Intermedia Spring 06

Class Notes: 4/25 and 4/27

2006-04-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

We did not meet formally as a class in favor of attending the candidates' presentation for the Intermedia Arts position and discussing their work afterwards.

Please bring work-in-progress on Tuesday as well as a list of the equipment you will need for the end-of-semester show.

Class Note: 4/20/06

2006-04-20T10:04:00.000-07:00

Today was a workday.

Next week, are a number of candidates coming in to interview for a new position in C&P in Intermedia Arts. Some of them have public lectures that are scheduled during our class, and I would like for you all to attend them. This way, you can give me your feedback to take to the committee.

So, we will be meeting on Tuesday to hear Antonio Martinez's presentation and on Thursday to hear Andy Cox's presentation. Both presentations will be held in the Dean's Conference Room (room 1032)

Class Notes: 4/18/06

2006-04-20T10:02:00.000-07:00

We watched a video about Fred Wilson today and continued the discussion about the museum and the practice of institutional critique.

Project 2 proposals were due as well.

Class Notes: 4/13/06

2006-04-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

Today we discussed initial ideas for the final project. We also went to the museum to see the School of Art and Design Ricker-Ziebolt award winners. This prompted a lengthy discussion about participation in the museum.

For Tuesday, I need a 1-page proposal for your final project.

Class Notes: 4/6/06

2006-04-11T06:20:00.000-07:00

We had a critique in class on the soundstage but did not get through everyone's work. We'll be continuing the crit on Tuesday in the classroom.

Class Notes: 4/4/06

2006-04-04T15:52:00.000-07:00

We met and discussed how the projects were progressing, including technical trouble-shooting. We will be meeting on the Soundstage on Thursday for critique.

Class Notes: 3/30/06

2006-04-03T21:00:00.000-07:00

Today was a work day. We checked in on presentation strategies and reminded students about the upcoming PPP show, organized by Chris Wildrick.

Class Notes: 3/23/06

2006-03-28T07:39:00.000-08:00

Discuss projects individually/workday.

Class Notes: 3/21/06

2006-03-21T15:39:00.000-08:00

1) announcements
2) go-around on project ideas and hand in proposals
3) demonstration on pro video camera--Mark Stoffel @10:30 AM
4) demonstration of Sony TRV cameras and C&P equipment check-out procedures @11:15 AM with Chris Parr
5) workshop project ideas

Class Notes: 3/7/06

2006-03-07T17:09:00.000-08:00

We had a question/answer session with Trevor Paglen at the Long Branch today. We also discussed "The Author as Producer."

Trevor's presentation (mandatory on the syllabu) is at 5 pm in Lawson 101.

No class on Thursday--professor at a conference, and we've been doing tons out of class, anyway.

Notes on Benjamin's Author as Producer

2006-03-07T17:08:00.000-08:00

In this 1934 essay, Benjamin argues that radical artists cannot only articulate a progressive vision in the content of their work but that they also must become technical and stylistic innovators to fundamentally remake the forms of their work and the conditions under which it is produced. While he refers primarily to writers, these ideas have implication for all art forms, and though he is writing at a time of Nazism in Europe, there are pieces of his ideas that can be applied more broadly. He calls for cultural workers to come to truly understand their position as just that--workers under capitalism--and to use their work not only to articulate oppositional 'content' but to actually pay attention to how that work is positioned within that condition: who sees it and where, how it is made, and how it functions socially.

Early in the essay, Benjamin calls for a shifting of attention away from what a work of art is 'about' topically and toward an analysis of both how it functions socially and the position of the artist in that process. "This question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time," or it inserts the political art project back into the mainstream of art and also allows political questions to be asked of conventional art. He is quite critical of artists who have only remade the subject matter of the work of art to reflect their idealism while leaving the implicit ideas about the position of the artist and the way that art functions untouched. "a political tendency, however revolutionary it may seems, has a counterrevolutionary function as the writer feels his solidarity with the proletariat only in his attidues, not as a producer." He is particularly sharp toward leftist intellectuals, whom he sees as "at best a social group," not a class and certainly not one of true solidarity with the working classes. This is a very anti-vanguardist position he is arguing--that the intellectual (and I would add artist) cannot be identified as outside or leading social change but must be understood within the process of cultural and economic production.

Benjamin asserts strongly that it is not enough for an artist to be "politically correct," he or she must also have 'quality.' He defines quality in a particular way--an expansion of existing forms and invention of new ones in order to "channel the...energies of the present." This kind of innovation is not driven simply by the desire to 'think different' (to borrow from Apple's old slogan reminiscent of the isolation of traditional avant-gardes) but by a deeply felt desire to respond to and change the world. He believes that traditional forms of art have fixed ideas of an artist/writer and public, and he calls on forms that democratize this process, or an art form that "revises the distinction between author and reader" and allow every reader to become a potential collaborator.

Benjamin provides examples of artistic work he feels is concerned with the "mere supplying of a productive apparatus [versus] its transformation." He accuses realist photography of presenting always a beautiful image, or of "transforming even abject poverty into an object of enjoyment." By contrast, he presents Brecht's theater as a radical art form that strives to "eliminate the antithesis firstly between performers and listeners and secondly between technique and content." What the artwork is--its form--is indistinguishable from what it is about--its content. Moreover, this kind of artist "will never merely work on products but always, at the same time, on the means of production." He calls for artists to become 'engineers' who make work that has a useful life as "an organizing function," or a way of foreshadowing and even bringing about the kind of positive, liberatory change that the artist/engineer wants to see. He believes that this work has a necessarily educational function, "which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producrs--that is, readers or spectators into collaborators." By this method, everyday life is transformed and the existing order is challenged through cultural work.

Class Notes: 3/2/06

2006-03-02T10:39:00.000-08:00

1. Importance of doing the reading--not doing the reading is just not acceptable and will be reflected in your grade.
2. Student paper presentations
3. Expectations for Tuesday--Trevor Paglen's visit
a. reading notes, which are always expected
b. two statements/two questions about the Benjamin reading
c. review his website thoroughly
d. come up with two statements and two questions about his work.

Class Notes: 2/28/06

2006-02-28T11:51:00.000-08:00

Outline:
1) Announcements
2) Presentation on contemporary artists whose work blurs art and life---use as a way to cover what was in the Kaprow and Wodizcko readings
3) Art/Life experiments
a. half the class goes to the student center and approaches passers-by to do a lee walton-style "Life/Theater Project" for 15 minutes.

1. Announcements:
March 9 class cancelled--no sub
Caponigro lecture and workshop

2. Lecture on the Blurring of Art and Life

Lee Walton "The Life/Theater Project"
On May 14th on the sidewalk of Rivington Street in the Lower East Side (NY), Lee Walton gathered a large crowd of spectators to experience his latest project entitled "The Life/Theater Project".

When the spectators were ready and the time was approaching 6:15 p.m., Walton made the following announcement to the group.

"Look around you in all directions. From 6:15 to 6:30, some of what you will see is "real" and some of it has been "orchestrated". After the 15 minutes have elapsed, those who were "acting" and taking part in the project will come back and reveal themselves...it is now 6:15- please enjoy the show."

From 6:15 to 6:30, the spectators watched as the daily activities of the Lower East Side took place in front of them. Slowly the minutes passed as each spectator scrutinized each pedestrian and passer-by. Before long the group became anxious and could not distinguish the "real" people from the "fake".

After about seven minutes, the spectators began applauding each person that passed by.

Progressively, as each person and minute passed, the entire scene became theatrical. The spectators were cheering for each person that graced the scene. At a certain point, many of the pedestrians, unsure of why they were being cheered, reacted to the crowd by waving or giving a thumbs up- some of them avoided walking down the street all together. At one point, a clown dressed in blue with a big red nose rode by on his bicycle- the crowd erupted with cheering and laughter.

After the 15 minutes had elapsed, the "actors" came back to join the crowd and reveal themselves. They were applauded for the show.

There were over 20 actors that particpated in the project and the clown with the red nose was not one of them.

Lee Walton--"Changing Things" 2005

Marisa Olson "American Idol Audition" 2004

Marc Horowitz, "Coffee In the Park" 2004
For Coffee in the Park, I daisy-chain 1300 ft of safety orange extension cord and string it from my kitchen to the eastern end of alamo square park, where I power my Mr. Coffee. The coffee is hot and tasty, but a bit slow to brew due to the electrical resistance. The first saturday, I met some very interesting people and acquired an entire band from all four corners of the park. Imagine that - theme music to making coffee in the park. Initially, I was doing CIP every Saturday, but that got to be a bit much for me, so I will now do it once a month.

Issues of public space--oblique way to approach politics:

Tis' a big shame the cops didn't like the free coffee idea in Berkeley, and shut the operation down. Apparently the city of berkeley has sanctioned several areas in the city to be "free speech" areas. In those areas, after obtaining a permit from the city, you can hand out information, speak aloud, and go about promoting your cause. I could feasibly serve coffee in of these areas, but I would also have to get permission from the FDA for handing out a free beverage. Also these "free speech" areas are fairly removed from the majority of foot traffic and are set-up to preach to choir, so to speak.

Alex Villar "Upward Mobility"
In contrast to the invisible horizontal line drawn by everyday movements in the city, this video shows a person in search of vertical deviations from this norm. Several situations depict attempts to move up in spaces like a bus stop, a telephone booth, a building marquee, cracks on a wall that lead to a window, among others. The character of the actions varies from that of a playful childish game to a teenage prank to a burglar break-in to a protester stunt, that is activities that have in common the pursuit of unusual routes of action.

Alex Villar "Temporary Occupations"
Temporary Occupations depicts a person running on the sidewalk in New York while ignoring the city's spatial codes and therefore resisting their effects upon the organization of everyday experience. The clips in the video register situations of temporary invasion and occupation of private spaces located in a public setting. The action simply articulates the continuity of these spaces with the remaining areas from which they were extricated, drawing attention to, and possibly subverting, the boundaries that demarcate them.

Review artists whose work we have already seen:
-Situationists
-Emily Jacir
-William Pope.L
-rtMark/The Yes Men

Krzysztof Wodiczko
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_62/ai_111655800/pg_5

Homeless Vehicle, 1986

The Border Projection (1988) and Tijuana Projection (2001)
"The Border Projection (1988) was a two-part still projection that took place on consecutive evenings on San Diego's Museum of Man and the Centro Cultural in Tijuana. Situated on either side of the United States-Mexico border, the project explored colonialism, borders, and illegal aliens. The Centro Cultural was designed by Manuel Rosen in 1982 to celebrate Mexican cultural heritage. I projected on the building's domed theater the image of a man with his hands clasped behind his head--the position taken during an arrest and search. For the Tijuana Projection (2001) I used both instruments and video projection. Young women who endure terrible conditions in the maquiladoras, the region's factories, participated in a yearlong process to animate--to become--this historical building. At the same time, they forced the building to become them. They appropriated the symbolic authority, as well as the physiognomy of the architecture. Their faces filled the entire elevation of the domed building. They engaged in a highly mediated fearless speech where they were simultaneously responding to their own projections through the instruments they used to project their faces and voices on the dome.

Of course, the media understood that the women who were speaking were not those who are normally heard in public space. This architectural landmark suddenly became human. Regardless of how critical we may choose to be, we have a psychological affair with these civic structures. We invest our hopes and desires. Buildings are conceived to have this effect. The Centro Cultural, in particular, brought modernity to Tijuana. But most progress is the consequence of a catastrophe. And the women who animated the building during the Tijuana Projection have witnessed firsthand the catastrophe of progress and modern industry."
(From interview with Patricia Phillips, Art Journal, 2003)

Mouthpiece (1996)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_n10_v84/ai_18749060
Mouthpiece is still in the initial phase of development. The prototype monitor encircles the jaw and mouth of the operator, playing a prerecorded and edited speech. The device literally acts as a mouthpiece by replacing the operator's actual speech with a moving image of the lips and the sound of the voice. Wodiczko hopes to enable the wearer to activate and select the prerecorded speeches through voice commands.

If Mouthpiece creates an objectively alien experience for both wearer and viewer, The Alien Staff offers a poignantly human encounter. It raises significant issues for our society while providing a public art performance that empowers and informs its participants and audience, a particularly challenging project for current political art.

Alien Staff (ongoing)
The Alien Staff is a portable form of public-address equipment and cultural network for individuals and groups of immigrants. It is an instrument that gives the singular operator-immigrant a chance to "address" directly anyone in the city who may be attracted by the symbolic form of the equipment, by the character of the "broadcast" program, and by the live presence and performance of its owner.

The Alien Staff resembles the biblical shepherd's rod. It is equipped with a mini video monitor, and loudspeaker. A laptop computer, field sensing circuitry, and batteries are are located in a specially designed shoulder bag. The small size of the monitor, its eye-level location and its closeness to the operator's face are important aspects of the design. Since the small image on the screen may attract attention and provoke observers to come very close to the monitor and therefore to the operator's face, the usual distance between the immigrant, the stranger, will decrease. Upon closer examination, it will become clear that the image on the face of the screen and the actual face of the person are of the same immigrant. The double presence in "media" and "life" invites a new perception of a stranger as "imagined" (a character on the screen) of as "experienced" (an actor off-stage---a real life person). Since both the imagination and the experience of the view are increasing with the decreasing distance, while the program itself reveals unexpected aspects of the alien's experience, his or her presence become both legitimate and real. This change in distance and perception might provide the ground for greater respect and self-respect, and become an inspiration for crossing the boundary between a stranger and a non-stranger. (from Wodiczko's website)

Aegis (ongoing)

The Ægis was the cloak of Athena, bearing a Gorgon's head, that she used to protect herself and others. The instrument is a piece of equipment designed to represent dual (and often dueling) truths, those living contradictions that both define, depict, and can sometimes destroy individual existence.

