Re: [-empyre-] Curatorial Dynamics

[Eduardo Navas <eduardo@navasse.net>]

Thanks for pulling out the quotes.

I have been a bit quite on the direction of the discussion, but I would like
now to take this opportunity and propose something in relation to the
initial premise.  This one reads:

Do conceptual art and curatorial practice merge in post digital cultural
production? How are new media art, criticism and curatorial
 practice a 'transgressive' ecology"?


On the first question I would say that conceptual art is not much of an
issue in new media practice.  While it is true that artists part of the
net.art group were influenced by a certain type of conceptualism, the
premises behind conceptual art as it is understood from its origins in the
New York scene is practically irrelevant in new media practice. When it is
brought up it is often in allegorical form.  Check MTAA's work for example,
in particular One year performance:
http://turbulence.org/Works/1year/
Which allegorizes this piece:
http://www.one-year-performance.com/no1.html

To get a gist of what I mean, you  may want to read my review:
http://netartreview.net/weeklyFeatures/2005_01_09_archive.html
(second article at the bottom)

This is in part because Institutional critique as developed by the likes of
Joseph Kosuth has now an established position within the institution.

Of course there are conceptual artists who still hold a particular critical
position, still questioning the establishment, but these are fewer at this
point.  Most have been comfortably absorbed by the art market.

The key concept to keep in mind in relation to Conceptual art is that it
developed in reaction to Greenbergian modernism.  Those who may disagree
check the writings of Kosuth and Wiener before reprimanding this
proposition, as I am not about to contest it here anymore.  Alan Sondheim
said this was not so in the Syndicate list a few months ago, but now I am
here explaining that conceptual practice is specific to the attempt at
dematerializing the object of art.  If anyone wants to consider this any
further check the book Conceptual Art, a critical anthology:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262511177/qid=1114675825/sr=2-4/ref=
pd_bbs_b_2_4/103-0360718-5120666


It is important to note that there is no physical object of art with much of
new media projects--especially internet art.  Of course we can say that we
have moved on to the actual discourse and its form as information becoming
the object, but when this shift happens the criticism also shifts.  We can
start to consider the role of this list (empyre) in relation to intellectual
capital and its new power position within the gift economy.  This is
something that has been mentioned a few times already by McKenzie and
others.

What actually happens is that the artist today --including the new media
artist--could develop work using dialectic materialism within the parameters
of conceptualism and this may be why some people confuse new media practice
following dialectic analysis with Conceptualism as understood with the likes
of Asher or Piper.  However, the basic criticism that made conceptualism a
specific movement of resistance is no longer there.  So how does conceptual
art relate to new media is a bit of a mute point; when it does, it is
allegorical as explained in my review.

Can new media practice be a transgressive ecology?  Well, that depends on
how one defines transgression.  On the Matrixial Encounters exchange
certainly such idea has been entertained in relation to psuchoanalysis, but
I would wonder if this is just another form of deferring the actual
limitations within our localities.  I would wonder how many people active
online have developed a stronger local position thanks to their online
influence?  This is something that certainly has offered the possibility for
people on the margins to come forward and be known.  At the same time
limitations are still at play and often carried over from pre-existing power
structures that are supported wsith pre-established ideologies, which people
think they have transgressed simply because they can communicate with other
around the world.  These ideologies are the ones we often claim to free us
from false consciousness, but in reality end up keeping us on a safe cage.
This is true for the subject of power and her/his many renegotiations,
locally or globally.

I also wonder based on Christina's last comment if we really are
co-subjects? Or is such proposition yet another form of deferrement of power
relations within current online discourse?

Eduardo Navas



On 4/28/05 12:29 AM, "Christina McPhee" <christina112@earthlink.net> wrote:

> dear LIst,
> 
> just to bring up again, the quote from Spivak to which Eduardo refers
> is one that Raul has supplied:
> 
> 
> "If one looks at the history of post-Enlightenment theory, the major
> problem
> has been the problem of autobiography: how subjective structures can, in
> fact, give objective truth.  During these same centuries, the Native
> Informant, who  was found in these other places, his stuff was
> unquestioningly treated as the objective evidence for the founding of
> so-called sciences like ethnography, ethno-linguistics, comparative
> religion, and so on.  So that, once again, the theoretical problems only
> relate to the person who knows.  The person who knows has all of the
> problems of selfhood.  The person who is known, somehow seems not to
> have a
> problematic self.  These days it is the same kind of agenda that is at
> work.
> Only the dominant self can be problematic; the self of the Other is
> authentic without a problem, naturally available to all kinds of
> complications.  This is very Frightening."
> 
> Gayatri Spivak, "Questions on Multiculturalism," The Post-Colonial
> Critic
> (New York: Routledge, 1990), 66.
> 
> ,as Eduardo writes:
>> this is a dynamic that plays up not to far off from Spivak's position I
>> previously described.  How can subjects who constantly rewrite their
>> autobiographies approached?  Silence may be the answer...
>> 
>> Thoughts, reproaches--but hopefully approaches are the hopes for this
>> message.  We have until Sunday, so I do hope others join in.
>> 
>> Raul's e-mail made me realize what this discussion is about, no matter
>> how
>> busy we may all be.  So after saying goodbye less than 24 hours agod,
>> I am
>> now admitting to be active on the list until the end of the week
> 
> Meanwhile I also note in passing, that Gayatri Spivak has also been
> quoted by Danny Butt, who may have been  thinking of both threads in
> our discussion when he quoted Gayatri here:
>> ... Cixous has recently written: 'I believe the text should
>> establish an ethical relationship to reality as well as to textural
>> practice.' The task here is to not suspend reading until such time as
>> the
>> text is our of quarantine.
>> 
>> All precautions taken, then we can say that Cixous is staging the
>> thought
>> that, even as we are determined in all kinds of other ways - academic,
>> philosopher, feminist, black, homeowner, menstruating woman, for
>> example -
>> we *are* also *always* in the peculiar being-determination that
>> sustains
>> these. She is staging that dimension in the name of the place of
>> mother-and-child. This is not really a space accessible to political
>> determinations, or to specific determinations of mothering in specific
>> cultural formations. ...
> 
>> - Gayatri Spivak, "French Feminism Revisited", Outside in the Teaching
>> Machine, p155.
>> .
> 
> So it would appear that for Spivak, there is no 'non probematic ' self.
> I suggest we are all in this interchange space as co-subjects and as
> such  we are all inauthentic.  The ethical demand, as Spivak interprets
> Helene Cixhous,  is to establish a text / or one might say, a syntax,
> in the political/cultural realm, and that this is done, par excellence,
> by art.
> 
> Christina
> 
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