital sampling technology.

Seliger: In an interview that you did for the Wexner Art Center, you stated with regard to the records: "I destroy, I scratch, I act against the fragility of the record in order to free the music from its captivity." It seems that the idea of change and time is a dominant thread that runs through your work. On the one hand one might think that by making a static visual object, you are interested in a retrieval or preservation of that thing, but in the performances you break the records or abuse them.

Marclay: The performances are time-based activities, in which I react to the objectification of music. Making an object, a sculpture, might seem contradictory because there's always that sense of preservation. I'm making something that might remain. But when I make objects it's more about change; altering the initial purpose of something in order to extract a new meaning. Change is the creative impulse. For instance, with these new Body Mixes, I combine several record covers in order to underscore that which we take for granted. The seductive covers are mutated into grotesque creatures. I point the finger at certain advertising methods, but I am also interested in a relation between the physical and the mechanical. We have always tried to give objects a human quality. We project on them a body scale, a texture, shape that resemble us. We give machines — or see in them — anthropomorphic qualities. The machine is an extension of the human body and the record is a mechanical object.

Seliger: What's interesting about these assemblages is that the record covers span a pretty broad period of time, from the 1960s through the 1980s, and during this time the whole notion of seduction and how to sell something has become a lot more sophisticated.

Marclay: We are not always aware of how we are being manipulated by the advertising techniques. They may now use more subliminal techniques, but ultimately sex has always been a big seller.

Seliger: In a sense I'd say that the marketing strategy that's typified by Michael Jackson's Bad album is distinctly different from that 1960s-looking Don Giovanni, which is combined with Highway Chile's Rockarama. Is your interest mainly visual or critical? I almost get the feeling that you're as interested in the narrative/discursive possibilities as you are in the figurative combinations.

Marclay: In every period the same kinds of mechanisms appear, and that becomes visible because I've mixed things from all these different times. What sells a classical record is not necessarily sex, but a more subtle patriarchal stereotype. The men on these covers are in control, directing with their hands in the foreground. On the other hand, the women are often shown with their backs to the camera, showing off their legs, looking over their shoulder. It's always a more vulnerable position. The same imagery appears in very different styles of music. The juxtapositions are a mix and match kind of process, it's like making a puzzle and I'm looking for the matching part. The juxtaposition of two different styles or periods is not so systematic. In that sense the initial choice is limited by the visual possibilities of what works or fits; so there is this incidental/accidental juxtaposition.
Within that framework, I still have many choices — I can find a different torso for these legs, but this one seemed to work because of the completely different styles of music, or the combination of the titles. The titles are sometimes very important. They become part of a poetic narrative.

Seliger: Would you say that it's more of an intuitive or a systematic process?

Marclay: Both. I forced myself to mix the genders. If I have female legs, then the torso will have to be male. It's a limitation in the process. The result can be intuitive as well, because of the many choices available. I'm not necessarily representing these bodies from a defined, gendered perspective. I want them to be either mixed gender or genderless or ambiguous, and that's a process that is used in advertising all the time. But my ambiguity is more grotesque, the seduction is disrupted. If I made a collage, say, of just female parts, then I would be playing the same game as advertisers. I had to be aware of that process and distance myself from it.

Seliger: With these pieces and perhaps the three-dimensional ones that preceded them, like the Skin Mixes, it seems like a big step away from some of your earlier work that had been more formally motivated. Pieces like Tape Fall, The Beatles, or the cubes of melted records were very distilled.

Marclay: In a way the new work has as many formal qualities, it is very graphic and colorful, but that's because the material used has those qualities. It's the only kind of serial work that I've ever made, besides the cover collages. In general I tend to work on one piece at a time, but because there were so many possible variations I was sort of forced to keep doing them, and follow their playfulness. The series for me is one piece with various components.

Seliger: I guess what I'm asking is whether there was a specific decision to make them more socially explicit?

Marclay: Perhaps that quality is more apparent here, but it follows a similar critical theme that comes up in my earlier work as well — the commodification of music, how music has become a salable object. I've done it with performances and with the objects. I'm trying to be critical of the whole music industry and the packaging plays a major role. I'm trying to make the recording process more apparent. We're so used to listening to music through recordings, it's a given, that's primarily how we experience music now. The live aspect is minimized. Other works might appear to be more contemplative or minimal, but they were motivated, in part, by the same desire to critique the music industry.
These pieces are dealing with more delicate issues, sex and music, and the question of political correctness. It's a very gray area. Some people see the work as critical, others see it as fun and playful and colorful, surreal or crazy. The seductive covers are turned into grotesque figures, some disturbing, others humorous. The advertising strategies are made visible forcing us to examine these covers more closely. Sex is not a new selling device, it is so old and common that we take it for granted. The woman's body is used everywhere. The woman on the packaging becomes the packaging, the flesh becomes a protective envelope, a protective skin for the record. There is a strange reversal of shape and sexual associations. The record is round, a feminine shape, the cover is square, masculine. But the cover is also the envelope, a slit that encloses the record. I wanted to blur the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, and also the distinction between music stars, idols, and the truncated and commodified bodies of un-known models.
The body is becoming more and more central to the sale of music through rock videos. The body is center stage, allowing a more physical identification by the consumer. The twelve-inch square of the old record cover allowed for an almost life-size representation of body parts. The head was the most common illustration, a teenager could kiss the face of her or his idol, a surrogate face, a life-size portrait. With compact discs you can't do that anymore, so in a sense the video compensates for that lack of advertising space.

Seliger: Along with being critical of the commodification of music, I'm wondering if by implication you're also involved with the art object as a commodity.

Marclay: Not specifically, but the art object is condemned to the same fate. Artists' activities, even those considered marginal and noncommercial, are being commodified by the art market. But these days everything ends up being salable, one way or another. Art like music today is inseparable from money.

Seliger: What is the relationship of your work to the Dada or Surreal object?

Marclay: It's very hard to dissociate oneself from art history, and often I've appropriated formal or stylistic devices to make my work. It tries to be original in content rather than form. People tend to think of the accidental juxtapositions in Surreal terms. But they are also very Cagean or Duchampian. It's hard to limit them to any one source, but I like to think that there is a tradition in art and that these are part of that tradition. People have tended to explain my work through visual association to older art, they drop names constantly and draw endless connections, but I use the process of appropriation as a device to make something that can be understood as an art object and can be accessed more easily. It is almost like a decoy.
For me the relation to Surrealism is more subtle and has to do with the erotic quality of machines as explored by certain artists such as Duchamp, Max Ernst or Picabia. The mechanical quality of the record is still very present for me. The turntable is a perfect machine célibataire in the Duchampian sense.

Seliger: The way that these albums are stitched together brings to mind Warhol's photo assemblages. I thought there was an interesting connection between the idea of repetition and time, and how that was somehow subtly alluded to perhaps through the stitching to Warhol, who in our time is the supreme icon of repetition and mechanical reproduction.

Marclay: I don't mind that association at all, because this whole body of work and some of the things that preceded it were triggered by Warhol's cover for the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers album. I did another piece that had covers held together with zippers that were sewn on; I also stitched "sound sheets" together in the past. That's when I got started using a sewing machine, but to me the sewing here implied stitching in the medical sense. I wanted these body parts to be stitched together as a Frankenstein monster. I had that image in mind. I made another piece that was sewn roughly by hand. The repetitive aspect that you were talking about is also reinforced by the fact that these covers are not unique, and when you refer to Warhol it makes them more related to photography. I stitched them rather than glued them because I wanted them to exist in a three-dimensional field, I wanted them to have a presence that I don't think would be the same if they were glued. I wanted them to be record covers and not just photographs, I wanted them to be objects. The stitching more aggressively forced things together and the bond is visible.

Seliger: The way they're stitched together almost brings to mind that a disaster has occurred. The quantity of them makes them into a crowd, and maybe some horrific accident has happened and all these different parts have been stitched together.