The Ægis is composed of of two wing-like screens enclosed in a backpack hanging from the shoulders of it's wearer. When the wearer is ready to deploy the equipment, the screens will unfold in response to physical or verbal commands and simultaneously play prerecorded video and sound images of the wearers face driven by a concealed laptop computer.

The truth (a-letheia: that which is not to be forgotten; rescued from lethe, Oblivion) demands an ethics of "response-ability" that can withstand even the threat of being silenced. Revealing the complex truth of experience requires showing the contradictions-that between authenticity and assimilation, or between liberation of oneself and being bound to or for another. For example, an adequate answer to the seemingly simple and well-meaning, but deeply insulting "Where are you from?" can only be given in the form of a dialogue between two concurrently present images, and can never be achieved without revealing ones own contradictions. Perplexity can only be met with complexity. The containers of these contradictory images require an opener; and in the process of disclosure, opening up-whether through physical effort on the part of the messenger, a mechanical device, or, best of all a sensor that responds to a verbal cue-is the heart of the Ægis. (from Wodiczko's website)

3) Break into two groups
Group 1 creates a “Life/Theater” project
Recruit volunteers to be the ‘actors’
Specify what they will do and where
Perform for the class group--10 min
Group 2 creates a “Making Changes” project
Change the environment in subtle ways
Lead the group on a silent tour of the area (and possibly others) in which the changes were made
Reconvene at south entrance to the building at 11:30

Wodiczko Links:
http://web.mit.edu/idg
http://art-history.concordia.ca/eea/artists/wodiczko.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_62/ai_111655800/pg_5

Notes on Kaprow

2006-02-28T11:50:00.000-08:00

In "Education of the Un-Artist" parts one and two, Allan Kaprow, the person who popularized Happenings in the 1950s and early 60s, calls for artists to go much further than then-contemporary (late 60s/early 70s) "anti-art" or "non-art" gestures that we can now read as early forms of postmodernism, site-specificity, and post studio practice. Instead, he advocates for artists to give up thinking about their work in light of that privileged category altogether and to unart themselves. In many ways, his call echoes earlier avant-gardes' calls for bringing the art world down a peg or two and engaging more directly in the world (Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, Situationism, et al), but he goes father by calling for the abolition of art as any kind of definition for the activities that are made by people formerly known as artists. The activities he proposes in art's place he terms "intermedia" (after Dick Higgins), and his definition emphasizes playfulness and enjoyment as a creative, expressive, pedagogical, and political act. Part one closes with a classic, though tongue in cheek, call to arms, "Artists of the world, drop out! You have nothing to lost but your professions" (109), echoing, of course, the traditional call for working-class solidarity.

Kaprow begins this pair of essays by claiming that the world outside of art is not only much more interesting than art but also much better art than art itself. He critiques 60s art trends of 'nonart' and 'anti-art' as colonizing the everyday. He defines nonartists as people "who consistently, or at one time or other, have chosen to operate outside the pale of art establishmes--that is, in their heads or in the daily or natural domain...but sooner or later most of them and their colleagues throughout the world have seen their work absorbed into the cultural institutions against which they initially measured their liberation" (98-99). He defines "anti-artists" as artists, like the Dadaists, who willfully and often violently inserted 'non-art' materials into art contexts in order to question or confront the precepts of art. This practice is now appropriated as well, since "antiart in 1969 is embraced in every case as proart, and therefore, from the standpoint of one of its chief functions, it is nullified" (100). Art is simply whatever the vast machinery of museums, galleries, curators, dealers, critics, buyers, and artists say it is. It becomes "Art art," or a discipline that "maintains for its exclusive use certain sacred settings and formats handed down by this tradition: exhibitions, books, recordings, concerts, arenas, shrines, civic monuments, stages, film screenings, and the "culture" columns of the mass media. These grant accreditation the way universities grant degrees" (101).

This great apparatus of professionalization that absorbs radical art gestures also prevents artists from playing "renegade with the profession of art itself," which Kaprow thinks they most certainly should do (101). The autonomy of the work and world of art is its own greatest enemy because ithas become indifferent to "the ritual escape from Culture" and offers this space of play in only the most cosmetic way (102). In other words, the incursions of art into life make art look a lot less interesting than life.

Therefore, Kaprow calls for artists to remake themselves, first, and fleetingly as nonartists and then, more permanently as unartists who will use humor and play to reinvigorate themselves and society. "When art is only one of several possible functions a situation may have, it loses its priveleged staus and becomes, so to speak, a lowercase attribute...[Intermedia emphasizes] context rather than category. Flow rather than work of art" (105).

Kaprow develops these ideas at greater length in part 2, where he discusses the new role of the unartist as being surprisingly like that of the old-fashioned artist: mimesis. Rather than reproducing the appearance of the world, however, the unartist is called to "imitate life as before. Jump right in. Show others how" (110). The activities of art-trained un-artists "parallels aspects of culture and reality as a whole" (111). Therefore, as desire to engage directly with the culture means to intervene in it, to change it somehow. "The feeling that one is part of the world would be quite an accomplishment in itself, but there's an added payoff: the feedback loop is never exact. As I have said, something new comes out in the process--knowledge, well-being, surprise, or, as in the case of bionics, useful technology" (112). Or, as Kaprow goes on to discuss as length, play.

Play is, for Kaprow, a powerfuly transgressive act, one that cuts against the most sacredly held traditions of Euro-American culture. In this culture, people work at having fun, and games are used as much for prestige and power as for enjoyment. He calls on the unartist "first to learn, then to celebrate, the idea of play--but play as inherently worthwhile, play stripped of game theory, that is, of winners and losers" (121). He sees this as an essential social function, even a pedagogical one far more efficacious than the traditionally difficult to find utility of 'art.' "Only when active artists willingly cease to be artists can they conver their abilities, like dollars into yen, into something the world can spend: play. Play as currency. We can best learn to play by example, and un-artists can provide it. In thir new job as educators, they need simply play as they once did under the banner of art, but among those who do not care about that. Gradually, the pedigree "art" will recede into irrelevance" (125).

Notes on Debord

2006-02-23T11:02:00.000-08:00

Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (originally published 1967), like Horkheimer and Adorno's "Culture Industy," identified alienated consumption as a central cause of mid-century Euro-American malaise and an actual form of oppression. Debord went beyond the Frankfurt School critique to describe a way social and emotional being based on the casual consumption of visual commodities (or the commodification of vision), which transformed individual subjectivity and the life-world in ways more profound than the dumbing propaganda produced by the Culture Industry. Debord also develops ways to combat the society of the spectacle in the cultural arena through 'detournement,' plagiarism, and the liberation of desire. In many ways, he prefigures postmodern ideas about the simulacrum, loss of authenticity, and superficiality as well as more recent theorists (Deleuze & Guattari, Antonio Negri) who locate opposition in the liberation of collective desire.

"The Commodity as Spectacle"
Debord begins by describing how his idea about the spectacle--a world that is meant to be passively watched and consumed, not participated or intervened in or felt too deeply-- came about as an extension of the Marxist idea of the commodity, or the product of labor that because 'dead' and abstract, alienated from its producer so as to be exchangeable. Debord believes that the entire economy, even the whole of society, becomes this sort of dead, abstract, alienated thing--the spectacle--under conditions of super-abundance because the infinite supply of commodities completely colonizes social and personal life. Instead of having relations with one another, people have relationships with commodities, until the whole of the social world becomes commodified. This is the condition he describes as the "Society of the Spectacle" (SOS), in which "the totality of the commodity world is visible in one piece, as the general equivalent of whatever society as a whole can be and do" (33).

As for conditions for regular working people under the SOS, Debord sees them as nothing more than 'gilded poverty.' Every part of life is commodified so that, even though there is not the same level of lack of goods as present in earlier times, there is no authentic experience, either, and instead of material and spiritual abundance, people experience mere "augmented survival" (28). Debord also seemed to anticipate the rise of the service sector to be "supply lines of the army responsible for distributing and hyping the commodities of the moment" (31). He locates real liberation in the creation of conditions in which "consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness" will produce new subjectivities which can possess "every aspect of their activity" (34).

"Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Sphere"
Debord begins by sketching out what is by now a familiar narrative about the cultural arena's increasing autonomy brought about by the secularization/modernization of society. He adds that this increasing autonomy was also "the revelation of culture's insufficiency,...a march toward culture's self-abolition" because the cultural sphere was completely unable to either transcend the traumas of modernization/the SOS or to rectify them (131). Instead, it became another commodity, or "a dead thing to be contemplated in the spectacle" (132). In rather avant-garde tones (though elsewhere Debord is very scornful of the avant-garde project) he calls on culture to make itself relevant once more by "embodying both an unmediated activity and a language commensurate with it. The point is to take effective possession of the community of dialogue, and the playful relationship to time, which the works of the poets and artists heretofore merely represented" (133). In other words, he wants art to become rather than to depict.

Debord continues by analyzing mid-century art and museum culture in terms of the spectacle which will be fairly familiar by now. He recounts how culture became a prized commodity of the SOS while the knowledge and creative industries became key parts of the economy. He includes much of academic work in this critique: "modern sociology undertakes a spectacular critique of the spectacle, studying separation with the sole aid of separation's own conceptual and material tools" (138) and "structures are the progeny of the power that is in place. Structuralism is a thought underwritten by the State, a thought that conceives of the present conditions of spectacular "communication" as an absolute" (142). He admits that his concepts about the SOS are equally embedded in SOS conditions but believes that any real analysis must be part and parcel with "the practical movement of negation within society," or that analysis is worthless without practical creative and political action (143).

The practical creative and political action that Debord centers around the concept of 'diversion' (or detournement): "the reversal of established relationships between concepts and...the attainments of earlier critical efforts" (144). This strategy of reversal or turning the culture on itself was, for Debord, the only way of breaking through and resisting the Society of the Spectacle. "The device of detournement restores all their subversive qualities to past critical judgements that have congealed into respectable truths--or, in other words, that have been transformed into lies" (145). This pranksterish approach bears many similarities with Dada, but with more directed ends in mind. Debord's cultural politics also calls for plagiarism (in one of his most famous quotations): "Ideas improve. The meaning of wrods has a part in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it. Staying close to ano author's phrasing, plagiarism exploits his expressions, erases false ideas, replacing them with correct ideas" (145). Plagiarism and detournement are closely related--detournement requires intelligent plagiarism.

In the end, Debord makes claims for the significance of cultural struggle, saying that real "negation [of the Spectacle] can no longer remain cultural" but transgresses into everyday life (146). He calls for a life-world of cultural opposition that moves beyond discrete artworks and toward a "unified theoretical critique that ggoes alone to its rendezvous with a unified social practice. (147).

http://strange.mcmaster.ca/~grockwel/weblog/notes/000707.html
http://www.protevi.com/john/Postmodernity/spectacle.html

Class Notes: 2/23/06

2006-02-23T10:12:00.000-08:00

1) Announcements:
1.BMFF Friday
2. Visiting Artist Monday:Trent Boyson

2) Discussion of Society of the Spectacle

What is the SOS?
How did it come about?
What is the role of culture in the SOS?
How can culture struggle against the SOS?
What is detournement?

How does Debord's ideas related to Horkheimer & Adornos?
How does this related to ideas of postmodernism?

3) Repossessing Popular Culture
What Kipnis is calling for is precisely what Debord is, although more in the present-day: an extension of the postmodern interest in leveling high-low culture to create a genuinely popular oppositional culture--something that is fun and critical

4) Discussion of RTMark based on student's comments brought into class; in light of detournement

5) Other examples of detournement:
-adbusters
-GI Joe PSAs
-bush remixed videos (Bryan Boyce, State of the Union)

6) In-class exercise/hw: detourning advertisements (white out, pens, markers, magazines)

Class Notes: 2/21/06

2006-02-21T10:14:00.000-08:00

Intermedia Art
2/21/06

Outline:
1) Announcements:
2) Return paper topics
3) Discussion of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
4) Quick summary/check-in on "The Culture Industry"
5) Presentation on William Pope L. in relation to questions of culture/reproducibility

1) Announcements:
Jackie Spinner presentation, Wed. 7 pm, Ballroom D
"Listening Room," Wed. 7 pm, COMM 1032
Reading Response #2 due 3/9 to allow for more article choice. This is the last reading response!

2) Paper topics:
Most of them were fine, some need to be revised by Thursday to better indicate what your analytical position/orientation will be and/or to flesh out the bibliography. I still don't have them from some of you. The paper is due March 2 (2 1/2 weeks).

3) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
In this germinal 1936 essay, Benjamin considers how technologies of reproduction have dramatically altered the role of the artwork in society. While he grounds his argument on film, many of these ideas have been very influential in considering many forms of reproducible artwork, including digital media and work that draws from commodity culture.

Content questions:
a. What is "aura"?
b. How does mechanical reproduction affect an artwork's aura?
c. Does Benjamin see this as a positive or negative development? Why?
d. How does film participate in this democratization of art/communication?

Discussion questions:
a. Where in present-day discussions do we see the trace of Benjamin's thought?
b. Many artists since the 1960s (when this was first published in English) have found this article extremely influential, esp. media artists. What do you think is useful about it?
c. Do Benjamin's arguments hold up to the historical record?

4) "The Culture Industry"
This 1944 article is a scathing critique of mass culture. Horkheimer and Adorno see none of the positive potentialities of the form identified by Benjamin but rather concentrate on the mechanisms by which culture is produced as a commodity.

Content questions:
a) What is Mass Culture in this view?
They see mass culture as the willful product of late capitalism that depends on alienated forms of consumption as much as on alienated forms of labor

b) What is its purpose?
To create 'amusements' which lull consumers into a false consciousness of acquiescing to their circumstances; to provide no way of addressing the emptyness of consumer culture except by participating in it

c) What is the role of individuals in the culture industry?

