Multidisziplinarität – what's next?

89plus

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:43 +0000

Since an introductory panel held in January 2013 at the DLD – Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, 89plus has conducted research in Australia with Kaldor Public Art Projects, in Hong Kong with Art Basel’s Salon series, in New York as part of the MoMA PS1 Colony, and in Italy with the Innovation Festival, Bolzano-Bozen. Other events include the 89plus Conference, which took place in Venice on September 5 2013 at Palazzo Grassi, and the 89plus Marathon on October 18 and 19 2013 at London’s Serpentine Galleries, bringing emerging practitioners from all disciplines together with world renowned artists and thinkers. 89plus has developed a series of residencies with various partners internationally, including the Park Avenue Armory in New York and the Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition.
Marked by several paradigm-shifting events, the year 1989 saw the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the start of the post-Cold War period; the introduction of the World Wide Web and the beginning of the universal availability of the Internet, as well as the orbit of the first Global Positioning System satellite. Positing a relationship between these world-changing events and creative production at large, 89plus introduces the work of some of this generation’s most inspiring protagonists.
Since an introductory panel held in January 2013 at the DLD – Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich, 89plus has conducted research in Australia with Kaldor Public Art Projects, in Hong Kong with Art Basel’s Salon series, and in New York as part of the MoMA PS1 Colony. In partnership with the Park Avenue Armory in New York, 89plus has selected visual artist and curator Alex Dolan to be artist-in-residence during the Armory’s Under Construction series, taking place in September 2013. Other events include the 89plus Conference, which took place in Venice on September 5 2013 at Palazzo Grassi, and on October 18 and 19 2013, the 89plus Marathon will be presented at London’s Serpentine Gallery during Frieze Art Fair, bringing emerging practitioners from all disciplines together with world-renowned artists and thinkers. In November 2013, several creative practitioners selected by 89plus will undertake a residency aboard the Tara Oceans Polar Circle Expedition, and in early 2014, 89plus will hold events in Cape Town as part of Design Indaba.

HEROES
The heroes list was put together by the artists who participated in the introductory panel at DLD (Jan 21.2013). They listed cultural references they are inspired by.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien in mehreren Fassungen unter: http://89plus.com/about/ [5.8.2013].

Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:42 +0000

1.
It would appear that the notion of the “contemporary” is irredeemably vain and empty; in fact, we would not be entirely mistaken in suspecting “contemporary art” to be a concept that became central to art as a result of the need to find a replacement, rather than as a matter of legitimate theorizing. For above all, “contemporary” is the term that stands to mark the death of “modern.” This vague descriptor of aesthetic currency became customary precisely when the critique of “the modern” (its mapping, specification, historicizing, and dismantling) exiled it to the dustbin of history. At that point, when current art lost the word that had provided it with a programmatic stance, chronological proximity became relevant – even if it did not indicate anything of substance. To be sure, “contemporary” fails to carry even a glimmer of the utopian expectation – of change and possible alternatives – encompassed by “the new.”

2.
Nothing would seem to so eloquently suggest the lack of substance in “contemporary art” than the facility with which it lends itself to practical adjustments. Museums, academic institutions, auction houses, and texts tend to circumvent the need to categorize recent artistic production by declaring the “contemporariness” of certain holdings or discourses on the basis of a chronological convention: the MOCA in Los Angeles takes into account everything made “after” 1940; the contemporary holdings of Tate Modern in London were all created sometime after 1965; Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz’s sourcebook Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art takes 1945 as its starting point. In other contexts – particularly on the periphery – the horizon of contemporaneity tends to be narrower, usually defined as appearing in the early 1990s and associated with the rise of the postcolonial debate, the collapse of the Euro-American monopoly over the narrative of modernism, or the end of the Cold War. In any case, “contemporary art” appears to be based on the multiple significance of an “after.”

