tiip: T(h)I(nk)I(ng) P(ractices), critical dialogues in contemporary art and media practices

2AMP7H1 MA/ Art and Media Practice/ University of Westminster/ School of Media, Arts and Design/ Department of Art and Design

1.2 relational aesthetics the role of dialogue in art
In order to consider this question it is necessary to ask, what are relational aesthetics? Where does it come from, what is its background, its history, what made it possible and how is it art relational? I attempted some sort of framework within my consideration of the changing roles of artist and audience in which I discussed how the spaces between high art and the audience as well as technological advances, created room for expansion. I touched on the role of dialogue and interpretation within the art world and its importance to the relational aesthetic movement that is developing today. Hopefully this will have provided a framework for an understanding of the development of Relational Aesthetics and its place in the world of art. Like the author Richard Schusterman, the arts curator Nicolas Bourriaud has been looking for alternatives and it is he who in 1998 coined the term ‘Relational Aesthetics’. In the glossary of his book Relational Aesthetics (199 he offers this broad definition of relational aesthetics as an -“Aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt.” On relational art he says it is,“A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than as an independent and private space.”

Nicolas Bourriaud (Relational aesthetics 1998p112-113)
Bourriaud considers that “The possibility of a relational art is testimony to the radical upheaval in aesthetic, cultural and political objectives brought about by modern art…….this development stems essentially from the birth of a global urban culture…”In short - “Relational art is neither a ‘revival’ of some movement nor the return of a style. It is born of the observation of the present and of a reflection on the destiny of artistic activity. Its basic hypothesis – the sphere of human relations as site for the artwork- is without precedent in the history of art, even though it can of course be seen, after the event, to be the obvious backdrop to all aesthetic practice, and the modernist theme par excellence.”

(Bourriaud in Participation ed. Clare Bishop 2006 P165)


Bourriaud considers the work of art as social interstice in which “an interstice is a space in social relations which, although it fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, suggests possibilities for exchanges other than those that prevail within the system.” Exhibitions…., “create free-spaces and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organise everyday life, and they encourage an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us.” (Bourriaud in Participation ed. Clare Bishop 2006 –P160-61)
To have a clearer idea of art that could be considered relational it might be helpful to consider a few examples of relational art –Philippe Parreno – invites a few people to pursue their favourite hobby on May Day, on a factory assembly line.Vanessa Beecroft – dresses 20 women identically in red. The visitor can only glimpse them through the doorway.Maurizio Cattelan feeds rats on Bel paese cheese and sells them as multiples.Jes Brinch and Henrik Plenge Jacobsen install an upturned bus in a Copenhagen square, causing a rival riot.Christine Hill offers services - works as a check out assistant in a supermarket, and organises a weekly gym workshop in a gallery. Offers back and shoulder massages to exhibition visitors, set up a fully functioning second-hand clothes shop.Jorge Pardo - a 50m jetty with a small pavilion was erected. The pier was functional providing mooring for boats, while a cigarette machine attached to the wall of the pavilion encouraged people to stop and look at the viewCarsten Holler recreates the chemical formula of molecules secreted by the human brain when in love, builds an inflatable plastic yacht, and breeds chaffinches with the aim of teaching them a new song.Noritoshi Hirakawa puts a small ad in a newspaper to find a girl to take part in his show.Angela Bulloch – creates a social space in her work – café.Santiago Sierra – persons paid to have their hair dyed blond 2001.Pierre Huyghe summons people to a casting session, makes a TV transmitter available to the public, and puts a photograph of labourers at work on view just a few yards from the building site.Liam Gillick – pinboard project, 1992 – contained instructions for use and potential items for inclusion. Tables and screens that are influenced by office spaces are erected in art galleries and provide backdrops to conversations.Rirkit Tiravanija, performance-installations: he organises a dinner in a collectors home and leaves him all the ingredients required to make Thai soup. He cooks for people attending museums or galleries. He reconstructed his New York apartment and opened it to the public 24 hrs a day, they could cook, wash, sleep as they wished.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_Aesthetics
Relational arts have arisen around the globe, some say in answer to social breakdown, political change and ‘trauma’ (Spheres of action – Peter Weibel. Art and Politics seminar, Tate Britain 2005) It has a variety of titles, relationalism; participation; communication arts; relative performance etc. Some of the artists while recognising the, “essentially collaborative nature of their work” refuse to be categorised within an ‘ism’ which would suggest that they do not recognise their role within a ‘movement’ but see themselves as groups working away from the dialogues of high art (Relationalism –Ben Lewis, safari art BBC 4) If we consider Arthur Danto’s argument that to philosophise about art is to bring about its end, (see the shifting role of artist and audience) then Nicolas Bourriaud is philosophising about their work in a way that might preclude or stultify its development and that might explain their reluctance to be feted as the new ‘ism’.However, such philosophy is difficult to avoid when the art is played out within gallery situations, as those very situations play into the hands of the critics and curators demanding dialogue and philosophy. It is much harder to do this if the art work is played outside within society. However, the recording and documentation pull it back into the realm of ‘Art’. More and more relational art is being played out in the street, on an everyday level. Artists are walking the streets documenting rubbish, leaving notes, having conversations, Sigur Ros – playing a series of concerts that weren’t advertised - Artists working for arts sake. So much of this art is ‘happening’ that the ‘is it life or is it art’ question has become a difficult one to answer. Maybe because it has finally become one? “Art participates in the organisation and reorganisation of experience… the making and remaking of our worlds.” – philosopher Nelson Goodman If we think that art is removed from society I think we need to think again – today art is everywhere, public art is more evident than ever before, references to art works and movements litter advertising campaigns and cartoons, it informs all our visual imagery and provides research sources for design ideas that fill our houses. “…the history of art as a tool box.”

(NB in an interview with Karen Moss by Stretcher – October, 2002) http://www.stretcher.org/archives/il_a/2003_02_25_il_archive.php
Art works are sold in art hypermarkets – museums and galleries abound and try to break down their otherness through late night and social events in which the art is the back drop for conversation and discussion. Maybe instead, we are a truly art centred society in which every nuance of life is mirrored back and forth in a myriad of media.Is relational art an extension of this society? Or is it a way of redressing the balance between high art (that ‘exalted’ in galleries) and the predominance of the visual image all around us, for want of a better description – ‘low’ art, dependent on borrowed images and references – set in new contexts, leading to new interpretations?Richard Schusterman in his book Surface and Depth 2002 (p185) says “works of art, like miraculous acts of God, transfigure the commonplace and require special interpretation, while ordinary mundane realities do not.” But what happens when ordinary mundane realities are proposed as art?If we consider relational art to be based in the ordinary, the mundane, then is it seeking, “…the holy grail of self-reflexive criticality.” (Rosalind Krauss A voyage on the North Sea p56 quoted in Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics Claire Bishop p64) through “special interpretation” – or is it art made out of a society subsumed by art and seeking to redress the balance, to return art to the centre of daily life and experience? Which position does it occupy – is it breaking down barriers or merely climbing and standing on them saying “look at me”? Does it seek to destroy the aura or merely try to restructure the domestic interface. I guess the answer will depend on whether you think art is separate, that it is, removed from daily life and experience. However, one thing is apparent; the role of dialogue is paramount to relational aesthetics perhaps more so than the work itself. The work requires, even necessitates, dialogue and documentation in order to occupy the realms of ‘high art’, to validate its position, in order to record that position in the history and development of art, to provide a point of reference. Equally it requires, “philosophy, to give its meanings genuine truth and life.”

(GWF Hegel, Introductory lectures on aesthetics 1993 p13)
As the relational projects become more elusive and ephemeral the range of documentation and analysis and dialogue seem to grow, proposals; manifestos; description; detailed logs of events; conversations; discussions; arguments; disputes; negotiations; reflections after the event; correspondence; retrospective surveys; 3rd person narratives; catalogues; essays and critical commentary.

There is so much written about this form of art maybe because the experience it produces is fleeting, transitory and personal. There is no ‘evidence’ of the art, only the feeling that you have experienced ‘something’ and a photograph or a letter written provides a souvenir of the experience, a memory of last week.
And yet who is relational art for, bearing in mind that those that have written about this art form, largely see it as work responding to the lack of connections, trying to repair, “weaknesses in the social bond” (Bourriaud Esthetique Relationnelle 1998 p37) Is it for everybody on the street or for an elite that practice a sensibility and a dialogue that maintains the role or at least the dialogue of high art? I would argue that the situations set up by relational artists connect like minded people and that the relations produced are “fundamentally harmonious” (Bourriaud) because they are “addressed to a community of viewing subjects with something in common.” – the subject, the environment, the situation, the time of day, the terminology, the language, etc.Does relational art stem from a social or perceived rootlessness leading to a desire to restructure the domestic interface? Or is its arts equivalent of putting the kettle on?Or “Perhaps discursivity and sociability are in the foreground of art today because they are scarce elsewhere.”

(Hal Foster, Chat Rooms 2004 p194 in participation ed. Claire Bishop 2006)
Maybe relational art is ultimately seeking to achieve a feeling of collective spiritual being, such as that achieved through carnival when people of all walks of life come together as one, perform as one, share the same experience, where the interpretation is equally as collective as the experience itself where “Art is a state of encounter…..” (Bourriaud) We might never know but we can talk about it.

above copied from: http://thinkingpractices.wordpress.com/theory/1-the-shifting-roles-of-artist-and-audience/12-relational-aesthetics-the-role-of-dialogue-in-art/

Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art, Grant Kester

Introduction:
Socially Engaged Practice Forum

There is pressure through the public funding system for the arts in the UK to create at least the allusion of engaging a broader demographic of the population. The reasoning for this is explained away as public funding shifts to an indirect yet local and media promoted form of taxation through the Lottery, so Government wishes to see - as much for its own PR as continuing Lottery sales - a publicly visible correlation between where the income is generated and on what it is being spent - 'good causes'. This can be seen to be having not dissimilar conservative repercussions on what receives public funding as happened with the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S.
One outcome has been the supporting of art that adheres to promoting and cultivating 'Social Inclusion'. This has placed the emphasis on artistic engagement as educational, or pedagogic, in a way that attests to inclusion within society as an integrated whole. At least superficially, this is espousing a shift in the terms of engagement between artists and what were traditionally regarded as audiences, to a more therapeutic or correctional interaction with an underscored group of people.
However, expectations and shifts in artistic practice are not a 'given' with legislative changes to government funding priorities, but performative. If a shift is to occur at the point of social engagement then it does not 'happen' coercively or in isolation but as a direct effect of an informed choice shift in formations of artistic practice in partnership with the people with which they work.
Within socially engaged approaches to arts practices there are widely differing dispositions, from what can be seen to be broadly in line with the Government's agenda - uni-directional activity of cultivating what are effectively better 'citizens'/ consumers where 'collaboration' is largely symbolic - to attempts at anaquality of engagement, where art is seen as "a medium for discussion with social reality", as artist Jay Koh puts it.
One description of the latter has been 'Littoral' practice. "Littoral - adj. of or on the shore. - n. a region lying along the shore." From its description it can be taken to express a point of complimentary meeting, an inbetween space.
The UK Government's take and emphasis on 'self-help' programmes has generated much scepticism with regard to socially engaged art practices. While there may have been many managerial conferences, effectively bolstering the position the Government is adopting, there has been little to no indepth and critical discussion.
One conference that was established to address issues of socially engaged practice was Critical Sites: Issues in Critical Art Practice and Pedagogy held in the Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, September '98, organised by Critical Access and Littoral in Ireland. At the conference Grant Kester, assistant professor of contemporary art history and theory at Arizona State University, delivered a paper: Socially Engaged Practice - Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art.
To raise and debate some of the related issues Variant is hosting an on-line forum on Socially Engaged Practice, commencing with the launch of this issue. Given his commitment and work done to date in these areas, to initiate this dialogue we asked Grant Kester to re-present his paper from the conference.
The Socially Engaged Art Practice on-line forum - held in collaboration with the Environmental Art Department of Glasgow School of Art - is at:
http//:sepf.listbot.com/
This includes an archive of all messages, available to all list members, you can subscribe (at no cost) to the list also from the above site.
Grant Kester's paper Socially Engaged Practice - Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art is also available as a downloadable PDF file at the Variant site:
www.variant.org.uk/
If you do not have access to e-mail but wish to respond to Grant Kester's paper, or any issues related to socially engaged practice, please post them to:
Variant, 1a Shamrock Street, Glasgow, G4 9JZ
The resulting exchanges will be subsequently documented at the Variant site and are intended to appear as a dedicated supplement within the ensuing issue, Variant #10 (Spring/Summer 2000).

Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework For Littoral Art
Grant Kester

I. Defining Littoral Art
In this paper I'm going to outline a framework for the critical analysis of "Littoral" or engaged art practices. I start with two related caveats. First, my analysis is based primarily on work that I am familiar with in the US and the UK. Thus, it is very much a selective framework. And second, even within this geographically limited context it is focused on a single aspect of these works which I feel is of particular importance. Given the time and space limitations there will be a number of complex questions which I will be unable to elaborate sufficiently and others which I will be forced to bypass altogether. I begin with the assumption that Littoral projects make very different demands on the practitioner than do typical gallery or museum-based art works and that they challenge on many levels the normative assumptions of conventional art works. By the same token I would contend that Littoralist art requires the development of a new critical framework and a new aesthetic paradigm. There are aspects of Littoralist practice that simply can't be grasped as relevant (or in some cases identified at all) by conventional art critical methodologies.
Mainstream art criticism is organized around two key elements. First, it is primarily concerned with the formal appearance of physical objects, which are understood to possess an immanent meaning. These meanings are then actualized as the object comes into contact with a viewer. The object here remains the primary carrier of aesthetic significance, whether in terms of a formal analysis or in terms of a speculative phenomenology that attempts to re-construct a postulated viewer's interactions with it. Second, the judgments produced through the critic's interaction with the physical object are authorized by the writer's individual, pleasure-based response. In The Scandal of Pleasure the American critic Wendy Steiner argues that the primary organizing principle of criticism should be "subjective preference" or what she terms the "I like" response.1
When contemporary critics confront Littoral projects they often lack the analytic tools necessary to understand the work on its own terms and instead simply project onto it a formal, pleasure-based methodology that is entirely inappropriate.2 The results are not surprising: Littoral works are criticized for being "unaesthetic" or are attacked for needlessly suppressing "visual gratification". Because the critic is unable to gain any sensory stimulation or fails to find the material in the work personally engaging it is dismissed as "failed" art. This was the reaction of a number of U.S. critics to the most recent Dokumenta exhibition. Ken Johnson of Art in America coined the term "post-retinal" to describe much of the work in the show.3 Although Johnson intended this term as a mild pejorative, I feel it is quite useful in capturing the ways in which many Littoral projects challenge the tendency of contemporary visual art to function primarily on the level of sensation. The reliance of contemporary criticism on the writer's personal response also has the effect of treating subjectivity as an unquestioned, a priori principle, rather than recognizing the extent to which the critic's "personal" taste is structured by forms of identification and power based on class, race, gender and sexuality. I would argue that the critic has a responsibility to interrogate their own individuality; to ask how their identity functions in relationship to other subjects and other social formations.
1. The Problem of Definition and Indeterminance
The concept of a Littoral criticism is important because it forces upon us the question of what Littoral "art" might be, which in turn requires that we differentiate Littoral art from other kinds of art (or other forms of cultural politics or activism for that matter). I know that for myself most of these differences have remained relatively intuitive or unconscious. The act of criticism requires that we make these intuitive judgments more concrete and subject them to some conceptual elaboration. The positive dimension of this activity is that it can deepen our understanding of what makes Littoralist art effective. The negative dimension is that it can lead to a hardening of categorical definitions and distinctions. This brings us to a central question. There is a long tradition of defining modernist art through its difference from dominant cultural forms. Thus, Clive Bell and Roger Fry defined avant-garde painting (and in particular, Postimpressionism) through its active suppression of representation, which they associated with the populist realism of Victorian genre painting; Greenberg, of course, contrasted authentic art with vulgar "kitsch". In the 1970s critic Michael Fried differentiated the truly avant-garde art of Anthony Caro and Frank Stella from the inauthentic "Literalist" art of Donald Judd or Robert Smithson, based on its resistance to "theater". That is, Caro's work was judged to be superior because it refused to incorporate formal cues that would acknowledge the presence of a viewer.
This resistance to fixity can be traced to the function of the aesthetic in early modern philosophy as a force that is intended to absorb antagonisms created elsewhere in society. Typically, as in the writings of Schiller, the aesthetic is conceived of as therapeutic; its job is to ameliorate the fragmenting effects of a market-driven society. This compensatory function needs to be understood within the context of liberalism. The aesthetic provides us with a unique power to comprehend and represent the totality of forces operating within society, and to envision more progressive or humane alternatives, but this epistemological insight is always joined with the requirement that the artist must never attempt to realize these alternatives through direct action. The "poet", according to Schiller, possesses a sovereign right only in the limitless domain of the imagination. In a parallel manner, for Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right, the "aesthetic state" can comprehend the deleterious social effects of private property but it is prevented from intervening in the ostensibly "natural" operations of the market. The resulting social tensions (poverty, a growing gap between rich and poor, environmental destruction) will be relieved, rather, by the expansion of the market and by the colonization of what he terms "backwards" lands. These as yet unclaimed colonies are defined, like the aesthetic imagination itself, as potentially boundless and conceptually indeterminate. For Kant the destructive impact of social stratification will be healed by the unfettered circulation of commerce and knowledge (or "books and money"), leading to the gradual diffusion of a spirit of harmonious Enlightenment. The aesthetic can thus be understood as one of several related mechanisms that were developed within liberalism to simultaneously regulate the threat posed by systematic forms of critique and to compensate for the dysfunctional effects of the emergent capitalist system. It must remain highly elastic and un-regulated, precisely because it is being called upon to absorb a potentially infinite range of divisive social effects.
Under the influence of late nineteenth-century critics such as Robert Vischer and Heinrich Wölfflin, this principle of indeterminateness was transferred from a general condition of aesthetic knowledge to a trait primarily associated with the experience of artworks. Specifically, the capacity of the modernist work to continually complicate or modify its own formal condition became an expression of its refusal of determinant boundaries. Critics like Bell, Fry, and Greenberg then endowed this idea of formal innovation with the specific motivation that modernist art must constantly transform itself to avoid co-optation by popular culture. This principle of indeterminateness remains with us today in the concept of the art work that refuses the economic exchange of the market or that resists translation into other forms of discourse or meaning (Adorno) or, for that matter, in the belief that art schools should be experimental and open-ended institutions.
In my remarks here I am, thus, working somewhat against the grain of a long tradition that says we must not attempt to limit or define art's potential meaning. In fact, I would argue that one of the strengths of Littoral practice lies in its capacity to transgress existing categories of knowledge. At the same time I want to stress the importance of understanding indeterminateness in specific social and historical contexts. Clearly we aren't talking about a generalized refusal of all ontological boundaries. The question is, how has indeterminacy functioned strategically over time? I would contend that, within the modernist tradition, it has been constructed through a dialogue that oscillates between the form of the work of art and its communicative function. And it is in this question of discursivity that I will locate the basis for my definition of Littoral art. It is necessary to consider the Littoralist work as a process as well as a physical product, and specifically as a process rooted in a discursively-mediated encounter in which the subject positions of artist and viewer or artist and subject are openly thematized and can potentially be challenged and transformed. I am particularly interested in a discursive aesthetic based on the possibility of a dialogical relationship that breaks down the conventional distinction between artist, art work and audience - a relationship that allows the viewer to "speak back" to the artist in certain ways, and in which this reply becomes in effect a part of the "work" itself.
2. Modern and Postmodern Anti-Discursivity
This approach is significant, I think, because it stands in opposition to a long tradition of anti-discursivity in modern art that associates communicability or discourse with fixity - the generalized belief that art must define itself as different from other forms of culture (popular culture, kitsch, Fried's theater) precisely by being difficult to understand, shocking or disruptive (except now, contra Schiller's return to "wholeness", a Lyotard-ian "ontological dislocation" becomes the therapeutic antidote to a centered Cartesian subjectivity). I would contend that the anti-discursive tendency in modern art hypostatizes discourse and communication as inherently oppressive. It can't conceive of a discursive form that is not contaminated by the problematic model of "communication" embodied in advertising and mass-media.4
Notably, this attitude runs across the historical and theoretical divide of modernism and postmodernism. Thus Lyotard writes with real disdain of art which is based on the assumption that the public "will recognize. . . will understand, what is signified."5 And both Greenberg and Lyotard postulate avant-garde art practice as the antidote to kitsch. If kitsch traffics in reductive or simple concepts and sensations then avant-garde art will be difficult and complex; if kitsch's preferred mode is a viewer-friendly "realism" then avant-garde art will be abstract, "opaque" and "unpresentable". In each case the anti-discursive orientation of the avant-garde artwork, its inscrutability and resistance to interpretation, is juxtaposed to a cultural form that is perceived as easy or facile (advertising, kitsch, "theatrical" art, etc.). The condition of this degraded cultural form is then seen as entirely exhausting the possibilities of a populist art, thus forcing the artist to withdraw completely from the field of discursive engagement.
What I am calling an "anti-discursive" tradition in the modern avant-garde is defined by two seemingly opposed moments. The first, which I have described elsewhere as an "orthopedic" aesthetic, seeks to aggressively transform the viewer's consciousness (implicitly defined as flawed or dulled) through an overwhelming encounter with the work of art.6 This perspective is more accurately thought of as counter-discursive in that it argues that the work of art has the ability to operate on the viewer through a unique, non-discursive, somatic power. Examples would include the "alienation" effect of the 1930's Russian and German avant-garde and Walter Benjamin's concept of a "shock" of critical awareness produced through the "dialectical" juxtaposition of images. Although ambivalently positioned relative to discursive forms of knowledge, these approaches provide an important framework for thinking through a communicative aesthetic model. The positive recognition that everyday language is always/ already ideologically prepared to interrupt the formation of a critical consciousness, is combined with what I view as a negative dimension: the positioning of the viewer as a passive subject whose epistemological orientation to the world will be adjusted by the work of art. The extent to which the commitment to shock (what we might call the "naughty artist" paradigm) remains an almost unconscious reflex can be seen in the recent controversy over the English art students who claimed to use a grant to vacation at Costa del Sol while actually staying in Leeds. Like some kind of dated Baudrillardian scenario the various characters (the outraged press, the spluttering conservatives, and the clever art students) played their roles almost as though they were working from a script, and in a way they were.
The second view contends that the artist, and the work of art, must remain entirely unconcerned with the viewer. This is the basis of Michael Fried's distinction between authentic and "theatrical" art. Fried insists that the artwork is under no obligation whatsoever to acknowledge the viewer's presence - that is, to anticipate or play off of the viewer's physical response, movement, or expectations relative to a given piece.7 In its extreme state this can take the form of the position that art is not a mode of communication at all. In a classic expression of this view, we find the painter Barnett Newman projecting an anti-discursive tendency into the very mists of time: "Man's first expression, like his first dream," Newman writes in 1947, "was an aesthetic one. Speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication. . . an address to the unknowable."8 (Or to an ideal but currently unrealizable Sensus Communis.)
3. Modern Aesthetics and the Problem of Universality
Greenberg's citation of Kant in his "Modernist Painting" essay is widely taken as proof of the neo-Kantian lineage of formalist art criticism. I would argue that we can draw very different lessons about the meaning of art from early modern aesthetics. The concept of the aesthetic that emerged in the work of philosophers such as Kant, Schiller, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson was centered on the relationship between the individual (defined by sense-based or somatic knowledge) and the social. This relationship was constructed through concepts such as "taste" (which marks the fortuitous harmony between the autonomous individual and a more objective standard of judgment). This work was only nominally concerned with the form of the art object per se. A primary term of reference was the concept of a sensus communis or Gemeinsinn, a common sense or knowledge that marked a horizon of shared communicability. This opens out into a whole area of debate in contemporary theory between Habermas, Foucault and Lyotard, among others. Lyotard goes so far as to link the concept of discourse and communicability in art with what he ominously terms a "call to order" and the cultures of fascism and Stalinism. Habermas' claim that art might expand from "questions of taste" to the exploration of "living historical situations" is linked for Lyotard with a naive, nostalgic and politically reactionary yearning after "unity" and the misguided attempt to reconcile art and society into a mythic "organic whole".
Of course Lyotard's fears of a universalizing discourse are well-founded. One does not have to look very far in the current cultural landscape to find concrete examples, such as recent attacks on the teaching of Spanish in California public schools (Proposition 227) under the guise of a resurgent one-language Americanism that attempts to define American identity through the negation of the complex cultures that actually constitute that country today. Clearly, any model of discourse or cultural identity that is founded on the violent suppression of difference is oppressive. At the same time the vehemently anti-discursive tradition within the modernist avant-garde has led to another kind of negation - an indifference and in some cases an outright contempt towards the viewer. "The artist," as sculptor David Smith insisted in 1952, "deserves to be belligerent to the majority".9 I would argue, however, that we don't have to choose between fascism and withdrawal into a mute, monadic isolation. Littoralist art is concerned precisely with exploring and negotiating the complexities of discursive inter-relationships, with trying to create a discourse which minimizes negation.
4. Implications for the Analysis of Art
I now want to outline three related components of a discursive or dialogical art practice.
1. Interdisciplinarity
First, Littoral art is interdisciplinary. It operates "between" discourses (art and activism, for example) and between institutions (the gallery and the community center or the housing block). This is opposed to traditional art that operates within both the discursive presuppositions and the institutional sites of the "art world" and art audiences and that is, moreover, often even further defined by its identification with a specific art medium. Ian Hunter of Projects Environment uses the term "interface" practices which I understand in two ways - first, the interface between practitioners and other individuals or groups and second, the interface that is created in Littoral works across disciplinary routines or bodies of knowledge. (This relates to the argument that the formation of disciplinary knowledge is both an empowering and a limiting activity, and that breakthroughs occur in the disciplinary interstices, while consolidation occurs within the disciplines themselves.)
Along with this interdisciplinarity comes the need to learn as much as possible about the ways in which meaning is produced in and through these other contexts. This interdisciplinarity, the ability to draw on analytic resources from other areas such as critical theory, social history or environmental science, and the ability to work through alternative institutional sites, allows Littoral art to develop a systematic critique that can be actualized through specific political or social struggles. The Littoral artist, by "interfacing" with existing sites of political and cultural resistance can challenge the disabling political quietism of liberal aesthetics.
2. Multiple registers of meaning vs. formal immanence
In Littoral art the "meaning" of a given work is not centered in the physical locus of the object, or in the imaginative capacity of the single viewer. Rather, it is dispersed through multiple registers. These include a spatial-temporal register, in which the work "means" differently in different locations and times, as opposed to the immanence that is characteristic of modernist formalism. The work also produces multiple levels of information at a given time and space as it interacts with a myriad of other discursive systems (existing belief systems, ideologies, the psychological make up of particular viewers or participants, etc.). There is thus no single "work" to be judged in a Littoralist criticism. This is what differentiates Littoral criticism from conventional art criticism. The "work" is constituted as an ensemble of effects and forces, which operate in numerous registers of signification and discursive interaction.
3. Dialogical indeterminance vs. formal indeterminance
The recognition that Littoral works operate on multiple levels of meaning doesn't imply that meaning is entirely indeterminate, however. It can be clearly analyzed at specific points, and this capacity to ascertain meaning effects among particular viewers or co-participants is an important part of the process of dialogical "feedback" (e.g., Stephen Willats projects with housing estate residents). At the same time, this doesn't make the work entirely fixed. Rather, the principle of indeterminance that is registered in conventional art through formal innovation is expressed in Littoral art through the open-ended process of dialogical engagement, which produces new and unanticipated forms of collaborative knowledge. I'm not saying that Littoral art works can't be formally innovative, but that they don't depend on the principle of immanent formal differentiation as the primary engine for their development.

