I’m a 23 year old art writer, though presently the process, even resulting text, of writing to me is perfunctory; I will not go so far as to say not necessary or incidental since what can we do but make marks.  But, in the way Zizek somewhat comically describes his method of extensive rambling note-taking followed by severe editing, eliminating writing in the process, I’m on board with that.  My oft heckled at main area of research has been relational aesthetics, and I’m committed to a prolonged investigation of it’s possibilities and implications (I think it deserves more than the short-shrift people give it).  But if I call it merely a jumping off point, it’s because I’m attempting to keep my eye on the future of art, the popular current blogospheric discourse about which seems to me completely blinkered by market concerns.  There’s still a hell of a lot of ideas out there that deserve sincere focus, and which have zilch to do with this market conversation.  And I’m especially interested in the history and future of exhibition making, both in art and non-art contexts, both in recognizable and yet-to-be-recognized forms. Yes, I’m reading Rethinking Curating, What Makes A Great Exhibition, Obrist’s book, Velthius’s book, etcetera.

BUT…

After my first research semester at the European Graduate School (a brilliant, semi-sadistic, experimental pedagogical interface in the Saastal mountains near Visp, Switzerland, where Avital Ronell is considered the most daring American philosopher, DeLanda the guy to clarify things, and Deleuze/Heidegger/Jean-Luc Nancy the entree at every communal meal, and Schopenhauerian suicide conversations happen daily – although it should be clear that Schopenhauer did not endorse suicide if only for the fact that one would be resigning to the hostility of the universe) I tend these days, perhaps predictably, (cliche?) towards more broadly and obliquely related areas that new art should/must confront.  By new art I choose to toggle off the browser tab containing chronology and historical trajectory, but rather refer to an amorphous body of art practices and involved in a fractured but immediately recognizable conversastion. And if I dare to be precociously/prematurely prescriptive I think more artists and ‘art people’ ought to engage to a greater and more coherent extent  this decade’s developments in continental and non-Western theory, salvageable fringe or radical impulses (a term now vague, sclerotic, bupkis), and especially ‘high science’.  I use CERN’s LHC as a synecdoche for that neat stuff which is problematic since it really takes effort to get past pop quantum physics as cargo cult, even for dedicated artist/theorists (and my own technopositivist faiths).   Although Bruce Sterling recently informed me in a seminar that CERN is basically a 50-year old hodgepodge of existent alongside abandoned projects with temporal shear and obsolete apparatuses held together by duct-tape at every turn, the perfect setting for a future fiction novel on media theory, maybe media punk.

Anyway just some thoughts, but here’s a link to an article I wrote on Triple Candie in NYC, which I was pleased and surprised to see they’ve kept in their press archives. http://www.triplecandie.org/About%20Press%20Calais%20antARTica%20112909.html

Some arguably relevant images I’m currently thinking about:

Christiania, Copenhagen - you are now leaving the EU

NSK

Oda Projesi in Galata - after George Perec's useless space?

Renzo Martens - Enjoy Poverty

Albert Figurt - Notre CAM de Paris

Nathalie Bookchin - Mass Ornament - 2009

Michelle Teran's geolocative project

Alex Fuller and Noah Bernsohn - on a mountain top - 2010

I was surprised, yet found myself nodding knowingly with a slight grin, to find a.aaaarg.org down this afternoon, having been replaced with a splash page reading “AAAARG.ORG DOESN’T EXIST.”  My first thought: cheeky bastards, they’re hinting at exactly what we should have been doing all along: keeping our mouths shut.  Perhaps the first rule of aaaarg should have always been: you do not talk about aaaarg! How could we not, though?  It’s been the simplest, easiest to navigate, free, no bullshit, no allegiances, and impressively generous library of theoretically oriented texts on the public web.  It also had the cool appeal of a successful relational art project (I’ll defend that contextualization if anyone disagrees), while being basically anonymous, and a clean white-cube gallery like interface.  JSTOR and Academic Search Premier look baroque in comparison.  I used it gluttonously and not in a very eco-friendly manner: rather than bringing a book on the train, I’d scroll aaaarg for a few tantalizing titles in the morning and print a chapter or two of each out; I was hardly ever without an ADD, informavoric selection of paper-clipped continental philosophy or art theory essays folded inside my jacket pocket.  Yet you and I had to acknowledge that although there  maybe is something genuinely lofty (read: noble, important, beyond capitalist economics to use that term in its vulgate, synecdochal (a vulgate and synecdoche into which we funnel lots of unrelated problems) sense) about the material which aaaarg has specialized in providing that made you want think of it as set apart from similar platforms in other industries like music, film, and non-academic publishing, above a certain key threshold of popularity, it begins to look the same, at very least to the companies whose margins are at risk.