Discussion questions:
a) Relate this argument with what we have read of postmodern theory.
b) How does this totalizing argument about the culture industry reflect or diverge from Foucault's view of power?
c) How might you criticism Horkheimer & Adorno's perspective?
c) Do Horkheimer & Adorno's ideas stand up to the historical record?

5) Presentation on William Pope L.

Contemporary African American artist, selected because he can be read in light of both Benjamin's and Adorno/Horkheimer's views of mass culture. He appropriates from commodity culture in ways that relate to Benjamin's thesis about using new technologies to see oneself as a producer, rather than consumer, of images/representations and making familiar ideas/images that were previously far away. His work may also be a useful position from which to recognize the validity of "The Culture Industry" critique while also questioning parts of its totalizing argument.

How Much is that Nigger in the Window? (1991)

"As Bessire shows, Pope.Us materials--mayonnaise, peanut butter, newsprint, paint, dolls, his own body--are used to unhinge and destabilize ingrained racial categories. In his performance How Much Is That Nigger in the Window (1990-91), the artist transformed his body into an object by spreading mayonnaise all over it. The intent was to become white. However, as the mayonnaise oxidized on his body, it lost its color: Pope.L., while white for a moment, became black (and very shiny). With such materials Pope.L's work resides in consumption, decay, and abjection, all of which serve as metaphors for the ways Americans understand (and literally consume) race and for the marginalization that occurs with racism. Class and capitalist exploitation are also vital to understanding his art. Much of it places race in a conversation with both: bodies are not just raced but classed and commodified. Ultimately, Bessire's essay gives an expansive view of Pope.L's practice, underscoring a shift in the ways in which blackness (and race more generally) figures into the work of an African American artist. He shows that Pope.L is not constructing a neat "black" identity; he is using blackness, and race more generally, as tools for a counternarrative on social and economic marginalization." from "Book Review: William Pope.L: the Friendliest Black Artist in America," African Arts, Summer, 2003 by Steven Nelson

Distributing Martin (ongoing)
http://www.distributingmartin.com/

I originally wanted to make a 10 foot by 30 foot billboard saying "This Is A Painting Of Martin Luther King's Penis From Inside My Father's Vagina," but the various sign companies I approached refused to make it, and my gallery in Harlem could not find a site willing to host it. As a result, I decided the billboard should remain purely conceptual but serve as a matrix for more dispersed activities. So the billboard text was made into thousands of postcards and flyers, rumors were spread, genetic material was inserted into supermarket fruit, and a website was created at http://distributingmartin.com. The goal of the project is to vaporize an encrusted monument called "the great black heroic father" into the wild air of everyday and everybody.
(December 18, 2002 "The Africana QA: Performance Artist William Pope.L
William Pope.L talks about his controversy inspiring performance art."
By Jascha Hoffman)

"Eating the Wall Street Journal" 2000

"Social inequality is addressed more directly in Eating the Wall Street Journal, a work that the artist has reconfigured many times as a performance and as an installation. In 2000, he performed the work at New York's Sculpture Center, sitting on a toilet 10 feet in the air, naked and covered in talcum powder, atop a rickety tower made of two-by-fours. During this performance, Pope.L chewed pages of the stock market's favorite newspaper, slugged gulps of milk and spit out the resulting gray sludge on the audience below. This practice, which the artist links to voodoo shaman rituals, puts him in the position of expressing both the contempt of the "haves" for the "have-nots," as well the disgust that "have-nots" often feel in return. For "eRacism," the toilet-topped tower, sans the performer, is presented as an `installation with surveillance cameras tracking and monitors reporting viewers' reactions. In a post-Enron gesture, the tower itself is now covered in pages of the Wall Street Journal strewn with headlines announcing "Booms" and "New Highs" that are already over. While the multi-media component cannot possibly match the impact of Pope.L's performance, the work still conveys a reversal of hierarchy, with scraps of the newspaper's all-important stock reports now appearing as a poor man's toilet paper."
("The art of public disturbance: William Pope.L consistently provokes visceral responses from viewers, especially with his street performances." Art in America, May, 2003 by Barbara Pollack)

"Party Room" 2001

Pope.L's installations and objects confront class as much as race, exposing problems broadly and painfully American. Party Room, 2001, is a small chamber with shelves for walls. Row after row of Wild Irish Rose whiskey bottles, each topped with a small stuffed toy, evoke the sometimes seamless transition from childhood to alcoholism or the connection between rural boredom and alcohol abuse that Pope.L has noticed in his adopted state. It probably also refers to his own childhood, as does Pop Tart Frieze, 1998, a row of unwrapped breakfast snacks lined up on a shelf, their pink frosted fronts defaced with racist graffiti--not kitsch, but, for the artist as a child, a coveted and unaffordable treat. In many works, Pope.L interacts with white foods like mayonnaise, vanilla ice cream, milk (which he drinks, spills, and pours), and flour (with which he has ritualistically coated himself in several performances) to construct and depict whiteness as something alternately unattainable, consumable, and revolting. To make Eating the Wall Street Journal, 2000, for example, Pope.L perched on a toilet about ten feet above the gallery floor, reading, then chewing up with ketchup and milk, then spitting out the WSJ onto a pile accumulating below. Scaffolding, toilet, newspaper, milk cartons, and other residue of the performance were on view at Artists Space as a work in its own right. "ERacism" can hardly "erase" what is deeply entrenched, but that does not stop Pope.L from keeping the issues on the (breakfast) table and shaping the debate one city block at a time.

("William Pope.L: Artists space/the project/mason gross Art Galleries at Rutgers University," ArtForum, April, 2004 by Meghan Dailey)

"The Black Factory" 2002-present

Conceived and constructed to fit inside a panel truck, The Black Factory travels throughout America to bring blackness wherever it is needed. The Factory consists of three compartments that unfold to create an interactive public environment made up of a library, a workshop, and a gift shop.

Through the circulation of promotional materials and by word of mouth, The Black Factory makes contact with a range of host-communities that invite the Factory to visit their city or town. In preparation for the Factory’s arrival, the hosts spread the word to the local community and ask them to ‘get the black out.’ Whether it’s the high school football filed or the foot of the steps to City Hall, the location chosen for The Black Factory to stop and set up shop becomes the drop-site: folks arrive ready to share the objects they’ve collected, things that reference blackness for them (from copies of The Soul of Black Folk and images of Martin Luther King Jr., to the Ku Klux Klan hoods and the ashes of Jacqueline Onassis Kennedy). (From Project Description on Creative Capital page)

Project Links:

Distributing Martin
The Black Factory
Online Black Factory Brochure
Black Factory Commercial (RealMedia)

Article Links:
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_5_91/ai_101010684
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0438/is_2_36/ai_111847731
http://mclir.blogspot.com/2005/06/art-of-contraries-william-popel.html
http://www.artistsnetwork.org/news3/news142.html

Notes on Benjamin's "Work of Art"

2006-02-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

In this germinal essay, Benjamin considers how technologies of reproduction have dramatically altered the role of the artwork in society. While he grounds his argument in film, many of these ideas have been very influential in considering many forms of reproducible artwork, including digital media and work that draws from commodity culture (see Adorno & Horkheimer and Debord). Benjamin's conclusions are far more nuanced than those of Horkheimer & Adorno and merit close scrutiny in any contemporary intermedia art class.

Benjamin begins by saying that it is far more useful to analyze about the "the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production," in other words, what it is doing in the here and now, than to think about what it might to in some future society (218). He sees this as useful because considering the ways that art has been changed by the fact that it can be infinitely reproducible brushes one of the most famous formulations of 20th century art theory, Benjamin says the reproduced artwork has lost it's 'aura,' or its unique presence in time and space and its claim to authenticity. Mechanical reproductions are unlike manual reproductions in that they are near-perfect (and digital reproductions can scarcely be called reproductions at all, but rather clones), thereby reducing the claim of the original to some auratic authenticity. The aura is also a result of holding art outside of social processes and in a domain of nature, as well as through the ritual use of the authentic object in its original context and tradition.

For Benjamin, the destruction of the aura is a good thing. The reproduction of artwork "enables the original to meet the beholder halfway," making previously lofty and elite art pieces approachable and appreciable in daily life, thereby reactivating the artworks that were reproduced (220). The destruction of the aura is also an indication of "the increasing significance of the masses in contemporary life" and therefore to democracy, or "the universal equality of things" (223). By stripping the art object of its context of ritual and mythology, "mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual" and "instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice--politics" (224). Because the reproducible artwork is infinitely relocatable and exhibitable, it "becomes a creation with entirely new fuctions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental."

Benjamin goes on to discuss the development of photography and film, arguing that earlier arguments about whether film and photography were arts really missed the point because their very existence "separated art from its basis in cult [and] the semblance of it autonomy disappeared forever" (226). Film epitomizes the withering of the aura because it irretrievably changes the relationship of the actor/artist to the audience and because of the 'mass' nature of the medium. In theater, the audience is reacting to an actor's presence on stage; in film, the audience reacts to a series of fragmentary images of an actor, pulled together from multiple shots and takes. Benjamin believes that the audience is therefore distanced from the performance and becomes "somewhat of an expert" rather than an awed spectator (231). (This point on critical distance is likely influenced by Benjamin's friendship with Brecht). Benjamin also notes that the pervasiveness and accuracy of reproductive technologies, such as printing, film and photography, blurs the lines between artist and spectator: "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. At any moment, the reader is ready to turn into a writer" (232). In addition, film is intended to be received en masse, in groups of spectators, whose "individual reactions are predetermined by the mass audience response they are about to produce," yielding a sense of collective identification rather than awed individual spectatorship (234).

Technologies of the mechanical reproduction of reality, like photography and film, cannot, for Benjamin, be separated from the ways they can be used by people. Because of the way that the camera captures more than is visible--and allows it to be framed, replayed, slowed down, etc.--"the film...extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand it manages to assure us of nan immense and unexpected field of action" (236). In addition, the rapid change of the flickering cinematic scene prevents the spectator from losing him/erself in rapt contemplation of the image.

At the same time, Benjamin is aware that film and photography did not by themselves radically reshape society. He sees that film also conditions a kind of distracted attention on the part of most viewers. "Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in film its true means of exercise...The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one" (240-1). The essay's epilogue is a meditation on and warning about the ways that Fascism mobilizes the technical posibilities of new art forms while forestalling their radical political corollaries through militarization.

Additional resources:
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC15folder/WalterBenjamin.html
http://stage.itp.nyu.edu/history/timeline/mechanicalreproduction.html
http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html

Class Notes 2/16/06

2006-02-18T17:41:00.000-08:00

We met at Long Branch Coffehouse and had a free-form discussion with Praba Pilar.

For next week, the readings are as listed in the syllabus.

For the Benjamin, focus on deeply understanding the following pages: 217-228, 231-232, 237-240.

Meeting Thursday 2/16

2006-02-14T10:24:00.000-08:00

Reminder: We will be meeting Praba Pilar for a discussion at the Long Branch this Thursday, Feb. 16. If you need a ride, please be at my office no later than 9:50 for a lift.

Please be prepared for the discussion by reading "Los Hexterminators" (available on e-reserves) and review her website: www.prabapilar.com.

Notes on Berger

2006-02-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

John Berger devotes this chapter of his classic introduction to visual culture text to the representation of the female nude in European art. He begins by talking about the difference between the ways males and females are represented. According to Berger, male "presence" is traditionally exercised outward and projected over the world, while women's presence is always immanent to her own image and body. This power relation produces a situation in which the woman is aware of what Laura Mulvey in another context called her "to-be-looked-at-ness." Berger summarizes this concept by saying, "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves." (47)

Berger then provides numerous examples from the history of European art that reinforce how "the subject (a woman) is aware of being seen by a spectator" and often participates in the act of viewing herself as an object (49). Berger points out that the genre of nude painting is a conventionalized representation of a woman, not a woman who is simply without clothes. This means that the genre springs from and reinforces unequal power relationships between women and men in the culture, many of which are perpetuated in contemporary advertising images. Berger acknowledges that it is possible to paint a naked woman in a way that does not participate in the genre of nude painting but maintains that this is a rare accomplishment, one that stems from a personal relationship with the woman being depicted. These paintings are unusual because the viewer no longer identifies with the artist in viewing the woman but instead "the spectator can witness their relationship--but he can do no more: he is forced to recognize himself as the outside he is. He cannot deceive himself into thinking that she is naked for him" (57-58). An example of this unusual type of painting of a new woman, one which recognizes that "nakedness is a process rather than a state" to be viewed is Rubens's portrait of his second wife, discussed in depth on pages 60-62.

Berger also considers the way that nude paintings often overwhelm the individuality of the model, focusing instead on "the sexual parts, whose formation suggests an utterly compelling but single process...their primary sexual category" (59) for the purpose of gratifying the male gaze and of reminding women of their primary purpose. He concludes the chapter by restating that the "'ideal' spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him" (64).

Notes on Demos

2006-02-14T09:44:00.000-08:00

Demos argues that Palestinian American artist Emily Jacir employs recent shifts towards a discursive approach to site specificity to create a body of work that recalls the simultaneity of presence and absence for unsited, diasporic peoples. He conducts a close analysis of her work, specifically the projects, "Where We Come From," "Change/Exchange," "Crossing Surda," and "Sexy Semite" to examine Jacir's oblique strategies of representation that seek not to "show" Palestinian experience to a non-Palestinian and very elite audience but to demonstrate the impossibility of ever fully recognizing or identifying with that experience in the artistic sphere, even as its pathos and injustice are suggested.

Where We Come From centers around the unbridgeable chasm between the act of desiring and desire's fulfillment, between speaking a wish and its realization, between identification and becoming, between Jacir's American citizenship and the possibility for really sharing that privilege. Ultimately, the possibility for art to intervene--in representation, in fulfillment, in justice--is acknowledged as very slight.