II. Current Political and Cultural Context

In the second half of this talk I want to use the concept of a dialogical aesthetic to outline some specific conditions for the analysis and criticism of Littoral art. As I've argued, one of the defining characteristics of Littoral art is its capacity for interaction with other areas of social practice. The "interface" includes more than just the "conversation" that takes place between practitioners and their co-participants. It also encompasses the broader discursive context within which a given Littoral project operates - for example, relevant public policies and debates, corporate ideologies, images and narratives promulgated by the mass media and numerous other sites which structure the political and cultural meaning that a specific work is capable of producing, and which are susceptible to being transformed by the work in turn. Two related tendencies in contemporary cultural politics are particularly salient. The first is the growing privatization of social life, linked with a corollary embrace of the individual as the primary locus of political and cultural authority. The second is the resistance to both theoretical and systematic forms of analysis. These tendencies, although differentially articulated, operate across a broad spectrum of cultural and political positions.
1. Individualism/ Privatization
In the U.S. we are witnessing the widespread privatization of those domains of social life which were based on the ideals (if not always the reality) of a shared commitment to a general public good and a willingness to sacrifice some portion of one's self-interest for the benefit of others. What might be termed the re-segregation of American life is occurring at numerous points: public education is being replaced by a system of selective "voucher" schools which often violate the separation of church and state; fortified "gated communities" are proliferating among the wealthy as a way to simultaneously express class privilege (and paranoia) and to opt out of shared municipal services;10 with declining state and federal moneys "public" universities are becoming research fiefdoms for major corporations; under the Republican congress industry lobbyists are being invited to re-draft federal regulatory legislation intended to protect the public from their own companies; and forms of collectively-financed health care and social services are under attack by proposals to restrict benefits to those least likely to need them.
Everywhere we see a retreat into privatized enclaves along with a refusal to acknowledge the relationship between economic privilege and consumption patterns here and lack of resources and opportunity elsewhere. The withdrawal from a public commitment to these programs is justified by the claim that they are inherently flawed. But rather than recognizing the problems experienced by, for example, urban high schools, as a result of an interconnected set of social and economic forces (declining tax bases due to white flight, lack of job opportunities as a result of a deliberate program of industrial disinvestment leading to the proliferation of a drug-based economy, etc.) their problems are attributed entirely to the failure of the poor as individuals; their lack of moral fiber and personal initiative. The implication is clear: the only effective public policies are those that function to transform the (failed) individual; to provide them with a work ethic and a capacity for self-sacrifice.
2. Anti-Systematic
The second, and related, tendency I noted was an opposition to systematic forms of analysis. Conservatives in the U.S. have undertaken a concerted effort to discredit any form of political analysis that seek to explain poverty or criminality as the result of economic and social inequality. This has involved in turn the adoption of a triumphalist view of recent American history.11 In this view the last few decades have seen the elimination of all forms of organized racism, classism or sexism in America such that women, the poor and working class, and people of color have no impediments whatsoever to competing in a fair and open way with economically privileged white men in what Dinesh D'Souza calls the "foot race" of modern life.12 Having realized this liberal ideal through past political struggles over civil rights, society is now understood to be composed of free individuals whose success or failure is due solely to their personal efforts.13 If, in this meritocractic utopia, white upper-class men still seem to dominate the most powerful positions in corporate and political life this certainly can't be attributed to the fact that society continues to systematically impede or limit the opportunities of women, the poor, or people of color. Rather, we must seek some internal cause, located in the individual rather than the social. Thus we have the pseudo-science of the Bell Curve, attributing a genetic inferiority to blacks, and conservative attacks on the immorality of the poor.14 I suspect that there are rough corollaries for these views in the UK today as well.
In place of flawed public institutions we find conservatives championing private philanthropy in which members of the upper class choose to dispense some portion of their accumulated wealth as a reflection of their own humanity and moral excellence. Social programs are to be viewed as a form of noblesse oblige, rather than as a collective recognition of inequalities that operate elsewhere in the social order. The result is a neo-Victorian discourse that locates the causes of poverty in personal failure. In line with the roots of early reform in Evangelical Christianity, the act of dispensing charity is itself intended to facilitate the moral transcendence of the giver, to demonstrate their own capacity to reach across the boundaries of class and race privilege on the basis of some putatively universal spiritual essence which they are able to recognize and activate through their elevated capacity for empathetic identification.15 There have been numerous books published during the last several years (e.g., Marvin Olasky's The Tragedy of American Compassion) in which conservatives argue that the real problem in the U.S. today is a lack of moral character among individuals, and that existing social problems can best be solved not by the state, but by the efforts of private individuals and organizations that develop programs focused on building the character of the poor.
3. Relationship to Art
In this brief outline I've discussed the conservative world view in terms of a resistance to systematic or holistic forms of analysis and a (fictive) construction of the subject as a radically autonomous individual whose desires must be either unimpeded (as a middle-class consumer) or rigorously policed (as a working-class producer). In general terms both the anti-systematic orientation and the rampant individualism of conservative thinking seek to detach a given subject, event or condition from its imbededness within a network of causal factors; to abstract the individual, as a product of social forces and discursive interrelationships into an entirely self-contained and generative entity.
Two interconnected tendencies in contemporary art critical discourse are of particular relevance here - the widespread interest in the role of visual pleasure in aesthetic experience and the consequent attack on theoretical or systematic analyses of art. These tendencies first emerged as a reaction to the perceived didacticism and theoretical excess of 1980's postmodernism. For critics in the U.S. such as Mark van Proyen and David Hickey "theory" marks a retreat from the unique somatic knowledge that is the special province of the artist.16 Theory is abstract and distanced; art is immediate and experiential. The iron heel of mind-driven theory has attempted to quash the subtle but necessary truths of the body over which the artist has a proprietary authority. Here mind and body, dominative reason and a spiritually cultivated intuition are juxtaposed in classic binary fashion. The assertion of "beauty" and personal pleasure as the only legitimate basis of an art experience and the reaction against "theory" (which is seen as contaminating the purity of that experience) coalesce around the troubled figure of the "individual". The artist (as an exemplary individual) becomes the final bunkered outpost of resistant subjectivity against a whole array of "objective" and abstract cognitive forces. The somatic or sensual experience that they register through their works is understood as having an inherently progressive political power, constituting a pre-social domain of personal autonomy and self-expression.
The "individual" marks an important point of congruence with the conservative views I've already outlined. The concept of the (bourgeois) individual constructed in conservative discourse bears a striking resemblance to conventional notions of the artist, virulently resisting any threat to the autonomy of personal expression or desire. This is not to say that any artistic position on individual autonomy is necessarily conservative. Further, it is clearly the case that the individual body and the right of expression mark an important domain of political struggle today. But the politics of the individual are not necessarily a given; they have to be established in and through specific contexts - a process that requires some form of analytic thinking.
The attack on theory in the arts is part of a more general reaction against analytic systems of thought that has been taken up across a range of cultural sites. The political implications of the anti-theory stance are particularly evident in recent debates in left journals such as The Nation. In a opinion column in May of 1998 Nation editor Eric Alterman castigated what he called the "radical/ academic" left (a.k.a. the "Foucaultian" left) for its focus on theory ("theory and identity are everything") at the expense of "real" politics.17 Wallowing in its own elitism and irrelevance the "cultural left" blithely assumes that "the higher the level of its abstraction the more subversive it is." Where many contemporary critics bemoan the irrelevance of theory to the actuality of art-making, Alterman contends that contemporary left academics are out of touch with the average worker and incapable of "translating theory into praxis in the real world of U.S. politics." In each case the attack on "theory" is generated out of the claimed authenticity of "experience".
Although these debates, in art and in contemporary political discourse, are being staged on very different terrains they share some tendencies. First, they express a common desire to bypass what is seen as the extraneous, abstract, or irrelevant discourse of theory in order to regain contact with the "empirical" basis of a given discipline or activity. They urge us to move closer to the object of study or engagement, to collapse the distance (critical, physical, emotional) between object and interlocutor, at the same time that they express a demand to recover the "essence" of politics or art in response to the dangerous forces of conservative attack and anarchic inter-disciplinary transgression. This is a perspective that makes it increasingly difficult to recognize the inter-connections among and between these various cultural and political fields. It marks a retreat from the possibilities of a cultural politics and from the possibility of a shared discourse among activists, artists, critics, and others, and specifically, from the kinds of processes that lie at the heart of Littoral practice.