I’m not up on the legal or ethical nuances of the now mature debate about copyright/left, piracy, etc, but I think I know two things: I want to see the continuation excellent thought to be written and published and that requires money one way or another; and I think it’s right that my favorite authors, and even the ones I don’t like, get paid so that they can live.  But I also believe that the impulse towards piracy will not go away; the virtually irreversible way the Internet has been designed and then emergently developed, makes piracy, even ultimately ethical piracy, too easy too resist for mortals, perhaps especially when we say “oh, it’s just Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, they’re dead, they won’t mind!”  As it also clear, there are many living (and much less famous than the aforementioned) authors, breathing normal modern people who drive cars and have mortgages, on aaaarg, who, whether they are for or against, are not getting paid where they could (I didn’t say should) be getting paid.  One inchoate suggestion to mitigate comes to mind: the open-source software techie community has been leading the way for many years towards a highly permissive, tip jar model (definitely influenced by communist thought, though they call it common sense)… again, this usually operates under the threshold at which individuals become consumers in a knowledge economy, and points on a parabola, but is something like this model an option for philosophy with a niche audience? Should every writer, tenured or not, make a website with a little donation button; I bet many would be pleasantly surprised if they did.  This is sort of reducible to the argument I hear a lot regarding copyright; make it really easy for us to pay you, to which I’ll add: also pay you whenever we spontaneously feel generous or have some dosh in our pockets to. That’s to a degree the reality we’re working with.

But onto my more theoretical suggestion: I knew from critic Claire Bishop (via Artforum then via Academic Search Premier via Bard College wifi), to read up on Mouffe and Laclau (via aaaarg) who wrote at some length about an agonistic model of democracy.  This is one of the notions on which good relational aesthetics, of which I am a supporter even when I often cringe or get hypercritical about it, seems to be consistently grounded in… Things will probably never be perfect — until we are all uploaded to harddrives and allowed the Vanilla Sky life we all deserve, where we can meet our long lost lovers afresh, again and again, each balmy Jamaican evening or whatever your hetero/homo fantasy, forever, now, never bored, no existential void at the middle of things –  especially in this concatenous, multiplicitous, fragmented present in which we vascillate between advanced civility and brilliance, hopeless endless catastrophic barbarism, and not metaphysically knowing which way up is, what morality is, whether objective reality exists, whether we’re better off than our million year old early hominoid ancestors, whether it’s wrong to eat animals, whether men are all created equally, what historical actors can be legitimately considered in a materalist ontological framework, etcetera, but we can TRY GOD DAMMIT, we can strive (god meant in the secular sense of hetero ego love narratives of course).  We can create microtopias!  Out of recyclable, upcycleable materials.  We can read Bruce Sterling, E.O. Wilson, Stewart Brand, be kind when we can, and start free, ad hoc pedagogical interfaces.  I think the same can be said for the situation with publishing; war is peace in a sense it has been argued if provocatively, so I say let’s keep the agonistic relationship going… there’s more writing out there with more eyeballs getting to it, with more initiatives being orchestrated as a result, than ever before (even if this is partially a function of population increase) and somehow it’s working, agonistically.  There will be casualties!  Frivolous lawsuits against deceased Oklahomans, legitimate lawsuits against brat hipsters who know they’re pushing their luck and milking the radical political associations of p2p spuriously, authors struggling financially who could be struggling less or even well-off, career changes, but there will be more eyes on the prize: truth.  Publishers are going to invent more built-in self-destruct mechanisms, hackers are going to continue cracking DRM.  Non-activists will mostly keep reaping the benefits of using their ex-girlfriends’ Netflix accounts.

The goal is thinking and writing and acting our way out of the catastrophic car-wreck of history, out of technological determinsm (which the self-awarely agonistic model puts a wrench in), and of the fundamentally hostile conditions of the universe (disclosure: I’m a misotheistic agnostic currently, there have been many of us).  Even allowing for singularity and permanent virtual reality vacations, we eventually we need to be getting off this rock in large numbers within the next several hundred years (‘the eventual choice of ours is spaceflight or extinction’ to paraphrase Carl Sagan) and/or, probably both, majorly downsize world population.  Or we give up on the human project and turn to antinatalism, nihilism, a very very very grave form of Lewboski-ism.  I am suggesting the much less drastic but seemingly irrational plan of action that we actually draw out, protract the checkers-like, Tom and Jerry-esque, war over intellectual property, and more provocatively that we occasionally switch sides (we all feel like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man sometimes anyway), batting for the Lessigs, the slashdotters, the Estonian hackers, the spam-kings, and the Mark Taylors and even RIAA on ocassion; it’s a kind of dither that will confuse the hell out of them, and in the process we’ll get to keep our precious content, our precious celebrities and lionized heroes, and not pay that much for it unless we’re hardcore fans, patrons.  We’ll also continue to deal with invasions of privacy, mainstream media and news that panders to what I believe is honestly a mostly imaginary audience of dimwits, stupid ads, and occasional wrongful imprisonment: the secular sacrificing of a life; but you know what, 250,000 people died in Haiti a couple of months ago, and that was the universe’s fault; our ethical perplexedness is not completely unwarranted.

some related images:

Danny Snelson - Endless Nameless

anniversary letter from Richard to Patricia Nixon

Adrain Piper - Everything

Aeolipile - created by Hero of Alexandria, 1st century A.D.