3.
However, as is usually the case with chronological categories, this neutrality may soon unfold into a noun with a certain substance. As with “the modern,” it would not be hard to imagine “the contemporary” one day becoming oxymoronically fixed, specified, and dated as the signifier of a particular shift in the dialectics of culture. There are at least two senses in which the contemporariness of artistic culture involves a poignant turn. There is the blatant immediacy of the relationship between a contemporary practice and its host society, and then there is its integration into a critical apparatus.
Never since the advent of historical relativism at the end of the eighteenth century has the art of the day had a less contentious social reception. Claims concerning the esoteric nature of contemporary art in the West mostly derive from the density of theoretical discourse on the topic – discourse that actually operates on the basis of practices that involve a certain level of general legibility. It may well be that one of the main characteristics of contemporary art is to always demand, at least, a double reception: first as part of general culture, and later as an attempt at sophisticated theoretical recuperation. Nonetheless, the fact that contemporary practices are linked to a hypertrophy of discourse that tries to mobilize them against the grain of their social currency is itself an indication of the extent to which contemporary art is an integrated culture that makes use of widely available referents, involving poetic operations that are closely linked to the historical sensibility of the day. It is the interlocking of extreme popularity and the rarefaction of criticism and theory that define this phenomenon. “Contemporary art” is, therefore, a form of aristocratic populism – a dialogical structure in which extreme subtlety and the utmost simplicity collide, forcing individuals of varying class, ethnic, and ideological affiliations – which might have otherwise kept them separated – to smell each other in artistic structures.

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4.
The ideal of modern beauty that Stendhal articulated in 1823 as “the art of presenting to the peoples . . . works which, in view of the present-day state of their customs and beliefs, afford them the utmost possible pleasure,” has finally been attained.¹ As a consequence, a temporal rift between radical aesthetics and social mores no longer exists today. The question of the death of the avant-garde ought to be reformulated to account for this institutionalization of the contemporary. As we all know, the schism between the project of modern subjectivity and the modern bourgeois subject was defined in historical terms as consisting of advances, regressions, re-enactments, futurities, and anachronism, and summarized in the politics of the avant-garde, with all the militaristic implications of the term. More than the death of the avant-garde as a project of cultural subversion – always a ridiculous argument coming from the mouth of the establishment; such radicalism is sure to reemerge in one disguise or another every time a poetic-political challenge to the nomos and episteme of dominant society becomes necessary – the shock of the postmodern involved the realization that “the new” could no longer be considered foreign to a subjectivity constantly bombarded by media and burning with the desire for consumption.
In any case, the temporal dislocation characteristic of both modernism and the avant- garde – the way the art of the day constantly defied the notion of a synchronic present (not limited to the chronological trope of the avant, which encompasses any number of other historical folds, from the theme of primitivism to the negotiations with obsolescence and the ruin, the refusal of the chronology of industrial labor, and so forth) – seems to have finally found some closure. In a compelling and scary form, modern capitalist society finally has an art that aligns with the audience, with the social elites that finance it, and with the academic industry that serves as its fellow traveler. In this sense art has become literally contemporary, thanks to its exorcism of aesthetic alienation and the growing integration of art into culture. When, by the millions, the masses vote with their feet to attend contemporary art museums, and when a number of cultural industries grow up around the former citadel of negativity, fine art is replaced by something that already occupies an intermediary region between elite entertainment and mass culture. And its signature is precisely the frenzy of “the contemporary”: the fact that art fairs, biennales, symposia, magazines, and new blockbuster shows and museums constitute evidence of art’s absorption into that which is merely present – not better, not worse, not hopeful, but a perverted instance of the given.