III. Littoral Practice - Dialogical Aesthetics

If, as I am suggesting, the evaluative framework for Littoral art is no longer centered on the physical object then what is the new locus of judgment? I would contend that it can be found in the condition and character of dialogical exchange itself. I would define this as a pragmatic form of criticism to the extent that it is concerned with the specific effects produced by these exchanges in a given context. At the same time, it retains a nominal teleological orientation in that it preserves some concept of an ideal discursive process that can act as a benchmark against which to evaluate actual projects. It is necessary to consider two conditions that are specific to the subject position of the contemporary "artist", and which bear directly on the artist's capacity for discursive engagement.
The first condition is ideological - the tendency of artists to identify themselves with a highly individualized concept of personal autonomy on the one hand, and with the capacity to transcend self through their mastery of a universal aesthetic knowledge on the other. The result is an often problematic mixture of traits: a failure to engage in critical self-reflection (due to the belief that one's individuality constitutes a redemptive, pre-ideological enclave) combined with the perceived authority to heedlessly transgress boundaries of class, race, and privilege, and to engage in discursive acts "on behalf of" any number of disenfranchised "others". The potential correspondence between this view and the concepts of privatized philanthropy that I outlined earlier is clear. The corollary to the philanthropic middle-class subject who is able to make contact with, and spiritually "improve", the racial or class Other is found in the long tradition of regarding the artist or intellectual as a trans-cultural agent. Thus we have St. Simon's "avant-garde", Coleridge's "Clerisy", and more recently, descriptions of the artist as a Shamanistic healer which engage in a problematic projection of archaic notions of "tribal" spirituality onto a society that is highly stratified, even if not especially within the arts. To the extent that Littoral projects involve this kind of cross-cultural or cross-class negotiation (and when they do it is almost always the case that the transgression is moving from a position of greater to lesser privilege), this will remain a persistent area of tension.
The second condition that poses a challenge to discursivity is institutional and logistical. It is what we might call the problem of itinerancy. Discourse, and the trust necessary for discursive interaction and identification, grow out of a sustained relationship in time and space, the co-participation in specific material conditions of existence. But the nature of contemporary art patronage and production mitigates against this kind of sustained commitment. Artists have to earn a living which may require regular re-location due to teaching or other jobs, foundation grants are often oriented around singular projects over a fixed time frame, and the art institutions that provide support for Littoral work are accustomed to inviting a practitioner in from "the outside" for a limited period of time. Many of the mechanisms of engaged arts patronage function to reinforce the view of a given "community" or constituency as an instrumentalized and fictively monolithic entity to be "serviced" by the visiting artist. The British artist Stephen Willats has negotiated the problem of itinerancy by returning to the same sites, often tower blocks, over a period of several years. Another solution is found in arts organizations that are located in, and build ongoing relationships with, specific neighborhoods, as in the East Bay Institute for Urban Arts in Oakland, California.
1. Discursive Determinism
Turning from the condition of the artist to the concept of discourse itself I would identity two areas of critical analysis. The first relates to the problem of discursive determinism - that is, the replacement of a vulgar Marxist concept of economic determinism by the equally reductive belief that "discourse" or dialogue in and of itself has the power to radically transform social relations. This is problematic for two reasons. First, because it overlooks the manifest differential in power relations that pre-conditions participation in discourse long before we get to the gallery, community center or meeting room. We can attempt to minimize the effect of power on discourse, to point to its effects, but we can't expect to eliminate it. Discursive determinism also overlooks the extent to which political change takes place through forms of "discourse" (such as violence or economic manipulation of the electoral system) that are far from open and ideal. This tendency treats discourse as an abstract and autonomous entity, but the essential mediating relationship between discourse and mechanisms of political or social change is left undeveloped. We might call this the "argue but obey" criticism of discourse, taken from Kant's famous citation of Frederick the Great, who had no problem with Prussia's intellectual class expressing any number of radical ideals in written form so long as they did nothing to directly challenge his political authority - "argue as much as you want, and about whatever you want, but obey" (in "What is Enlightenment?"). "Discourse" becomes aesthetic, in the sense that I have used the term previously, to the extent that it becomes detached from mechanisms of political change and instead takes on a compensatory or primarily symbolic role.
2. Empathy and Negation
The second axis of a discursive aesthetic revolves around the related concepts of "empathy" and "negation". The specific function of conventional aesthetic perception is to treat the perceived object as an ensemble of stimuli to be registered on the conscious mind of the artist. Everything that is outside of the perceiving subject thus becomes a kind of raw material to be processed by the senses and the mind in order to produce what we might call a "transcendence effect". This process allows the subject to reflectively perceive the operations of their own consciousness, and by extension to glimpse the potential cognitive ground of a universal basis of communication. The transcendence effect is most pronounced when the material being experienced is treated as a mere representation, thus insulating the meditative perceiver from any direct contact with the viewed object which might distract them from the process of self-reflection. This is typically expressed in the early to mid-twentieth century concept of a formalist, self-referential art practice.
The effect, then, is to negate the specific identity of those objects around you (and people can easily function as objects), and instead to treat them as instrumentalized material. In contrast, a dialogical aesthetic would locate meaning "outside" the self; in the exchange that takes place, via discourse, between two subjects. Moreover, the identities of these subjects are not entirely set, but rather, are formed and transformed through the process of dialogical exchange. In the traditional view I've just outlined aesthetic experience prepares the subject to participate in intersubjective exchange by giving them mastery over a universal discursive form. They function as an already fixed enunciative agent who merely makes use of discourse to express the a priori "content" of their internal being. In the model that I'm outlining the subject is literally produced in and through dialogical exchange.
One way in which the instrumentalizing tendency of traditional aesthetic experience has been negotiated is through the concept of empathy (e.g., Burke and Lessing). Empathy is a relationship to others that at least potentially allows us to experience the world not as a transcendent eyeball searching out aesthetic stimulation, but as a discursively integrated subject willing to sacrifice some sense of autonomy in order to imaginatively inhabit, learn from (and be transformed by) another subject's material condition and world view. Politically resistant communities are typically formed by people who share lived experience and interests in ways that a Littoral practitioner may not. Yet, the problems of universality notwithstanding, we must retain some concept of an intersubjective common ground that would allow for the possibility of shared discourse, and that would allow the practitioner to bridge the gap of difference between themselves and their co-participants.
At the same time, empathy is susceptible to a kind of ethical/ epistemological abuse in which the very act of empathetic identification is used to negate the specific identity of the other subject. It is simply not the case that "we" are all "the same" - we are differentially positioned relative to material, cultural, and economic interests. And, historically, it is precisely in crossing these kind of objective divisions that "empathy" is most often evoked. Empathy can become an excuse to deny our own privilege and the real differences between ourselves and others, and to subject them instead to an instrumentalizing aestheticization. It is notable that in philosophical terms empathy has been constructed as non-discursive relationship. In Lessing's Laocoön essay he defines empathy in part through the restrained silence of Laocoön himself, even as he is attacked by poisonous snakes. The empathized subject is not expected to answer back, only to bear the marks of their suffering and to thereby elicit our emotive identification. Moreover, empathy is the product of distance, which guarantees that we cannot be "existentially implicated in the tragic event".18 Thus both Lessing and Burke associate empathy with pity and with a quasi-pleasurable aesthetic response. I'm reminded here of a friend who worked developing art-based therapy in an Alzheimer's care facility. After some time she grew to be rather unpopular with the regular care-givers who resented what they saw as her tendency to romanticize dementia as liberating the creative child within. There is of course a long history of artists tortured by the desire to "do good" or be useful. Van Gogh's transition from Evangelical minister to the miners of Belgium, where he even began to physically mimic their impoverished lifestyle, to painting solemn scenes of peasant culture is exemplary of the tendency to treat the other as a material to be converted by the well-intentioned artist, or as a "representational" resource.
To make this point somewhat clearer relative to Littoral practice I want to briefly re-visit a project that I discussed in some detail at the Salford Littoral conference in 1994. The project is called Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths and was produced by an artist from New Orleans named Dawn Dedeaux in 1993. It began as part of an "art in the prisons" program in Louisiana and eventually mushroomed into a travelling multi-media installation with sculptural elements, multiple video monitors, fabricated rooms, large photo-based images, a sound track and so on. In this form it toured from New Orleans to a number of major cities including Baltimore and Los Angeles. The project was subject to some criticism, especially by African American writers, because it presented provocative images of one of Dedeaux's chief subjects, a convicted crack dealer and gang leader named Wayne Hardy, half dressed, holding a spear, a shield and in one case a target. Although there are many "voices" in the installation, in fact a cacophony of audio and video tapes ran constantly, the dominant narrative "voice" of the piece was that of Dedeaux herself, who planned and orchestrated the project with some minimal "collaboration" from Wayne Hardy regarding the staging of his life size portraits. Dedeaux sought to help white viewers "empathize" with the conditions faced by young black men, at the same time that she hoped the piece would act as a kind of moral prophylactic for young black men who came to see it, who would presumably mend their ways after witnessing the contrition expressed by a number of imprisoned figures.
Dedeaux, who is from a white, upper-class New Orleans family, spoke of the project as a way to overcome her fear of young black men after being mugged in the French quarter. The young black men she worked with thus served as the vehicle for a kind of immersion therapy that allowed her to transcend her own painfully self-conscious whiteness. At the same time, Dedeaux's project positioned her subjects as ciphers of black criminality (they are always viewed in the context of prison and of discussions about their crimes) by failing to locate their relentlessly foregrounded "criminality" in the broader context of the current urban political economy. Images of young black men in prison circulate widely in U.S. culture and their interpretation is heavily influenced by a broad network of presuppositions largely dominated by conservative policy statements, books, op-ed pieces and so on. These images cannot simply be re-circulated in an art context without taking that a priori discursive network into consideration, and without taking the artist's own position vis-a-vis these images into account. I certainly don't hold Dedeaux accountable for conservative policies on race and crime, but they constituted one of the most significant discursive interfaces for this project and, assuming that she didn't find herself in agreement with them, she should have devised some representational strategy to resist the assimilation of her project to these views.
Since this project was widely covered several years ago there have been two interesting addenda. First, in 1996 one of Dedeaux's subjects, Paul Hardy, was arrested for the murder of a police witness and, in order to build its case against him the FBI raided Dedeaux's studio, seizing interviews and videotapes. These images, which Dedeaux had collected and catalogued in her studio, are not simply a representational resource, they are in a very real way linked to the lives of her subjects, with immediate and profound consequences. The second addendum is provided by Dedeaux herself, who presented a mocking "self-portrait" (Self-Portrait, Rome) in a 1997 issue of the journal Art Papers which featured her in smiling black-face make-up with the phrase "Do You Like Me Better Now?" written on the palm of her hand. It is probably safe to assume that this image was intended as a response to those critics (possibly including myself) who raised questions about the position she took up in the Soul Shadows project. She seems to be suggesting here that the only reason she was criticized was because she was white.
Of course Dedeaux's easy accommodation to conservative views about black crime and poverty is not simply a matter of her race. At the same time, if she was black herself it is unlikely that the experience of being mugged would have made her fearful of all black men, and led her to produce a piece that is so problematically related to questions of difference, access, and mastery. Dedeaux's whiteness is not simply a question of skin color but of her imaginative orientation to racial identity and Otherness itself. While her class and racial background and her resulting isolation relative to poor and working class black communities might predispose her to reinforce these views, it doesn't predetermine it. This image is made more problematic by the fact that it is, presumably, meant as an indirect citation of David Hammons' billboard "How You like me Now?" which was installed on the streets of Washington, D.C. as part of the Blues Aesthetic exhibition in 1989. The billboard featured Jackson in whiteface and was meant as a critique of those Democrats who feared that Jackson's "Rainbow Coalition" would split the black vote. As the billboard was being installed several black passersby found the image of a white-faced Jackson, being erected by an all-white crew, insulting. They returned with sledge-hammers and destroyed the piece.
This project provides an instructive example of the ways in which a discursively-based Littoral practice differs from gallery-based strategies, which assume that the physical object "in and of itself" carries sufficient meaning. There was no attempt by the sponsoring institution at discursive interaction with the "public" on whom this billboard would be imposed. Part of the difficulty lies in the ambiguity of Hammons' piece. "How you like me now?" could be a way of saying that Jackson was an "Uncle Tom" who was willing to play white to gain Democratic support just as easily as it could be taken as a criticism of Democrats who feared Jackson's blackness. On the streets of a formerly black DC neighborhood which was undergoing gentrification (in part encouraged by the activities of white artists and arts institutions), the fact that it was perceived as a provocation is hardly surprising. This makes Dedeaux's citation of the work in her image all the more questionable. Dedeaux displays an almost instinctive affinity for conservative views on race. Here she transforms Hammons' image, which was intended as an indictment of the suppressed racism of the Democratic party, into a caustic lamentation on the effects of reverse racism, in which she portrays herself as the oppressed victim of mean-spirited critics who attacked her solely on the basis of her skin color.
3. Critical Pedagogy and the Politically Coherent Community
As I've suggested, the antinomy between empathy and negation can be at least partially resolved by recourse to a discursive aesthetic which conceives of the artist primarily as a collaborator in dialogue rather than an expressive agent. Here the artist's identity is tested and transformed by intersubjective experience, rather than being fortified against it. The "artist" occupies a socially constructed position of privileged subjectivity, reinforced by both institutional sponsorship and deeply imbedded cultural connotations. It is the achievement of Littoral practitioners to work to mitigate the effects of these associations as much as possible, and to open up and equalize the process of dialogical exchange. This process is most easily facilitated in those cases in which the artist collaborates with a politically coherent community, that is, with a community or collectivity that has, through its own internal processes, achieved some degree of coherence, and a sense of its own political interests, and is able to enter into a discursive collaboration on more equal footing. This is perhaps the most effective way in which to avoid the problems posed by the "salvage" paradigm in which the artist takes on the task of "improving" the implicitly flawed subject. My intention here is not to idealize "community" per se. As I have written elsewhere, any process of community formation is based on some degree of violence and negation (of those individual characteristics that are seen as extraneous to a given community's common values or ideals).19 Further, it is by now something of a commonplace to define "community" as an ongoing process, rather than a fixed and closed entity. But my question here is less theoretical than strategic; what role does the artist, as a singularly privileged cultural figure, play relative to this process? It is precisely the belief that the artist can somehow "create" community through a superior aesthetic power or relate to a given social or cultural collective from a transcendent or aesthetically autonomous position, which I would want to question.
Although artists can clearly function as co-participants in the formation of specific communities, they are also limited by the historical moment in which they live, and the extent to which existing social and political circumstances favor or preclude this formation. An exemplary case in this regard would be Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson's work during the 1980s with the Docklands Community Poster Project, which they developed in direct consultation and collaboration with tenants action groups, local councils and so on. This work was produced during a period of widespread political mobilization in response to Thatcherite programs for economic "redevelopment" that posed a serious threat to poor and working class neighborhoods in East London. This period also coincided, fortuitously, with the development of extremely innovative forms of arts patronage through the Greater London Council. The fact that the larger battle against Docklands development failed is less relevant here than the fact that the structural conditions for an activist cultural practice existed at the time that made it possible for Dunn and Leeson to produce works through a process of ongoing collaborative dialogue with a wide range of community groups.
Unfortunately the last fifteen years have seen a drastic change in activist politics in the U.S. and England. We live in a period of diminishing expectations, in which left organizations have in many cases taken up an accomodationist relationship to conservative policies, and in which the imaginative reach of activist politics has been severely restricted. The system of public support for activist work has been seriously eroded in the U.S., and a growing number of artists interested in Littoralist practices have to rely on private foundation support, or alliances with private sector institutions. It is difficult, if not impossible, to survive as an artist working primarily through grass-roots political organizations. Increasingly artists are forced to develop strategic relationships with ancillary institutions such as public schools, prisons, and economic redevelopment agencies. Obviously these institutions are far more ambivalently positioned relative to the collective interests of poor or working class communities. Specifically, they function by defining community members through regulatory categories such as "at risk youth", "drug addicts", or "the homeless" which implicate the artist in a highly problematic chain of associations about their culpability as political and cultural agents.
A typical example of this tendency is seen in Jim Hubbard's peripatetic Shooting Back project, which began in 1988 with ex-UPI photographer Hubbard working with homeless children in the Washington, D.C. area to "document their lived experience as a means of personal empowerment." The project has been transported into a variety of other sites, including, in 1994, the Shooting Back From the Reservation series produced with Native American children in the west and southwest. Hubbard's press release for this project begins with a series of shocking statistics regarding unemployment rates among Native Americans and ends with a reference to the high incidence of alcoholism and suicide among reservations populations. Lurking just beneath the surface of Hubbard's description is the assumption that Native Americans exist in a classic "culture of poverty" in which the most significant barrier to their advancement isn't the absence of jobs, substandard schools or poor housing, but their lack of self-esteem, evidenced by their recourse to suicide and alcoholism. Hubbard himself substantiates this view. When he asked why he teaches children how to use cameras when what they really need is shelter his response was: "Housing won't be enough. Self-esteem is a big issue, particularly with children. Mastering the camera and seeing their own images in print have boosted their confidence." The project's effects are consistently described in terms of its remedial effect on truant youth. Thus, according to a press release: "children who experienced problems in regular school classrooms. . . are showing improvement in school work habits" due to the Shooting Back program. Or alternately, "children have been motivated to be productive in other school activities" because the Shooting Back program "contributes to their sense of self-confidence and accomplishment." Instead of addressing the structural conditions of Native American poverty Hubbard will "empower" them with the "self-esteem" necessary to succeed in the work-place by allowing them to temporarily inhabit the privileged subjectivity of the artist documenting the world around them.
It is necessary to bear in mind here the increasingly conflictive role played by the public school system in the U.S. as a training ground for service sector and low-level technology employers. In northern Idaho, where I lived for the last two years, plans are under way to eliminate world history, geography, reading and even computer class requirements from the high school curriculum so that students can have more "flexibility for career-oriented electives." According to curriculum director Hazel Bauman, "What we are hearing from business and industry is that the large majority of kids who do not get baccalaureate degrees need to come out of high school with a good basis in technical skills." A plan currently being developed by the Coeur d'Alene Chamber of Commerce involves having local public school teachers spend their summer vacations working as "interns" at local businesses, like fast food restaurants or mines, in order to help them understand what these businesses need in students. According to band teacher Kevin Cope, "We're getting our students ready to go out and work for these corporations. We need to know what to teach them."
The Shooting Back project takes for granted the fatalistic political horizons of current conservative rhetoric; the best that can be hoped is to give Native American children the "self esteem" needed to stay sober and get to MacDonalds on time in the morning. Clearly there is nothing wrong with teaching kids how to use a camera. But why can't these technical skills be joined with some form of pedagogy which would help to encourage the formation of a critical consciousness of their situation within the current political economy? One of the most important characteristics of the aesthetic lies in its power to critically comprehend a cultural or social totality, and to think beyond its limitations. There is no sense of this kind of vision in Hubbard's project - no sense that he is conscious of working in and through an ideological apparatus that is precisely intended to circumvent the formation of a collective political identity among young Native Americans. Hubbard's decision to work with children is justified on the basis that they represent the "future" of Native American culture, but children are also far less likely to challenge Hubbard's own presuppositions regarding their own poverty. Children are typically selected by artists such as Dedeaux and Hubbard because they present themselves as more malleable subjects, less resistant to the impress of the artists' transformative power. But this is hardly a relationship that is likely to encourage any significant discursive equity or exchange.
We see this same failure of self-reflection in the recent National Endowment for the Arts' "American Canvas" report which attempts to insulate the NEA from future conservative attack by aligning it with programs designed to improve the poor and working class. In some of the more unintentionally amusing passages in the report Richard Deasy, director of the "Goals 2000 Arts Education Partnership", evokes the image of a rigorous, hard-headed art that isn't afraid to roll up its shirt sleeves and get things done. Deasy calls for an art based on "mastery" and "substantive, disciplined study." This "muscular" art can provide America's disadvantaged with the "self-esteem" that they are so obviously lacking, and can help them build the "workplace skills needed to ensure their own employability and their ability to make solid economic contributions to their communities." Having jettisoned its sissified ways on the cultural Nordic Track this manly art will "suffuse" itself "throughout the civic structure," according to Olson, "finding a home in a variety of community service and economic development activities."
These calls for a socially-engaged art are combined with a palpable fear among many of the contributors of calling too much attention to the political implications of this stance. In this context, the un-self-consciousness with which a number of participants in the public "American Canvas Forums" spoke of establishing friendly "partnerships" with the criminal justice system, urban renewal and economic redevelopment agencies, Enterprise Zones, and proponents of "cultural tourism" was truly astounding. The compromised function of these various institutions, relative to the interests of the poor, the working class, and people of color has, one would think, been well established, yet they are here viewed as nothing more than politically neutral vehicles for a pragmatic and non-ideological form of cultural activism.
In addition to their widely advertised positive effects, projects such as Hubbard's have the effect of encouraging children to believe that self-motivation and determination are the necessary conditions for progress; that it is "up to them" to succeed through the personal spark of creativity that will be unleashed by the art-making experience. When Hubbard's students are unable to start careers as UPI photographers who will be at fault? The project doesn't give them a way to understand the contradictory nature of their own status as "underprivileged" subjects in the first place - the very status that the artist depends on, and takes for granted, in choosing to work with them. It does little to help them develop a political critique of their own condition as "at risk youth" which might lead them to ask why the reservation has to fight for the crumbs of philanthropy and depend on well-intentioned artists to favor them with their projects in the first place. There is, in short, little space left open in these projects for the kind of emancipatory political vision that is a central feature of Littoral practice.
This criticism brings us back to the questions of individualism and anti-systematic thought that I outlined earlier as part of the current political and cultural context. For me the "indeterminateness" of a discursive aesthetic is not simply the condition of open-ended dialog, it also refers to the ability to think beyond or outside of the existing, constrained horizons of neo-liberal discourse which takes global capitalism, economic inequality, an individualized moral economy, "sustainable" levels of environmental destruction and so on as given conditions. When compared to the political climate of the 1920's, or even the 1960's this represents a deplorably impoverished range of options - the "end of ideology" real politik of NAFTA and the IMF. The demise of the USSR and the Berlin Wall is widely taken as a justification to dismiss any form of systematic critique as inherently "Stalinist". Yet I would contend that this is precisely where the transgressive powers of Littoral practice, and of a dialogical aesthetic, are most needed today.