Analytical Engine - unbuilt proto-computer 1829, replica, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace

Yann Arthus-Bertrand - 6 Billion Others Project

Benjamin Edwards

Ben Fry

Daniel Bozhkov - Training in Assertive Hospitality - 2002

cellular automata

Dylan Stone - Lifesize Watercolor - 2005

Christian Phillip Muller - Passe Immediat

Yes to All - Sylvia Fleury - 2007

from Brucennial - on the cover of Bookforum

David von Schlegell (they look like laptops)

Erwin Wurm

Helmut Smits - Unseen Work - 2008

Jan Hoeft - Hallo herr lewitt

Matthew Barney for JCrew

e-toy corporation - Mission Eternity

Jochem Hendricks - Tax

Rivane Neuenschwander - Joe Carioca - 2008

Ashkan Sahihi – Face series

Anna Jermolaewa – Kremlin Doppelganger

Lina Viste – Gronli 2

Matthieu Laurette – Artists Biopic CinemaThomas Demand – Tunnel

Valentin Hertweck

Superstudio – Supersurface life – 1972

via e-flux:

The Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program supports individual writers whose work addresses contemporary visual art through grants ranging from 3,000 to 50,000 USD.

Writers who meet the program’s eligibility requirements are invited to apply in the following categories:

• Articles
• Blogs
• Books
• New and Alternative Media
• Short-Form Writing

We regret that due to legal constraints we can only fund U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and holders of O-1 visas. For guidelines and additional eligibility requirements, please visit http://www.artswriters.org.

ART WRITING WORKSHOP

In partnership with the International Association of Art Critics/USA Section, the Arts Writers Grant Program offers applicants consultations with leading art critics. For more information, please visit http://www.aicausa.org.

Nina Power: Do you think art has become indeterminate as well?

Sylvère Lotringer: Absolutely. This has little to do with individual works – whether good or bad – only with the dizzying change of scale, the massive production, circulation and consumption world-wide. The art market has expanded exponentially and has been losing its shape to achieve monstrous proportions. It is occupying all the space, wildly metastasizing in every possible direction. It is so bloated at the core that it doesn’t seem able anymore to digest all the data. It is on its way to surpass its function. The early 1980s orchestrated the return to painting, and gave the art market a chance to fasten its hold. But it didn’t stop there and it didn’t take long before art started outgrowing its own boundaries, opening itself up to the exchangeability of capital. First it absorbed photography, until then considered unworthy; then it move to architecture, fashion and design. Along the way, it has integrated ‘outsider art’, abolishing its own internal limit, and put together ubiquitous ‘installations’ liable to be pitched anywhere and provide a fast pedigree for ‘rogue nations’. Today it is difficult to imagine anything that could be excluded from art. Its field has expanded exponentially to include the entire society. Along the way, it has grabbed anything that could be used for its own purpose, recycling garbage, forging communities, investigating political issues and perfumes, tampering with biology, etc., simultaneously appearing and disappearing with an ambiguous promiscuity. Art has finally fulfilled the program of Dada with a vengeance, embedding art into life. The only thing left for art to do is ‘auto-dissolve.’ Most avant-gardes promised too much and never delivered. Their manifestos of ‘auto-dissolution’, on the contrary, revealed them at their most radical and paroxysmal moment. This moment has come to contemporary art, and it may even spare itself the trouble of publicizing its own exit. Forget art then. Unless it is capable of bringing us up to the next paradigmatic shift, as Andy Warhol once did, forgetting about its own name and past history. Artists themselves maybe have been showing the way by venturing so far astray from home. All it would take is to cut off the umbilical cord that still ties art to the market, or rather turn it into a rich rhizome. Some art groups are already working at it. Autonomists used to say, ‘The margins at the centre’. We haven’t yet given art a chance to grow autonomously.

from “Intelligence Agency” in Frieze, Issue 125, Sep 2009

Lucas Samaras, Mirrored Room, 1966

Human!  Your entire existence takes place in a matrixial hallucination composed of binary data and pre-written loops!