5.
In this way, the main cultural function of art institutions and ceremonies in relation to global capitalism today is to instantiate the pandemic of contemporariness as a mythological scheme occurring (and recurring) each time we instigate this “program.” After all, the art world has surpassed other, more anachronistic auratic devices (the cult of the artist, of nationality or creativity) as the profane global religion for making “the contemporary manifest. The hunger to be part of the global art calendar has more to do with the hope of keeping up with the frenzy of time than with any actual aesthetic pursuit or interest. Mallarmé’s dictum that “one must be absolutely modern” has become a duty to stay up-to-date. But given the lack of historical occasions which could represent an opportunity to experience the core of our era – pivotal revolutionary moments of significant social change or upheaval – a participation in the eternal renewal of the contemporary might not be completely misguided, for it at least invokes a longing for the specter of an enthusiasm that asks for more than just the newest technological gadget.

6.
But, once again, the devil of contemporaneousness does its deed: whereas the system of modern art was territorialized in a centrifugal structure of centers and peripheries around modernity’s historical monopoly in the liberal-capitalist enclave of the North Atlantic, we now face a regime of international generalization transmitting the pandemic of the contemporary to the last recesses of the earth. In fact, the main reason for the craze surrounding the contemporary art market in recent years (and for its not having immediately collapsed after the plunge of global capitalism) has been the market’s lateral extension: bourgeoises who would previously buy work within their local art circuits became part of a new private jet set of global elites consuming the same brand of artistic products, ensuring spiraling sales and the celebration of an age in which endless “editions” allow artworks to be disseminated throughout an extended geography. In turn, each enclave of these globalized elites drives the development of a contemporary art infrastructure in their own city, using a standard mixture of global art references and local “emergent” schools. Contemporary art is defined by a new global social context in which disenfranchised wealthy individuals (who have abdicated their roles as industrial and commerce managers to the bureaucracy of CEOs) seek a certain civic identity through aesthetic “philanthropy.” In this fashion they interact with a new social economy of services performed by artists, critics, and curators – services with symbolic capital that rests on an ability to trade in a semblance of “the contemporary.” Contemporary art thus becomes the social new private jet set and a jet proletariat.

7.
This new machinery of the dialectic between the global elites of financial capitalism and the nomadic agents of global culture would be easy to dismiss as critically meaningless were it not for the way “the contemporary” also stands for the leveling of the temporal perception of cultural geography and of a certain political orientation. Particularly for those who come from the so-called periphery (the South and the former socialist world), “the contemporary” still carries a certain utopian ring. For indeed, notwithstanding the cunning imbalances of power that prevail in the art world, the mere fact of intervening in the matrix of contemporary culture constitutes a major political and historical conquest. The global art circus of biennales, fairs, and global art museums has forced an end to the use of a metaphor that understood geography in terms of historical succession – it is no longer possible to rely upon the belatedness of the South in presuming that artistic culture goes from the center to the periphery. Although it probably does not seem so extraordinary now, the voicing of the need to represent the periphery in the global art circuits was, to a great extent, a claim to the right to participate in producing “the contemporary.” And while the critical consequences of the policies of inclusion are less central to the agenda of the South than the critique of stereotypes, the activation of social memory, and the pursuit of different kinds of cultural agency, it remains the case that “contemporary art” marks the stage at which different geographies and localities are finally considered within the same network of questions and strategies. Art becomes “contemporary” in the strong sense when it refers to the progressive obsolescence of narratives that concentrated cultural innovation so completely in colonial and imperial metropolises as to finally identify modernism with what we ought to properly describe as “NATO art.”

8.
This is not to say that such a process of inclusion is free from its own deformities: in many instances, a peculiar neurosis provoked by the stereotyping of ethnic, regional, or national authenticity and the pressures to accommodate art from the periphery into a subsidiary category of metropolitan referents produces so-called “alternative modernism” or “global conceptualism.” Nonetheless, the inclusion of the South in the narratives of “the contemporary” has already disrupted the genealogies of the present, such as the simplified concept of the “post-conceptual” that arose in the late 1980s to describe an apparent commonality between the radical artistic revolutions of the 1960s and the advanced art of its day. In its various historical and geographical settings, “contemporary art” claims a circularity between 1968, conceptualism, Brazilian Neo-Concretism or the French Nouvelle Vague, and recent works trapped in perpetual historical mirroring. In this sense, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, “contemporary art” appears as the figure of a revolution in standstill, awaiting the moment of resolution.

