User:Lbattich/Essay on method - drafts & notes

“Today the canon appears less a barricade to storm than a ruin to pick through."

(Foster, 2002, 81)

Introduction

My artistic strategy involves the production of process-led works in different artistic mediums. In broad terms, the main areas addressed through my artistic investigation are our engagement with artistic history and aesthetic experience as affected by the digital technologies we take for granted today.

A particular area of concern in my practice is our relationship with the cultural past, artistic history, and the manner in which digital technologies may influence this relationship. This interest is manifest in practices of quotation, re-appropriation and citation of past cultural works, mainly taken from the institutional canon of Western art.

This investigation includes a consideration in how canonical narratives are constructed (to elaborate on these themes, see again Harold Bloom, The Western Canon, and The Anxiety of Influence), and the institutional (though not always institutional) apparatus that exerts its authority for these effects.

This area of interest has led me to work on authoritative art history books, the use of the proper name within the art circuit – which has the tendency of framing the artist’s identity into a contralized, unified and institutionalized subjectivity.

Side note: On the argument that the use of proper names within the artworld has a non-transparent agenda, see Andrea Fraser ('In and Out of Place' 1985):
"The conventional organization of art practices around a signature – everything which allows a work of art to be identified as a "Pollock" or a "Warhol," etc. – institutes the proper name as interior to the art object; thus, artists are locked in a structure of institutionalized subjectivity. And the institutional exhibition of proper names, designating the authors and owners of objects, defines that subjectivity in terms of consumption and ownership."

In my works, I aim to retain a tension between aesthetic quality and criticality, or between poetic suggestion and criticism. For this reason, I should emphasise that my works are not conceived as militant criticism on the issues investigated (being the institutional and canonical status of certain art historical narratives, etc), a criticism that would strive to reach conclusions – but rather the works are conceived as specific interventions to highlight tensions and complexities to develop a further dialogue.

A brief sketch of my background for current practice

For the purpose of clarifying my current position, it will be useful to mention several works and interests developed in previous years.

The practices of what is now called conceptual writing have been central to my artistic development since 2011, although I arrived to these issues not from practitioned such as Kenneth Goldsmith, but from considering the history of conceptual art, and particularly the instruction-based works of Yoko Ono, and the language works of Joseph Kosuth, John Baldessari and others, as well as the Oulipo literary movement.

The artist book μῆνιν (Menin, Ancient Greek for anger, wrath) was produced in 2012 with this artistic and cultural background in mind. μῆνιν is a book where the first word of Homer’s Iliad is repeated throughout the whole length of the poem, which is originally composed of 15,693 lines. The use of the Ancient Greek word for anger/wrath is not meant to be explicitly negative or judgemental toward Homer and the canon. The work does not express this wrath, merely appropriates the word. The point for me is to linger in this word, the very first word of the whole of Western literature, by creating a systematic exposition. At the same time, I find it interesting that we know next to nothing on the author or authors of the first work in the literary tradition in Western culture, and that subsequently this culture would develop an almost obsessive cult on the individual creative originator.

On appropriation and “uncreative” practices

Some early conceptual art practitioners felt that their art, being 'dematerialized', would escape the usual restrains of the art market. This proved misguided. (See, for instance, Lippard, 1973) Conceptual artists, within a mere three to five years, were as 'marketable' as artists working on the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture. Documentation and sketches took over the place of 'dematerilized' artworks, and the aura of the artists (as brand) replaced the aura proper to the physical presence of the artwork. Several early appropriation artists (during the early 1980s) claimed that they were challenging "ideas of competence, originality, authorship and property." (Barbara Kruger, quoted in Foster, 1996) While they certainly challenged some strands of traditional thought on those ideas, at the end this also proved misguided to a degree. They became (and always were) subsumed by the powers granted by the 'originality' they set to challenge. Notions of the original, authorship and propriety, in this case were shifted from a skill-based craft, to an intellectual-based practice, but they changed little otherwise.

(More on this reading of the Pictures Generation as asserting authorship rather than suvberting it, see Crimp 1982, and Harrison, 2010)

Similarly, 'uncreative' and 'conceptual' writing during recent years, is meant to do away with traditional ideas of originality, creativity and authorship. And it is doing a great job at that. But at the same time it repeats the cynical reasoning of early appropriative art. Not surprisingly, given that 'uncreative writing' is basically a form of appropriating, less in the manner of quotations and citations, and rather in the manner of appropriative art of the Pictures Generation. It shifts long held problems in the visual arts to literature. The author is not so much the one that 'writes' the words ex nihilo, so to speak, but one that appropriates them and arranges them in different configurations following a certain plan or logic. And yet, for all that, authorship here is no diminished. As in the previous shift from objects to ideas in the artworld, this notion of authorship just makes a move from the words-as-objects to the creative authority of the author's plan or logic for the work. This fact is made evident in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing (2005), which appropriates and builds upon Sol LeWitt’s 1967 influential text on conceptual art. To say that Kenneth Goldsmith’s works are subverting the concept of authorship means to dangerously ignore the developments of art (and literature) during modernism, and especially in the second half of the twentieth century.