Yin Xiuzhen

More advanced lifeforms from across the Oort Cloud exist in more elaborate dimensions, and your efforts to contact us have been in vain.  Your teeming metropolises are ersatz desnsities of digital matter.  Here… (alien produces a city from its suitcase)

James Turrell - Bridget's Bardot - 2009 - Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg

Actually, I lie, you are actually inside Bridget Bardot’s vagine.

Anthony Gormley, Human Forms

Idiot human. I blast you with my lazer gun.   PEW PEW!!

In his patafictive film F For Fake (1974), Orson Welles ruminates that of all the monuments to where we as humans have been and what we have sought out from existence, perhaps the cathedral at Chartres would be the most appropriate.

Well, while it may not provide the wealth of information about where we have been, whenever I look at the weathered granite runeforms of Tim Hawkinson’s Bear (2005), I picture it also as a potent testament.  I suppose it is more precise to say that I feel this way about the ruin form of the teddybear, to the idea of a monument to the desire for tenderness that must be at the root of so much human drama, and which to me would fit right beside the ancient Hindu excavations that scatter Hampi, India.

Tim Hawksinon, Bear, 2005

Hampi, India

After seeing the Jonas Akerlund-directed “trailer” for Francesco Vezzoli’s orchestration of the MOCA 30th anniversary gala, entitled Ballet Russes Italian Style (The Shortest Musical You Will Never See Again), featuring the Ballet Russes and Lady Gaga, she instantly became more appealing to me; jaundiced and inobservant had been my eye in not considering the obvious contextualization of her work in the performative tradition of acts like Marlena Dietrich, Klaus Nomi, the Kipper Kids, Sasha Fierce, even Ali G.  It’s also rather timely that I am reading essayist David Shields’ recent “manifesto”, Reality Hunger, which attempts to codify the migration of fiction into real life, and that tonight at the New Museum there is a lecture on the parafictional work Headless by artist duo Senneby + Goldin.  Yet my new contextual reading of Lady Gaga was almost immediately overshadowed by the most fascinating internet meme in recent memory, South African hip-hop group Die Antwoord, who not only developed a global fanbase within days of their website’s launch, but will likely drop the jaws of cultural critics interested in issues of otherness, globalization, and parafiction.  There is no doubt, this is some of the most interesting performance art, understood in the sense of advanced popular culture, possible.

Robet Musil was a writer plagued by low demand throughout his literary career, though The Wall Street Journal coronated The Man Without Qualities as one of the three best novels of the twentieth century (the others being Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time).¹  I was looking at a collection of some of his of short stories, essays, and briefer articles, Volume 72 of “The German Library In 100 Volumes”, and came across his essay Monuments (Die Denkmale), written in 1932, the thesis of which is the “conspicuous inconspicuousness” of monuments.  Here is just a passage from that essay, which, though it focuses on the fate of monuments, bears relevance to contemporary public art and exhibitions with “open air” components such as Documenta, or inSite San Diego/Tijuana.

Everything permanent loses its ability to impress.  Everything that forms the walls of our lives, so to speak the stage set of our consciousness, loses the ability to play a role in this consciousness.  After a few hours we no longer hear a constant, bothersome noise.  Pictures we hang on the wall are sucked up by the wall within a few days; it happens very seldom that one places oneself in front of them and looks at them.  Half-read books which one has shelved in the magnificent rows of books in one’s library will never be read to the end.  For sensitive people it is sufficient to buy a book whose beginning they like, but they will never thereafter pick it up again.  In this case the process is aggressive, but one can also pursue its inevitable course in the higher feelings, and there its is always aggressive, for example in family life.  The firm possession of marriage is distinguished countless times from inconstant desire by the sentence: Must I tell you every fifteen minutes that I love you?  How much greater must be those psychological disadvantages to which the permanent is exposed in phenomena of brass and marble!

If one is well-disposed towards monuments, one must inexorably draw the conclusion that they make claims on us which run against our nature, and satisfying them calls for special arrangements.  If one were to make warning signs for trucks as inconspicuous in color as monuments it would be a crime.  Locomotives, after all, whistle shrilly and not timidly, and even mailboxes are painted in attractive colors.  In a word, monuments today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort!  Anybody can stand quietly by the side of the road and allow glances to be bestowed on him; these days we can demand more of monuments.  Once one has grasped this thought — which thanks to certain cultural currents is slowly making headway — one can realize how backward the art of monuments is compared with the contemporary development of advertising.

Articles which mention Die Denkmale:

The Monument Is Invisible, The Sign Visible – Werner Fenz – October  #102

Monument: antimonument – Jeremy Melvin – Architectural Review (Oct 2002)

Commemorative Monuments – Lisa Moran – presented at Dublin City Council 2007

1. http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2006_08_009654.php [↩]