On the other hand, Jacir also has created works that seek to more directly intervene in the daily production of diaspora, such as "Sexy Semite" and "Crossing Surda." Sexy Semite mediates "on the ridiculous effects of such barriers on people's lives, to point out that ridiculousness by contrasting it with the ease of other forms of exchange or with easy exchanges enjoyed by others." (Demos, 76)

EX: From Texas With Love
"When one endlessly repeats the freedom of movement here, one also continually reenacts the painful reminder of its impossibility there." (Demos, 76)

In this way, a linkage is created between represented, representor, and audience that is far more explicit and far more accountable than the relation between viewer, subject, and audience.

"Throughout it, we confront the absences that Jacir's service cannot fill. These instill a yearning in us, its viewers, to see some sort of resolution, to wish for an answer to the inequities of movement outside the piece." (Demos, 78). This is a far more specific sort of relationship to what is represented than a simple equation of visibility=power, and it calls on the viewer to take a far more active role.

Class Notes: 2/14/06

2006-02-14T09:41:00.000-08:00

Outline:
1) Lecture/Discussion on Emily Jacir & issues of representation
2) Go-Round of Paper Topics
3) Demonstration of Morris Library indices and Google Scholar research tools.

1) Emily Jacir

In the readings for this week, John Berger describes specifically how images of the female nude have been constructed in Western art not only to gratify the male gaze but also to reinforce male dominance by creating literally 'ownable' images of women and reminding women of their "to-be-looked-at-ness" (in Laura Mulvey's words). He analyzes how traditional depictions of the nude female as available for and even welcoming of the visual consumption of the presumably male viewer have been recapitulated in present-day advertisements. In so doing, he demonstrates that representation is more than a matter of being pictured (or not ) but is a question of how, why, and for whom one is being pictured.

Very frequently, visibility is equated with political power, and the relative invisibility of marginalized groups is seen as both a symptom of their lack of power and one of the ways that lack of power is perpetuated.

EX: number of African Americans, gays and lesbians on prime-time TV

In order to correct this lack of power/invisibility, one of the favorite traditional activities of artists has been to make visible what once was invisible.

EX: Leon Golub

However, a critique of representation proper goes well beyond questions of simple visibility or the lack thereof. As Peggy Phelan points out, "If representational visibility equals power, then almost naked, white young women should be running Western culture." Clearly, more questions must be asked when analyzing a representation OR considering why a group of people or their experience is not being represented at all.

Questions to be asked, then, could include:
1) Who is being represented and how?
2) What does the representation imply about the subject?
3) Who is the intended viewer of the representation?
4) What claims to truth does the representation make?
5) How does the representation function in its context?

EX: Curtis Indian photos, Shirin Neshat, Hotentot Venus images...

All of this is a rather back-door way of approaching the work of Emily Jacir, a Palestinian American artist who addresses the Palestinian diaspora not by seeking to represent it but instead by evoking it.

EX: Memorial to the 418 Palestinian Villages

In the reading for today, Demos argues that Palestinian American artist Emily Jacir employs recent shifts towards a discursive approach to site specificity to create a body of work that recalls the simultaneity of presence and absence for unsited, diasporic peoples.

EX: Where We Come From (2003)

This project centers around the unbridgeable chasm between the act of desiring and desire's fulfillment, between speaking a wish and its realization, between identification and becoming, between Jacir's American citizenship and the possibility for really sharing that privilege. Ultimately, the possibility for art to intervene--in representation, in fulfillment, in justice--is acknowledged as very slight.

On the other hand, Jacir also has created works that seek to more directly intervene in the daily production of diaspora.

EX: Sexy Semite (2000-01)

"to mediate on the ridiculous effects of such barriers on people's lives, to point out that ridiculousness by contrasting it with the ease of other forms of exchange or with easy exchanges enjoyed by others." (Demos, 76)

In yet another piece, Jacir does not seek to represent people but to represent a condition: the uneven experience of mobility.

EX: From Texas With Love (2002)

EX: Crossing Surda (a record of going to and from work) (2003)

"When one endlessly repeats the freedom of movement here, one also continually reenacts the painful reminder of its impossibility there." (Demos, 76). In this way, a linkage is created between represented, representor, and audience that is far more explicit and far more accountable than the relation between viewer, subject, and audience.

"Throughout it, we confront the absences that Jacir's service cannot fill. These instill a yearning in us, its viewers, to see some sort of resolution, to wish for an answer to the inequities of movement outside the piece." (Demos, 78). This is a far more specific sort of relationship to what is represented than a simple equation of visibility=power, and it calls on the viewer to take a far more active role.

Questions??

2) Quick Go-Round of Paper Topics

3) Demonstrate Online Research Tools available through Morris Library Homepage: http://www.lib.siu.edu/resources/resources/articles

A reading response from: Jason Z.

2006-02-09T16:44:00.000-08:00

For me, postmodernism is a very difficult concept. Is it helpful to our society, or is it a burden that does more harm than good? When did postmodernism begin? Was it with the destruction of the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe building in 1972 as Charles Jencks said? Or did it begin earlier, at a time when no one could have conceived of postmodernism as we know it today? Whatever postmodernism is, and what ever it will become, I believe that it is driven by technology and will continue to evolve.
One of the major initiating forces of modernism was the industrial revolution. The new technologies drastically changed much of the world, and changed how everyday people lived their lives. However, technology didn’t continue to influence modernist art directly. It was rare that technology would have a major roll in the concept of the art. This is, I believe, because technology had yet to truly pervade society. Art is, after all, a reflection of the people. So if modernism was initiated by the introduction of technology to society, then postmodernism is a result of technology permeating society.
This is evident in the work of artists and groups such as the Bureau of Inverse Technology who rely on technology to create their art. Today there is even art that is technology, videogames for instance. Many people don’t even recognize videogames or other similar media as art, but that was the case with early film as well. I’m even a little embarrassed to mention videogames.
For me this raises an interesting question. When did technology permeate our society to the extent that we became a postmodern culture? The moment I asked myself this question I realized I have a major bias, so let me backtrack a bit. Jameson said that it is impossible to criticize our society without bias, because it is impossible step outside of our culture. In other words, we have been so affected by the media that we can’t think without it. I have lived inside extremely modern technology my entire life. I cannot even without the internet. I would not even consider myself as being part of the “MTV generation,” I am too young. Maybe the “Nintendo generation.”
Anyway, the point is that I think of almost everything in the context of technology. If I were to try to predict what life would be like in fifty years, I would consider two things: politics and technology. An interesting way to look at this situation, is the contrast between the thought process of modernism and postmodernism. According to Huyssen, modernism attempted to understand a complex and singular reality. Whereas, postmodernism questions how different realities may coexist, collide, and interpenetrate. This postmodernism point of view is a direct result of globalization, and globalization would not be possible without technology.
So if technology continues to grow, the world will continue to “shrink” and postmodernism will continue to change and become more, for lack of a better word, drastic. But what aspects of postmodernism will become more part of the everyday life? It is my hope that the good parts of postmodernism will affect our daily lives more than the bad. Yet who gets to decide what parts of postmodernism are “good,” and which parts are “bad.”
Unfortunately, those parts of the world that aren’t willing, or cannot afford to progress with the western world are excluded with the ultimate penalty, destruction. The current globalization route victimizes many cultures, and often leads to destruction. This is part of my bias. I feel that we as a society should press to become as globalized as possible, though I hope it’s obvious that I have my reservations.
So when did postmodernism begin? I think it began when most of western society felt the daily affects of extremely modern technology, at least that is when it began for the western world as a whole. Aspects of postmodernism were most definitely visible in the work of artists like Andy Warhol before postmodernism had truly set in. I believe that today postmodernism is entering a new phase, if not nearing its end. Again, I base this belief on the evolution of technology and it’s affects on the world.

Reading Response Jennifer

2006-02-09T09:41:00.000-08:00

Jennifer Reichert
Intermedia Arts
February 7th 2006
Reading Response #2

"The idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism". I agree with this statement. Art is an expression of ones self and how they feel and view the world. Harvey talks about the fact that realities may coexist, collide, an interpenetrate with one another. I agree. Every person has a different perspective. Every image can be seen a in different light depending on how it is displayed to the viewer. Art is a small and simple word. One that is to small to hold all the meanings for it.
Radicals were and are independent thinkers. There beliefs were not self involved but were for the greater good. Postmoderism brought with it a new way of thinking. I brought the thought that anything can be art. That are has no definition. I a way to look at it life is art. In many beliefs life was created from one mans vision and a form of himself. What gives anyone the right to say what is and isn’t art? One agrument we had in class was art as a product, being made for only consumers. That is the way art is “now”. I feel that art has always been made for the comsumer. Every artist thoughout history has created art to make a living. From Michelangelo to Polleck artists have painted and sculptured to mark their place in history. And yeah they earned a few dollars along the way. Art is not so different today than 100 years ago. It has evolved and enhanced just like everything else in life. I feel that it is wrong to even question art. Art is every where, it is a creation, it is an accident, and it is a thought that is expressed thought different means.
Postmodernism, follows most of the same ideas as modernism. Like modernism postmodernism rejects boundaries between high and low forms of art, refuses genre distinctions, emphasizing imitation, parody, bricolage, irony, and playfulness. Postmodern art favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, and emphasizes on the destructured, decentered, dehumanized subject. Postmodernism is a most open way to think about art.
Harvey states that the effect of postmodernism "is to call into question all the illusions of fixed systems of representation". Harvey is right in my opinion. He is basically saying that what art represents is an illusion, because it can be viewed by many different people in many different ways. What art represents is in the eye of the beholder. And that isn’t just with postmodernism it is with all art.

1. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, "Chapter 3: Postmodernism"

second reading response

2006-02-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

Intertextuality & the Phenomenon of “Global Culture” in Postmodernism

David Harvey writes, in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), that postmodern readings simply "view a work as a 'text' with its own particular 'rhetoric' and 'idiolect,' but which can in principle be compared with any other text of no matter what sort." (Harvey, p. 44) He explains that, as far as postmodern theory is concerned, the "tight and identifiable relation" between signified and signifier breaks down and is able to reattach in new combinations. "Cultural life is then viewed as a series of texts intersecting with other texts, producing more texts." (Harvey, p. 49) I believe that these types of readings are problematic because, first, they belittle and corrupt other cultures at the expense of the highly Eurocentric postmodern project and, second, they fail at their attempt to create the supposedly neutral, historically undefined space after which their disillusionment with modern Enlightenment has them lusting.
The first thing we must ask when we look at the postmodernist's skepticism of truth is: what exactly follows from this skepticism? Even in discarding all signified meaning in a text and using its pieces to construct something different, one would be constructing some new kind of meaning, with some historically defined motive behind it. A rejection of all universals is itself an ideal that comes loaded with personal and political agendas-- the nihilistic, postmodern individual carries his own metanarrative.
Though the notion of cultural relativism is generally accepted aound the world, the devaluation or outright rejection of culture and history is a strictly European phenomenon. By building a culture that holds these vallues and imposes them on the rest of the “global community,” whiteness continues to do what it has done for centuries-- it manifests itself as universal and, by means of this hiddenness, dominates and oppresses everything it excludes.
When one assumes a power-neutral “global culture” in which we are all able to pick and choose our signifiersand use them to create meanings outside of their original soicio-historical context, one is actually producing an intermediary text that creates dialogue between the culture from which the sign originated and the culture that is appropriating this sign (namely, postmodern/European culture). As there is an obvious power imbalance between the two (no matter what the originating culture may be), the values and interpretations of the dominant culture become imposed upon the subordinated one. Even if the latter manages to perserve its unique interpretation of the signifier (difficult indeed, in the age of mass media and globalization), the images produced in the minds of Westerners has a direct impact on how they view and interact with other societies. With so much power in the hands of such people, it is dangerous to give them such misinformed, convoluted images of foreign cultures as postmodernism has been persistantly doing.
Finally, we must realize that the intermediary text produced in these situations is not culture-neutral, as postmodernists would like to think, but distinctly Euro-centric. We cannot begin the construction of such discourses in a void-- there is always some culture, some language that is taken for granted as one’s starting point before one can even begin to borrow and appropriate the ideas of others. European history is at the very root of the pastiche aesthetic, and it would be more useful to acknowledge and familiarize oneself with this history than to ignore it and try to fragment one’s identity by attempting to claim cultural signs that one does not truly understand.

Suggested Intermedia Artists

2006-02-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

The following list of artists should help you get started in selecting a project for your analytic/interpretive paper. I’ve divided the list into “More Established” and “Less Established” artists. This refers to how long the artists have been active and how they have chose to show their work (in art world or not) and has no relation to quality whatsoever. Artists listed as more established are more likely to have books written on their work, but all of them are included in many print and online catalogs.