Marclay: There is an implied violence in photography because of its cropping quality. Photog-raphy is about stealing, displacing, chopping up. The camera is a sharp weapon. Like sound recording, photography is a mechanical device that tries to simulate life. The recording and the photograph, both incomplete reproductions of nature, come together as record/ album to reinforce each other in their illusion. Like the "Charmin' Chatty" doll, the record is inside the body. You pull a string and it speaks. It's an aural accompaniment to the visual appearance. If you only saw one of the Body Mix pieces, it would have less of an impact, you might think, oh, what a nice coincidence! But when you see so many you have to wonder, what is going on here? Patterns begin to emerge. The amount of crotches and breasts and legs makes them almost so unoriginal and formulaic. The newer albums, like Michael Jackson's Bad, are more ambiguous or subliminal. It's not so obvious, but his hand is on his zipper — he finally unzipped it in the new video — and he's wearing a lot of make-up but, at the same time, he's trying to look very macho. There's a lot of bondage imagery. He is playing with his own gender identity. That confusion is used as a seduction device.

Seliger: To what degree are you simply presenting the imagery, and to what degree do you feel that you're commenting on it? Through the sheer volume and variety, you're presenting a lot of information.

Marclay: The restructured presentation is the commentary. But I don't want to limit the work to just being a critique of the advertising process. These found objects also bring back a whole picture book of memories from our collective past — images and sounds, or rather memories of sounds, not only a collective memory but a very personal one, unique to each viewer, associations that the remembered music might conjure up. I am not just presenting a collection of legs and arms or whatever, but in combining them I'm making fun of this fetishization, twisting it, and through humorous juxtapositions I hope the viewer can distance herself or himself from the initial relation to the commercial object. It is like comedy; while laughing, you can say things that are very pointed.


Text: © Copyright, Journal of Contemporary Art, Inc. and the authors.

Above copied from: http://www.jca-online.com/marclay.html

After Sherrie Levine, Jeanne Siegel

A Promethean thief or an immoralist confiscator, Sherrie Levine challenges art at its matrix of model and originality.

For the past eight years Sherrie Levine has dealt with appropriated imagery. Her first confiscations were collages. She cut pictures out of books and magazines and glued them onto mats. Since then she has made copies of photographs after Elliot Porter, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and Alexander Rodchenko; drawings after Willem de Kooning, Egon Schiele, and Kasimir Malevich; watercolors after Mondrian, Matisse, El Lissitzky, and Léger, to name a few.

After the initial shock of discovering the artist's audacity in quoting and mounting famous artists' works, the question becomes: what then? Does her magnetism rest merely in the paradox of originality through copies? Does she recast the principle of the copy in a new and contemporary light? Why does she choose only male artists to copy? How does she view her own work and the considerable rhetoric that has gathered around it?

Jeanne Siegel: You were educated at the University of Wisconsin. How did this influence your direction, if indeed it did at all?

Sherrie Levine: I think growing up in the Midwest certainly did. I grew up in St. Louis and I went to school in Wisconsin for eight years. I got my undergraduate and graduate degrees there. Having the feeling of somehow being outside of the mainstream of the art world had a lot to do with my feelings about art. Seeing everything through magazines and books- I got a lot of my sense of what art looked like in terms of surface and finish.

JS: One feature that serves as a clue is the way you preserve in the way the faint tints or discolorations that were the result of the photoprinting or reproductive process. This distinguishes it from the original. So you were conscious of the notion of a secondary source from the start.

SL: Yes. It was the Sixties. I was in college and a minimal painter and Minimal art looked even flatter in magazines. I felt that my work was becoming very mannerist and empty for me. I began to use photography as a way of introducing representational imagery into my work.

JS: It seems significant that you received your graduate degree in photo-printmaking.

SL: I was interested in the idea of multiple images and mechanical reproduction. I did a lot of commercial art for money from the time I was in college until very recently.

JS: Do you see that as an influence also?

SL: I think it had a lot to do with it. I was really interested in how they dealt with the idea of originality. If they wanted an image, they'd just take it. It was never an issue of morality; it was always an issuee of utility. There was no sense that images belonged to anybody; all images were in the public domain and as an artist I found that very liberating.

JS: There are specific methods that commercial artists use, for example, tracing.

SL: And the use of copy cameras.

JS: It occurred to me that your process of working from prints is somewhat like the custom popular in the 17th century of copying a painting to make a print. What the print artist did was to remain true to the composition and poses of the figures, but they didn't nessarily hold to the original expression on people's faces. They thought of the print as being slightly original. In other words, it stepped away to become something new.

SL: I think that copies and prints were the main way of distributing images at that time, before photography.

JS: The Caravaggio exhibition currently at the Metropolitan Museum focuses the idea of copying in another way. An original Caravaggio is mounted next to a copy or to works that have been attributed to Caravaggio. The exhibition reflects the modern need for uniqueness, whereas at that time one commissioned a copy of a master because one loved the painting or because a pious patron might want an image of John the Baptist.

SL: So much of our sense of art history is based on copies, fakes, and forgeries. I just read The Caravaggio Conspiracy, a book about art theft and forgery written by an investigative reporter. While he's looking for a stolen Caravaggio painting, he comes across an incredible amount of forged art. There's always been a lot of it around. Some entire museum collections are forgeries.

JS: My point is that in the 16th century a copy was not necessarily frowned upon. People respected copies.

SL: I think it was a different relationship to history at that time. It was more like an Oriental belief in tradition. You strove to be fully mature in your tradition. Originality was not an issue. I think that's where modernism was a real break.

JS: In the process of copying from an original painting to make a print, the size is reduced. This seems to have some connection to your work.

SL: In most cases it is reduced from the original but maintains the size of the book plate. Maintaining a uniform format has a democratizing effect on the images that I like. The watercolors and drawings are traced out of books onto ll-by-14-inch pieces of paper. The paintings are easel-size on 20-by-24-inch boards.

The pictures I make are really ghosts of ghosts; their relationship to the original images is tertiary, i.e., three or four times removed. By the time a picture becomes a bookplate it's already been rephotographed several times. When I started doing this work, I wanted to make a picture which contradicted itself. I wanted to put a picture on top of a picture so that there are times when both pictures disappear and other times when they're both manifest; that vibration is basically what the work's about for me-that space in the middle where there's no picture.

JS: Can you elaborate on what originality means to you?

SL: It's not that I don't think that the word originality means anything or has no meaning. I just think it's gotten a very narrow meaning lately. What I think about in terms of my work is broadening the definitions of the word "original." I think of originality as a trope. There is no such thing as an ahistorical activity (I mean history in terms of one's personal history, too).

JS: What about the idea behind the introduction of your hand? This came about when you stopped copying photographs and began to draw "de Koonings."

SL: A lot of the most sophisticated psychoanalytic and feminist critiques about art and film posit the supremacy of the visual over all our other senses in a patriarchal society. I think a lot of what's alienating and oppressive about our media culture is its voyeuristic aspect. It's ironic that most of this theory that is applied to art has been mainly in support of photographic work. There seems to be a denial of the rest of the body- In art, the hand becomes the metonymical symbol for the body.

JS: There is something in the work that suggests that you thoroughly enjoy this hand work. It's visceral on occasion.

SL: Oh yes. There's no other reason to do it. For me, art's basically about pleasure. I'm not saying there's no pleasure in making or looking at photography, but there are definitely some different kinds of pleasure in making and looking at painting.

JS: Can you see this process of copying from a print as a manifestation of the recent revival of craft?

SL: I wouldn't want to deny that. I think a lot of people see this evidence of the body as antidotal to an overmechanized culture.

JS: Do you concentrate on matching? Do you investigate and reconstruct the original colors?

SL: I give it a couple of shots if necessary. I stop when the color works with what I've already got on my page. I don't make it a photo-realist activity because that's mechanistic again and then I'm back where I started. I'm trying not to be tyrannized by the original jmage. What I'm really interested in is constructing my relationship to the image.

JS: Does your choice of artist or particular work of that artist have any relation to this question of craft?

SL: Painting very complex images would become drudgery for me, and I have no interest in that.

JS: In titling your works After Kasimir Malevich or After Egon Schiele you are alluding to an accepted earlier convention in art- one which flowered in the Baroque period and continued into the 19th century. Viewed historically, you could say that during the Renaissance Vasari established a canon of greatness which was adhered to by later generations. Is there a parallel to this pattern in that you chose the so-called heroes from earlier Modernism?

SL: There is. I think about it a lot in psychological terms. I mean, in an Oedipal way, about the authority of the father and the authority of the father's desire. My work is so much about desire and its triangular nature. Desire is always mediated through someone else's desire.

JS: And this is why the someone else that you appropriate is always male?

SL: A lot of what my work has been about since the beginning has been realizing the difficulties of situating myself in the art world as a woman, because the art world is so much an arena for the celebration of male desire.