9.
Complicated as this may be, however, it does not blur the radical significance of the cultural transformation that took place in artistic practice in the years after 1960. One crucial element of “contemporary art” is the embrace of a certain “unified field” in the concept of art. Beyond the de-definition of specific media, skills, and disciplines, there is some radical value in the fact that “the arts” seem to have merged into a single multifarious and nomadic kind of practice that forbids any attempt at specification beyond the micro-narratives that each artist or cultural movement produces along the way. If “contemporary art” refers to the confluence of a general field of activities, actions, tactics, and interventions falling under the umbrella of a single poetic matrix and within a single temporality, it is because they occupy the ruins of the “visual arts.” In this sense, “contemporary art” carries forward the lines of experimentation and revolt found in all kinds of disciplines and arts that were brought “back to order” after 1970, forced to reconstitute their tradition. “Contemporary art” then becomes the sanctuary of repressed experimentation and the questioning of subjectivity that was effectively contained in any number of arts, discourses, and social structures following the collapse of the twentieth century’s revolutionary projects. I suspect that the circularity of our current cultural narratives will only be broken once we stop experiencing contemporary culture as the déjà vu of a revolution that never entirely took place.

10.
By the same token, it is no coincidence that the institutions, media, and cultural structures of the contemporary art world have become the last refuge of political and intellectual radicalism. As various intellectual traditions of the left appear to be losing ground in political arenas and social discourses, and despite the way art is entwined with the social structures of capitalism, contemporary art circuits are some of the only remaining spaces in which leftist thought still circulates as public discourse. In a world where academic circuits have ossified and become increasingly isolated, and where the classical modern role of the public intellectual dwindles before the cataclysmic power of media networks and the balkanization of political opinion, it should come as no surprise that contemporary art has (momentarily) become something like the refuge of modern radicalism. If we should question the ethical significance of participating in contemporary art circuits, this sole fact ought to vindicate us. Just as the broken lineages of experimental music, cinema, and literature finally found themselves in the formless and undefined poetic space of contemporary art in general, we should not be shocked to find the cultural sector – apparently most compromised by the celebration of capitalism – functioning as the vicarious public sphere in which trends such as deconstruction, postcolonial critique, post-Marxism, social activism, and psychoanalytic theory are grounded. It would seem that, just as the art object poses a continuous mystery – a space of resistance and reflection leading towards enlightenment – so do the institutions and power structures of contemporary art also function as the critical self-consciousness of capitalist hypermodernity.

11.
However, given the negative relationship of art to its own time, one would suspect the current radicalization of art and the constant politicization of its practice to be dangerous symptoms. Just as modern art rescued forms of practice, sensibility, and skills that were crushed by the industrial system, so does contemporary art seem to have the task of protecting cultural critique and social radicalism from the banality of the present. Unlike theorists who lament the apparent co-opting of radicalism and critique by the official sphere of art, we would need to consider the possibility that our task may consist, in large part, of protecting utopia – seen as the necessary collusion of the past with what lies ahead – from its demise at the hands of the ideology of present time. This is, to be sure, an uncomfortable inheritance. At the end of the day, it involves the memory of failure and a necessary infatuation with the powers of history. I do not know a better way to describe such a genealogy than by offering a quotation from the Dada artist and historian Hans Richter, who summarized the experience of Dada as that of “the vacuum created by the sudden arrival of freedom and the possibilities it seemed to offer.”² And it may well be that contemporary art’s ethical imperative is to deal with the ambivalence of the experience of emancipation. If art has indeed become the sanctuary of revolutionary thought, it is because it deals with the memory of a number of ambiguous interruptions. With this, we hopefully find an advantage to the constant collision of perfume and theory that we experience in contemporary art events around the world.

