Gian Pablo @ ITP

This piece is a catalog of works covered in an exhibition, as such my reaction is to collection of works and not necessarily the essay itself. While I admire the works of the artists quoted in the piece, I cannot help being somewhat frustrated at their self-imposed limitation of scope.

Intervention, in political and medical terms, refers to an action that produces lasting change without asserting direct control. By this definition, the Interventionists do not really achieve this, though they clearly aspire to.

Continue reading "Week 9: Response to Thompson & Shalette, “The Interventionists”" »

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Kwon is concerned with problem of what constitutes a “right” place and a “wrong” place, and whether one is more desirable than the other. Conventionally, a “right” place is a place where one has ties, and is able to develop a sense of identity, whereas a “wrong” place is one of discomfort and dislocation.

I believe that it is possible to develop strategies that allow an individual to change a "wrong" place into a "right" place, or vice versa, and that these strategies are a valid field for artistic exploration.

Continue reading "Week 9: Reaction to Miwon Kwon, “The Wrong Place”" »

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Response to articles by Borden, Whyte & Nielsen

What struck me about this set of readings was the emphasis on deep observation, and to some extent, the emphasis on practical utility. I found this underlying commonality of approach as interesting as the other common theme, of people reshaping the urban environment according to their own needs.

Continue reading "Week 8: Insight Through Deep Observation" »

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Response to Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life”

The gist of de Certeau’s argument seems to be that there is a correspondence between moving through space and the use of language, and that both are potential venues for the expression of individual creativity in the face of an authoritarian constraints.

De Certeau has appropriated the term “strategy” to refer to the process by which the “field” is constructed by those in power, for example the layout of a city. “Tactics” is used to refer to the way people navigate within the framework created by “strategies”, for example the paths chosen by individuals to navigate the city, in effect “creating” their own city.

Continue reading "Week 6: Walking/Talking, Language/Space" »

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Januszczak answers his titular question very definitively: “What's art for? What it's always been for. To get you out of here.”, which makes it very easy to structure a response.

While I find it a useful conclusion, I can see the logic of an opposed view: that art is meant to really bring you to where you are, to see things as they really are. I recently enjoyed listening to the Max Neuhaus installation “Times Square”, a sound piece under a traffic island in the middle of that location. The low droning tone merges with the ambient sound of the place, somehow enhancing it. However, one could argue that it does not take you “away” from Times Square – rather, it makes you aware of a musicality and harmony that has always been present in the place.

In a similar way, Gautel & Karaindros “Angel Detector” (a light which went on when there was complete silence around it), encourages people around it to listen with particular acuity. When viewing the work, sounds around you come into particularly crisp focus, and you start noticing things that otherwise would have never passed the threshold of awareness.

Both of these works are saying, in a way, “come back here – there are things going on that you have never noticed”, which is the diametric opposite of “getting you out of here”.

Now, in order to finish the Hegelian dialectic, is there a way to reconcile both views? Can art do both things at the same time?

Well, if the “here” that Januszczak refers to is the blinkered mindstate of most people’s day-to-day existence, and “getting out” can refer to seeing things in the world that we have previously been blind to, then yes: both of these definitions are compatible. In fact, Januszczak’s is slightly more flexible, as it admits the element of fantasy. Getting “out of here” can mean transcending your existing mindstate, by either seeing new things in your world, or by escaping into a world of fantasy.

In any case, what seems to require more thought is the concept of the “here”, the trapped mindstate that we are getting out of. Are most people, in fact, stuck in a limited mindstate? Is there a benefit to escaping it, becoming more awake? Is art the only way to do this?

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Dunne & Raby’s “Design Noir” is an attempt to explore the relationships people develop with electronic objects, beyond mere consumers. (I have this book, so I won’t limit my comments to just the first two chapters.)

I suppose the first obvious question is, why electronics? While Dunne and Raby don’t discuss this, at least in the first two chapters, it seems worth reflecting on the topic. Probably the most interesting thing about electronics is the appearance of life: they do things on their own (sometimes unpredictably) and, as embedded microprocessors become more ubiquitous, they exhibit more and more complex behaviors. They work in realms (radio frequency and infrared) that are not readily perceptible by humans. Finally, they are often used in situations that carry significant emotional weight: communications, or consumption of carefully crafted mass media. Each of these factors separately has some precedents in other areas, however, they come together for the first time in consumer electronics, where they support each other and create a compelling emotional impact.

Continue reading "Week 4: Response to Dunne and Raby, “Design Noir: The Secret Life of Electronic Objects”, Sections 01 and 02" »

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A reflection and response to Jonathan Crary, “Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory”, Lev Manovich, “The Poetics of Augmented Space” and Chrissie Illes, “Video and Film Space”

In these three readings, the key role of technology in the rise of the “spectacle” becomes clearer. However, in order to understand this better, I feel it is necessary to both look into the past more thoroughly, and to look into the future with a broader perspective.