More Established
Mona Hatoum
Shirin Neshat
Adrian Piper
William Pope L.
Andrea Fraser
Krzysztof Wodizcko
David Hammons
Hans Haacke
Carrie Mae Weems
Kim Sooja
Nam June Paik
Vito Acconci
Ant Farm
Guillermo Gomez-Pena
Coco Fusco
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Linda Montano
Tehching Hsieh
Martha Rosler
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Yoko Ono
Joseph Beuys
Suzanne Lacy
Cai Guo-Qiang
Alfredo Jaar
Laurie Anderson
Mel Chin
Janine Antoni
Paul Pfeiffer
Joan Jonas
Mike Kelley
Edgar Hachivi Heap of Birds

Less Established
Repohistory
Valerie Tevere
Neurotransmitter
Center for Urban Pedagogy
Raqs Media Collective
Simon Levine & Laurie Long
Miranda July
Harrell Fletcher
Red 76
Paul Vanouse
Natalie Bookchin
Natalie Jeremijenko
Bureau of Inverse Technology
Christian Jankowski
Christian Marclay
Christina Kubisch
Center for Tactical Magic
Institute for Applied Autonomy
Ricardo Dominguez
Daniel Joseph Martinez
Beatriz de Costa
Los Cybrids
Temporary Services
HaHa
Douglas Gordon
Critical Art Ensemble
Emily Jacir
Walid Raad/The Atlas Group
James Luna
Glowlab
Igor Vamos
SubRosa
Wochenklauser
N55
Future Farmers
Tana Hargest
Allison Smith
Lee Wilson
RTmark
J Morgan Puett
Ruben Ortiz Torres
Spurse
Michael Rakowitz

Reading Notes: Harvey's Postmodernism

2006-02-07T12:45:00.000-08:00

David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, "Chapter 3: Postmodernism"

Harvey begins by outlining how postmodernism has been seen as a change in both the "structure of feeling" in 1970s Euro-American society and a radical change in the aesthetics of architecture (as described by Charles Jencks) and practices of urban planning. He shows how familiar postmodern aesthetic strategies have been replicated in the arena of urban planning, which now seeks out "'pluralistic' and 'organic' strategies for approaching urban development as a 'collage of highly differentiated spaces and mixtures, rather than pursuing gradiose plans based on functional zoming of different activities. 'Collage city' is now the theme and 'urban revitalization' has replaced the vilified 'urban renewal as the key buzz-word in the planners' lexicon" (40). Harvey identifies an analogous shift in literature, where "radically different realities may coexist, collide, an interpenetrate;" and in philosophy, where faith in the power of reason has fallen so low that "the moral crisis of our time is a crisis of Enlightenment thought" (41).

Harvey goes on to sketch in broad terms other thinkers' contributions to postmodernism, including Hassan's dualistic schemata of differences from modernism, Foucault's radical reformulation of the operation of power, and Lyotard's dispersal of the functionality of language. He is struck by how postmodernism has elevated that side of modernism that concerned "the ephemerality, fragmentation, discontinuity, and the chaotic" (44).

Harvey summarizes how Foucault "breaks with the notion that power is ultimately located within the state" and explores how power is produced "in different localities, contexts, and social situations [that] leads hiim to conclude that there is an intimate relation between the systems of knowledge ('discourse') which codify techniques and practifes for the exercise of social control and domination within particular localized contexts"--e.g. prisons, hospitals, schools, etc. (45). He demonstrates that, while Foucault shows that power always generates its own resistances (in an almost dialectical relationship) he also precludes any way of escaping the exercise and production of power because it is produced so intimately and is so bound up in the ways we think ourselves. Harvey sees Foucault as unintentionally influencing various 1960s and 70s activist groups that made 'the personal political,' while also precluding the possibility of those groups ever achieving traditional power or even discursive dominance, since for Foucault such dominance would be an oppressive form of power-knowledge itself.

Lyotard's notion of the proliferation of contextually specific "language games" similarly displaces large social institutions from center stage in the production of power in favor of looking at the ways people negotiate relationships. While Lyotard recognizes that big institutions (academic, lay, science, government) codify their own forms of language, he wants to to remember that "the differentiated performance of language games creates instiutional languages and powers in the first place" (47).

This kind of thinking has the effect of seeing institutions as much more heterogeneous and changeable than other forms of analysis, and to the extent that it opens 'chinks' to resistance, it has been applauded or adopted by radical activists. "The idea that all groups have a right to speak for themselves, in their own voice, and have that voice accepted as authentic and legitimate is essential to the pluralistic stance of postmodernism" (48). At the same time, "to accept the fragmentations, the pluralism, and the authenticity of other voices and other worlds poses the acutre problem of communication and the means of exercising power through command thereof" (49).

Futhermore, this pluralism includes not only a pluralism of voices but also a pluralism of the ways those voices might be heard. Postmodernists tend to see cultural products (texts) as fluid and shifting and 'interpretation' as a no less creative act than 'production.' "Minimizing the authority of the cultural producer creates the opportunity for popular participation and democratic determinations of cultural values, but at the price of a certain incoherence or, more problematic, vulnerability to mass-market manipulation" (51). The Sturken and Cartwright reading demonstrated how this act of cultural collage and intertextuality was amply manipulated by advertisers.

According to Harvey, the overall effect of postmodernism "is to call into question all the illusions of fixed systems of representation" (51). The logical outcome, championed by philosophers like Richard Rorty and bemoaned by neo-Enlightenment thinkers like Habermas, is that, "since coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusionary (and would therefore doomed to be self-dissolving and self-defeating), we should not even try to engage in some global project" (52). This produces a type of subjectivity (or way of being in and experiencing/knowing the world) that is analogous to schizophrenia: "If personal identity is forged through 'a certain temporal unification ofthe past the future with the present before me,' and if sentences move through the same trajectory, then an inability to unify past, present, and future in the sentence betokens a similar inability to 'unify the past, present, and future in our own biogrpahical experience or psychic life'"(53). To Harvey, this is a quiescent subjectivity: "postmodernism typically...[concentrates] upon the schizophrenic circumstances induced by fragmentation and all those instabilities (including those of language) that prevent us even picturing coherently, let alone devising strategies to produce, some radically different future" (54).

Harvey then retreads much of the territory previously explored by Jameson, including the historical pastiche, the crisis of judgement and criticism, the loss of temporal continuity in favor of simultaneity, the collapse of distinctions between high and low culture, and the "contrived depthlessness" of continual play upon the surfaces of ideas and images. Harvey points out how certain features of postmodernism, such as the supposed collapse of high and low culture, were actually reworked (in with Barthes's insistence on 'jouissance' in the act of reading that distinguished it from 'mere' consumption) so that the arena of art actually became ever more opaque to the uninitiated even if it borrowed from its content, technologies, and aesthetics. At the same time, "The closing of the gap between popular culture and cultural production in the contemporary period, while strongly dependent on new technologies of communication, seems to lack any avant-gardist or revolutionary impulse, leading many to accuse postmodernism of a simple and direct surrender to commodification, commercialization, and the market" (59).

Postmodernism therefore has a highly ambivalent relation to "the culture of daily life," and it is unclear whether postmodern art is a reaction to or a leader of changes in mass culture (59). For some (Daniel Bell), artists have had no choice but to become postmodernism, since late modernism institutionalized all forms of artistic production and creative rebellion. For others (Iain Chambers) the proliferation of mass-culture styles represents a major concession of universalistic bourgeois to demands of marginalized groups for representation and self-determination in cultural forms (fashion, movies, music). While Harvey cautions against the simple equation of television producing postmodernity, he sees the ubiquity of television and the kinds of viewership it promotes (channel surfing, the co-existence of many forms of time in one place) as paradigmatic of postmodernism. Regardless of how various debates over postmodernism's precise relation to daily life might come out, then, it is important to see it deeply rooted there, to changes in the economy, popular culture, languages, and the ways that power is experienced and produced.

Class Notes: 2/7/06

2006-02-07T12:36:00.000-08:00

1) Assignment for next class (in addition to reading response):
Bring in 3+ images by a single artist on the supplied list. We will be exploring how to talk about this work next time, given what we know about modernity and postmodernity now...This is preparation for your 3-5 page close analysis papers.

2) Individually or in pairs, work on definitions or explanations of "postmodern buzzwords." Generate discussion questions around these.

3) Go to Mall for Postmodernism Scavenger Hunt!

Reading Notes: Jameson

2006-02-02T10:17:00.000-08:00

Jameson sets out to articulate a social foundation for the emergence of postmodernism, which we describes as an "inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of hte future, catastrophic or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that" (62) He starts by asking the rhetorical question "does it imply any more fundamental change or break than the periodic style- and fashion-changes determined by an older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?" (62). The remainder of this excerpt from his book goes about proving that it is a much more symptomatic change of the whole of society rather than on stylistic choice among many. He says that it is"essential to grasp 'postmodernism' not as a style, but rather as a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinant features." He sees postmodernism as qualitatively and substantially different from modernism, which included artists whose work seems very much like the work of posmodernists, because of differences in the function of the aesthetic under present-day capitalism. "Aesthetic production doay has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to airplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (65). He also defends his periodization against charges that it produces a sense of destiny and futility by saying that understanding the present-day "cultural dominant" precludes developing effective actions to counteract it.

Jameson believes that architecture is the arena in which the transition from modernism to postmodernism is most evident, as evidenced by the radical differences in approach from Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe et al, who razed cities in order to build their aesthetic masterpieces, and Venturi, Gehry, etc. who proposed "learning from Las Vegas." In other words, the new architects effaced the frontier between high culture and mass culture, going beyond simply "quoting" popular forms promoted by the culture industy to actually fusing with them. Jameson however goes beyond many other critics by looking at postmodernism as an economic question, not merely an aesthetic one. He states unequivoally that "every position on postmodernism in culture--whether apologia or stigmatization--is also at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today" (64).

Jameson identifies a number of cultural features of postmodernism and seeks to explain what they mean about the culture and the kind of cultural experience they produce.

I The Deconstruction of Expression
Jameson begins by discussing Van Gogh's "Peasant Shoes," which he holds as paradigmatic of modernism because the transformation of drab peasant shoes into a stunning expression of vision opens up an autonomous and Utopian space in which individual vision, not collective work or feudal suffering, has primacy. The shoes stand in as a bridge between the materiality of the body and earth and the transcendence that art and history can provide. He contrasts this mechanism with the ways that Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" functions. Warhol's shoes are not a hermaneutic key from which some universal understanding can be drawn, rather, they are simply there, mute. While the work is turns on commodification, it has no appreciable take on it, and "one would want to begin to wonder a little more seriously about the possibilities of political or critical art in the postmodern period of late capital" (68).

Jameson goes on the describe two aesthetic and emotive features of postmodernism, which he calls "the waning of affect" and "euphoria and self-annihilation." He contrasts Edvard Munch's "The Scream" as an expression of modern existential horror with the depthlessness and lack of expression present in, say, Warhol's celebrity portraits. The centered, if perturbed, ego present in the modern painting is superceded by the world of fractured surface appearances of postmodernism. The decentered ego and fractured self cannot be an expressive, avant-garde artist. The subject is liberated from the sorts of modern anxieties "The Scream" expressed but is liberated into feeling nothing much at all, a "free-floating and impersonal...euphoria" (72).

II Postmodernism and the Past
Jameson echoes what many other writers on postmodernism have noted, that postmodern art recycles the styles of the past in a decontextualized way called pastiche. He describes the process by which this came about as the result of a cacophony of individualized modernist styles where artists found themselves endlessly quoting themselves and their signature styles. The self consciousness of modern style were received as "postmodern codes" (73), and began to be played with without a sense of criticism. Modernist individualistic stylization therefore birthed postmodern pastiche, or irony stripped of criticism.

At the same time, this borrowing from modern styles without reference to their contexts eclipses history. Jameson describes a number of 70s-80s films and purportedly historical novels that are ostensibly set in historical time but which replace the historical events and personalities of the specific past with a generalized sense of the past through style. He says, "the nostalgia film was never a matter of some old-fashioned 'representation' of historical content, but approach the 'past' through stylistic connotation, conveying 'pastness' by the glossy qualities of the image, and '1930s-ness' or '1950s-ness' by the attributes of fashion" (75). He touches on how this is a loss because one is deprived of the lessons of historical analysis and inspiration. Instead, the nostalgia film or new epic novel "can only 'represent' out ideas and stereotypes about that past (which thereby at once becomes 'pop history'). Cultural production is thereby driven back inside a mental space which is no longer that of the old monadic subject, but rather that of some degraded collective 'objective spirit': it can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstructuion of a past history which was once itself a present, rather, as in Plato's cave, it must trace our mental images of that past upon its confining walls" (79). Jameson sees this as a dangerous and disempowering situation.

III Postmodernism and the City
Jameson writes an outstanding close analysis of the way the architecture and the site relationship of the Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles reproduces the postmodern experience. It is worth reading for an example of a strong formal and interpretive analysis of a work of postmodern art and for an explanation of the phenomenology of postmodernism, but I won't stress it in this course.

IVThe Abolition of Critical Distance
While Jameson is highly critical of postmodernism for doing "more than merely replicat[ing] the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it," he does not want to simply issue a moral judgement and be done with it. He believes that the critic or moralizer him/er self is deeply suffused by postmodernismthat such moral pronouncements are both overly simplistic and ineffective. He calls for seeing postmodernism much as Marx saw capitalism, as both the best and worst thing that ever happened to the world. He describes the world that Nato discussed, where "not only local punctual and local countercultural forms of cultural resistance and guerilla warfare but also even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash, are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system" but, like Nato, sees that it has opened up a whole new terrain for cultural engagement. That engagement can only be produced spatially, in Jameson's view, by creating "cognitive maps" of the cultural territory produced by postmodernity and the kinds of cultural interventions that work in it. "An aesthetic of cognitive maping--a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system--will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and to invent radically new forms in order to do it justice" (91).

Reading Notes: Sturken & Cartwright

2006-02-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

Chapter Seven: Postmodernism and Popular Culture

Sturken and Cartwright analyze certain stylistic characteristics postmodernism to begin to sketch out the cultural position of postmodernity. Like the terms "modernity" and "modernism," the terms related to "the postmodern" can mean several different things:
1) styles and approaches to making images that have arisen since the 1970s
2) ideologies related to high-tech late capitalism, variously called globalization, post industrialism or the digital era
3) the experience of living in the world which is produced these image-systems and economic systems

However, postmodernism should not be interpreted as meaning that modernism is finished; rather, postmodernism suffuses late modernism, and the the coexist and interpentrate, often conflicting or criticizing on another. Instead, "postmodernism describes a set of conditions and practices occurring in late modernity" (251). It is therefore necessary to understand modernism in order to understand how postmodernism differs within it.