WiederabdruckDieser Text erschien zuerst in: e-flux journal # 12, Januar 2010, http://www.e-flux.com/journal/contemptorary-eleven-theses/ [29.5.2013].

1.) Stendhal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Georges Eudes (Paris: Larrive, 1954), 16:27, quoted in Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avantgarde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 4.
2.) Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1997), 136.

Variations on an Audience1

admin — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 12:42:40 +0000

Ladies and Gentlemen:
Audiences are endangered species. They are slowly vanishing in this world showered with limelight, where fifteen minutes of fame is now a cacophony of 24/7 programming. We all speak at the same time, and no one listens. When everyone is an artist, no one can be in the audience. We only sit off stage because we are waiting for our turn at the lectern.
What we call an audience today, like the one here tonight, is nothing more than a collection of highly individualized minds. You all are authors, we all produce things: you take pictures, you write blogs, you all own creative real estate. You all here tonight are so different from each other. How can I, or anyone, talk to you in a comprehensive manner, so that you all feel engaged?
Unfortunately, most people who lecture have failed to recognize this simple fact. They still speak to audiences as if they existed as one whole, as if this hypothetical and amorphous mass was a homogenous group of listeners, not a heterogeneous entity of speakers. They talk to this hypothetical audience as if it thought and felt exactly like them.
Let’s take, for instance, Slavoj Zˇizˇek. Slavoj Zˇizˇek talks to everyone as if we all were Slavoj Zˇizˇek. A scholar assumes we all are scholars interested in long bibliographies and in the reference to that 1974 book where the footnote of the footnote clarifies what the footnote of the footnote of the 1973 version didn’t clarify.
Artists, when they are invited to speak, usually think that their audience wants them to act as if they don’t care about them, but of course artists care, and their audiences – well, their audiences usually are other artists who are respectful enough, but what they really want is not to be in the audience but to be the artist who is speaking.
So it is very painful for me to say this, but the truth is that in this post-postmodern world, we all are confused about when to speak and when to listen. As a result of this, we are both unprofessional speakers and unprofessional audiences.
This spells slight doom, the temporary boredom we all have to live through every time we attend a lecture. We don’t even know why we do it. But it shouldn’t be that way.
Lectures could be like sex. They could be like the seduction of love, like the erotic dance or the magic act or the psychic séance or the hypnotic session. All it takes is for the speaker to find a way to talk to each one of the persons in the room as if it were a one-to-one conversation – an audience whisperer.
So by all means, then, let’s do variations on an audience, or rather, on this non-audience. I will talk not to all of you, but to each of you. For this exercise I will assume that, among the group here there is at least one person of the following sort:
1. Theorists. That is public intellectuals, poststructuralist scholars, downtown East Village, readers of October magazine.
2. Chelseaspeakers. Uber-professional art speakers, curators, consultants, critics.
3. Grant-writers and administrators. Working for nonprofit organizations and the U.S. government and the Department of Education or School Board.
4. “Show-me-the-money“ speakers. No-nonsense, uncomplicated, like when we talk about art late at an after party after a few drinks.
Now that we have established the four sets of individuals that I will be addressing, I will now repeat my introduction in these four ways, starting with the Speaker version 1 style:
The construct of the spectator as redefined today by post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination, reveal society – and its involutionary transformation – as a product of a demystified late-capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents.
The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly original producers of knowledge, as opposed to receivers, creates a different activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results. Where one searches for the hidden receiver finds instead the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content, the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that varies only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity, usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary concept definitions within a well-founded domain of references visible only to reduced agents of the operation.

