User:Lbattich/(Im)Possible Project Proposals

Overview of interests / areas of research

Contemporary practices of appropriation in relation to cultural nostalgia

• The appropriative impulse: questions in appropriative art other than authorial critique.
• Contemporary nostalgia (facilitated by the rise of what sociologist Manuel Castells has termed the information society, and the mileu generated by digitalization and network culture, which have had a major impact on the approach to strategies of artistic appropriation.)
• Contemporary practices of appropriation in relation to cultural nostalgia

other ideas

• Colour: approached to digital colour, and the tension between digital language and real sensations...

• The role of proper names in art:

Practical: Replace the proper names of artists in art historical discourse, with empty spaces, with my name ("I am all the names in history" -Nietzsche), with my name, or names of people that have nothing to do with art. Mix up all the existing names randomly.

• Look more into contemporary Romanticism, esp. Conceptual romantic practices (meta-modernism, etc. though some of these are curatorial strategic labels: "Romantic Conceptualism" (Jörg Heiser) wraps together several diverse and different practices with a complex history...)

AND MANY MORE IDEAS!!!!!

The Marsenne Prime Book Series

A publication (or several) that presents the current largest prime number discovered. This number has 17,425,170 digits (equivalent to a 17MB plain text file). Yay!

(some more info here. Beware researchers predict a new prime number will be discovered by the end of 2015!)

Consider too:

• other large numbers
• Pi book: a book containing the first, say, 1 millon digits of pi.

COLOUR and abstraction in artist's cinema

Colour: approached to digital colour, and the tension between digital language and real sensations...

Appropriating Broothaers:

• The Third Conquest of Space: Atlas for the use of Curators, Art Administrators and the Military

Book, open edition. Description: The book features the geographical/political shape of nations, arranged in alphabetical order. The 4th page of the books states: "In honour of Marcel Broodthaers, Belgian."

• Art Conversations with Animals

A line of different "products", released in the shape of audio recordnings (digital and CD releases), films, and text (booklets). The works under this collection line feature conversations about art with dead animals, live animals, digital 'animals' (virtual animals, images of animals with meme status over the internet, such as cats, etc), as well as recordings of the teaching of art history to animals.

AND MORE: OTHER STUFF I'M SOOO INTO:

• make homages to unreal artists

Project Proposal I: Appropriation

The question of appropriation in art and of plagarism is usually framed through a discourse on authorship. In this project, however, my aim will be to explore the manner in which appropriation can operate as a symptom of cultural nostalgia. My investigation thus is not concerned directly with the question of "who is the author", and similar questions on copyright. These discourse are usually centred on the subject, (the author), even if subjecthood and indentity is blurred and brought into critique. My investigation is not concerned so much with the individual producer, but with the cultural undercurrents that motivate practices of appropriation.

The first part o the project would be to provide a historical background, considering various practices of appropriation art. The study would concentrate from the 1960s onwards, where practices of appropriation was developed as a particular artistic strategy of its own. This strategy peaked in the late 1980s, in the works of artists such as Sherry Levine and other associated with the 'Picture Generation.'

With the hindsight of historical distance, my approach to this practices is not concerned so much with the physical proprieties of appropriated artwork (the fact that appropriative works “look alike” the original material), but rather with the shift from the sensory qualities of a work of art to the conceptual register, and the specific agenda behind each artwork. The project is informed by the position that in appropriative art of the 20th century, the modern notion of authorship was challenged, but not subverted.

This critical reading of the history of appropriation art in the second half of the 20th century provides a platform to consider contemporary practices of appropriation. The main part of the research project are centred in this area.

In the majority of research and practice in appropriation art, the emphasis is still laid on questions of authorship or representation (and increasingly on issues of copyright and legal question on copies and plagiarism). How can we conceptualize contemporary practices of appropriation under a framework other than such authorial discourse?

Most studies on appropriation as art rely on a theory of representation. The research project would concentrate on contemporary practices of appropriation in relation to cultural nostalgia.

The conceptual framework would also be developed in conjunction with case studies. These would include, among other potential cases, the analysis of certain trends in what has been called 'conceptual writing', and more precisely 'uncreative writing' – with Kenneth Goldsmith being the central spokesperson of this practice – and certainly its most famous practitioner. Whereas during the 1980s appropriation aimed to a critique of conventional notions of authorship and other modernist dogmas, contemporary practices of appropriation can take a variety of forms, some less critical than others. Thus many projects involving appropriation take the shape of homages, or are motivated by a nostalgic impulse to connect to modernism, rather than a critical impulse. My practice would propose to address this shift: from critical appropriation to nostalgic reprisal.

Project proposal IV.05: The proper name and Gilles deleuze: towards a non-representational view of the proper name

This project in concerned with critically examining the concept of the proper name as it is developed through the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, addressing this development, or rather trajectory, in particular texts from different periods, Nietzsche and Philosophy, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?. The project will be concerned in elucidating a Deleuzian perspective on the theory of the signature and the proper name, in close relation to the work on authorship by thinkers as Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, commonly associated with the 1960s discourse of the ‘death of the author’. This discourse generally hinges on the trope of the author’s intention and its relevancy (or lack thereof). I will seek to examine the role of the proper name beyond the question of intentionality, and rather as a mediator in-between the physical person and its subjectivity, the author-function exercised by it, and the text or artwork where this function is manifest.

The philosophical position of Gilles Deleuze (and Feliz Guattari) provides a platform to approach this question. On one hand Deleuze provides the theoretical tools to examine the construction of identity through the encounters of underlying forces. On the other hand Deleuze's own remarks apropos the proper name point to a theory based not on representation, but rather on 'effects.' The project will propose that, following Deleuze’s analyses, the proper name conveys an act of depersonalization, opening up different multiplicities that pervade the named author, and are only actualized depending on the conditions of the reader. How can Deleuze’s position assist in both elucidating and problematizing what the role of the proper name is in our relationship to a body of work or a set of concepts, as readers and authors, and how authorial subjectivities are constructed by the use of proper names?