[-empyre-] re: demi-gods (Valerie), Relational Aesthetics (Mark), hypperreality (Christina)

[lmdk@nbnet.nb.ca (Lea)]

Hi Valerie
Hi every one

Picking up a few threads: namely cyber time and space possibilities (Valerie)
Relational Aesthetics (Mark ) and Hyppereality (Christina)

	What comes to mind is periphery. The digest we have compiled 
so far, challenges that the dialogical process be one of inclusion, 
of meshing what appears or enters in a successive chronological 
manner beyond a one on one basis. As well, the indexical (links and 
web references) info introduced in all our respective entries further 
define and ground enunciated perspectives. As viewers or readers we 
are being solicited and prompted to convergence and coherence through 
what feels like floating eclectic arrays. The  overlap of "delayed" 
and "differed" responses to "incoming" new ones may blur the textual 
linearity and chronology. It is not unreasonable to move about these 
threads in a mode of alert peripheral vision.

	 It is much in that manner that I approached the curatorial 
process of the e-lounge event. The carnivalesque convergence of 
idiosyncratic and main stream new media artists and theorists was in 
effect perceived by some as a defiant politicized utterance posing a 
risk to aesthetic normalcy. The details of which I will pursue in 
forthcoming proceedings. In one instance an artist about to present 
and discuss work confided to me feeling a bit nervous in the presence 
of a web art curator who had been dismissive of earlier submissions. 
Never having met it turns out that these two occupied the same 
neighborhood in a distant city and made a pact to have breakfast 
after they got home. On what was predicated the curator's decision 
not to include x's work?  and to what degree was the work deviant 
from aesthetic normalcy beckons the question whether curatorial 
processes must be thematically driven?

	Your manifesto BIG ARTISTS DEFINING AN UNCOMPROMISING WORLD 
(the demi-gods) resonates with Okwui Enwezor's artistic direction of 
Documenta 11.  http://www.documenta.de/data/english/index.html. In 
periphery to the 100 day exhibit of 116 artists, a series of 6 
platforms around the world were scheduled throughout the year. 
"Planned as intellectually rigorous and methodologically adventurous, 
the culmination of the platforms as an exhibition unfolds the complex 
vicissitudes that shape the Documenta 11 exhibition when it opens on 
June 8, 2002. The platforms can be understood then as constellations 
that open up a critical review of processes of a range of knowledge 
production. Equally, these platforms perform a second operation in 
that they allow Documenta 11 the opportunity to render transparent 
the dimension of its intellectual interest and curatorial research. 
Hence the entire conceptual orientation of the exhibition is 
decidedly interdisciplinary, connecting a wide range of scholars, 
philosophers, artists, and film makers, institutions, cities, and 
audiences. The locus of Documenta 11 is one of debate and 
contestation, intellectually rigorous; methodologically adventurous 
more than any exhibition of contemporary art."

	The problematics of aesthetic normalcy vis-a-vis the new 
relations of spectatorships proposed by Okwui Enwezor are examined in 
a review by Peter Wollen, The Last Hundred Days, (LRB,3 October 2002) 
"Enwezor's perceived bias towards little-known artists from distant 
corners of the globe seems to have earned him condescending and 
scurrilously ad hominem coverage from the New York press". Wollen 
continues, "Indeed, the critics and curators with whom I have talked 
about the show often expressed confusion, seeing Documenta 11 as an 
unstructured lucky dip within which the viewer might find a few 
islands of stability but a great many more archipelagos of 
uncertainty and confusion; a few major works but a great many more 
minor works with an obsessive attachment to particularity and a 
disregard for conventional aesthetics, which are replaced with by a 
spirit of documentary reportage, investigative journalism and 
idiosyncratic record-keeping."

