Piet Mondrian - Broadway Boogie Woogie (1921)

VS

Mark Bradford - Kryptonite (2006)

Kendell Geers (Title Witheld) Blow – 1993

Urs Fischer

There is an excellent conversation going on at edge.org about the way technology is reshaping human cognition when it comes to learning, thinking, and remembering.  In a debate that dates back not two decades but at least two centuries, one camp fervently believes that technology makes us stupider, more asocial, and generally spells the end of civilized society, while another reminds us how flawed and deficient our memory and behavior is in the first place, and that technology offers a serious boon to cognition.  I wonder how this conversation, which in the last twenty years has focused on the fundamental shifts in cognition steered by the Internet, pertains to artistic practice and art knowledge.  Daniel Dennet, in 2007, remarked: ‘we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.’  I think about this notion when I look at the astonishing volume (maybe variety too) of art that is out there; more than any one person, even Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Serota, Okwui Enwezor, or Robert Hughes, can know about.  Is the amount of art being made detrimental to our ability to process and interpret it?  Is our understanding of any one work of art weakened by all the noise of ten thousand works that look and behave very similarly to it?

Annalena Mcaffee points out the evidence identifying an increase in cases of attention deficit disorder.  Will the art our era values in the long-run be determined by our collective ADD?  She also points out what has been termed the “promiscuity” encouraged by news aggregators like Google News — if you get thirty five art blogs (the kind with mostly pictures and very few words), from C-Monster to bloggy to we-make-money-not-art to post.thing.net, on your dashboard every morning, that might expose you to a very wide array of art, but does it have a substantial effect on the attention given to an issue of OCTOBER, or even ARTFORUM (artforum, Artforum)?

Here is a quote from McAffee on how the young regulate their online intake:

There is an anxiety that we’re all like fat frat boys gorging ourselves at the free, 24-hour, all-you-can-read information buffet. Even here, though, in bouts of online gluttony, we display timeless human traits: the urge to binge in times of plenty, feasting till we’re queasy on roasted mammoth, since instinct tells us there might be nothing to eat out there again for a month or two. But our systems are their own regulators. We can only take so much. After a while we long for a simple glass of water, an indigestion pill and wholesome human pleasures, which may or may not involve a book (electronic or paper), music (ipod or live), sport, landscape, love. And as one of your correspondents writes, the young — for whom digital innovation is an unremarkable fact of life — are better at handling the screen-life balance than their seniors, who are too often awestruck by innovation and waylaid by serendipity. The young take for granted today’s surfeit of mammoths and they moderate their intakes accordingly.

Another question, which Frank Schirrmacher (influential German author and co-publisher of Frankfurter Allegmeine Zeitung newspaper) raises, is what information does it become important to know, to remember and be able to recall at will?  How do we assess what ideas in art are important (worth our cognitive time) in such a vast “socio-biological” system?

Here is the link to the Edge conversation: http://edge.org/3rd_culture/schirrmacher09/schirrmacher09_index.html

TBC…

Note: does anyone have a good method for removing foam-core artwork labels which have been super-glued to a white wall, without damaging the paint?

I like proto-mu because they gave an award for conceptual art to the Stuckists, a group that condemns conceptual art like that of Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, the Chapman Brothers, and numerous other Turner Prize winners, as un-real and signifying a crisis in the meaning of art.  I don’t know how active proto-mu is today — although according to their website we are all members — but in that I am currently interested in the how the contemporary artists views herself in society as well as in the context of her peers, I wanted to see how people feel about this short text of theirs from several years ago, on being an artist:

so, you do art for a few years, looking at artists you like, developing your own path, but after a while maybe you start to think about what art really is, why you’re doing this, and nobody seems able to give you a good explanation, so you go back to basics, decide no more bullshit and look at what you believe, what you actually, honestly, really and truly believe, not just about art but your whole fuckin’ life, throwing away the crap and seeing what, if anything, is left, and when you’re looking at whether to keep something, maybe you look to see what someone else has done with it before, but mostly it’s what use it is to you that’s important, and whether you can use it to say something that you want to other people, whether it can help you to actually fuckin’ communicate with another human being about something that you care about, something that’s important to you both, to everybody, and maybe you won’t seem to be doing anything particularly ground-breaking and everyone’ll think you’ve gone off the rails, but that doesn’t matter any more ’cos you’d rather touch one person in the heart than have the whole world think you’re clever, so you have to figure out a way of really experiencing the world and passing on what you’ve experienced, while not allowing it to be turned into a product that destroys everything good and true in it, so you’ve still got to make it seem enough like art for people to pay attention, but different enough so that they realise something is going on, and you don’t want to just preach to an audience, you want to involve them, learn from them, connect and communicate in an equal way, and it gets so you can’t hide the spiritual side to what you’re doing, but you’ve got to try to express it so that it can be understood whether you believe in god, the universe, or nothing, just so long as it’s what you really believe, and maybe you’re not even an artist any more, or maybe art has evolved into this whole new thing where you can’t tell where it starts and ends, or maybe it’s just you who’s evolved and it seems that way because you can’t tell where you stop and art starts, and when you see that someone else has really understood, you know it’s spread to them too and maybe the whole world is going to be like this soon

-http://www.sitesled.com/members/protomu/words1.html

via Blackberry:

But I ask myself: what I am I rebelling against?

Nothing seems to be more common in our present situation than a millenarianist feeling of closure.  Whether celebratory (what I will call manic) or melancholic one hears endless diagnoses of death; death of ideologies (Lyotard); or industrial society (Bell); of the real (Baudrillard); of authorship (Barthes); of man (Foucault); of history (Kojeve) and, of course, of modernism (all of us when we use the word postmodern).  Yet what does all of this mean?  From what point of view are these affirmations of death being proclaimed?  Should all of these voices be characterized as the voice of mystagogy, bearing the tone that Kant stigmatized in About a Recently Raised Pretentiously Noble Tone in Philosophy (1796)?  Derrida writes:

“Then each time we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the subject, of consciousness, of history, of the West or of literature, and according to the latest news of progress itself, the idea of which has never been in such bad health to the right and the left?  What effect do these people, gentile prophets or eloquent visionaries, want to produce?  In view of what immediate or adjourned benefit?  What do they do, what do we do in saying this?  To seduce or subjugate whom, intimidate or make come whom?”¹

UPDATE:  I had posted this passage because I have observed certain artists, when their practice is teleologically challenged by critics or theorists, sometimes defend themselves with questions similar to those Derrida poses here: namely, “what are you trying to do, sink the boat? what for?”  To me, an artist like Julian Schnabel is a caricature of one who would use this particular defensive strategy, one which I’m afraid can stultify critical discussion.  I haven’t developed this thought, clearly.  At any rate, two articles in the New York Times this morning, on the occassion of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, seem relevant:

20 Years of Collapse – Slavoj Zizek

Life After The End of History – Ross Douthat

Also relevant:

False Positives – Art Lies

The End – n + 1

De Appel’s Final Curatorial Project, 2008/2009 “Weak Signals, Wild Cards”

1. Yves Alain-Bois, from “Painting: The Task of Mourning” [↩]

What would happen in art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to rearrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties?¹

1. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man [↩]

I was looking at some telephony related art projects, online, such as:

Tanalum Memorial - Graham Harwood

Mystic Truth (Calling Bruce) - Barbara Visser - 2007

Broodthaers' phone number taken over by Jan Mot gallery - Mario Garcia Torres

Emily Jacir - Inbox (2004-2005) (has to do with e-mails, not phone, but was still relevant)

one of Moholy Nagy's 1921 Telephone Paintings, dictated by phone using graphing paper, and executed in a factory

And a film called dust by Bard alum Eric Saks, which there are no images of online.  And I was looking for this project I might have seen in Mute Magazine, can’t remember, where all the world’s telephone books were put into a room in London, creating a monumental, but explicitly incomplete and futile taxonomical record of everyone in the world’s phone numbers.  I couldn’t locate the piece, but I did come across this nice quote on dense critical language from the very Derrida inspired Avital Ronell:

From

The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, by Avital Ronell

Q: Are you concerned that your style might make you difficult to understand?

A: … understanding as such — thinking one has understood — is a disaster. It places closural moves on a problem. Right now I’m not on the side of understanding in that simple sense of “Yes, I understand,” and that’s it. To make things “perfectly clear” is reactionary, stupifying. The real is not perfectly clear.

- Avital Ronell being interviewed in Mondo 2000, #4

Why didn’t I go to NYU again?