Differences from modernism (please note that these are broad and often crude generalizations):
1) Modernists were generally disdainful of mass or popular culture, while postmodernists embrace it--high art and mass culture fuse
2) Modernists adopted an outsider position from the culture they critiqued; postmodern critics see themselves as embedded in the culture being analyzed and therefore cannot pretend to be objective or truthful about it
3) Modernists believed in a stable, unified, authentic, self-conscious, and universal human subject; postmodernists see the subject as constituted by history, position, and by mediated experience (simulation) and highly unstable, fragmentary, and contingent. postmodernists also see identity as formed by difference and pluralism than by membership in universal categories like "mankind"
4) Modernists tended toward formal innovation and radical ruptures with past styles toward the articulation of a style that either was or reinforced the content of the work of art; postmodernists recycle past styles (pastiche)
5) Modernists incorporated reflexivity and distancing techniques to remind the viewer of the process and material involved in producing the work of art; postmodernists emply reflexivity in order to draw attention to the artist's embeddedness in the culture of simulation, institutions of cultural production, or for the sake of pure enjoyment rather than criticality (e.g DVD 'extras'). For modernists, this reflexivity implied a critical distance, while no necessary criticism follows from postmodern reflexivity, which is often employed cynically by advertisers to engaged bored viewers.
6) High modernists tended to obey certain 'canons' of aesthetic modernism; postmodernism tends to take its cue from popular culture and advertising practices
7) Modernists tended to believe that historic change and scientific discovery, while difficult and often traumatic, were eventually to be for the best; postmodernists tend to question "grand narratives" of historic progress and scientific objectivity.
8) Modernists believed in the possibility of direct, unmediated experience ('presence'); postmodernists assert that everything is 'always already' mediated by language and images and that there is no experience beyond the text
9) Modernity was characterized by a desire to look beyond the surface appearance of things and find an inner truth; postmodernity has done away with the notion of universal truth and elevates the level of surface "We can no longer look below the surface for depth and true meaning, because we will find nothing there" (258).

"Much postmodern art is not concerned with representing reality but with rethinking the function of art and emphaszing the role of institutional context in producing meaning" (263).

The authors go into a discussion of postmodern advertising and mass media strategies, using them to flesh out ideas of intertextuality, reflexivity, and metacommunication and raising questions about whether the postmodern turn is more liberating than cynical. They conclude the essay with, "What then is the status of social concerns and political movements, when such statements are so easily coopted in the name of commerce? Does a political statements have an force when it is an inegral part of an ad selling a product?...Postmodernism is not necessarily liberating; just because it breaks with the tenets of modernism does not necessarily mean that it breaks with or is resistant to dominant ideology. Indeed, it can be seen as deeply implicated within the ideologies of consumer culture. In its rejecton of nostalgia, universal humanism, and a single concept of truth, postmodernism is also about acknowledging the overlap between the categories of art, commerce, new, and advertising" (276-7)

Key Words of Postmodernism:
Simulation: a new image paradigm that replaces representation and reproduction; rather than referring to an external reality, the image stands in for and surpasses reality (simulacrum); their example is the politician's media campaign that produces a personality for him/er rather than reflecting his/er politics
Pastiche: an aesthetic strategy of borrowing from other cultures and styles without historical or spatial context
Meta-narrative: a framework that claims to explain all of society in a universal way; considered a modernist idea that is constantly questioned by postmodernism
Presence: the belief that "there is no substitute for experience;" contested by postmodernists who counter that all experience is mediated
Hyperreality: a condition of consumer culture in which the real becomes meaningless because of the profusions of proxy, mediated experiences and products that first stand in, then surpass the real (ex: a sports drink of a flavour that doesn't exist ("wild ice zest berry") that surpasses the taste of fruit juice)
Polysemy: the existence of multiple and contingent meanings of any text
Hypertext: literally, non-linear computer-based texts with multiple links to other points within the text and outside it; emblematic of the way postmodernism disrupts linear narrative and incorporates disparate sources
Appropriation: taking existing cultural forms and images and reusing them
Reflexivity: the practice of making viewers aware of how an image or text was produced
Intertextuality: the insertion of another text/image within a new text/image; also refers to the tendency of postmodern cultural products to require a sophisticated knowledge of pop culture in order to "get" the reference. "This form thus demands a self-consciousness on the part of viewers, in which they are constantly noting the form, style, genre, and conventions (and parodic departures from them) rather than the story itself" (269).
Metacommunication: communication that is about the process of communicating or viewing/receiving, rather than about the ostensible 'content,' e.g ad campaigns that comment on advertising rather than trying to sell the product directly--for example, the "Image is Nothing, Taste is Everything" Sprite campaign. "Metacommunciation can be thought of as a postmodern strategy of addressing viewers/consumer, in that is appear to address viewer as more sophisticated and knowing...Yet, their actual goal is to get viewers' attention long enough to create a commodity sign for their product" (271).
Indexical Sign: an image that has some direct connection to what it represents and therefore lays claim to cultural truth (e.g. photographic evidence)

Class Notes: 2/2/06

2006-02-02T10:14:00.000-08:00

1) Presentation on Postmodernism
2) Discussion on the Readings
3) Creative Notebook Assignment: one modernist collage, one postmodernist collage
4) View "Transformation: Wonder Woman"

Class Notes: 1/31/06

2006-01-31T10:29:00.000-08:00

1) Discussion of Nato's Talk
-What did you get out of it?
-What questions do you continue to have?

2) Discussion: Begin to think about how do you talk about artwork when the tradition questions of the degree to which it adhere to the medium cannot be asked? What questions do you ask instead? What does the frame of 'art' bring to considering a project?

3)Critique of psychogeographic maps, both visual and non-visual

4) For next time: concentrate on reading Sturken & Cartwright pps 237-240 and 251-end

ANNOUNCEMENT: Syllabus Changes

2006-01-29T11:30:00.001-08:00

As discussed in class on Thursday, January 26th, the syllabus will be shuffled around slightly to accomodate the interests and backgrounds of folks in the class. There will be more emphasis on creative exercises to understand the history and theories being discussed, and the reading load will be lightened.

Here are the changes planned for the coming weeks:

January 31
NO READING
DUE: Psychogeographic Map drawings/media pieces based on in-class walk last Thursday
We will also be discussing Nato Thompson's talk.

February 2
DUE: Sturken and Cartright reading
(Jameson advanced reading)
In-class collage/pastiche exercise

February 7
DUE: Harvey, chapter 3
(Fraser & Nicholson advanced reading)
Lecture: Postmodern Art & Theory

February 9
DUE: Reading Response No. 2
In-class exercises: Interpretive Strategies
Assign Paper

February 14: Representation
Spotlight Artist: Emily Jacir
Required Reading: Berger, Demos
Advanced Reading: Tagg

February 16: Artist Visit--Praba Pilar
Required Lecture, 5 pm, 101 Lawson
Required Reading: Pilar
Due: Paper Topics (hard copy, please)

Adjustments to the remainder of the semester will be made as needed

Class Notes: 1/26/06

2006-01-29T11:30:00.000-08:00

1) Discuss possible changes to be made in the class re: lecture, readings, mini-projects, etc.
2) Slideshow on Dada, Situationism & Situationist-inspired walking work
3) Introduce Mini-Project #1& begin by walking

MEETING LOCATION THURSDAY 1/26

2006-01-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

Remember, this Thursday's class meeting is at the NMC classroom, room 9e.

See you there.

Notes on Oguibe

2006-01-24T13:58:00.000-08:00

The essay opens by attacking the project of periodizing history as a colonizing endeavor that makes history "a validating privilege which it is the West's to grant." Oguibe differentiates between history and History, with the latter reserved for free-market civilization and the former a mere recitation of events open to all. Without grappling with he concept of History and who has the right to grant it, exploring ideas about Modernism and Modernity is meaningless: "Without restituting History to other than just the Occident, or more accurately, recognizing the univerality of the concept of History whileperhaps leaving its specific configurations to individual cultures, it is untenable and unrealistic to place such other temporal and ideological concepts as Modernism, Modernity, Contemporaneity, Development in the arena" (227).

Oguibe echoes many other theorists who have observed that Africa has been largely relegated to Premodernism and primitivism in Western discourse, that African modernities have not been seen. He takes issue with some who have sought to move the center of modernism from Europe but argues instead for superseding the idea of a center in modernism altogether: "...any meaningful discussion of modernity and "modernism" in Africa must be conducted, not in relation to the idea of an existing cenre of a "Modernism" against which we must all read our bearings, but in regocnition of the multiplicity and culture-specificity of modernisms and the pluralities of centres" (227). In turn, he advocates to futher interrogate the terms of the debate, including the existence of a unitary or given Africa at all. While acknowledging the strategic imperative of constructing unified narratives of resistance, he argues that the 'invention' of Africa as colonial subject is only reinforced when groups create a 'vague multinationalism' rather than undermining "the idea of The African [in order] to exterminate a whole discursive and referential system" (227).

Oguibe then addresses how the European modern project has produced a taxonomy of Africanness based out of its own racism and political convenience more than on the experience or knowledge of the people themselves. In this taxonomy, a set of preferred and disdained types of Africans are produced, from the more favored "Arab" to the sub-Saharan object of contempt and/or pity. He does acknowledge the political utility of a pan-Africanism that acknowledges pluralism but that is created through its definition by the continent's inhabitants themselves.

Many questions concerning the definition and universalism of modernism become more poignant and politicized in the case of Africa. Oguibe writes, "Where then does one locate the break with the past which the idea of a "modernism" insinuates? In disucssing "modern" African art, does one continue to exclude half the continent? Is it realistic, otherwise, to discuss a modern culture that defies existing invented boundaries? Are there grounds in the present, which did not exist in the past, to justify a unifying discourse, or is it safer to pursue a plurality of discourses?" (230). When these questions are followed logically and are applied to scholarly questions that are usually framed of 'problems of modernity in Africa,' those problems end up falling apart and revealing themselves to be more about the
construction of a fictive Africa that Europe needs to maintain its hold on universal modernism than anything about the continuent or modernity itself.

At the end of the essay, Oguibe, after punching holes in many scholarly debates on Africa, asserts that modernity itself is not some special category and that treating it as such only reinforces an ideology of European exceptionalism and superiority. He advocates for a common-sense definition of modernity: "every new epoch is modern till it is superceded by another, and this is common to all societies" (232). He goes on to argue, "Modernity equally involves...the appropriation and assimilation of novel elements," but he refuses to see this as the exclusive purview of Europe and alleges, "to valorise one's modernity while denying the imperative of transition in an Other is to denigrate and disparage" (232)

Notes on Harvey, "Modernity and Modernism"

2006-01-24T13:57:00.000-08:00

Harvey states his task in this essay is to pay close attend to modernity's conjoining of the ephemeral and eternal

He uses Berman (1982) and Frisby (1985) to establish that flux and instability are key features of modernity while acknowledging that they might be writing from a contemporary position that tends to overstate the flux half of the modern equation. Nonetheless, he concludes, "the only secure thing about modernity is insecurity." (11)

Harvey identifies several consquences of modern fragmentation:
1) modernity has no respect for its own past, let alone that of pre-modern social orders
2) modernity destroys a sense of historical continuity because the modern maelstrom influences the debates and objects of study within it; there is no 'outside'
3) modernity is characterized by violent historical and intellectual ruptures, and the avant-garde was the source of these ruptures (Poggioli 1968 and Burger 1984)

Following Habermas (1983) Harvey identifies the start of the project of modernity as being the Enlightenment, with the goal of developing reason, objectivity, universal morality and law to liberate human beings from the irrationalities of myth and superstition, abuses of power, the vicissitudes of the environment, and the darker sides of our own nature. Secular universalism was central to this ideology, which believed itself to be about the perfection of humanity.

The 20th century made the optimistic view of the Enlightenment project untenable at best and at worst revealed that the logic of control hiding behind universalism could only lead to oppression. Far from being a historical aberation, people like Horkheimer & Adorno believed that it was the logical outcome of the modern project. Recent philosophical thought is roughly split between those who advocate abandoning the Enlightenment as hopelessly oppressive and those (like Habermas) who believe universalist values have only been mis- or incompletely applied.

Problems with the Enlightenment:
1) tension between means and ends
2) what is emancipation to some looks oppressive to others
3) who gets to decide and on what grounds? who possesses the superior reason needed to produce utopia? this tended to favor those who already had power
4) what is the agent of positive social transformation? the free market's invisible hand (Adam Smith) or collective, class-based social struggle (Karl Marx)?

The Enlightment project has had many critics. Early on, Edmund Burke faulted the Enlightenment's anti-aristocratic tendencies for the bloodbath of the Reign of
Terror, Malthus believed scarcity was an essential natural condition, and De Sade advocated for the emancipatory potential of extreme physicality and subjectivity against cerebral and universalistic reason. Weber argued that the Enlightement was really about "purposive-instrumental rationality" that produced an "iron cage" of bureaucracy and crushed the human spirit (Bernstein 1985).

"Creative Destruction"
Formulated by Nietzsche, the self-detructive but creative "affirmation of self was to act, to manifest will, in this maelstrom of destructive creation and creative destruction even if the outcome was bound to be tragic." (16) This is the other half of the dual formulation of modernism as both eternal and ephemeral, and it came out of very practical questions faced in the process of modernization. Examples include Hausmann's redesign of Paris, Moses's redevelopment of New York, Schumpeter's ideal capitalist, and Gertrude Stein's Picasso.

Neitzsche's elevation of creative destruction and aesthetics as "beyond good and evil" gave new power to cultural modernism and the avant-garde, which now had a heroic and "creative role to play in defining the essence of humanity" (19). An undercurrent of Enlightenment thought always incorporated questions of aesthetics and aesthetic judgement "as a separate realm of cognition," but the 19th century elevated artistic practices to an end in themselves, generated the "untrammelled individualsim" and "radical subjectivism" decried by conservative critics of modernism such as Daniel Bell (1978). Harvey sees as a problem with the equation of the aesthetic avant-grade with human liberation is that the aestheticization of politics can just as easily lead rightward as leftward. Universalistic formulations about the avant-garde tend to ignore historical contingency and fail to take into account how the positioning of cultural workers affects how they represented the link between the eternal and ephemeral parts of modernity.