Continue reading "Week 3: Power over Space: Emotional, Physical and Virtual" »

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Kwon studies an evolution in site-specific art, from a focus on an immovable physical location, to an attempt to create works that are unique, not just in their relation to place, but in how they relate to their overall context – including time, culture, and other economic and political factors.

While covering much of the same ground as the Meyer piece, Kwon seems both more realistic and more far-reaching in her analysis, presenting the change in works from the 1960’s onward as an attempt to explore the problem of subverting and calling attention, not just to the surrounding “art world” context, but to the political/social/economic context of the world at large. (Technology could be added to the list in today’s art.)

Kwon goes further than Meyer in exploring the implications of moving away from literal site-specificity. Key explorations are of works that turn a critical eye on the art world itself, mobility of the artist and mobility of art. A natural outgrowth of this is a reflection on the nature of intellectual property and author’s rights…

I found particularly interesting the discussion of the 1989 Ace Gallery exhibition, where works by Carl Andre and Donald Judd were re-created for the show, since the originals were too difficult to move. This implies an attachment to the original physical object and location which rather contradicts the idea of working to a functional site. If the key aspects of the work are relational, and not tied to a specific place or object, why shouldn’t there be copies?

This is an interesting parallel to the Open Source movement, which has gone beyond software to include things like beer, electronic circuits and machine tools. The key ideas and intellectual assets are shared freely, and anyone can use them to build for themselves the open-sourced thing.

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This piece attempts to establish a difference between the “site-specific” works of the 60s and 70s, and newer works which appear to reference those principles. Meyer identifies as the key difference the focus on a literal site, a physical location which is intrinsic and inseparable from the work, vs. the functional site, which simply happens to be the place where the work is emplaced (or takes place). One could say that works focused on a literal site are customized for that site, and are not the same work if moved. In contrast, works that make use of a functional site actually recontextualize the site itself – moving such a work to another place simply makes the new site part of the work.

While this is a useful distinction, I am not sure that it is the crucial distinction between the works of the 60s and 70s, and those of mid-90s onwards, or that such a clear-cut distinction even exists. Simple examination of Suderburg’s timeline shows a lot of works during the 80s and 90s, and while there are differences in the most prominent works, there does seem to be a continuity.

Moreover, there are many artists today who continue to be focused on the literal site (eg. Goldsworthy) while artists of the 60s and 70s were already focusing on the functional site (eg. Beuys, Smithson, Acconci).

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Pretty interesting piece, which by trying to address a definition for sculpture, comes up with a useful model for thinking of site in general. The model incorporates landscape, architecture, not-landscape and not-architecture as key pillars, and then defines various interactions. For example, site construction lies between architecture and landscape (eg. Works of Robert Morris and Smithson). Sculpture is located between non-architecture and non-landscape.

I am struck by how it may be possible for a single work to move among these categories. For example, many ancient sculptures and temples, relocated to modern museums, move from one extreme to the other. For example, the great altar of Zeus at Pergamun (today in Berlin) was intended to shape the landscape in which it was located, an example of site-construction. Visiting the site in Turkey today, one is struck by the dominating absence of the altar! Moving the entire structure into a museum in a distant country suddenly reformats it as a work of sculpture, between not-landscape and not-architecture.

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At first, I was a bit perplexed (and bemused) as to what this reading has to do with the class. This did not last long! Delillo’s work uses dislocation in space as a simile for alienation: the main character literally & figuratively does not know where he is going. Given that we are concerned with works tied to a specific place, exploring this kind of geographic confusion can be a good starting point.

At a more practical level, I found it interesting to visualize the play, when staged, as an installation. The amount of repetition, the fragmented timeline and the simplicity of the staging make it possible to imagine this as an installation where, rather than an audience sitting still, visitors could wander in and out, gradually picking up a sense of the underlying story.

This kind of dipping in and out, “consuming” the work by stringing together repetitive soundbites, also echoes the forms of broadcast television. I believe it would be possible to “channel-surf” Valparaiso in the same way that you watch television.

I was reminded of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, a film where the demands of television consume the protagonist’s life, making him a much more involved participant than he really expected to be.

The choice of Valparaiso as the (implied) locale for the main events of the play is also interesting. During the Pinochet dictatorship, political prisoners were bound, with plastic bags over their head, and thrown out of airplanes into the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps Michael Majeski, having tapped into this resonance, has to play out his role to its fatal ending.

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Reaction to “Space, Site, Intervention”, Introduction, by Erika Suderburg

Suderburg sets out to define what is meant by site-specific and installation art, and only partially succeeds. She succeeds by using examples to define a set of candidates, she fails by not then providing a synthesis. However, I found the piece useful in that it gave me a large set of examples, some of them unknown to me, which helped me construct my own synthesis.

Continue reading "Week 1: Reaction to Suderburg intro" »

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