Notes
1 Wendy Steiner, The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p.7.
2 There are a few exceptions here, including writings by Carol Becker, Hal Foster, Suzi Gablik, Suzanne Lacy and Lucy Lippard, among others.
3 Ken Johnson, "A post-retinal documenta," Art in America, vol.85, no.10 (October 1997), pp.80-88.
4 Some of the ideas presented here are taken from a forthcoming book project, Words that Hear: Discourse and Counter-Discourse in Modern Art.
5 Jean-François Lyotard, "What is Postmodernism?," The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.76.
6 Grant Kester, "Rhetorical Questions: The Alternative Arts Sector and the Imaginary Public" in Art, Activism and Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, edited by Grant Kester (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998).
7 See "Art and Objecthood" in Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp.148-172.
8 Barnett Newman, "The First Man was an Artist" (1947) reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, editors (Blackwell: London, 1992), p.568.
9 David Smith, "Aesthetics, the Artist and the Audience" (1952), reprinted in Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, p.578.
10 According to David Dillon, in the June 1994 issue of Planning, one-third of all new communities being built in Southern California, Phoenix, Florida and the suburbs of Washington, D.C. are "gated." Along with the gates come surveillance cameras, infrared sensors, guard dogs, private police patrols and even barbed wire. These communities frequently privatize many of the functions previously performed by a local or municipal governments, such as trash collection, the provision of utilities, and even education.
11 For a particularly egregious example of this see a recent op-ed. piece by James K. Glassman a "fellow" at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute. In "From War to Art" (Washington Post, January 6, 1998), Glassman makes a virtue out of low voter turn-outs and the media's failure to report on domestic policy (in favor of stories such as Princess Diana's death and the "little girl in Texas" who fell into a well), which he attributes to the fact that "lots of people are happy" and thus don't really care about government anymore. Although "poverty, ignorance and pathology" still exist (the latter perhaps being a reference to arguments about the depraved or criminalized poor), the majority of Americans are using their new-found happiness to "read, listen to music and look at pictures". He cites as evidence the presence of "enthusiastic crowds" at a recent Richard Diebenkorn exhibition at the Whitney, praising Diebenkorn's "beautiful, sane and rhythmic" paintings.
12 Dinesh D'Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multiracial Society, (New York: Free Press, 1995).
13 The institutional expression of this ethos is found in the privileged legal status granted to private corporations in the U.S. as fictive "individuals", which was first established by railroad monopolies in an 1886 Supreme Court decision (Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad).
14 Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, (New York: Free Press, 1994).
15 On the relationship between this view and contemporary community-based art practices see Grant Kester, "Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Art," Afterimage 22:6 (January 1995), pp.5-11.
16 See Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993).
17 Eric Alterman, "Making One and One Equal Two," The Nation, May 25, 1998, p.10.
18 David Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p.165.
19 See the "Rhetorical Questions" essay cited above (note 5).

above copied from: http://www.variant.randomstate.org/9texts/KesterSupplement.html

A Manner of Speaking: An Interview with Gary Hill by Lucinda Furlong

March 1983, Afterimage, Vol. 10, No. 8

Although he is better known for his videotapes and installations, Gary Hill has also been prolific as a sculptor. Born in Santa Monica, Calif. in 1951, Hill moved east in 1969, and in the early '70s began making videotapes at Woodstock (N.Y.) Community Video. Like many artists in the late '60s and early 70s, Hill's earliest tapes reflected a highly experimental approach in which the capabilities of various electronic imaging tools were explored. For the most part, this kind of video was visual in orientation, and Hill's work was no exception, drawing as it did on conventions of abstract expressionist painting. Eventually dissatisfied with the limitations of such an approach, Hill began to make tapes that integrated the audio and video components so tightly that sound became almost visually apprehensible. This concern-in which the immaterial is somehow made physical-is central to all of Hill's video installations and tapes, and to some extent, is derived from his background as a sculptor.

In his most recent work, however, language and thoughtrather than electronics-are the immaterial entities that are given form. Hill's tapes since 1980 are of two types: short, descriptive, often convoluted passages which are sparely "illustrated" by abstract black and white imagery; and extended monologues that directly address the viewer, to which video is rapidly edited to the beat of Hill's voice. Though they differ greatly in tone, these tapes reveal Hill's exacting-almost obsessive-weighing of image and language as carriers of meaning. At the same time, they are richly evocative pieces that variously resemble poems, stories, and soliloquies. Hill's installations, too, bespeak his interest in setting up dichotomies between sight and sound, language and image.

Hill has received production grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and PBS-station WNET in New York. In 1981, he was awarded a video artists' fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation. A 1982 recipient of the United States/Japan Exchange fellowship, Hill will travel to Japan next fall. This summer he will be teaching video at Bard College's recently established M.F.A. program in video.

The following interview was edited from transcripts of two meetings in Barrytown, N.Y. on Oct. 28, 1982 and Jan. 5, 1983. The interview incorporates Hill's additions and revisions.
-Lucinda Furlong

Lucinda Furlong: You worked in sculpture for a long time before you became interested in video.

Gary Hill: I got into sculpture in 1969, when I was 15, while I was still in high school in Redondo Beach. I had always been interested in art, and the brother of a friend of mine-Tony Parks-was a sculptor. He welded. I saw him working and was immediately drawn to the process. I had a summerjob at a hamburger stand on the beach-a surfer's dream-so I saved money to buy welding tanks and started welding. Soon after that I was set up making sculpture in all my spare time, except for a little surfing. It's not that easy to give up.

Even though I had vague notions about the avant-garde, I really wasn't aware of American art. I was looking at Giacometti and Picasso. Picasso was a god to me.

I had lots of support from my friends and parents, in particular my high-school teacher, Mr. Pelster, who just let me do my thing. He was a big reason why I even finished high school. I didn't see much point in it, and almost quit. When I got out, I saw a pamphlet for the Art Students' League in Woodstock, N.Y., which described it as an idyllic artists' colony. I came out for a month on a scholarship, but I didn't do sculpture. I just drew and painted, made thousands of drawings. Then I went back to California to go to a community college-partially for a draft deferment-but decided I would get out anotherway, and college definitely was not for me. I quit in about two weeks.

My teacher at the League-Bruce Dorfman-had invited me to work independently with him. So I packed my belongings and hopped in a driveaway car. I experienced my first fall, first snow, first being cold-as-shit, first super struggle. I didn't stay in that situation very long, though. I got jobs. Actually, I've been pretty lucky in terms of being able to do my work with very little struggle.

About that time, I began to see art in New York, and the thing that really overwhelmed me was a show at the Met called "1940-1970." It was the New York School. I was knocked out, and went through a lot of different attitudes in my own work. I still used the same materials, but I went from making cage-like structures with human forms-almost Bosch-like-to abstract biomorphic shapes mixed with geometric shapes. Pretty soon it was all geometric. I started using wire mesh, spray paint, welding armatures for shaped canvases which were incorporated into the work. I would make shapes, pile them into a corner, and then work with them later. It was like being my own factory. I went through a complete cycle of color. I slowly started to add color to the metal. I got very extreme using fluorescents, and later I toned down to metallics, essentially monochromatic, and finally back to the natural color of the material-copper-coated steel welding rods. I started improvising large constructions in the exhibition space, usually working off a wall and down to the floor into a kind of sprawl. I was working a lot with more patterns, and the sheer density of layers and shapes. Experimenting, burying myself in the process, working all the time. It wasn't intellectual. It was more like-how far can I take this material as a worker?

LF: How did you get involved with video?