	 In an earlier Empyre thread 'Relational Aesthetics' Mark 
Kristmanson also recalls that, "Crossing the threshold into the 
gallery space activates protocols that cue the public and even the 
participants to aestheticize the encounter." He cautions further that 
"if such a contract fails to deliver the cue to aestheticization to 
an audience as has been the intention in some of my work  it is usual 
to be accused of having 'broken the sacred bond' or of 'tricking the 
public'...The difficulty with taking the 'contract' as the basis for 
such exchanges is that contracts are so heavily dependent for their 
meaning and interpretation on pre-given contexts--the density and 
intractability (and yes, the inequalities) of which should not be 
underestimated."

	 Again in pursuing Christina's overture on FILE 2002 
<http://www.file.org.br/> one finds under the Share Works title a 
willful shift towards the periphery that is towards the collapse of 
current curatorial and derived art practices: "The FILE international 
festival of electronic language  has posed strategies for cultural 
producers with the  aim of potentializing multiplicative perspectives 
for the emergence and development of living processes of 
heterogenesis in digital culture. It has therefore launched a new 
proposal that we have called shared  works. In the contemporary 
cultural situation, these will be works capable of triggering 
inaugural procedures and performances to fulfill expectations in 
relation to collective creativity and to other aspects as yet 
unexplored by the cultural pantheon of digitality, and also to 
contribute to the deconstruction of 'artistic' behaviors inherited 
from the culture of transcendence. What is involved here is 
discovering new tactics for connectivity and transformation in the 
production of cultural work that is no longer done under the guise of 
the uniqueness of the author or consensus of official disciplines. 
This gives rise to both unnamable alterity events and multi-cellular 
works whose creative transversality leads to crosses between 
previously incompatible worlds and poetics in which their existence 
will be incompatible."

	Yet Christina's experience of FILE 2002 signals some 
discrepancies: "Hard to understand, for a foreign visitor, was the 
ideological role or intentionality of the net art curatorial gesture 
within the local political conditions. What were the political 
accomodations of left and right to the fact of the digital media 
hyperspace?  A quick search of the word 'periphery' on the web 
conjures this link: http://www.oneworld.org/sejup/stories1.htm and 
its subsequent home page http://www.oneworld.org/sejup/index.htm as a 
possible backdrop to FILE 2002 when juxtaposed to Christina's insight 
of an absent cultural context. She relates the experience of a 
"labyrinth of electronic spatial narratives available at certain 
checkpoints, within which a cacophony of images flowed like white 
noise covering something else that was actually going on in a 
subliminal cultural context?" This white noise does evoke an 
homogeneity of digital flux and of aesthetic normalcy. How many 
increments away are we from normalizing "The presumably unprecedented 
condition of hyperreality". Christina reminds us how it 
"simultaneously assaults and freezes the process of reality testing 
and empirical observation; there is a loss of a sense of touch, and 
everything is processed by representation.The operational force is a 
kind of omnipresent coercion, without definite boundaries, with 
submerged checkpoints, so you can never see where you really are or 
what is going on."

	Valerie, your memory of watching television on Christmas eve 
1995 is also a memory about (your) spectatorship. Within the 
electronic flow of hundreds of shows available to you that special 
evening you chose to witness two events broadcasted in real time from 
distant small communities. As neophyte television consumers you 
sought to overrule the diegesis of representation and fiction in and 
rather experience anonymously temporal proximity.

	As spectators we are defined by the various mediating 
apparatuses, we come to normalize and adjust to the options and 
features we are subjected to.  What agency we are left with as 
spectators translates into our subjective location or positioning of 
art, objects, events, processes on a time line of newness, 
redundancy, and perhaps eventual obsolescence. Perhaps on the 
boundary of newness a claim could be made that the minor works of 
idiosyncratic artists endeavor to bridge to (or include) the marginal 
and the peripheral. I suggest by 'peripheral' something other than 
sensationalism, something which will (would) not or cannot be easily 
commodified or bartered as capital.

	Reflecting on the origins and the influx of funding 
associated and required in the making, diffusion and re-defining of 
aesthetic processes, aesthetic normalcy in the hands of some, may 
serve a dual purpose, function as a transparent veneer (screen) to 
'unnamable alterity' but also as a mirror reflecting the 'sacred 
bonds' engineered by the 'cultural pantheon'.

Lea