What my practice is not about – or how does authorship fit into my practice:

Although I am highly interested in the concept of authorship, most of my works do not attempt to address this directly, or at least it is not my intention to subvert of challenge traditional notions of authorship – in the footsteps of the Picture Generation artists. Regarding authorship, in my work I want to draw attention to the fact that that authorship is nevertheless present even in acts of appropriation. In signing my works I do not aim to reclaim the appropriated texts and images as my own, or to question the (authorial) authority of the original material, but rather, in the manner of contemporary conceptual writing, and paraphrasing Joseph Kosuth, the source material is rearranged or transformed – however slightly – into a new text or paragraph, as Kosuth puts it, and it’s that paragraph I claim authorship of. (Kosuth)

These issues may show that it is not entirely correct for me to easily situate my work within the discourse of appropriation art – especially if we consider appropriation art in the wake of the Picture Generation artists. Although much of my practice concentrates on this, it would be best to say that my work utilizes appropriative tropes for its own ends. And these ends vary from work to work and project to project.

My works, in their attempt to use citation and quotation – terms which I prefer to ‘appropriation’ – serve as well as homages to the source texts, images and cultural objects. In this sense, they are tinged with nostalgia. Most of my works that utilize appropriative means are not primarily designed to subvert the source objects, but to present them in a different context, or utilize their aura as content for different aims, which includes treating the material in a metaphorical sense. This use of appropriation remains in stark contrast to other historical uses associated with appropriation, especially to the notion of détournement employed by the Situationist International, which refers to the practice of reusing ‘preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble.’ For the Situationists détournement implies a devaluation of the appropriated material.(Debord et al, 1959)

Rather than devaluation or subversion, my works attempt a recontextualisation, perhaps more in the manner of homages.

Retrograde Chapbooks:

Retrograde Chapbooks, for instance, proposes a literal “going-back” movement to the power of early avant-garde manifestoes. The intention here is neither to criticise the original texts, nor to question their authorship, but rather to present a concept or desire by means of a metaphor. The resulting altered manifestoes are presented as metaphors for a nostalgic desire.

Some descriptions of recent works:

Retrograde:

In Arnold Schoenberg’s 12-tone system, retrograde refers to the operation of time-reversing the tones in a musical series, while maintaining the original pitches and rhythms on the sequence. As a literary counterpart to Schoenberg’s retrogression technique, the Retrograde Chapbooks present existing texts from the history of modernism and the avant-garde, where all sentences have been re-arranged in the inverse order. The immediate meaning and readability of each sentence is maintained, but the overall sense is displaced within the text as a whole.

Retrograde Chapbooks aims to celebrate the original texts, while at the same time proposes to inquiry into the supposed linearity of historical development in culture, by performing an all too literal “going back” movement to modernist paradigms.

Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside

This web-based work is inspired by internet culture production of image-macros with quotations, and specially by the practice of "troll quotes," which misattribute all 3 elements of the image (photograph, quotation and author). On each click by the user, this work generates a new quotation image-macro by random association among these 3 elements.

The title of the work is taken from a sentence by Walter Benjamin.

According to Know Your Meme site:

"Troll quotes are image macros that feature a quote from a popular movie or TV show and attribute the quote to a character in another popular movie or TV show. Often the background image will come from a third unrelated pop culture source. These images are created in order to annoy or troll members of all the involved fandoms who will quickly identify the obviously incorrect attribution."

Vanities 1611 edition

The text is a rendering of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1 from the King James Bible 1611 edition into binary. The encoded binary text contains the original 1611 version, including its antiquated spelling, verse numbers and line breaks. I have singled out one word from the text and preserved it in its original form, as the concept of vanity stood out in my interpretation of Ecclesiastes. Binary encoding makes everything flat and equal, as the machine does not discriminate between information, and the content that this information carries. I wanted to suggest that there may be concepts that cannot be completely flattened. My interest is to look at the contrast between the language of digital information (a meta-text for machines to communicate with each other) and a text that is concerned with existential questions of human beings, and to address the tensions created in between these two texts.

Working notes, embrionic drafts and other rubble

include cul-de-sac and blind alleys: came, saw and (not) conquered.

Chromophobia: on the tension between approaches to colour: colour anarchy and the desire to control and rid of colour...

A short history of my practice?

Meaning:

(romantic) abstract photographs
web-based and film-works on the topic of digital colour (RGB, colour glitch, etc)
repurposing of texts: books that present poems in binary form, images in hax code, re-purposing of modern manifestoes, etc.
etc
etc
...

Romantic Conceptualism. (? do not quite like the idea of identifying my work in these terms, yet it might need to be mentioned)

Bibliography

Batchelor, D. (2000) Chromophobia. London: Reaktion Books.

Debord, G. et al (1959) ‘Détournement as Negation and Prelude’, in Knabb, K. (ed.) (2006) Situationist International Anthology. 2nd ed. Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets.

Crimp, D. (1982) 'Appropriating Appropriation', in Evans, D. (ed.) (2009) Appropriation. Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 189-193.

Goldsmith, K. (2011) Uncreative Writing : Managing Language in The Digital Age, New York: Columbia University Press.

Goldsmith, K. (2005) ‘Sentences on Conceptual Writing’. Available: http://www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol_goldsmith.html. Accessed 3 June 2015.

Harrison, N. (2010) 'The Pictures Generation, the Copyright Act of 1976, and the Reassertion of Authorship in Postmodernity', Art & Education. Available: http://www.artandeducation.net/paper/the-pictures-generation-the-copyright-act-of-1976-and-the-reassertion-of-authorship-in-postmodernity/. Accessed 3 June 2015.

Lippard, L. R. (1973) Six Years: The Dematerialization of The Art Object From 1966 to 1972. New York: Praeger. 1973.

Foster, H. (1996) The Return of the Real. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Foster, H. (2002) ‘Archives of Modern Art’. October, Vol. 99, Winter. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.