JS: So his desire becomes yours in order to make this explicit? Then it's in the nature of a critique, really.

SL: I prefer the word "analysis." Somebody recently referred to my watercolors as position papers. One thing I'd like to make clear is that I make the things I want to make. The language and the rhet- oric come afterward when I attempt to describe to myself and to other people what I've done, but I'm not making the art to make a point or to illustrate a theory. I'm making the picture I want to look at which is what I think everybody does. The desire comes first,

JS: Egon Schiele could be considered a possible exception to your choices of "greats." How did that come about?

SL: I haven't done this just in relationship to the history books, although obviously they form everybody's ideas about what's important. It's also been about my own personal relationship to this work, and Schiele is somebody who's been important to me.

JS: Why?

SL: There is something in his eroticism that strikes a chord. Partly it's the self-conscious representation of his own narcissism. I don't want to say too much on this topic. A girl's gotta keep some secrets.

JS: There seems to exist a kind of contradiction. Does your attitude have something in common with Lichtenstein's? Although he parodied the Abstract-Expressionist brushstroke, he said he liked it.

SL: It's a dialectical relationship, I think, which is the kind of relationship one has to authority. That's where the irony in the work is located. But the parody is not in relationship to the original; it's in how I perceive the original.

JS: In discussing the history of the changing approach to the object in the 20th century, particularly in relation to its uniqueness and originality, Suzi Gablik {Has Modernism Failed?) mentions your duplications of photographs of famous photographers. This follows a discussion of Rauschenberg's Erased Drawing of de Kooning's. It seemed to me that in a way you are doing the reverse of what Rauschenberg did: whereas he wipes it out, you are putting it back, albeit in another form.

SL: A lot of people do see my work as an erasure. I think the people it offends most imagine it's an erasure,
JS: In what sense?

SL: In the sense that it's a screen memory-a memory that blocks a more primal memory.

JS: What was your reaction to Gablik's analysis of your intentions and her conclusions? I quote: "Levine lays no claim to traditional notions of 'creativity.' By willfully refusing to acknowledge any difference between the originals and her own reproductions, she is addressing her work in a subversive way to the current mass cult for collecting photographs, and their absorption into the art market as one more expensive commodity. Obviously ideas like these are successful as a negation of commodity-oriented culture. Only until commodity culture succeeds in accommodating even these 'pirated' creations and turning them into yet another saleable item within the framework of institutionalized art-world distribution ... at which point they become more parasitic than critical, feeding on the very system they are meant to criticize."

SL: My works were never intended to be anything but commodities. It's taken a while for the work to sell but it has always been my hope that it would, and that it would wind up in collections and in museums. You know, money talks but it don't sing.
The work is in a dialectical relationship to the notion of originality. Originality was always something I was thinking about, but there's also the idea of ownership and property. Lawrence Weiner has this nice quote about wanting to make. a art that makes us think about our relationship to the material world. That's something that I feel very close to. It's not that I'm trying to deny that people own things. That isn't even the point. The point isthat people want to own things, which is more interesting to me. What does it mean to own something, and, stranger still, what does it mean to own n an image?

JS: Do you believe that viewers outeide of the inner circle of the art world know what it is?

SL: There's a lot of irony in this problem because when I first started making this work I thought that anybody could understand it. It didn't seem elitist to me at all. Any thoughtful person could understand that a picture of a picture was a strange object. I still think it's true that anybody can understand the work- Some people think they're not understanding it, that there's something that they don't know about, and that's when they feel deceiyed or betrayed. A picture of a picture is a strange thing and it brings up lots of contradictions; it seems to me that anybody can understand that. Obviously not everybody likes it.

JS: Some of the people who look at it might not even know the original, so they don't have a basis of comparison.

SL: I don't mind that. People enjoy or don't enjoy the pictures that I make. My pictures have other relationships than their relationship to me. I like to think that it's complex work and it can be appreciated on a lot of levels, or not appreciated on a lot of levels. For one thing, I think this work is very funny. I'm always surprised when people apologize to me for thinking it's funny. I want the work to be funny, but that doesn't mean I'm not serious.

JS: The practice of copying another existing artwork is often identified with the formative years of an artist. Are you connected to that or is it just coincidental?

SL: No; I've thought about it a lot, especially when I think of what I want to do next. I realize that this was something that I needed to do. It's interesting to me because I never consciously thought of myself as a student or apprentice, but I realize that it's a step that I wanted to take. I'm not in any way demeaning the work or saying that it's immature. But the irony to me is that people were so worried about what I would do next and it's been so generative for me.

JS: Could you discuss some of those developments generated by the use of the copy? For example, in the 1917 show (Nature Morte Gallery, October 1984), you coupled works by two artists that gave them a meaning beyond their showing separately.

SL: My appropriated images have been dealing with the Modernists and their ideas, a lot of which were Utopian. This summer when I was doing drawings by both Malevich and Schiele, I started to realize that the dates all circulated around 1917. It was amazing to me that these two extremely radical and yet seemingly mutually ex- clusive activities could be going on at the same time. I thought it might make sense to show Schiele's erotic drawings with Malevich's Suprematist works. [This was discussed earlier in an unpublished interview with Cindy Carr.]

JS: So this represented a comment on your part on the naive optimism in art's capacity to change political systems?

SL: When I began this work I was thinking about my relationship to the Utopian ideas expressed by the Modernists. We no longer have the naive optimism in art's capacity to change political systems- an aspiration that many Modernist projects shared. As Post-Modernists we find that simple faith very moving, but our relationship to that simplicity is necessarily complex.

JS: In the more recent Repetitions show (Hunter College Art Gallery, March 1985), you used another strategy. You repeated six pencil drawings of an identical composition by Malevich.

SL: When Maurice Berger, the curator, told me he was doing a show called Repetitions and wanted me to be in it, I was very excited because I had been thinking about doing a piece where an image was repeated several times. Repetition's implied in the work anyway (i.e., if you can make one copy, then you can make any number of them). So I thought this was a perfect opportunity to repeat an image six times.

JS: Also, you now seem to be anxious to keep works together in a group that previously you showed singly. This is true of the works in the current Whitney Biennial.

SL: People have been loathe to discuss the work iconographically for some reason. Last month I was talking to the writer Howard Singerman who lives in Los Angeles; he was saying that people tend to look at the work as if it starts at the frame and goes out, as opposed to looking at the picture from the frame in. What he meant was that we've become so sensitized to context that we sometimes just see the picture as a hole in the wall. In fact, they are pictures.
They're very complicated pictures, but they can be read iconographically. The images in the 1917 show are crosses and people masturbating. Most people who have written about the work have either ignored or denied the iconographic content.

I think a lot of people seem to get lost in the gap and think that there's no picture there, when in fact there are two pictures there.

JS: Coming back to appropriation again, how do you feel that you differ, for example, from Andy Warhol, to whom you have expressed an affinity?

SL: There's an emptiness in Warhol's work that's always been very interesting to me because of that vibration I was talking about. There are three spaces: the original image, his image, and then a space in between, a sort of Zen emptiness- an oblivion in his work that's always been very interesting for me.

JS: Your choices of images are quite different from his.

SL: Yes, although I often think that Warhol chooses images that loves, which is what makes the work much less nasty than it might be, and that's important to me, too.

JS: A few months ago you were invited to show in an exhibition Production Re: Production, which dealt explicitly with appropition and you refused to participate. Why?

SL: I never aspired to belong to a school of appropriators. "Appropriation" is a label that makes me cringe because it's come to signify a polemic; as an artist, I don't like to think of myself as a polemicist.

I think I've softened a lot since I first started talking about this work. I should make it clear that I don't think art should be any one thing- my work only has meaning in relationship to everyone else's project. It has no meaning in isolation, and on the level of desire everyone's project is different. I believe that one of the most important advances that feminist artists and writers have made has in establishing the possibility of difference, the possibility of a plurality of voices and gazes. It's important to me that my work be situated in the totality of contemporary artmaking. I'm not trying to supplant anything; my work is in addition. The idea is to broaden the discussion, not to narrow it.

JS: In the process of becoming recognized, you have been grouped with certain artists referred to as "deconstructors." In what way do you separate yourself from them?

SL: I may have a more traditional relationship to art. I grew in St. Louis which has a very beautiful museum that I loved going to as a child. Although I have a conflicted relationship to art world institutions and culture industries, I do love art and modernist art in particular.