Harvey goes on to discuss some of the strategies modern artists developed to represent the eternal/ephemeral dualism of modernity and to explore how some of these developments were also a reaction to questions of historical, cultural, and class positioning:
1) Preoccupation with language: "Modernism, from its very beginning...became preoccupied with language, with finding som special mode of representation of eternal truths" (21). Harvey points out that many avant-garde artists developed new codes and allusions that often then needed to be in turn disrupted in the name of modern flux.
2) Montage/Collage are paradigmatically modernist because they recombine and flatten both time and space while still creating an object for 'eternal' aesthetic contemplation.
3) Art-as-fashion: The permanent revolution of modernism tended to produce art movements as rapidly as the flux of fashion, which in turn reflected the need of artists to "change the bases of aestheic judgement, if ony to sell his or her product" given the free-market in which modern artists must support themselves (22). 4) Autonomous or 'auratic art' imbued with some mystical element by the personality of the artist. "The result was often a hightly individualistic, aristocratic, disdainful (particularly of popular culture), and even arrogant perspective on the part of cultural producers" (22), though some avant-gardes (such as Dadaists, sought to fust their art with popular culture and daily life.
5) Modern technologies such as electronic broadcasting and technical innovations in printing "radically changed the material conditions of the artists' existence and hence their social and political role" (23) that tended to undermine claims of auratic art but open up new possibilities to fuse art with popular life; other artist used popular architecture and life as an aesthetic influence.

Harvey concludes his discussion on modern aesthetic reaction with an admonition to "keep in mind, therefore, that the modernism that emerged before the First World War was more of a reaction tot he new conditions of production (the machine, the factory, urbanization), circulations (the new systems of transport and communications), circulations (the new systems of transport and communications), and consumption (the rise of mass markets, advertising, ass fashion) than it was a pioneer in such changes. yet hte form the reaction took was to be of consideratble subsequent importance. Not only did it provide ways to absorb, refect upon, and codify thse rapid changes, but it also suggested lines of action that might modify or support them" (23).

Harvey is a cultural geographer, and he goes into the geography of modernism, pointing out that "tensions between internationalism and nationalism, between globalism and parochialist ethnocentrism, betwen universalism and class privileges were never far from the surface" (24-5) He points out that modern avant-gardes were often both very universalistic in their rhetoric but deeply bound to a certain place its particularities (whether those particularities were acknowledged or not). Usually, that place was an urban one, and "the pressing need to confront the psychological, sociological, technical, organizational, and political problems of massive urbanization was one of the seed-beds in which modernist movements flourished" (25). Modern writer Georg Simmel saw the city as contradictorily a space to achieve individual autonomy and self-definition and a place that encouraged the treatment of others as commodities, with the cultivation of a sham individuality through the pursuit of fashion. Harvey also discusses the role of particularites of national cultures and histories in creating a highly Eurocentric modernism, with the extreme clashes between working class and industrialists about the direction of modernization as seen in cities like Paris helping to produce a particularly rich kind of modernism.

Harvey then goes on to periodize modernism in order to better set the stage to introduce and understand postmodernism. Beginning in the Enlightenment, the modern project assumed that "the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture it rightly," which assumed a single and universally correct way of representing it (27). Around 1848 (the date corresponds with a number of revolutions and the publication of _The Communist Manifesto_), the unitary vision of the Enlightenment began to be challenged with increasingly militant claims of divergent and often subjective systems of representation. Somewhere between 1910 and 1915, this process accelerated dramatically, and "the whole world of representation and of knowledge underwent a fundamental transformation during this short space of time" (28-29) that culminated with World War II. After World War II, "high modernism" became institutionalized "in a society where a corporate capitalist version of the Enlightenment project of development for progress and human emancipation held sway as a political-economic dominant" (35).

Harvey identifies the inter-war qualitative shift with "a growing unease with the categorical fixity of Enlightenment thought" (29), the disparities produced by capitalism became more apparent, and cultural workers were being increasingly squeezed and forced to choose sides (especially during the revolutions of the 1910s and in the post World War I era). At the same time, the growing sense of the anarchy and violence of modern life produced movements to liberate the erotic, psychological, irrational needs of human beings (surrealism, psychoanalysis), and a pluralism of modernism resulted that had the paradoxical character of taking on"multiple perspectivism and relativism as its epistemology for revealing what it still took to be the true nature of a unified, though complex, underlying reality" (30). Some of these perspectives sought to produce a new mythos that was both ancient and modern (Joyce's Ulysses) and a functional answer to the problems facing the post-war economies and infrastructures of Europe (architects like Le Corbusier, Bauhaus, van der Rohe). The philosophy of logical positivism was one result, which largely rehashed and professionalized the Enlightment's faith in technology, and there has been a strong machinist element to 20th century modernism (from the Futurists through "better life through chemistry" adverts). Other modernists did not reference their own social formations so directly and instead 'borrowed' from other cultures, often ones not perceived as modern (T.S. Eliot, Picasso), out of both imperialism and a sense of desperation.

It is hard to overstate the profundity of the post-war transition of aesthetic modernism from challenging avant-garde to cultural institution. The heroism and machine-myths of the avant-garde migrated too well to a rationale for and celebration of corporate-bureaucratic power and influence many aspects of social development: cavernous modernist housing projects, urban renewal, corporate architecture and artworks. In painting, "the de-politicization of modernism that occurred with the rise of abstract expressionism ironically presage its embrace by the political and cultural establishment as an ideological weapon in the cold war struggle. The art was full enough of alienation and anxiety, and expressive enough of violent fragmentation and creative destruction (all of which were surely appropriate to the nuclear age) to be used as a marvellous exemplar of US commitment to liberty of expression, rugged individualism and creative freedom" (37). "Establishment art and high culture became such an exclusive preserve of a dominant elite that experimentation within it frame...became increasingly difficult...Worse still, it seemed that [it] could do nothing more than monumentalize corporate and state power or the American dream as self-referential myths, projecting a certain emptiness of sensibility on that side of Baudelaire's formulation that dwelt upon human aspirations and eternal truths" (38).

All this sets the stage to understand the "post-avant garde" movements that emerged after WWII and which, to some degree and debatably, are still going on in the name of "intermedia," "tactical media" and other terms.

Class Notes: 1/24/06

2006-01-24T13:55:00.000-08:00

1. Announcements:
Nato Thompson talk 5 pm Thursday @ Lawson-REQUIRED
Dean Kessman talk 8 pm Thursday @ Lawson
Next Time: lecture & discussion in NMC; also sign up for Blogger

2. Summary of Harvey & Oguibe Readings--Sarah

3. Generate discussion questions about the reading (all of it)--each person in class generates 2 questions, emphasize issues of relevance in the present day and for cultural workers.

Exs:
What are some of the present-day contradictions in our society that echo those Berman and Harvey saw of the modern period?
Where would you place yourself in the three variants of late modernism that Berman describes (withdrawal, negative, or affirmative) and why?
Where in the discourse of our day is the equation of free markets bringing about free thought replicated? What do you think about that argument? How does Harvey's discussion of high modernism's institutionalization fit in to this argument?
What would it mean for cultural workers to “recognize the depths of their own dependence…on the bourgeois world they despise”?
How do those issues of dependence and entanglement play out for artists today?

4. Discuss around these discussion questions...

5. Hand in reading responses.

Long Branch Coffee House

2006-01-19T19:43:00.000-08:00

As we decided at the end of class today, we'll meet for many of our discussions at the Long Branch Coffee House, including this coming Tuesday.

For those of you unfamiliar with this particular spot, directions are below.

Take US-51/S. Illinois Avenue NORTH (away from campus) just past the square with the long, wooden shelter and the public art with people dancing.

Turn RIGHT on E. Jackson St. This is the next possible right after the light at Main/Route 13.

Cross the railroad tracks and make a left into the parking lot. The coffee shop is right on the corner of the parking lot. We will be in the back room.

See you Tuesday.

Notes on Berman

2006-01-19T10:46:00.001-08:00

Notes on All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

INTRODUCTION

(p 15-16)
500 years of modernity has created certain modern 'traditions'--his task is to chart what they are and have been. Berman's desire is to bring back 19th century dynamic modernism

Modernity=a historical period; roughly end of renaissance to end of 20th century
Modernization=the social, economic, and technological processes that have occured during modernity and that bring about the modern 'maelstrom' condition
Modernism=the values and visions that make people "subjects rather than objects" of modernization

Berman identifies 3 phases in modernity (16-19)
1) 16th-18th century (late renaissance/scientific revolution/urbanization/checks on the power of kings and beginning of bourgeoisie)
2) 1790s-1900--era of bourgeois revolutions, massive industrialization produced the maelstrom & the sense of living in 2 worlds (the modern and premodern) simultaneously--rise of romantic/nostalgic anti-modernism in this time
3) 20th century--final phase of modernism/high modernism--"As the modern public expands it shatters into a multitude of fragments, speaking incommensurable private languages, the idea of modernity, conceived in numerous fragmentary ways, loses much of its vividness, resonance, depth (17) Berman identifies 20th century with a un-visionary, mechanized, uncreative modernism

Berman contends that all 19th century modernists embrace modernity's contradictions and dangers (19-23)
-19th century modernism and Marxian dialectics
-engine of change & history lies in the contradictions of an epoch (capitalism shall bring about the conditions that inevitably spell its downfall)
19th century modernism and Nietschean nihilism
-irony and dialectic in the destruction of Christian order/god
-despite the absence and emptiness of modern values, he embroaces the perils of modernity to create a new thoroughly modern Man.

Berman contends 20th century modernists have a regressive, closed, or flat view of modernity (23-29)
-mechanization of the modern visions, from Futurism ("What happens to the people who get swept away in these tides [modernization]?") to 60s counterculture to the one-dimensional man of Marcuse & the counterculture
-this negative view of modernity ignored 19th century utopian traditions & saw modernity as producing a 'no way out' solution, hence turn to 3rd world struggles

Berman turns to characterizing 3 threads in 1960s modernism (29-34)
-Withdrawal from the culture (Greenberg and Barthes)--leads to aesthetic tomb
-Negative--modernity is a constant revolution--ignores the constructive and liberatory parts of modernity
-Affirmative view of modernism (post-modernism, in Berman's eyes)--break down divisions between disciplines, risks being very uncritical & amoral

MARX, MODERNIZATION, MODERNISM--argues for a 19th century vision of the totality of modern life & for Marx's position as a modernist

1) The Melting Vision & Its Dialectic (90-98)
-notes characteristics of Marx's description of the process of capital that melts into luminous prose
-glowing account of bourgeois accomplishments
-values bourgeois harnassing and transformation of "human life and energy" (93) over materials/technical accomplishments
-this transformation of life doesn't really matter to bourgeois unless it can make money; the forces this transformation unleashes in spirits & hearts will
ultimately destroy bourgeoisie (relation to Hardt & Negri)
-"Thus, for all Marx's invective against the bourgeois economy, he embraces enthusiastically the personality structure that this economy has produced" (95)

2) Innovative Self-Destruction (98-105)
"Catastrophes are transmored into lucrative opportunities for redevelopment and renewal, disintegration works as amobilizaing and hence inegrating force" (95)
-Capital woul deat its own monuments for a profit (98-101)
-Why, then should the productive/destructive forces unleased by capitalsm ever destroy it, if it can simply profit on them?
-Why should workers' communities necessarily be any more enduring than anything else produced by the bourgeois economy?

3) Nakedness: The Unaccomodated Man (105-110)
-Modern literature, including Marx, is full of a dualism equation openness/nakedness/freedom vs. hiddenness/veiledness/secrecy
-Hostility toward the Islamic veil is predicated on this dualism--the absence of the veil as a symbol of fraternal equality, leveling of status difference, and privileging of vision as truth
-This can be seen also as a fall from innocence and disastrous descent into knowledge (Burke)
-Marx sees a both/and--a painful wrenching of illusion necessary for the festering wounds of society to be healed by communism through exposure.
-Problems:
-collective recognition is not the only outcome of stripping of illusions (social fragmentation into hyper-individualism or the reerection of social illusions could also follow)
-how does a society so unstable as to constantly be ripping veils/making profane allow for a stable "real self" to emerge?