Speech Version 2:
The notion of audience has been redefined today by posttechnological networks. Cultural producers today produce works that critique Western notions of collective spectatorship and propose new critical models.
Notions of performance are incorporated in this new critique, resulting in innovative explorations that operate in the realm of conceptual art in various formats. The viewer becomes an active participant in the work, which explores notions of viewers becoming active participants.
The work becomes an active participant in the viewer, which is an exploration of notions of viewers. These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, including the way in which spectators receive information in a postmodern world. These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations.

In other words, Speech Version 3:
Audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression. In this multicultural and multidisciplinary society, there are multiple voices that reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support. In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support. We only face, as a society, the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and in life, fulfilling the long objective of change, creativity, and achievement for the generations to come.

Speech Version 4:
I mean it’s like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like blogs and apps and movies and stuff it’s like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, like today things maybe have become retarded or something when you really think about it it’s really amazing like everything can mean anything because anyone can do whatever. I mean like today the world and like culture has become a place where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things if you know what I am saying. It’s like that is how it’s done today when we just say what we have to say and we know why we say it and we know what you are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, but the point that there is no point is maybe like the point.
And now, to merge these styles, we will patch together the choir of art world voices. You can call it an audience fugue:
The construct of the spectator as redefined today by post-technological networks reunites a number of given implications that, upon close examination, I mean it’s like sometimes because you are online so much and you get to like get to do all this like, audiences in our global world today face the challenges and the opportunities that come along with the emerging forms of expression. The notion of audience has been redefined today by post-technological networks – and its involutionary transformation – as a product of a demystified late-capitalist model without centers and reformulated contents. The involution of cultural communication into a system of seemingly original producers of knowledge it’s like today everything is so easy to do so why do we need anyone else doing it but us, In this multicultural and multidisciplinary society Cultural producers today produce works that critique western notions of collective spectatorship as opposed to receivers creates a different activity universe that contrasts with the deflection of speech, blogs and apps and movies and stuff, like there are multiple voices that reflect our diverse culture and that are important to support, today things maybe have become retarded or something when you really think about it it’s really amazing like a seemingly anti-political task of horizontal results.
In some cases, these voices will challenge the viewer to reflect on important issues we all face, where one searches for the hidden receiver finds instead the manifested materialization of parallel mimetic producers but they all reflect the feelings and thoughts of others and are representative of the diversity of original community voices that we all should strive to support, I mean everything can mean anything because anyone can do, like, whatever. It is the fabrication of the plot of the content, I mean like today the world and like, the substance of normative principles of inclusion of concepts, that we only face as a society the challenge to expand our long-term partnerships and advisory support to those who have an important message to convey to their constituents, These works are conceptual narratives that question a variety of concepts, where we all talk about ourselves and then it like makes everything look the same because no one seems to be listening or something. By acting together, we can overcome the obstacles that for too long have prevented real change on the critical issues that audiences face in art and life, only in stylistic practices of scientific postmodernity, I mean that’s cool, but it’s like if I am talking and you are talking and he is talking and then if we just talk in different ways that doesn’t mean we are saying different things, like These practices thus become explorations of conceptual information of notions of participants, building enduring foundations for community partnerships with real solutions, usually not self-identified as such but actively embracing a regiment of exclusionary definitions that participate in notions of information of conceptual explorations, if you know what I am saying, including the way in which spectators receive information in a postmodern world, and we know why we say it and we know what you are going to say so what’s the point of even saying it, within a well-founded domain of references visible only to a reduced agents of the operation, fulfilling the long objective of change, creativity, and achievement for the generations to come, an exploration of notions of viewers, Its like that is how its done today when we just say what we have to say but the point that there is no point is maybe, like, the point.

Wiederabdruck
Dieser Text erschien zuerst in: Helguera, Pablo: Art Scenes: The Social Scripts of the Art World, edited by Rebecca Roberts, Jorge Pinto Books Inc., 2012.

1.) This performance lecture, designed to be performed only once with no documentation other than this written script, was presented at the Bruce High Quality Foundation University in New York on October 13, 2009.