JS: Your work has triggered a good deal of rhetoric. I am interested in your response to some of the ideas that have been articulated. One, which we have already touched on briefly, is the role of the Oedipus complex as stated by Lacan. In an article on Lacan and Freud (The Massachusetts Review, Summer, 1979), Neal H. Bruss says: "For Lacan,'it is the resolution of the Oedipus complex which reduces the infinitude of potential desires and linguistic choices to a manageable system; it does so by initiating the child into a third order, the 'Symbolic,' the code of language and custom by which, the larger community operates. Lacan takes the Oedipal resolution as a parable like the mirror stage, justified by Freud's own recognition that it could be reached without the child having actually witnessed a primal scene. Lacan's parablistic reading of the Oedipal complex for example, does not exclude female children from the Oedipal role. ..."

SL: That's why I've been so interested in critiques of Freud and Lacan by feminists like Jacqueline Rose and Juliet Mitchell, because they show us a way to have ideas about feminine desire. They talk about how culture creates an indivisible bond between gender and sexuality, a bond which becomes a yoke, a bond which is even more complex in the case of femininity.

JS: You have expressed interest in Jean Baudrillard's critiques. According to Craig Owens (Art & Social Change, U.S.A., April, 1983), Baudrillard argued that power is no longer exercised exclusively or even primarily through control of the means of production, but through control of the means of representation: the code. What was needed, then, was a critique of representation, but one free from a productivist bias. Owens concludes, "It was such a critique that new group of artists set out to provide." As you were included included in this group, please comment.

SL: This writing exposed the indignity of speaking for others. Like most women, I'd gotten pretty tired of being depicted and represented by men.

JS: A year ago, when asked whether you anticipated a change in your work away from working "after" other artists, you responded by saying that this was really your desire at the moment. "I'm making the pictures I want to look at," you said, which implied that were not thinking about any change. How do you feel now?

SL: I'm in a transitional period right now. I'm thinking of making more kinds of choices ... I guess I'm reluctant to speak about it too much yet.

originaly published in: ARTS Magazine, Summer 1985

Above copied from: http://www.artnotart.com/sherrielevine/arts.su.85.html

Meaningless Work, Walter De Maria

Meaningless work is obviously the most important and significant art form today. The aesthetic feeling given by meaningless work can not be described exactly because it varies with each individual doing the work. Meaningless work is honest. Meaningless work will be enjoyed and hated by intellectuals - though they should understand it. Meaningless work can not be sold in art galleries or win prizes in museums - though old fasion records of meaningless work (most all paintings) do partake in these indignities. Like ordinary work, meaningless work can make you sweat if you do it long enough. By meaningless work I simply mean work which does not make money or accomplish a conventional purpose. For instance putting wooden blocks from one box to another, then putting them back to the original box, back and forth, back and forth etc., is a fine example of meaningless work. Or digging a hole, then covering it is another example. Filing letters in a filing cabinet could be considered meaningless work, only if one were not considered a secretary, and if one scattered the file on the floor periodically so that one didn't get any feeling of accomplishment. Digging in the garden is not meaningless work. Weight lifting, though monotonous, is not meaningless work in its aesthetic since because it will give you muscles and you know it. Caution should be taken that the work chosen should not be too pleasurable, lest pleasure becomes the purpose of the work. Hence, sex, though rhythmix, can not stictly be called meaningless - though I'm sure many people consider it so.

Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today. This concept is not a joke. Try some meaningless work in the privacy of your own room. In fact, to be fully understood, meaningless work should be done alone or else it becomes entertainment for others and the reaction or lack of reaction of the art lover to the meaningless work can not honestly be felt.

Meaningless work can contan all of the best qualities of old art forms such as painting, writing, etc. It can make you feel and think about yourself, the outside world, morality, reality, unconsciousness, nature, history, time, philosophy, nothing at all, politics, etc. without the limitations of the old art forms.

Meaningless work is individual in nature and it can be done in any form and over any span of time - from one second up to the limits of exhaustion. It can be done fast or slow or both. Rhythmically or not. It can be done anywhere in any weather conditions. Clothing, if any, is left to the individual. Whether the meaningless work, as an art form, is meaningless, in the ordinary sense of that term, is of course up to the individual. Meaningless work is the new way to tell who is square.
Grunt
Get to work

March, 1960

copied from: http://www.artnotart.com/fluxus/wdemaria-meaninglesswork.html

For an Engaged Knowledge [ Pour un savoir engage ] by Pierre Bourdieu

If it’s important, not to say necessary, that a certain number of independent researchers associate themselves with social movements, it’s because we are confronted with a politics of globalisation. (I mean a “politics of globalisation”, I’m not talking of “globalisation” as if it was a question of a natural process.) This politics, largely, operates in secret, in its production and its diffusion. And it’s already a full research task that is needed to spot it before it has been put into effect. It follows that this politics has effects which one could foresee thanks to the resources of social science, but which, in the short term, are still invisible to most people. Another characteristic of this politics – it is partly the product of researchers themselves. The question being to know if those who anticipate from their scientific knowledge the dire consequences of this politics can and ought to stay silent. Or if there isn’t in that a sort of failure to help people in danger. If it’s true that the planet is threatened by
grave calamities, don’t those who believe they know about those calamities in advance have a duty to emerge from the reserve which scholars have traditionally imposed upon themselves?
There is in the mind of most educated people, especially in social science, a dichotomy which seems to me entirely baneful: the dichotomy between scholarship and commitment [both in English, NC] – between those who devote themselves to scientific work, performed according to scholarly methods and aimed at other scholars, and those who are engaged and who take their scholarship to the outside world. The opposition is artificial and, in fact, you have to be an independent scholar, who works in accordance with the rules of scholarship [in English] to be able to produce an engaged scholarship, that is a ‘scholarship with commitment’ [in English].
To be a truly engaged scholar, you must be legitimately engaged, engaged in knowledge. And this knowledge is not acquired except by the work of scholarship, undertaken according to the rules of the scholarly community. Put another way, we have to get over a number of obstacles that are in our heads and that have a way of authorising us to give up: starting with the scholar who locks
himself up in his ivory tower. The dichotomy between scholarship and commitment [in English] confirms the researcher in his good conscience, because he receives the approval of the scientific community. It’s as if scholars believed themselves to be scholars twice over because they make nothing of their science. But in the case of biologists, that may be criminal. It’s equally serious in the case of criminologists. This reserve, this flight into purity, has very serious social consequences. Should people like me, paid by the State to do research, guard the resources of their research zealously for their colleagues? It is absolutely fundamental to submit what one believes is a discovery first to the criticism of one’s colleagues, but why reserve to them the collective achievement and control of knowledge?
It seems to me that the researcher has no choice: if he has the conviction that there is a
correlation between neoliberal politics and the rates of delinquency, a correlation between neoliberal politics and the rates of criminality, a correlation between neoliberal politics and all the signs of what Durkheim would have called ‘anomie’, how can he not say so? Not only is there nothing to reproach him with if he speaks up, but one ought to congratulate him (I am perhaps apologising for my own position) . . .
Now, what is this social movement researcher going to do? First, he shouldn’t go and give lessons – as certain organic intellectuals did, who, not being able to impose their wares on the scientific market, where the competition is stiff, went to make intellectuals among the non-intellectuals, while saying that the intellectual didn’t exist. The researcher is neither a prophet nor a guru. He must discover a new rule, which is very difficult: he must listen, he must research and discover; he must try to help organisations who are dedicated to the mission – less and less strongly, unfortunately, and that includes the trade unions – of resisting neoliberal politics; he must give himself the talk of helping them acquire their tools. In particular the tools to combat the symbolic power exercised by the ‘experts’ engaged by the large multinational corporations. One must call things by their name. [a few sentences on education edited out] Researchers can also do something newer and more difficult: encourage the appearance of organisational conditions for the collective production of the will to discover a political project and, secondly, the organisational conditions for the intended success of such a political project: which will obviously be a collective project. After all, the constituent assembly of 1789 and the Philadelphia Assembly were composed of people like you and me . . . who discovered democratic structures. In the same way, today, one must invent things . . . Of course, one might say: “there are parliaments, a European confederation of unions, all sorts of institutions which are mandated to do this”. I am not going to make a formal demonstration here, but one should insist that this is not what they are doing. One must create conditions which are favourable to the invention [of that political project, NC]. One must help to remove the obstacles to its invention; obstacles which are in part present in the social movement charged with removing them – notably the unions.
Can one be optimistic? I think that one can speak in terms of reasonable chances of success, one could say that now is a fateful moment [kairos in Greek], an opportune moment. When we were in discussions around 1995, we had in common not being listened to and being taken for mad. The people who, like Cassandra, announced catastrophes, they got mocked, journalists attacked them and they were insulted. Now, a little less so. Why? Because work has been accomplished. There has been Seattle and a whole series of demonstrations. And then, the consequences of neoliberal politics – which we had foreseen abstractly – have begun to be visible. And people now understand . . . Even the most narrow and obstinate journalist knows that a corporation which doesn’t make 15% profits goes bust. The most catastrophic prophecies of the prophets of doom (who were simply better informed than the rest) are beginning to be realised. It’s not too soon. But it’s not yet too late. For this is only the beginning, the catastrophes have hardly begun. . . .
A European social movement, in my view, has no chance of being effective unless it brings together three elements: unions, social movement, and researchers – on the condition, of course, that it integrates them, rather than merely juxtaposing them. I was saying yesterday to some trade unionists that between the social movements and the unionists in all European countries there is a profound difference regarding both contents and means of action. Social movements have brought into existence political objectives that the trade unions and parties had abandoned, or forgotten, or repressed.
In particular the methods of personal action: the actors of the social movement return to symbolic practice, a symbolic practice that depends, in part, on the personal engagement of those who demonstrate: a personal engagement which is also a bodily engagement. It’s necessary to take risks. It’s not a matter of walking arm in arm as the trade unionists traditionally did on the 1st of May. It’s necessary to perform actions, occupations, and so on. Which demands both imagination and courage. But I want to say this also: Beware, no union-phobia. There’s a logic of trade union displays which must be understood. Why is it that I speak to unionists of things that are close to the social movements’ view of themselves and speak to social movements of things that are close to trade unionists’ view of themselves? Because it’s only through each of these groups seeing themselves as it sees others that one can overcome the divisions which help weaken groups already very weak. The resistance movement to neoliberal politics is globally very weak, and it is weakened by its divisions: it’s a motor vehicle that wastes 80% of its energy in heat, that is in the form of tensions, frictions, conflict etc. A motor which could go much faster and further if . . .
The obstacles to creating a unified European social movement are of several kinds. They are linguistic obstacles, which are very important, for example the communication between unions and social movement – bosses and management speak foreign languages, unionists and militants much less. Because of this fact, the internationalisation of social movements and unions is made difficult. So there are obstacles tied to habit, to ways of thought, and the force of social structures, organisational structures. What can be the role of researchers in this? That of working towards a collective discovery of the collective structures of invention which will give birth to a new social movement, that is, one with new contents, new goals, and new international means of action.