4) The Metamorphosis of Value (111-114)
-Bourgeois values are only that which can be made monetarily valuable
-Marx therefore believed that radical ideas can flourish in the "marketplace of ideas" so long as they can sell
-Problems:
-free trade is an ideal; fixing markets is the usual experience
-because of state's investment in 'free trade,' ideas are usual regulated to ensure stability; true liberals are few
-this belief ends up creating a collusion between radical opponents of capitalism and the economic system that 'permits' them to work as "merchants and promoters of revolution." (114)

5) The Loss of a Halo (115-120)
-Proletarianization of knowledge/creative work by capital simultaneously creates a "spiritual equality" among all people--no mystification of holy people, healers, etc.
-Commodity fetishism: the "halo" is transferred to the commodity, the saleable/buyable "thing," which becomes a carrier of relational/social value between people; also, people begin to treat each other like commodities
-Modern culture IS part of modern industry; therefore cultural workers are dependent on the economic order in order to do their work. "Creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways tha will dumfound or horrify their creators." (117)
-This dependence is also spiritual: while cultural workers are relatively privileged workers, they are emotionally tied up with their work and the economy has them more intimately controlled.
-This dependence tends to both produce and frustrate radicalism; produce it because of the dependence and frustrate it by capital's ability to appropriate its own critiques
-Avant-gardes tended to replace the 'halo' over their heads--a denial of capital. "They were at once perceptive and trenchant in their critiques of capitalism, and, at the same time, absurdly complacent in their faith that they had the power to transcend it, that they could live and work freely beyond its norms and demands." (119)
-"Intellectuals must recognize the depths of their own dependence--spiritual as well as economic dependence--on the bourgeouis world they despise." (119)

6) Culture and the Contradictions of Capitalism
-this chapter has read Marx as a modernist and modernism as a Marxist in order to "thaw" both traditions from their mutual skepticism.
-conservative critique of modernism ignores how modernism was socially and economically produced
-questions about the universality of modernism & the production of a "world culture"
-is modernism a necessary outcome of modernization, a 'return of the repressed' which is why it is being repressed by dictatorships? (here Berman seems to be guilty of the flaw he identified of conservative anti-modernists: disentangling modernism from modernity and capitalism)
-Marcuse's criticism of Marx for fetishizing labor or, more generally, productive forces, at the expense of sensual and imaginative lives--Berman points out that productive forces certainly can include those; today Negri's multitude certainly creates this bridge
-Arendt's criticism that Marx's world lacks a real political community because it is simply an amalgam of "freely developing individuals" living private lives in public; Berman takes issue with Arendt's circumscribing the personal beyond the political while conceding that Marx did not draw up a working model of political community

Class Notes 1/19/06

2006-01-19T10:46:00.000-08:00

1. Break into pairs to sketch out major content of the reading for the day (20 min)

2. Report back from groups; make sure all major material is covered, as below in notes (30 min)

3. Discussion questions (30-40 min)
a. To summarize, what are some of the features of modernism?
b. What are some of the present-day contradictions in our society that echo those Berman saw of the modern period?
c. Is Berman simply being nostalgic (a quintessentially modern reaction) for an earlier version of modernity that may or may not have been?
d. Where would you place yourself in the three variants of late modernism that Berman describes (withdrawal, negative, or affirmative) and why?
e. Where in the discourse of our day is the equation of free markets bringing about free thought replicated? What do you think about that argument?
f. What would it mean for cultural workers to “recognize the depths of their own dependence…on the bourgeois world they despise”?
g. How do those issues of dependence and entanglement play out for artists today?
h. What about “world culture?” The majority of the artists I presented last time were Euro-American or, if they were not, they had immigrated, at least part time, to the United States or Europe. What does this saw about the existence of a “world culture” and who or what has primacy in it?

4. Presentation on what is entailed in a reading response—handout. (20 min)

5. Reading for Tuesday (5-10 min)

Class Notes 1/17/06

2006-01-17T11:17:00.000-08:00

Today's slide lecture is available online here.

Introduction
• What is intermedia art, anyway?
• Where did it come from?
• What are we going to do in this class?

What is intermedia?
• A position, not a genre

Surveillance Camera Players, Amnesia, 2002

The strategic use of different media

Natalie Bookchin, Metapet, 2002

• Strive for relevance beyond the boundaries between specialized media and even beyond art

Natalie Jeremijenko (BIT), Clear Skies, 2002

Why not ‘New Media?’
• “New” is not so new anymore
• Fetishization of novelty and technology
• Tendency to exclude projects that don’t use technology at all
• Neo-Modernist overtones

Where does intermedia come from?
• Critiques of Modernism
– Freedom from representational, religious, or decorative, or social functions
Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte Victoire, 1897-1902

– Clarification of forms into the purity of essence for a given medium (Clement Greenberg)

Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollack at Work, 1950
Jackson Pollack, Lavender Mist, 1950
David Smith, Cubi XII, 1963
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Place de l’Europe, 1932
Stan Brakhage, Chartres Series, 1993

– Tends to carve out an autonomous, rarified, and self-involved space for rather empty formalism (“art pour l’art”)

• Theories of the (neo) avant-garde
– Historic avant-garde attempted to rupture art pour l’art to create a unified aesthetico-political lifeworld

Umberto Boccioni, Charge of the Lancers, 1915
Futurism

Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire, 1916
Francis Picabia (painter) & Erik Satie (composer) ca. 1917
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
Dada

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the 3rd International, 1920
El Lissitzky, Beat the Whites with the Reds, 1919
Constructivism

Where does intermedia come from?

– Avant-garde failure--end in repression or self-destruction
– Neo-avant-garde recycles avant-garde forms (Peter Burger) or attempts to understand them in the present (Hal Foster)

Situationist International, Psychogeographical map of Paris

John Cage
In 1948, Cage joined the faculty of Black Mountain College, where he regularly worked on collaborations with Merce Cunningham. Around this time, he visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University (an anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally soundproofed.) Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation." Cage had gone to a place where he expected there to be no sound, and yet sound was nevertheless discernible. He stated "until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music." The realisation as he saw it of the impossibility of silence led to the composition of his most notorious piece, 4’33’’.

Another cited influence for this piece came from the field of the visual arts. Cage's friend and Black Mountain colleague, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, had, while working at the college, produced a series of white paintings. These were apparently blank canvases that, in fact, changed according to varying light conditions of the rooms in which they were hung, as well as the shadows of people in the room. These paintings inspired Cage to use a similar idea, using the 'silence' of the piece as an 'aural blank canvas' to reflect the dynamic flux of ambient sounds surrounding each performance.

The premiere of the three-movement 4’33’’ was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and lift the lid of the piano. Some time later, without having played any notes, he closed the lid. A while after that, again having played nothing, he lifted the lid. And after a further period of time, he closed the lid once more and rose from the piano. The piece had passed without a note being played and without Tudor having made any deliberate sound, although he timed the lengths on a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score. Only then could the audience recognize what Cage insisted upon, that “There is no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.”

Conceived in 1952, Theater Piece No. 1 consisted of Cage collaborating with Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles Olson at Black Mountain College where the performance took place amongst the audience. "Happenings", as set forth by Cage, are theatrical events that abandoned the traditional concept of stage-audience and occur without a sense of definite duration; instead, they are left to chance. They have a minimal script, with no plot. In fact, a "Happening" is so-named because it occurs in the present, attempting to arrest the concept of passing time. Cage believed that theater was the closest route to integrating art and (real) life. "Happenings" were events that were later appropriated by his student Allan Kaprow who was to define it as a genre in the late fifties. In following these developments Cage was strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal treatise The Theatre and It’s Double, and the “Happenings” of this period can be viewed a forerunner to the ensuing Fluxus movement.
(From Wikipedia)

Allan Kaprow, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, 1959
“In his groundbreaking happening, presented at the Reuben Gallery in New York in the fall of 1959, Kaprow synthesized his training in action painting with his study of Cage’s scored and performed events. Working from a carefully conceived and tighlty scripted score, he created an interactive environment that manipulated the audience to a degree virtually unprecedented in 20th century art. The audience were given programs and three stapled cards, which provided instructions for their participation: ‹The performance is divided into six parts...Each part contains three happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell. At the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard...There will be no applause after each set, but you may applaud after the sixth set if you wish.› These instructions also stipulated when audience members were required to change seats and move to the next of the three rooms into which the gallery was divided.
These rooms were formed by semitransparent plastic sheets painted and collaged with references to Kaprow’s earlier work; by panels on which words were roughly painted, and by rows of plastic fruit. (...) In contrast to Cage, whose encouragement of the participation of audience members war motivated by his desire to relinquish authorial control, audience members in many of Kaprow’s Happenings became props through which the artist’s vision was executed.»

(source: Paul Schimmel, «Leap into the Void: Performance and the Object», in: Out of Actions: between performance and the object, 1949–1979, MoCA Los Angeles, New York/London, 1998, pp.61f.)

George Maciunas, fluxus game, ca. 1965
“In Latin and other languages, "Fluxus" literally means "flow" and "change." Similarly, the related English word "flux" is used variously to mean "a state of continuous change," "a fusion," and "a gushing of fluid from a body."

George Maciunas (Lithuanian-American, 1931-1978) coined the name Fluxus. He described it as "a fusion of Spike Jones, gags, games, Vaudeville, Cage and Duchamp." He co-ordinated and edited numerous Fluxus publications.

According to George Maciunas, Fluxus intended to "purge the world of bourgeois sickness . . . of dead art," to "promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, anti-art, promote non art reality . . ." and to "fuse the cadres of cultural, social, and political revolutionaries into a united front and action."

Fluxus (from "to flow") is an art movement noted for the blending of different artistic disciplines, primarily visual art but also music and literature. Fluxus was loosely organized in 1962 by George Maciunas (1931-78), a Lithuanian-American artist who had moved to Germany to escape his creditors, along with his fellow Lithuanian and personal friend, Almus Salcius. Besides America and Europe, Fluxus also took root in Japan.

Among its associates were Joseph Beuys, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik and Yoko Ono who explored media ranging from performance art to poetry to experimental music to film. They took the stance of opposition to the ideas of tradition and professionalism in the arts of their time, the Fluxus group shifted the emphasis from what an artist makes to the artist's personality, actions, and opinions. Throughout the 1960s and '70s (their most active period) they staged "action" events, engaged in politics and public speaking, and produced sculptural works featuring unconventional materials. Their radically untraditional works included, for example, the video art of Nam June Paik and the performance art of Beuys. The often playful style of Fluxus artists led to their being considered by some little more than a group of pranksters in their early years. Fluxus has also been compared to Dada and aspects of Pop Art and is seen as the starting point of mail art.”
From http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/f/fluxus.html
Most notorious are the Fluxus performance pieces or "Event Scores" such as George Brecht's Drip Music. Fluxus artists differentiate Event Scores from "happenings" which they called Flux Events. Whereas Happenings were meant to blur the lines between performer and audience, performance and reality, Fluxus performances were sometimes one-liners and sight gags. The performances sought to elevate the banal and dissemble the high culture of serious music and art.”

Nam June Paik, TV Buddha, 1974
Joseph Beuys, 5000 Oaks, 1980

• Contributions of Postmodernism
– Dismantling of grand narratives, including utopian/avant-garde

Adrian Piper, Cornered, 1988

– Establishing deconstructive methodologies

Martha Rosler, If You Lived Here, 1989

“Created in 1989, "If You Lived Here ..." consisted of a three-part show curated by Rosler at an exhibition space in SoHo run by the Dia Art Foundation, as it was known at the time; a series of lectures and panel discussions by artists, activists and theorists engaged with the then hot-button issue of homelessness in New York City; and a publication which printed transcripts of exchanges from the panels and related essays. The project was remarkable both for the complexity of the models it offered for thinking about the problem of homelessness, its causes and possible remedies.

In Rosler's recent retrospective, a partial reconstruction of the Dia shows captured the chaotic spirit of the original installation, where works by activist artists hung side by side with graphs demonstrating the city's housing shortage, newspaper articles on homelessness and on the New York real estate boom of the '80s, pamphlets, waiting-room furniture and documentary photographs of devastated urban neighborhoods. There were also photographs at the ICP of the 1989 Dia installations and a reconstruction of a house by a 1980s urban guerrilla group called the Mad Housers, whose tactics featured the erection of unauthorized wooden shelters on vacant lots.
(Eleanor Heartney, “Documents of Dissent,” Art in American, March, 2001)

– Valorizing of hybridity and indeterminacy

Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny, 2000

“My transgenic artwork «GFP Bunny» comprises the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit, the public dialogue generated by the project, and the social integration of the rabbit. GFP stands for green fluorescent protein. «GFP Bunny» was realized in 2000 and first presented publicly in Avignon, France. Transgenic art, I proposed elsewhere, is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism, to create unique living beings. This must be done with great care, with acknowledgment of the complex issues thus raised and, above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture, and love the life thus created.” - Eduardo Kac

– Disciplinary "borrowings”
Repohistory, Lower Manhattan Sign Project, 1992

So where are we now?
(and what are we doing in this class?)

“Today’s avant-garde faces the formidable task of inventing new solutions, modes of production, and reception. Such an avant-garde no doubt exists, and it will be both like and unlike the one that once appeared as the “historic” avant-garde at the beginning of the previous century. Those outside forces--technologies, economies, and power relations--that it works over, appropriates, and transforms are themselves in constant movement.” (Sven-Olov Wallerstein, 2001)

Show Examples of Contemporary Work:
Critical Art Ensemble, Radio Bike, 2000
Wochenklauser, From Place to Place, 2001
Walid Raad, The Atlas Group, 1999-
William Pope L., The Black Factory, 2003-
Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Rocket, 2004
Bureau of Inverse Technology, BIT Rocket, 2004
Emily Jacir, Sexy Semite, 2000
Emily Jacir, Where We Come From, 2002-3

OK, and what are we doing in this class?
HAND OUT SYLLABUS AND ASK STUDENTS TO FOLLOW ALONG

• Understand the historical and conceptual development of intermedia artwork
• Demonstrate skills of formal and content analysis for intermedia artwork
• Learn to speak critically about your own work and the work of others
• Produce two original intermedia art projects in response to assignments, readings, and visiting artists

Requirements
• Plan to spend 6-10 hours/week working outside of class
• 3-5 page paper analyzing one intermedia work
• 1-2 original projects completed
• 3 reading responses
• Visiting artist lecture & creative notebook
• Attendance is mandatory; no more than 2 absences

Texts
• Morris Library e-reserve
• Required vs. advanced texts

Required Materials
• Sketchbook/Creative Notebook
• Other materials as required
• $50 lab fee for NMC lab and C&P equipment room

Evaluation & Extra Credit
• Project 2: 20
• Project 1: 20
• Participation: 20
• Paper and presentation: 15
• Reading responses: 15 (3 responses x 5 points each)
• Creative notebook: 10

Semester Overview
• Foundations
– Modernism, postmodernism, dada, situationism, visual methodologies
• Issues and Tactics
– Specific artists, issues of representation, commodity culture, detournement, enactment
• Practicum
– Making of new works of art

SHOW WEBSITE AND BLOG

HAND OUT QUESTIONNAIRE & TAKE SHOW OF HANDS OF THOSE STILL INTERESTED IN THE COURSE TO GAUGE ENROLLMENT ISSUES

HOMEWORK:
Read Berman for Thursday; make notes in creative notebook for class discussion

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2006-01-12T21:22:00.000-08:00

this is a test