GH: I got into sound first. I discovered the sculptures generated interesting sounds, lots of different timbres. The overall texture seemed to mirror what I was seeing. I worked a lot with loops and multi-track audio tapes, which later became an integral part of the sculpture.

Getting into video isn't so smooth in retrospect. I think at the time I was getting frustrated with sculpture. I needed a change. I was drawn more and more into working with sound. Around that time, Woodstock Community Video had been established. I walked up the stairs, knocked on the door, and said, "Gee, I'd like to try that. Can I take out a Portapak?" So I did a performance/environment piece with a friend, Jim Collins. For four or five nights in a row, we painted colored rectangles in the town of Woodstock-all over everything, stores, private property, public property. They slowly appeared,'til we got caught. I did a little-not really a documentary ... I just went out and talked about it with people, about what they thought. Should there be more colored rectangles? Should they go away? I really enjoyed the whole process, the experiential aspect of that little thing up there next to my eye. It seemed like there was a high energy connection to whatever I was looking at. I guess I became obsessed with that electronic buzz [laughs]. It was like a synapse with the rest of the world in a removed way, yet attached at the same time.

So I exchanged work at Woodstock Community Video-- recording town board meetings, or whatever Ken Marsh [the former director] wanted-- in exchange for using the equipment. Sooner or later I got a job there, because NYSCA [the New York State Council on the Arts], which had been heavily oriented toward community video, seitched to the art route--in video at least.

LF: When was that?

GH: Around 1973-74. I was given a salaried position as the TV lab coordinator, helping people to use the equipment. They had a few devices-a broken genlock unit and a keyer-put away because they didn't really work. So I asked Ken Marsh if I could come in late at night and see what I could make them do. I totally got into that. Everything half worked. The keyers would put out really harsh, broken edges. I don't know what the genlock put out, but there was always something. I had monitors all over this little stud io-rescanning everything, starting and stopping the tape, manipulating it with my hands. Everything was open. It was a very free feeling. Discovering how to manipulate this material was amazing.

I can remember being totally naked, lying on the floor with a tripod over my head pointing a camera down on my mouth and another camera lying on my stomach. I would make kind of a primal sound with my breathing, raising the camera on my stomach so that it would reveal my head from the bottom view, making this sound. This was all somehow mixed through a special effects generator. In a manner of speaking, I was practically fucking the equipment. Some time around then I made Rock City Road [1974-75].

LF: Were you colorizing the tapes?

GH: There was no colorizer thereat first, but Ken was friends with Eric Siegel, and he got a Siegel colorizer fairly soon. About the same time, I found out about the Experimental Television Center [now in Owego, N.Y.]. I didn't know about the equipment there; I just had heard that they had all these possibilities. With the tools I was using in Woodstock I saw an infinity of image-making possibilities, and they had a whole set that was much more sophisticated.... So I went up there and met Walter Wright [artist-in-residence at the Experimental Television Center from 1973-75], and became very good friends with him. We did some multi-media performances together called "Synergism" [1975-6], with Sara Cook, a dancer in Woodstock. Then we started fantasizing about having our own machines, but it didn't really happen until 1976. Ken thought that Woodstock Community Video was going to be a media-organization-in-residence at Bard College. Everyone involved moved over to Rhinebeck, but it fell through at the last minute. So for a short time Barbara Buckner, Steven Colpan, and me all lived together as artists-in-residence. There we were in this big house and we weren't using all the rooms. I made Ken a deal-I asked if I could have David Jones come down to build some equipment, and I would pay extra rent [Jones, a video tool designer and builder, is now affiliated with the Experimental Television Center].

LF: What did he build?

GH: First we put together four input amps and an output amplifier. The main thing Walter and I wanted was a multichannel colorizer. Ironically enough, we never got to that. David had designed an analog-to-digital converter, which led to other things, culminating in a small frame buffer with a resolution of 64 by 64. One day I came home and David was gone. He had left the equipment on, and there was this digitally stored image on the screen of him smiling and waving. Suddenly colorizing seemed superficial, next to having access and control over the architecture of the frame in real time.

LF: Is that around the time you made Windows?

GH: No, the first tape I made using any digital processing was Bathing [1977], which was all done through the analogto-digital converter. [In Bathing, a color tape shot in real time is intercut with stills rescanned with a color camera and digitized. Different placements of color and gray level are derived from rearranging the digital-to-analog output.] I'd record something, take the circuit board out, resolder the wires, and try it again until I got the images I wanted. It's just another way of working. It's like when I started at Woodstock Community Video: you mess around with the innards, where all this stuff really happens. It was a process of trial and error. Since I wasn't working so much with preconceived images, "control" wasn't a problem. There were always surprises-images that happened outside of control, things you wouldn't dream or think of.

LF: How did the converter change the image visually?

GH: Radically. It remaps the gray levels of an image and it also remaps the color you're mixing with it.

If it had any imposed framework, Bathing was centered around vague ideas of painting, taking traditional subject matter-a bather-and exploring it with the notion that any one frame could be a painting. Windows [1978] was the first tape in which I explored the idea of mixing analog and digital images together. I did it as a study for an installation that would have been similar in nature-dense, layered images, structured compositionally, but on several monitors. The images would pass between monitors, all under automated control. No tapes. I was still working intuitively, feeding off the images, seeing an image, liking it, working with it.

In those early tapes, though, I was distracted by the phenomena of electronics-several tapes were really part of that learning process. I'm glad I went through it-to have the knowledge and to feel free to do what I want within the medium. But if I never do something strictly imagistic again, it wouldn't matter. The knowledge of how things work is embedded now; it applies itself to whatever I'm doing.

LF: Those early tapes seem to fit what has become a genre of video art-image processing.

GH: I think there's a big problem even with the term. What does "image processing" refer to? Any tape that has processed an image electronically?

LF: It is too broad. It can mean video put through a time-base corrector or something that's been colorized.

GH: Yeah, but when someone says "image processing," what automatically comes to mind is a heavily mixed collage, like Windows [laughs], that I can't possibly decode-in fact I can't even see the point of using color. When you look at a painting, you can't always verbalize why the artist used a color or shape, but you feel some kind of visual tension, something getting at you. So much that I see that falls under "image processing" I can't even fathom.

When I first started working with machines, and exploring images-around the time I was working with Walter WrightI remember him calling tapes Processed Video l, Processed Video ll, etc. But process had no reference to machines. It had to do with the process of working, an improvisational situation in which devices could be patched in a number of different ways. Image processing suggests taking known or fixed images and processing them, sort of like food processing. I think for some people who are put in this category, it was an open method of working-dialoguing with the tools in search of images.

LF: Did others think of it this way, too?

GH: I don't know. The Vasulkas had to be among the first to experiment with the properties inherent to video. They were certainly more methodical than anyone else. Whatever machine they had, they expored it to the n `h degree. When I think of their work chronologically, the development is razorsharp, didactic, yet mysteriously powerful, especially Woody's. Steina, I think, became more idiosyncratic, and that's probably why they present themselves as two separate artists now. Between the two of them they've covered a lot of ground.
This experimental notion of dialoguing with tools has its tradition, though. It's like whatfilmmakers did. That'swhy-in the end-it was no longer interesting for me. OK, it's video, it's electronic, it functions differently, it has different properties-but it's the same approach that photographers and filmmakers already applied. I started to see it as a dead end. I wanted to dialogue with my mental processes, consciously, self-consciously.

LF: How important do you think it is for viewers to know the technical circumstances under which a tape was produced?

GH: It's an element, part of the information that's valuable. But I think that for anything to work, it has somehow to translate that. Some works do and some don't; all the explaining in the world and all the complex electronics and knowing the insides of the machine won't do anything. It's a difficult question. You can't sidestep the mechanics of the medium, but it's not what makes something. A whole different shift occurs in putting a work together-materializing it-and perceiving it. If a piece really works for you, your response goes beyond a question about how it was made, though it might come up later as extra information.

LF: I agree, but it's something I think a lot about when I look at tapes that are exhausting or investigating the properties of video. They stop at a certain point. I "get it"-l understand what that tape is "about," and it ends there. It seems that "Primary", "Elements", "Mouth Piece", "Sums and Differences" [all 1978], and "Objects with Destinations" [1979] not only investigate the properties of video, but how video and audio function both separately and as an integrated unit. They illustrate well how the two can operate on one another.

GH: But how video and audio function separately and together are the properties of video. What I was getting at is something else, granted a little more difficult to talk about. I think Sums and Differences really works in terms of sound and image actually becoming one another. [In this tape, four separate video images of four musical instruments and their corresponding sounds are sequenced together at a continuously increasing rate. Normally, a video image is scanned on the video raster at 60 cycles per second. As the rates of change increase, starting at about one cycle per second, switching becomes faster than the time it takes to scan the complete image. This produces an effect whereby all four images appear simultaneously on the screen in four, 8, 12, etc. horizontal bars. When the switching rate is at higher frequencies, the different sounds, including the switching frequencies, become blurred into one, just as the different images become one image.] In that tape, audio and video can't be separated. There's a simultaneity of seeing and hearing.

If I were only investigating the "properties," I wouldn't have digitized the images, electronically generated the instrumental sounds, or used additional frequencies slightly out of phase with sync that slowly roll through the picture. These were also digitized, which created thin horizontal lines on the edges, that at certain times I associate with "strings." There's an overall energy constructed from a lot of subtle modulation. The question here becomes-Did I add things that weren't there, circumvent my own concept, seduce you, the viewer, into believing something that wasn't there? I think from this tape on a basic theme in my work became physicality. I no longer wanted to be behind the glass, playing jazz with my friends. I wanted to, you know, communicate-reach out and touch someone.

LF: "Picture Story" [1979] seems to represent a shift to how language is used to construct meaning. [In this tape, Hill's didactic voiceover describes a quality shared by four letters of the alphabet-H, I, O, and X. Whether they are written upside down or backwards, their readability, and meaning, is essentially unchanged. As we hear this description, rectangles containing words referring not only to video, but to narrative and pictorial representation, randomly collapse into horizontal and vertical lines and points, whereupon a hand traces them. At the end of the tape, the four letters are used to draw an image of an ox. The letters thus form not only the basis of a story, but a picture as well.]

GH: It really wasn't a shift. Language simply became fair game, too. What I discovered in doing that piece was that there are these invisible properties-properties of language-that I could work with, rather than essentially mechanical or electronic properties. Structurally, perhaps even organically, in some way linguistics seemed related to electronic phenomena. I remember calling it "electronic linguistics." I really began to think of the mind as a kind of muscle, and wanted to physicalize its workings in some way. But I don't feel there was a jump from working with the elements of video to a plateau where I said, "Gee, I'm working with ideas now." I don't have any hard-and-fast rules about how I work.

LF: I'm not trying to impose any final categories on the development of your work, but as an observer of your tapes, I think that while your working process may have been the same, the end result isn't.

GH: In terms of development, "Ring Modulation" [1978] was just as pivotal as "Picture Story". [In "Ring Modulation", the video screen is divided into three sections. In the bottom portion, there's a close-up of hands holding a welding rod, attempting to bend it into a circle. As this happens, Hill's mouth vocalizes an "Ah" sound, which becomes distorted by the effort of bending the rod. In the upper portion of the screen, one box contains a full image of Hill bending the rod. The other contains a wavering circular image from an oscilloscope, generated by mixing Hill's unsteady voice with a steady electronic signal. If, instead of the voice, the second sound was a cosine of the first electronic signal, a circle would be produced.]

In "Ring Modulation", there's a paradoxical struggle: trying to sculpt physical material into a circle and simultaneously trying to form a circle electronically with non-physical materialwaveforms. It's impossible to do. I did it as a kind of alchemical ritual, trying to change this "material." In this light, the copper coating of the welding rod took on other meanings in relation to the phosphorus green of the oscilloscope. When copper rusts, it turns green. "Ring Modulation" was, again, returning to working more physically, using sculptural concerns, getting back to things I had left hanging.

The installation Mesh, which I worked on during the same period, had similar concerns-trying to merge physical material and concepts into some sort of unifying tactile resonance. It was a fairly complex installation, in some ways a culmination of burying myself in circuit building. [In the installation, layers of wire mesh were mounted on walls; each layer contained one oscillator which generated a certain pitch depending on the size of the mesh. The pitch generated would pan between four speakers mounted on each layer of mesh. Hill used small (3-in.) speakers to give a metallic quality to the sound and to give the effect of the sound being "woven" into the mesh. Upon entering the space, the viewer-participant activated the piece, became "meshed" into it when a camera picked up their image. This image was digitally encoded, producing a grid effect, and was then displayed on the first of four monitors. Each person who entered the space generated a new image, which, when, displayed on monitor one, cycled the previous image to monitor two, and so on.]

I didn't use discrete multiple channels in that piece-or Primarily Speaking and even Glass Onion. It's all dynamically controlled and inter-related, so that you're taking information and moving it in space, which is really interesting. I want to take this idea a lot further.

LF: You mean a kind of layering? I'm remembering Soundings [1979], where you put sand on an audio speaker, and it vibrates as the sound comes through. Then you go through variations-water, burning the speaker.

GH: I meant taking one or more images from cameras or tape and directing them out into different spaces, different monitors. Moving images in space. The work came about because I'd used a lot of mesh in my sculpture, and was interested in overlapping things to make a third element or pattern. Literally, the title refers not only to the material-the mesh-but compressing sound and image together. What was different about both Mesh and Ring Modulation was not only this preoccupation with physicality, but that an underlying concept was becoming increasingly more important. In the earlier works, there was much more of a visual orientation.