Translation © Nick Couldry 2002
Original French text © Pierre Bourdieu and Le Monde Diplomatique 2002.

Above copied from: http://radical.temp.si/node/86

History of Experimental Music in the United States, John Cage

Once when Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was giving a talk at Columbia University he mentioned the name of a Chinese monk who had figured in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Sukuki said, "He lived in the ninth or the tenth century." He added, after a pause, "or the seventh century, or the twelfth or thirteenth century of the fourteenth."

About the same time, Willem de Kooning, the New York painter, gave a talk at the Art Alliance in Philadelphia. Afterwards there was a discussion: questions and answers. Someone asked De mooning who the painters of the past were who had influenced him the most. De Kooning said, "The past does not influence me; I influence it."

A little over ten years ago I acted as music editor for a magazine called Possibilities. Only one issue of this magazine appeared. However: in it, four American composers (Virgil Thomson, Edgard Varese, Ben Weber, and Alexei Haieff) answered question put to them by twenty other composers. My question to Varese concerned his views of the future of music. His answer that neither the past nor the future interested him; that his concern was with the present.

Sri Ramakrishna was once asked, "Why, if God is good, is there evil in the world?" He said, "In order to thicken the plot." Nowadays in the field of music, we often hear that everything is possible; (for instance) that with electronic means one may employ any sound (any frequency, any amplitude, any timbre, any duration); that there are no limits to possibility. This is technically, nowadays, theoretically possible and in practical terms is often felt to be impossible only because of the absence of mechanical aids which, nevertheless, could be provided if the society felt the urgency of musical advance. Debussy said quite some time ago, "Any sounds in any combination and in any succession are henceforth free to be used in a musical continuity." Paraphrasing the question put to Sri Ramakrishna and the answer he gave, I would ask this: "Why, if everything is possible, do we concern ourselves with history (in other words with a sense of what is necessary to be done at a particular time?" And I would answer, "In order to thicken the plot." In this view, then, all those interpenetrations which seem at first glance to b hellish - history, for instance, if we are speaking of experimental music - are to be espoused. One does not then make just any experiment but dos what must be done. By this I mean one does not seek by his actions to arrive at fame (success) but does what must be done; one does not seek by his actions to provide pleasure to the senses (beauty) but does what must be done; one does not seek by this actions to arrive at the establishing of a school (truth) but does what must be done. One does something else. What else?

In an article called "new and Electronic Music," Christian Wolff says: What is, or seems to be, new in this music?... One finds a concern for a kind of objectivity, almost anonymity - sound come into its own. The 'music' is a resultant existing simply in the sounds we hear, given no impulse by expressions of self or personality. It is indifferent in motive, originating in no psychology nor in dramatic intentions, nor in literary or pictorial purposes. For at least some of these composers, then, the final intention is to be free of artistry and taste. But his need not make their work 'abstract,' for nothing, in the end, is denied. It is simply that personal expression, drama, psychology, and the like are not part of the composer's initial calculation: they are at best gratuitous.

"The procedure of composing tends to be radical, going directly to the sounds and their characteristics, to the way in which they are produced and how they are notated."

"Sound come into its own." What does that mean? For one thing: it means that noise s are as useful to new music as so-called musical tones, for the simple reason that they are sounds. This decision alters the view of history, so that one is no longer concerned with tonality or atonality, Schoenberg or Stravinsky (the twelve tones or the twelve expressed as seven plus five), nor with consonance and dissonance, but rather with Edgard Varese who fathered forth noise into twentieth-century music. But it is clear that ways must be discovered that allow noises and tones to be just noises and tones, not exponents subservient to Varese's imagination.

What else did Varese do that is relevant to present necessity? He was the first to write directly for instruments, giving up the practice of making a piano sketch and later orchestrating it. What is unnecessary in Varese (from a present point of view of necessity) are all his mannerisms, of which two stand out as signatures (the repeated note resembling a telegraphic transmission and the cadence of a tone held through a crescendo to maximum amplitude). These mannerisms do not establish sounds in their own right. They make it quit difficult to hear the sounds just as they are, for they draw attention to Varese ad his imagination.

What is the nature of an experimental action? It is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen. It is therefore very useful if one has decided that sounds are to come into their own, rather than being exploited to express sentiments or ideas of order. Among these actions the outcomes of which are not foreseen, actions resulting from chance operation are useful. However, more essential than composing by means of chance operations, it seems to me now is composing in such a way that what one does is indeterminate of its performance. In such a case one can just work directly, for nothing one does gives rise to anything that I preconceived. This necessitates, of course, a rather great change in habits of notation. I take a sheet of paper and place points on it. Next I make parallel lines on a transparency, say five parallel lines. I establish five categories of sound for the five lines, but I do not say which line is which category. The transparency may be placed on the sheet with points in any position and readings of the points may be taken with regard to all the characteristics one wishes to distinguish. Another transparency may be used for further measurements, even altering the succession of sounds in time. In this situation no chance operations are necessary (for instance, no tossing of coins) for nothing is foreseen, though everything may be later minutely measured or simply taken as a vague suggestion.

Implicit here, it seems to me, are principles familiar from modern painting and architecture: collage and space. What makes this action like Dada are the underlying philosophical views and the collage like actions. But what makes this action unlike Dada is the space in it. For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary at this point in history (not the sounds that happen in it - or their relationships) (not the stones - thinking of a Japanese stone garden - or their relationships but the emptiness of the sand which needs the stones anywhere in the space in order to be empty). When I said recently in Darmstadt that one could write music by observing the imperfections in the paper upon which one was writing, a student who did not understand because he was full of musical ideas asked, "Would one piece of paper be better than another: one for instance that had more imperfections? He was attached to sounds and because of his attachment could not let sounds be just sounds. He needed to attach himself to the emptiness, to the silence. Then things - sounds, that is - would come into being of themselves. Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? There are many ways of saying why. One is this: In order that each sound may become the Buddha. If that is too Oriental an expression, take the Christian Gnostic statement: "Split the stick and there is Jesus."

