re: [-empyre-] location and data, forward from Simon Taylor

[Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>]

This message from Simon bounced so I am resending it, thanks, Simon...

Christina



-- From: Simon Taylor <swht@clear.net.nz>
Date: Thu, 23 Sep 2004 10:20:16 +1200
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] location and data

Thankyou for the Matta link - Gordon to Roberto (a strange declension):
Gordon Matta-Clark's work opening keyhole-views in derelict buildings
appeals to me as particularly resonant (with the echolalia of architectural
theory which seems to haunt the topic of the locative symbolic). I
reciprocate with a sideline comment of Rem Koolhaas (el croquis 79 , Madrid,
Espana, 1996: (edition devoted to Koolhaas) pp. 21-22):
 
"The inert can never outrun the semantic.
"To put it simply, both the need in Japan to have traditional motifs, and
the need in the West, - even in the most sophisticated neo-modernist circles
-, to amplify or make resonant traces of a past occupation show the same
inability to read the present construction as authentic. They are both
crutches or reinforcements of authenticity, or donors of past authenticity
that seem to be necessary because whatever we construct is never authentic.
We are becoming blind to an enormous domain of authenticity that unfolds
before our eyes and that, simply because it has none of the explicit
references, becomes inaccessible to us."
 
 
Naomi wrote:
"Curators, critics, galleries, and museums inhabit another realm - the
physical realm. Mobile media inhabits the realm of the common and
pragmatic." ... "it is low art in its engagement of mundane communication
and navigation functions."
I don't think I would so readily discriminate between the space of the
'common and pragmatic' as an outside of art/critique and a putative
'physical realm' of galleries and curatorial activity as an inside. Were
there a radical art practice employing locative media would it call its
practitioners Positionists?
 
Further, there is nothing mundane about 'navigation and communication
functions' once they are mediated or mediatised as information/data flows,
except perhaps an extramundanity, positioning such technologically produced
material as the newest (giving currency in the economics of the art world)
for exploration by artists and critics. (Walter Benjamin wrote once on a
literary score: "Critics are the strategists in the literary struggle.")
 
yours
simon taylor
 
 
 <http://www.subtle.net/empyre>

 soundart performance videoinstallation multimedia painting theory


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