LF: Was Mesh your first video installation?

GH: Actually, the first was Hole in the Wall, done in 1974 at the Woodstock Art Association. Unfortunately, the only remaining element of the piece-a tape-was destroyed by accident. You have to see it in light of the political-social context of the Woodstock Art Association, where there's an old guard, and there are always new people around who want to get in. When I was involved with it, it was always a hotbed of controversy.

I set up a camera and zoomed in on a wall, framing an area approximately actual size when displayed on a 23-in. monitor. On the video screen, you saw a hand with a ruler drawing a frame on the edge of the screen. A matte knife entered the frame, cut the muslin surface on the wall, and then various tools were used to cut through a number of layers-plasterboard, fiberglass, etc.-to the wall outside. At one point, we reached structural beams. The camera zoomed in and framed a smaller frame. Then that was cut through to the outside. At the opening, a monitor was fitted into the hole, and played back the tape performing the action. When the camera zoomed in, I took the big monitor out, put a smaller one in, and then at the end of the tape, when you see outdoors, I took the monitor away.

Besides the fighting between the older, established artists and the younger ones trying to break into the scene, the Woodstock Art Association didn't consider video an art form. It wasn't until the mid-'70s that they accepted photography! So the political implications are obvious, and formally the piece contained reverberations of drawing, painting, sculpture, video, and conceptual art. What made it even more interesting at the time was that an art critic, Irwin Touster, mentioned the piece in the local paper, The Woodstock Times, with a statement like "Hill's Hole is a monumental act of hostility in the guise of art." I sent a letter to the editor which simply read: "Re: Irwin Touster's review ... a rebuttal," with a large photograph, taken in the gallery, of my ass sticking through the hole. So that was my first installation.

LF: Getting back to how your work changed, Around and About seems like a big leap.

GH: It was. I was talking in the first person directly to the viewer. When I was making Windows, for example, I never dreamed-it was the farthest thing from my mind-that I would use language. Now language seems like it will never go away. It's like a monkey on my back.

In the summer of 1979, I just started writing. I wrote the texts that ended up in Equal Time [the tape was done in 1979; an installation of the same title was shown at the Long Beach Museum of Art in March 1982], Picture Story, and a few of the Videograms texts. In the first month of 1980, I made Processual Video, BlacklWhitelText, and then, shortly after, I made Around and About. That was a very prolific time for me.

LF: Someone told me Around and About came from your frustration with your class at the State University of New York at Buffalo-that you couldn't communicate with the students.

GH: That's not true. I had to move suddenly, and I was also going through some heavy changes in a relationship. I had to move all my things, my studio, into my office at SUNY. Those two things coinciding put me on the edge. I had a lot of anxiety, and was paralyzed in terms of what to do. I sat down and wrote the text very quickly, as if I were talking out loud. I think the idea of editing the images to the syllables of my speech came out of this frustrating situation. It was almost as if I wanted to abuse the images, push them around, manipulate them with words. Maybe I was trying to expand this tiny little space, persuade the woman I lived with of the art-life paradox in plain English. On both accounts, I failed. I did the whole thing in my office, and each shot was set up and edited as I went along.

LF: So you wrote the text, laid it down as an audio track, and then plugged in images as you were shooting?

GH: Right. Even the concrete wall-where there's one layer of wall over another? I had two cameras. I would set up the matte, then zoom in the camera, then set it up again for each edit. And I edited it by hand. I didn't use a controller.

LF: That's amazing, because it looks like you used sophisticated equipment.

GH: People ask me if I used a Quantel. It's great to tell people how it actually was made-especially students-because then they don't feel intimidated about equipment. The thing about "Around and About" is that I was able to use the image and the text as a single unit. Suddenly I began to think about how far the images could get from what I was saying and still have the tape work. The images could be whatever I had at hand. Of course, the tape was also determined' by the frustration of being in this closed space-stuff was everywhere. I couldn't have done anything else anyway.

LF: There seem to be two different strains in your most recent tapes. While they all are made from texts with non-synchronous video, some-like "Around and About" and "Primarily Speaking" [1981-83]-make use of direct address. You establish an I/you relationship, and it's very confrontational. On the other hand, "Videograms" and "Processual Video" [1980] are much slower, descriptive, and you use the third person.

GH: There's an urgency in "Around and About" and "Primarily Speaking", whereas the others are much more timeless, almost about beauty. Videograms and Processual Video are much more object-oriented-"Here, look at this." There's a relationship between these words and this image.

LF: When you make the "Videograms", do you write the text first, and then sit down and figure out images? [In Videograms, abstract black and white images undergo subtle transformations as Hill recites short passages whose simplicity and compression resemble Haiku poetry. Because the passages are variously concrete and abstract, descriptive and metaphoric, the images alternately become illustrations and counterpoints.]

GH: So far, the texts have been written beforehand. However, when I actually combine them with the video, a phrase or a word or the ordering might change here or there. Little details might change, but in essence, the text is written beforehand.

LF: What do you use to produce the abstract images in "Videograms"?

GH: A Rutt/Etra Scan Processor. [The Rutt/Etra, invented by Steve Ruff and Bill Etra in the early 1970s, allows one to manipulate the video image or raster. According to "The Electronic Image," an unpublished paper by the Experimental Television Center, Owego, N.Y., the raster can be described as the visible rectangle of light emanating from a cathode ray tube, and is normally constructed by a beam of electrons focused to a fine point. This point is moved around in an orderly and continuous manner-horizontally from left to right and vertically from top to bottom-so that the raster, or image, is described. The rate at which the raster is drawn is determined by a timing pulse called sync. The Rutt/Etra allows one to manipulate sync signals, providing an enormous amount of flexibility in altering a video input, or in generating new images by using other inputs, such as waveforms. The images produced are always black and white, and cannot be recorded directly; they must be recorded by pointing a camera at the display monitor.]

The Rutt/Etra is interesting. Conceptually a lot more is possible on it than with commercial digital effects. It's a powerful machine, and relatively unexplored. It probably never will be because it's hard to find access to them, and people tend to bypass black and white like it's-well, you know, black and white is black and white, man, it's not color. And you have to re-scan it. And that's primitive. It's not state-of-the-art.

LF: What's nice about the Videograms is that they're so spare.

GH: Some of the "Videograms" are more successful than others. Some are too literal, others I'll probably redo because the image isn't quite right. I'm working on a new work, "Happenstance", which has similarities to "Videograms", but it's not a series. It's continuous, and it uses sound and character-generated text in addition to the voiceover. The images are more developed, also.

LF: Something more like "Processual Video"? [In "Processual Video", a single white line revolves clockwise in the center of the monitor. Its movement is synchronized to a text read by Hill, so that the mental images conjured up by the text are often reinforced by the location of the line. For instance, when a line is in a horizontal or vertical position, there are references to surfing and skiing, the ocean and mountains. Into these visually suggestive sentences, Hill interweaves seemingly random, but highly self-conscious musings, about the text and the line.]

GH: Actually, I did a performance out of Processual Video for the "Video Viewpoints" series at the Museum of Modern Art. In fact, the piece was written as my lecture for the series.

LF: How did it work?

GH: There was a large monitor facing the audience, and the text was scored on paper. I watched a small monitor so I knew approximately where the bar was in relation to what I was reading. In different readings, there would be slight variations, but it all remained pretty close to the score. In that tape, there are references to me, references to the audience sitting in chairs, but it's more allegorical than "Around and About" and "Primarily Speaking". In those tapes, the address is acutely direct. "Primarily Speaking" is probably the most complex work I've done. It still isn't finished. Its complexity gets subverted by the use of idiomatic expressions. I still haven't unwound it because it exists on so many different levels.

LF: In "Primarily Speaking", why did you use color bars as a background for the two boxes? Was it a reference to broadcast television? [In the single-channel piece, the screen is divided into two boxes which are framed top and bottom by vertical bars of color-a standard test pattern for adjusting the color video signal. Inside the boxes, two sets of images are rapidly edited-like "Around and About"-to the syllables of the text, which is constructed entirely from idiomatic expressions.]

GH: It's a general reference, an idiom of television. To me, it becomes a kind of social frame. The tape has a very superficial layer to it, which I love, in that the whole thing is constructed from idioms. It's curious, when someone says something using an idiomatic expression, it's taken with a grain of salt. And yet, idioms are the heart of the matter, expressions that originally put a thought or feeling in a nutshell. I really constructed the text. It wasn't like writing. When I was doing the text, I thought of Matisse's cut-outs, these re-energized primal shapes. Idioms seem like language cut-outs. Once you get inside of idioms, they're incredibly rich. Television is the most advanced communication system and yet it's one big idiom. Everything that's spewed out is an idiom-the corporate world takes on how life should be.

LF: Did you divide the screen into two boxes to designate one box as the speaker and the other as the viewer?

GH: Not specifically, but to set up the idea of oscillating relationships.

LF: You establish some very literal connections between the images and what your voice is saying in that tape. For example, when you say, "So," an image of a pig flashes by; when you say "Listen," there's a conch shell. But the tape doesn't operate just on that level. Most of the word-image connections are impossible to pin down, and I found myself reading into the tape, trying to figure out what the nonliteral connections meant. At one point, I was convinced that the tape was a comment on industrial pollution, because there were all these images of pipes and industrial waste, and you say: "They've done it again." At another point, I thought you were talking about the inability of two people to communicate. Finally, I felt that that was what the tape was designed to do-bring me to this process of making associations. But I also felt that it didn't matter if the associations I was making were the "right" ones, because there really could be no "correct" interpretation. On the one hand, the tape seemed extremely tight and structured, and on the other, the relationships were completely ambiguous.

GH: All those things are there, they exist, a lot are intentional. But then again, all those things-the images, the puns-are to me distractions from the heart of the work, which is the text. Consequently, Primarily Speaking. It's like a spear, and everything else is outside that. At the same time, it's an internal dialogue and a monologue addressing someone: who is talking to whom? There's a section where the images are just black and white rectangles-1 thought of this process as standing in front of a mirror for a long time, of the way you can separate the reflection from yourself and kind of have a conversation.

When you're trying to focus an idea, you're always in the context of everything else. All the external distractions are still going to exist, and they're going to affect that honed-in moment you're having. But the text is the heart of it. Language can be this incredibly forceful material-there's something about it where if you can strip away its history, get to the materiality of it, it can rip into you like claws, whereas images sometimes just slide off the edge of your, mind, as if you were looking out a car window.

LF: Well, one always has an ongoing mental dialogue. One thing you seem to be doing to make that apparent is editing the video to the pace of the audio. The video becomes subservient. The images pass by faster than you can assimilate them.

GH: That gives a contradictory feeling. It makes the textimage construct, the syntax, the way it's coming at you, seem very purposeful. They're one unit, yet so much of the time they're disparate; they're pulled apart. The video is forcing associations-you could easily wander off-but the text continues straight ahead, getting larger than life, almost. At certain times, I try to second guess the viewer, fill in their mind with their own thoughts.

LF: Are the images completely arbitrary then?

GH: Yes and no. If I went out and did that tape right now, I could take the text, erase all the images, and put in a whole new set. The work would be archetypically the same; it would be a variation on a theme.

LF: In "Primarily Speaking", the rapidly edited images in the boxes are interrupted a number of times by short breaks or interludes in which your voice says or sings a puzzling rhyme. One of them is "Time on our hands is blood on our hands." Your voice sounds like it's been processed-it has a very eerie tone, especially in the break where you have two dangling telephones.

GH: It's vocoded speech [a Vocoder breaks down an audio input into 16 different frequency bands, then imposes those frequencies onto another carrier frequency]. I was trying to come up with almost idiomatic, harmonic sounds analogous to what's being said. The telephone is a rather pessimistic reference to communication. I remember that when I shot it I wanted the dangling phone to turn around so that the ITT on it could be read. The receiver hanging there conjures up, to me, images of something,that happened to someone while they were on the telephone, or they simply left, or the telephone's dead.

LF: What about the rhyme that goes with it?

GH: In that section, I say: "Blue, green, red, cyan, magenta, yellow, food, feed, fed, I have the time of dayglow." It's a way of saying that television feeds us constantly. It even gives us the time of day. In the section, "Time on our hands is blood on our hands," when the two GASILAND signs appear, that's probably the most synchronous segment in the tape. First of all, you have the rhyme, the political implications of blood and gas. Then you have the actual sign being in languagewords-on a sign that's designed to look like a TV set, which coincides with the frame of the monitor TV.

LF: I don't know that I would have made those connections, but I read them as general references to communication. You also made an installation from "Primarily Speaking", and there the interludes work very differently. [In the installation, two walls of four monitors face one another, forming a corridor about the width of outstretched arms. The images which appear inside the two boxes in the single channel tape are two separate tapes in the installation: one rectangle fills up the entire screen. On one end of each side of the corridor, the two videotapes are played on monitors facing each other. On the other three monitors are solid fields of color: one set of monitors displays red, green, blue; the other set displays cyan, magenta, and yellow. Each wall of monitors alternately functions as a "speaking" wall, in that the text emanates from the speakers on that side only. As in the tape, the video is edited to each syllable, as if Hill's voice were activating the movement of the images. The other wall functions as a "listening" wall, in that no sound emanates from its audio speakers while the other wall is "speaking." The video on the "listening" wall is also activated by the audio, but rather than being edited to the beat of every syllable, the image actually rotates from one monitor to the next at a pace slower than the rapid video edits of the "speaking" wall. During the breaks, the images--all the monitors are rapidly sequenced, so that they ripple up and down the bank of monitors in a fixed relationship to one another.] How do you think the tape differs from the installation in terms of how each is experienced?