We know now that sounds and noises are not just frequencies (pitches): that is why so much of European musical studies and even so much of modern music is not longer urgently necessary. It is pleasant if you happen to hear Beethoven or Chopin or whatever, but it isn't urge st to do so any more. Nor is harmony or counterpoint or counting in meters of two, three, or four or any other number. So that much of Ives (Charles Ives) is no longer experimental or necessary for us (though people are so used to knowing that he was the first to do such and such). He did do things in space and in collage, and he did say, Do this or this (whichever you choose), and so indeterminacy which is so essential now did enter into his music. But his meters and rhythms are no longer any more important for us than curiosities of the past like the patterns one finds in Stravinsky. Counting is no longer necessary for magnetic tape music (where so many inches or centimeters equal so many seconds): magnetic tape music makes it clear that we are in time itself, not in measures of two, three, or four or any other number. And so instead of counting we use watches if we want to know where in time we are, or rather where in time a sound is to be. All this can be summed up by saying each aspect of sound (frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration) is to be seen as a continuum, not as a series of discrete steps favored by conventions (Occidental or Oriental). (Clearly all the Americana aspects of Ives are in the way of sound coming into its own, since sounds by their nature are no more American than they are Egyptian.)

Carl Ruggles? He works and reworks a handful of compositions o that they better and better express his intentions, which perhaps ever so slightly are changing. His work is therefore not experimental at all but in a most sophisticated way attached to the past and to art.

Henry Cowell was for many years the open sesame for new music in America. Mos selflessly he published the New Music Edition and encouraged the young to discover new directions. From him, as from an efficient information booth, you could always get not only the address and telephone number of anyone working in a lively way in music, but you could also get an unbiased introduction from him as to what that anyone was doing. He was not attached (as Varese also was not attached) to what seemed to so many to be he important question: Whether to follow Schoenberg or Stravinsky. He's early works for piano, long before Varese's Ionization (which, by the way, was published by Cowell), by their tone clusters and use of the piano strings, pointed towards noise and a continuum of timbre. Other works of his are indeterminate in ways analogous to those currently in use by Boulez and Stockhausen. For example: Cowell's Mosaic Quartet, where the performers, in any way they choose, produce a continuity from composed blocks provided by him. Or his Elastic Musics, the time lengths of which can be short or long through the use or omission of measures provided by him. These actions by Cowell Mae very close to current experimental compositions which have parts but no scores, and which are therefore not objects but processes providing experience not burdened by psychological intentions on the part of the composer.

And in connection with musical continuity, Cowell remarked at the New School before a concert of works by Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and myself, that there were four composers where getting rid of glue. That is: Where people had felt the necessity to stick sounds together to make a continuity, we four felt the opposite necessity to get rid of the glue so that sounds would be themselves.

Christian Wolff was the first to do this. He wrote some pieces vertically on the page but recommended their being played horizontally left to right, as is conventional. Later he discovered other geometrical means for freeing his music of intentional continuity. Morton Feldman divided pitches into three areas, high middle, and low, and established a time unit. Writing on graph paper, he simply inscribed numbers of tones to be played at any time within specified periods of time.

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

Giving up control so that sounds can be sounds (they are not men: they are sounds) means for instance: the conductor of an orchestra is no longer a policeman. Simply an indicator of time - not in beats - like a chronometer. He has his own part. Actually he is not necessary if all the players have Somme other way of knowing what time it is and how that time is changing.

What else is there to say about the history of experimental music in America? Probably a lot. But we don't need to talk about neo-classicism (I agree with Varese when he says neo-classicism is indicative of intellectual poverty), nor about the twelve-tone system. In Europe, the number twelve has already been dropped and in a recent lecture Stockhausen questions the current necessity for the concept of a series. Elliott Carter's ideas about rhythmic modulation are not experimental They just extend sophistication out from tonality ideas towards ideas about modulation from one tempo to another. They put a new wing on the academy and open no doors to the world outside the school. Cowell's present interests in the various traditions, Oriental and early American, are not experimental but eclectic. Jazz per se derives from serious music. And when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly.

One must make an exception in the case of William Russell. Though still living, he no longer composes. His works, though stemming from jazz - hot jazz - New Orleans and Chicago styles - were short, epigrammatic, original and entirely interesting. It may be suspected that he lacked the academic skills which would have enabled him to extend and develop his ideas. The fact is, his pieces were all expositions without development and therefore, even today, twenty years after their composition, interesting to hear. He used string drums made from kerosene cans, washboards, out-of-tune upright pianos; he cut a board such a length that it could be used to play all the eighty-eight piano keys at once.

If one uses the word "experimental" (somewhat differently than I have been using it) to mean simply the introduction of novel elements into one's music, we find that America has a rich history: the clusters of Leo Ornstein, the resonances of Dane Rudhyar, the near-Eastern aspects of Alan Hovhaness, the tack piano of Lou Harrison, my own prepared piano, the distribution in space of instrumental ensembles in works by Henry Brant, the sliding tones of Ruth Crawford and, more recently, Gut her Schuller, the microtones and novel instruments of Harry Patch, the mathematic continuity of cliches of Virgil Thomson. These are not experimental composers in my terminology, but neither are they part of the stream of European music which though formerly divided into neo-classicism and dodecaphony has become one in America under Arthur Berger's term, consolidation: consolidation of the acquisitions of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

Actually America has an intellectual climate suitable for radical experimentation. We are, as Gertrude Stein said, the oldest country of the twentieth century. And I like to add: in our air way of knowing nowness. Buckminister Fuller, the dymaxion architect, in his three-hour lecture on the history of civilization, explains that men leaving Asia to go to Europe went again the wind and developed machines, ideas, and Occidental philosophies in accord with a struggle against nature; that, on the other hand, men leaving Asia to go to America went with the wind, put up a sail, and developed ideas and Oriental philosophies in accord with the acceptance of nature. These two tendencies met in America, producing a movement into the air, not bound to the past, traditions, or whatever. Once in Amsterdam, a Dutch musician said to me, "it must be very difficult for you in America to write music, for you are so far away from the centers of tradition." I had to say, "It must be very difficult for you in Europe to write music, you are so close to the centers of tradition." Why, since the climate for experimentation in America is so good, why is American experimental music so lacking in strength politically ( mean unsupported by those with money (individuals and foundations), unpublished, undiffused, ignored), and why is there so little of that is truly uncompromising? I think the answer is this: Until 1950 about all the energy for furthering music America was concentrated either in the League of Composers or in the ISCM (another way of saying Boulanger and Stravinksy on the one hand and Schroeder on the other). The New Music Society of Henry Cowell was independent and therefore not politically strong. Anything that was vividly experimental was discouraged by the League and the ISCM. So that a long period of contemporary music history in America was devoid of performances by Ives and Varese. Now the scene changes, but the last few years have been quiet. The League and the ISCM fused and, so doing, gave no concerts at all. We may trust that new life will spring up,since society like nature abhors a vacuum.

What about music for magnetic tape in America? Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky call themselves experimental because of their use of this new medium. However, they just continue conventional musical practices, at most extending the ranges of instruments electronically and so forth. The Barrons, Loui and Bebe, are also cautious, doing nothing that does not have an immediate popular acceptance. The Canadian Norman McLaren, working with film, is more adventurous than these - also the Whitney brothers in California. Henry Jacobs and those who surround him in the San Francisco area are as conventional as Luening, Ussachevsky, and the Barrons. These do move move in directions that are as experimental as those taken by the Europeans: Pousseur, Berio, Maderna, Boulez, Stockhausen, and so forth. For this reason one can complain that the society of musicians in America has neither recognized nor furthered its native musical resource (by "native" I hat resource which distinguishes it from Europe and Asia - its capacity to easily break with tradition, to move easily into the air, its capacity for the unforeseen, its capacity for experimentation). The figures in the ISCM and the League, however, were not powerful aesthetically, but powerful only politically. The names of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern are more golden than any of their American derivatives. These latter have therefore little musical influence, and now that they are becoming quiescent politically, one may expect a change in the musical society.

above copied from: http://www.zakros.com/mica/soundart/s04/cage_text.html

Collaborative Art and Relational Experiences in Public Space, Jordi Claramone, Javier Rodrigo (La fiambrera Obrera)

What’s all this about collaborative art?

Conventional public art tends to be defined as an aesthetic object by its relationship to a physical place; in contrast, the emerging practices of public art in the 90s constituted interventions in the public realm that included the processes of discussion and construction of a community will and a project of community, able to house all meaningful subsequent work. It is about this that we wish to speak.
Collaborative work does not mean, as some seem to have thought, that what was negotiated before with some “authority” (installation of a dolt on a horse) must now be framed by a more or less ethereal and un-localizable “community”.
We do collaborative work because artistic processes tend to be inextricably bound to the processes of constructing an identity and a public realm currently threatened by the neo-liberal steamroller.
Much of all this used to fit into the concept of “empowerment”, essential to collaborative work, which sustains “the creative values of the fragmented, -decentralized and democratized- power to develop local narratives against the great globalized discourses of the power groups…” M. Miles. At this stage it should be clear that “empowerment” is useful to us as a challenge to the deconstructive postmodernism that began by negating the very possibilities of the processes of significance.
Having reached a medium in which the political appears so directly, surely someone will make us note that all this is fine and good, but is it still art?
(whoever doesn’t care that much about this question, as we “fiambreras” don’t care may stop reading now without further hesitation, because what follows is hardcore theory)

The person who does care to answer this question faces the task of reconstructing history from the avant-garde and even before, spinning the thread that consistently shows how the practice of art is wholly united within these processes of the radicalization of democracy:
Adorno asked us to consider how art could be saved in so far as it included a bunch of things that were not- yet- art. In that sense, Rosalind Krauss develops a possible connection when she speaks of minimal art as a practice capable of inciting the environment that envelops the work; that the piece incites that which it is not and puts it into operation as space. Hal Foster also goes in this direction when he affirms the identical function in a more social rather than merely topographical sense, as in works by Buren or Haacke regarding exhibition spaces and powers. From there, it’s not hard to imagine a model that puts the work into different categories of relation and tension with the social and political context in which it is produced and distributed.
The October theorists read the Frankfurt School theorists who in turn had read the old enlightened scholars and so on, no matter how many turns we make, that’s where we’re heading: to Diderot, who calls beautiful “everything that contains in itself something with which to awaken the idea of relation in my understanding.”
Watch out, because thanks to encyclopedic old Denis, we can take on a whole bunch of things, in a very clarifying way, that the moderns had such a hard time separating under the names of art and life and such. Let’s get used to thinking about the relevance of that which awakens in us the idea of relation, and that it does so, to follow with the Enlightenment, without being limited to concept.
And therefore recall Proust, for example, speaking of how no artist succeeds in contributing more than a single beauty, which is to say a single relationship or kind of relation, a kind of production, of conception therefore, an ontology and a pragmatics (a “representational space” Lefebvre would have said; a play on words the other would have said)

I know we’re moving very fast, but if we are with Diderot, with Proust (with Valery or with Mondrian) in that the practice of art has meant putting into circulation ways of relating (whether it be in music, painting or narrative) which can be read as ways of life… it so happens that the specificity of collaborative art is now limited to contextualizing that practice within the current conditions of the production and distribution of signs, representations and discourses… (Conditions clearly marked by a growing impossibility for the autonomy of lives and consciences.)
And in doing so, we have to accept from the start (or from the end) that our work can no longer be confined in any way to the artworld, our work must take on, as its specific morpheme, the combat against unitary or monolithic thought (or unitary, monolithic life) and its small un-astonishing agents: if in our work we run across rehabilitation plans that eject residents, bishops that rob parks and so many privatization plans, it is because together they form a kind of puree whose common enemy is the proliferation of relational liberties that in another time were called art… or life.
In the end you make collaborative projects because you find that you “can’t” do anything else; that is to say, you know that any other thing doesn’t have to be what it says or wants to be: at another time in history you could compose a sonnet and imagine that with it, you made art, that is to say, you put into circulation the elements of a certain way of relating (new or not).
Now, as soon as you try to do something like that, you’ve got to be a real imbecile not to notice that neither the publishing channels nor much less the art galleries are free spaces for the free circulation of relational proposals. You have to see that they are taken over and stagnant worlds. And that the freedom of others to take our proposals and our own freedom to propose them and live them, these liberties I say, are not some piece of information, they are something to be constructed and defended.

For that reason, we call collaborative art the process by which a group of people construct the specific conditions for a setting of specific freedom and in doing so free and release a way or a handful of ways of relating; that is to say, it frees a work of art…
We know that the choice itself for this discourse to circulate is its insertion in a certain “way” or fashion that has carried a most NGO-like spirit to the world of art.
Even the professors, who yesterday celebrated the jinx of postmodern incommunicability, today are all mixed up in signing manifestos against this and against that. That’s why we trust even less than ever those who waste their breath in idle chatter and distinctions, the purisms, that’s why it is crucial that the practices do exactly as they please, that the discourses last just enough and that we meet each other on the streets.

Domesticated and staged experience. Problems and contradictions within collaborations.

The public space simply cannot be considered a neutral and willing setting for the experience (aesthetic or not) of a specific agent (the artist or cultural worker). The experience that one seeks to represent passes for genuine and unique, even though it is totally artificial. That is to say, it is established and described within certain parameters of contention set by the artist and above all by the institution from which the artist gets the experiential field for the aesthetic experience.

The spectator appears as a participating-passive element, given a setting in which the subject matter is already fixed, as the means and conditions of distribution of the product, and in which the activation of the work always remains subordinated to an institutional frame from which its distribution and repercussion are controlled. They may sometimes go no further than the walls of the museum or the temporary spatial frame in which the author’s intervention is set. The dichotomy museum and public space, or museum and streets, no longer serves as a means by which to catalogue the work of a political activist or socially committed person. To the expansion of sculpture, proclaimed and celebrated as the liberation of the 90s, one now adds the expansion of the field of art and the creative sector to all public space. Perversely, with several and uncontrolled effects, culture appears like a custom to exploit or a mine to proliferate its social and clearly speculative dimension. In this way, the gallery, the museum, the biennial, and even Documenta (standards of the art institution) expand the terrain of the public, but very much to our chagrin, nowadays so too does the cultural market (present in the creative industries, in the agencies of urban renewal that municipal governments manage and in the public art projects), as spaces of colonization and the re-appropriation of certain social modes and currents that are captured and represented as a value in the third sector.

Additionally, in these settings, the artist or group of artists (this question is of no importance in terms of the degree of experience contained or packaged to be sold) construct their image and profile as the only active agent capable of constructing a meaningful experience and therefore set themselves up as the true Enlightened leaders of the inexperienced masses, or rather, of the un-identified or over-identified masses: the groups that are worked with have had certain classifications imposed on them which help us central Europeans or members of the white middle class feel good in our work in a kind of enlightened populism which serves to clean our social conscience.

This relationship entails the “stretcher” effect of the NGO, also called aesthetic messianism by Kester or sub-contracted services. The artist, artists or cultural workers (there are several labels…) construct a relationship of service and temporary assistance to the other and this other in turn lends them their social representation. This other is determined as the needy, the underdeveloped or the subordinate class. Since these people’s experience does not allow them to see beyond their meted and decimated horizon of life, they show us that it is the artists who regulate a kind of activity that, it seems, will reveal the path of their liberation, their emerging consciousness (the famous “conscience raising” or “empowerment” that feminism and the politics of identity defended so necessarily in the 80’s, now refashioned into a social advertising campaign seen everywhere). This collaborative relationship is founded after a prior tacit agreement, like a Rousseauian contract; from the start it establishes a continuously asymmetric relationship between the artist and the collective and maintains a kind of experiential production that limits and annuls the complexity of the social, the contradictions of the field and the diverse tensions and differences that always arise in the public space. With it, the experience appears already canned and delimited, its design, its contents, prefixed, and it is imprinted like a recipe book on the communities or groups with which it has had its shindig (where needless to say the experience does not emerge, it is designed and staged ostentatiously). And we say “shindig” to refer to the celebratory range of the production of this docile space where the artists create these temporary and unlikely contexts for social coexistence: call them soup kitchens, a clothes exchange fair, open air videos or projections, or streaming in real time between who knows who or what. In all of these artificial settings, the important thing is not so much their degree of fiction or intervention, which actually could be feasible and effective for certain situations or for certain works, even as an engine for later work (who doesn’t remember the projects of the grandfathers of public space at the end of the 80’s such as Holzer or Wodyzckwo?). Rather, our argument here rests on the nullification of the conflict, the obliteration of the multiplicity of views and above all on the later instrumentalization of this experience in the Art Institution for its benefit only, in detriment of any work or reciprocal benefit for the community or social network with which it has been developed, beyond the mere excuse of “giving voice” or raising “critical consciences in the subordinate masses” (and other messianic proverbs).