GH: The tape is very linear. You sit in front of it; it locks you in-your eyes fix on two squares that are almost like horse blinders, spatially. The installation expands the idea of the images being an element that distracts from the text. In the tape, you're on the outside-watching. In the installation, you're inside. It's as if the two walls are speaking to each other; there's much more of a sense not only of talking back and forth, but on the images relating back and forth. You're constantly looking over your shoulder, walking up and down in a thoroughfare of images. The movement constantly distracts. The solid fields of color soften this, wash the space in a kind of sensuality, another distraction.

LF: Do you have a preference for installations over tapes?

GH: Installations. I like the complexity of working spatially, combining materials and media in different ways. I generally have ambiguous feelings about the experience of watching tapes on television.

LF: You mean sitting in a gallery and watching tapes?

GH: Yes, even more so with seeing video work on television. But it's more that the tape, the images, don't have a surface. They're encased behind glass. Yet at the same time, I really like the quality of emitted light.

LF: In the pieces that exist both as tapes and installations, you always change them in the process of going from one to the other, don't you?

GH: Definitely. A lot of times, in the middle of making a tape, I'll be thinking of an installation. It's not an afterthought. Some people think that one compromises the other, but for me, it's all raw material, even the texts. It's not pristine-this text belongs to this tape, and anything that's done outside of its original context compromises it.

LF: It really depends on how it's realized as an installation or as a tape. Some people show tapes from installations as unaltered tapes, and it often doesn't translate.

GH: Yeah. For instance, there isn't a Mesh tape, and there's not a "War Zone" [a 1980 installation at Media Study, Buffalo, N.Y.] tape, although I do have a tape documenting it. But I don't show it as a "tape."

LF: You've called "War Zone" a metaphor for the empty mind thinking to itself. That seems very similar to the "internal dialogue" in "Primarily Speaking".

GH: There's a similarity in dealing with image and language, but "War Zone" deals with it more directly. The scenario was image and language being at war. It also refers to the left and right sides of the brain, the perceptual and conceptual faculties battling for control. It's definitely a battle within myself, but the experience of the two pieces is very different.

The original idea for "War Zone" was to have many speakers in a room whispering single words, so that the experience would be walking through a room of white noise. As you walked around, individual words naming the objects would become audible. In the end, this became the basic texture of the piece. The large sound-space [at Media Study] determined certain details. It's insulated for sound recording, and feels quite raw, with exposed fiberglass on all the walls and ceiling. The pink of the fiberglass and the deadness of the sound changed my thinking about it, and I constructed the piece much more literally, picturing the space as "inside the mind."

LF: In using the metaphor of fighting, the camera represents a machine gun, the audio speakers function as mines in a mine field, the panning lights become surveillance lights. How did you choose the objects you used?

GH: A lot was determined by what I found around Media Study. Once I got a few things, it gave me the idea of using objects that would become analogous to thought processes, psychologically symbolic. For instance, a ladder represented a kind of hierarchy of thought; the dolly represented a stable thought, moving horizontally in any direction, but never shaken; a mirror represented reflection; and various things, such as a rope hanging from the ceiling, represented escape. There were 16 objects identified with speakers. These references were not intended to be perceived exactly the way I described them, but rather as a kind of map or diagram for constructing the piece.

LF: What about the white rabbit?

GH: That rabbit was the only live element; it represented illusion. When I think of the way rabbits dart around, it represents to me the creative aspects of the mind. Among the identified objects in the space, it served as the unidentified, non-verbal, unconscious element.

LF: Your other installations, "Glass Onion" [1981] and "Equal Time" [1982] also seem to set up physical spaces in which language and image play off of one another. In "Glass Onion", you used a rectangle constructed from video feedback as the only image. What was the thinking behind that? ["Glass Onion" consists of four concentric rectangles. In the outermost layer are four monitors; in each of the next two layers are four audio speakers; in the center is a single monitor displaying a tape of an image of a black and white rectangle which was constructed from video feedback. The central monitor and the speakers all lie on the floor facing up. Pointing down from the ceiling is a camera with an automated zoom lens: when zoomed all the way in, it frames the single monitor; when zoomed all the way out, it frames the outermost rectangle of monitors. This undulating image is displayed on the outer monitors. It is also altered whenever a person enters the space, because their image is picked up by the camera. The rate at which the rectangle shrinks and expands-or the rate at which the lens zooms in and out-is determined by the sound track, which is measured by the enunciation of the three syllables: reo-tan-gle. Based on the rhythm of these syllables, a mathematical structure of enunciation is set up for the entire text: one phrase overlaps another at a certain rate, mimicking and thereby describing the process of video feedback.]

GH: I "did Glass Onion" right after "BlacklWhitelText" [l980, the single-channel work that "Processual Video" is based on]. They're similar in that both take a very basic image and try to question image versus language-what happens when you use a very simple image with a text that gets very complex. "Glass Onion" is much more anchored to the original tape than my other installations. It uses a known image and process as a foundation.

The curious thing about feedback is that it's about delaythat's what makes the squares within the squares-but you see it all at once. You don't experience the time until you know what it is, and then you can conceptualize the delay. The problem with any feedback is that it just keeps feeding on itself, and you're pulled into it without any kind of external check. It's like two people who begin by having a conversation and get into an argument. If you listen to it later, it oscillates into oblivion. That's what I think of when I watch video feedback-it's meaningless after awhile.

The text provides a check, a kind of third party. It isolates segments of time, so that you don't fall into the feedback. The experience of text is perceived as time passing; with the image, the parts, are not separated. There is no isolation of the individual loops or segments of time that construct the image.

LF: In other words, the video feedback flows continuously, whereas the text is composed of discrete syllables and words that provide an overall structure?

GH: It's more specific than that. It's the way the description is structured. The idea was to try to isolate the individual rings in the feedback, and to have an analog in language, something that would be comparable to video feedback, but without actually using audio feedback. The text literally describes feedback, and is structured as a process of feedback. It is read backwards so that the phrases pile up on one another until they invert and you actually hear it from beginning to end. The end of the sentence is said first, and then each phrase is repeated, overlaps with the phrase before it, until the whole paragraph is constructed. Each phrase is twice as long as the one before it, and so there's a mathematical relationship almost like a pyramid. The installation itself is laid out like a pyramid, topographically.

LF: So you layered the phrases in order to create an experience similar to looking at video feedback?

GH: Yes, you don't follow the words linearly; it's a kind of linguistic maze that one gets lost in and every once in a while, when the individual phrases double up on each other, "objects of meaning" appear.

LF: What do you mean by "objects of meaning"?

GH: That term is a little obtuse, isn't it? The text literally defines the outer parameter of the space as a character-generated image that crawls along the bottom of each monitor. This outlining is again reinforced by the quadrature movement of the sound (speech) between each set of four speakers, which mark the corners of concentric rectangles. The charactergenerated text consists of the individual phrases or units that make up the text you're hearing, but in linear order. The first barrier is the "reading" of the text. This describes what you're entering. With each successive barrier or rectangle, the "description" gets more complex-that is to say, it's no longer a word-for-word interpretation. Experientially, something else is taking place. The sound of the text feeding back on itself is becoming that object of meaning, which finally leads us to go to the central monitor, the image "tomb," and there it is, in living black and white-this graphic image of where you're standing. One tends to retrace one's steps, to feedback on one's own movement, and construct this "object of meaning."

LF: How does this installation compare to Equal Time?

GH: "Glass Onion" is autonomous in the sense that the installation defines its own space. In fact, the height of the overhead camera and the focal length of the lens are the determining factors. When the camera is zoomed out to the widest view, that becomes the outer rectangle. Equal Time was set up in a given, almost symmetrical space, with all the components set up as oscillating pairs, everything in a kind of reciprocal relationship, all trying to cancel each other out. This cancelling relatioship is prevented by the viewer's own participation, because of the nature of perception when seeing and/or hearing two or more things simultaneously. This idea was the structuring principle of the work.

In the original tape, there are two texts. Each is a long paragraph. One describes the opening of a fictional art show. It's kind of a joke: one gallery wall is painted white, but it's still wet. That's the exhibit. People are at the opening, drinking and talking, and at the end, they notice that they have paint all over them. The other text is a description of a private performance, very solitary. Both texts are very image-oriented and descriptive-except one's public and one's private. Both texts are the same length, and the last part of each is the same: "I left the room, exiting to a hallway. It was long enough to form extreme perspective looking in either direction with doors to other rooms on both sides. I crossed the hall and entered the room opposite me."

This is another instance where the text could be replaced with other texts, and the piece would still be the "same." The content would be different, but "Equal Time" isn't about the content. It's about how content is experienced when structured in this field of simultaneity. I considered having other pairs of texts, which would change every other time I crossed the hall and entered the room opposite me. I felt this would have made it unnecessarily complicated, giving the impression of rooms with many scenes. The repetition of just the two texts reinforces the static quality of being inside an object and figuring out how it's constructed.

In the installation, there are two adjacent rooms connected by a narrow passage. In the center of each room there are monitors facing the passageway, and each other. The monitors display separate tapes which consist of the same images, images which refer to the text. The only difference is that on one monitor the images corresponding to, say, text A are prioritized, or keyed over, the images of text B. The opposite exists on the other monitor.

LF: So while you can always hear both texts, one text always dominates, depending on where you are. And in the room where one text dominates, its accompanying video also dominates?

GH: Right. At the end of both tapes, one hears the same last sentence, and then the two audio tracks are reversed, along with the images, and repeated in opposite rooms. Inside the passageway there are two more monitors, also facing each other, displaying another videotape. In that tape, there's an abstract image of two shiny, grid-like panels that slowly move until they overlap each other. They overlap at the point where the two texts overlap, creating a more pattern; and then, when the texts start up again, the panels start to move again.

LF: What was the reasoning behind using the abstract imagery in the small space?

GH: The abstract imagery was the original tape for "Equal Time". It functions similarly to BlacklWhitelText, somewhat diagrammatically, mirroring the movement of the sound/text. There are also a lot of textural, abstract references to the text. Because of the location of those inner monitors becomes so narrow, you almost have to turn sideways to get through. It became a kind of synaptical point, where all four monitors pointed towards each other. It was the "hot spot," especially when there were several people in the space. It was the ambiguous zone, where one asked where one space met another.

LF: Given that you're literally saying in Equal Time that people in the art world are all wet-covered with paint-I'm interested in what you think about video being plugged into that world.

GH:I think that essentially it's not.

LF: No?

GH: Peripherally, but not really, basically because it's not marketable.

LF: They said that about photography, too.

GH: It maybe in the future, but right now it's not. Video as an art form proving itself ... for me the whole idea of the singularity of an art form is backwards, dead, reactionary. So much is manipulated and defined by the market.

LF: Don't you think that there's an imperative to intellectualize, institutionalize, and legitimize video?

GH: Sure. The Paik show ["Nam June Paik," a retrospective originating at the Whitney Museum of American Art, April 30 June 27, 1982]. It was still a great show though. I don't know. I could see some point-not necessarily far away-where I wouldn't be doing video, but something else. I don't see myself as a video artist. Anytime I feel like I'm falling into "this is what I do," I don't like it, and I want to push it away. I worked in sculpture longer than video. I could see working with just about anything, working with nothing, not doing anything for two years. Just thinking.

SELECTED VIDEOGRAPHY
The Fall (1973, 11 min., black and white, sound)
Air Raid (1974, 6 min., color, sound)
Rock City Road (1974-75, 12 min., color, silent)
Earth Pulse (1975, 6 min., color, sound)
Embryonics 11 (1976, 12 min., color, silent)
Improvisations with Bluestone (1976, 7 min., color, sound)
Mirror Road (1976, 6 min., color, silent)
Bathing (1977)
Electronic Linguistics (1978, 3:25 min., black and white, sound)
Windows (1978, 8 min., color, silent)
Sums & Differences (1978, 8 min., black and white, sound)
Mouth Piece (1978, 1 min., color, sound)
Ring Modulation (1978, 3:25 min., color, sound)
Primary (1978,1:40 min., color, sound)
Elements (1978, 2 min., black and white, sound)
Objects with Destinations (1979, 3:40 min., color, silent)
Equal Time (1979, 4 min., color, stereo sound)
Picture Story (1979, 7 min., color, sound)
Soundings (1979, 17 min., color, sound)
Processual Video (1980, 11 min., black and white, sound)
BlacklWhitelText (1980, 7 min., black and white, stereo sound)
Commentary (1980, 0:40 min., color, sound)
Around & About (1980, 4:45 min., color, sound)
Videograms (1980-81, 13:25 min., black and white, sound)
Primarily Speaking (1981-83, 20 min., color, stereo sound)
Happenstance (in progress, black and white, stereo sound)

INSTALLATIONS Hole in the Wall (1974), Mesh (1979), War Zone (1980), Glass Onion (1981), Primarily Speaking (1981), Equal Time (1982).

above copied from: http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/people/pview.php3?id=7&page=1