We believe, and we emphasize as an ideological point of view, that this kind of experience is pre-described, pre-assigned and programmed beforehand so that it is staked out in the public space in order to be sufficiently pleasurable and celebrative of the social space, and at the same time, minimally transgressive for the cultural institutions or cultural policies that promote its celebration. That is to say, transgression and conflict are minimalized or symbolized in order to make a profit for the culture market. So this transgression often consists of a site outside of the museum, or an interaction with collectives, translated into events that do not “bother” anyone and do not work on the institution’s political structures (and if they are given the label of educational, better yet). We believe that the key point of any work with meaningful experience resides in an organic and articulating element, since it is impossible to delimit and much less to constrain experience to a given enclave, since it can always flow, interact, relate and be collectivized in unexpected places, and with that, possibly, create agency.
Here, much to our regret, the unpredictable nature of the social space is domesticated into the cultural institution, and the critical autonomy of culture is planned and simplified in the field of the social. The experience understood as “modal” in so far as it can be reiterated and appropriated evaporates. Only the postmodern superficiality of the event remains, that point where “it seems” as though it’s beyond everything, while the experience disappears and will be replaced by another postmodern event the next week: one day it’s counter-cultural hip-hop, the next it’s children’s story telling. The experience is quickly consumed and we can’t digest it or make it meaningful beyond the symbolic spectacle it’s served for the museum or cultural institution (that spends its money afterwards in making catalogues or in representing these social events in great marquees). As we see, this kind of preconceived, canned and rapidly digested experience can well be described as a “fast food” or cultural “junk food” that loses the contextualization and ecological and articulating depth of the experience as a space of long-term collaborative work.

In these pseudo-participative relationships with the experience as a collective element, we finally see how the relationship with the field of public space is limited by a vertical regulation towards the other, through a degree of contained experience. This degree can be quantified, though at a qualitative level, in order to be made visible at a later date, that is, documented, packaged and institutionalized as a product for sale . Here the experience that supposedly is constructed as collective is really canned to be sold as a symbolic value within the institution. The cultural capital of the people involved in the experience (or better, their lack of cultural capital in the institution’s eyes), whether they are communities, a group of people or the X-group, is sold as a group experience, meaningful and emancipating for the art institution, without bothering anyone. Much less can it be re-appropriated, so that in the end its subversive capacity has been neutralized at the end of its distribution.

Articulation from practices: final considerations
To conclude this text, we think that seeking to translate this rhetoric into concrete projects would be the best way to discuss the statute of intervention necessary for collaborative practices, if we really want to construct a continuous articulation. Throughout these years, and among the successive people who have crossed our paths and produced their forms and ways of making and doing within our works, we have been able to see how the collaborative experience always emerges invisibly from between the nooks and crannies of systems, and how it was extended, constructed and appropriated contagiously in an infinity of settings and very different situations (we have made a great number of friends, comrades, but also enemies).

It is curious that most of our works that have lasted the longest (or that others have continued and disseminated) have been precisely those which, as they were set at the edge of legality, were always articulated by different collectives and already active as social networks for their dissemination. It is there that a part of the work, as continued, delayed or submerged activism--we would speak of long-term collaborative practices--has gotten people talking and has probably been more effective in its behavior and continuous articulations. Thus, always thinking about some kind of DIY policies (“do it yourself” policies), an “I cook it, I eat it” collective, has helped us conceive collective projects in which people teach and follow instructions on how to rob as a form of life, having only to download the famous red and purple books, and thanks to that, acting out themselves in an endless variety of different supermarkets and fashionable shops. We have also been witnesses to a process of how to develop amusing and ironic means of representation in order to advance the use of public space, taking parks with the effective help of the neighbors, and even, why not, sexual relations from a setting of independence and work in action (well, this work in fact made us come out in the media and even in the tabloid gossip pages).

In all of these projects, the idea of articulation as a space in which people produce their modes of making and doing was key, since it entails the real use of a contagious autonomy in a specific space and structure. Our objective, if it can really be reduced to one, was precisely to produce the most effective tactical means of intervention for the organic structuring of experience. However, or fortunately, - each can judge for him or herself- projects like the agencies meant a weakening due to the illegalization of the very organism of modal practices, and above all a factual demonstration that work which articulates experiences may well include collateral effects that an institution or a museum sometimes cannot stand, as well as direct reprisals (the burning of the bus of the agencies). Events that demonstrate in the end, how much power this kind of collective experience brings together when it is precisely transformed into that: agencies.

Also right now, we have been able to see another direct line of work which we will talk about a bit more and which again responds to this need to create networks for a work of constant articulation. This project is the Bordergames. While not new in its design, we have spent several years with the idea; yes, it means a provocation and a challenge for us in many respects, which furthermore has allowed us again to contrast our collaborative aspirations with the day to day reality and work with networks in other cities and situations.
On defining Bordergames we’ve always known that saying that it was a participatory videogame made by young people, and such things we tend to say (see the Web page of the project www.bordergames.org), was limited. We also became aware that people confused the the entire project of autonomy, on the one hand, as a space of compulsive metonymy according to which something symbolic could be put forward or carried out. Thus, some people over-identified with the business of aesthetics of the actual videogame, new technologies and art, while others were overwhelmed by the idea of free software and new uses of the web, or even saw in it a great project for working with young people on digital literacy– these are all aspects we’re always pleased to see taken into consideration and in fact form part of the project-. However, nobody talked about the idea of the web as a network, and of the relational-autonomous work that bordergames sought to set in motion. Here the issue was that of bringing together an initial modal proposition with articulation as the final goal: we always imagined groups of young people working and making their own versions at other sites and afterwards making workshops for other people.

We continue our travels and incursions with the first Bordergames under our arm and have been lucky enough to experience its dissemination in two different workshops: the first one in Figueres, with the help of Náu – Coclea, and a second one in Berlin (www.bordergames.de) within a project of street theater, with the help of Raumlabor during the first stage. Our drifting through these cities has had positive results in terms of the project’s articulation: those of us who wanted to make a Bordergames were no longer a few enlightened types, no, we had a meeting place and space for collaborations with different networks that gave rise to the structuring of autonomous work teams in both cities. Additionally, very different teams emerged, with entirely contextual stories, and above all a network of collaborative work. On reaching out this point, we now also work in Barcelona, thanks to the partnership with an association of social educators working with young people called TEB (Ravalgames will soon be released ). We are also working in Morocco, thanks to the collaboration with Rifsystems at the city Al-Hoicema ( "Rifgames" on the way, as well) and in Gijón thanks to the youth association Mar de Niebla and the Laboral Arts Centre.

In all of these enclaves, collaborative work has meant negotiating and working with the networks and people in each place, with their means and their contexts in order to activate reflection on the public space, and also, make its constant articulation possible thanks to the videogame and the workshops that come out of it. Here some of us still work face to face with educators and other agents, and we continue learning and collaborating – and sometimes even have a few beers—together. Additionally, in this sense, collaborations with new members of the network have been created, fostering team work, in the hope that in a second year round, in different centers, the participants themselves – or some of them- might give the workshops and create their own experiences beyond our presence. For that reason, the work of articulation has always been in tandem, on two fronts, as we don’t only wish to create the setting in which the modal relations may be spread through the different workshops and city representations, but we also think that this work should be activated by the networks themselves in an immediate future. We think that our collaboration with bordergames has served as a toolbox, so that each person can use and create his or her own recipes and methods in each context (or make their own repairs and arrangements). This helped Bordergames to serve as a network and therefore as a mechanism of distribution. With it, we believe we are pointing to the construction of another mechanism of articulation to be used and re-used constantly, in each situation, in addition to an exchange among the different nodes of the network. This is part of the history of Bordergames, which we also hope will soon become disseminated.

www.sindominio.net/fiambrera
www.bordergames.org
www.bordergames.de

Above copied from: http://radical.temp.si/node/112