I have not participated much on Empyre, so I don't want to put my foot in my mouth by jumping in here. But Christina's more candid account of the Documenta experience strikes a familiar chord with me.
I have had several several run-ins with what I'll call, for want of a better term, "institutional new media organizations." These groups are well-funded, prominent in the wider cultural community (ie not just among new media people or even artists), and hopelessly disconnected from (what I see as) the real current new media art scene.
At their worst, these groups exploit independent artists financially or artistically, as Christina's story relates. This has happened to me (on a smaller scale than Christina's story) several times.
More often, these groups merely damage the field of new media art by mounting high-profile exhibitions which claim to be authoritative views of our field but which in fact show very outdated work, work that isn't new media art, or work at the most obnoxious fringe of new media. These shows give the public a false impression of our field and deprive most new media artists of the opportunity to have their work shown in prominent venues, because these venues have such strange curatorial policies. Meanwhile, all the grant money goes to this kind of organization, so little remains for independent artists.
The situation is made worse by the fact that it is frightening to even discuss this issue for fear of offending the people who might possibly support our work (you will notice that I named no specific organization and gave no specific details!).
Millie
- original message -
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] economics of the art system: the example of documenta
From: Christina McPhee <christina112@earthlink.net>
Date: 07/29/2007 18:14
hi all
back in California, I feel as if i can speak a bit more plainly
about -empyre- and what has happened at Documenta 12.
Just as background, I want to quote from my introduction to the =-
empyre- discussion on 'bare life' in connectionw with Documenta 12:
The increased intensity of global communication and simultaneity
makes the challenge of trying to 'be' an individual subject --
whatever that is--- continually more complex and overwhelming. -
empyre-, if not implicated in this process, is still in the midst
of it and perhaps may be, as our founder Melinda Rackham has called
it , our 'soft-skinned space', a space of resistance as well, in
that we can hope to generate -- on the fly--- a contemporary art
and new media ethics in a public space we create for ourselves and
others.
Indeed. What does 'being an individual subject mean in the context
of a situation in which our texts have been made so inaccessible that
Google can't find them? More broadly, how can we resist Documenta 12?
Let's start with money. Rumor has it that funding was cut from the
project as early as 18 months to 2 years ago. The vision of the
magazine project was apparently truncated in midstream. The person
who initiated it, Georg Schoelhamer of Springerin, was always
enthusiastic, and I do not doubt his sincerity; yet something went
terribly wrong. The entire Documenta 12 is said to have cost 19
million euros. How the 1100 or so Chinese visitors were funded as
well as the clandestine flights for special dinners at an artist's
restaurant in Spain remains obscure. In AU -empyre- tself is run
entirely for free by people volunteering their time. We have no
support from the Australian cultural apparatus except for the free
sever space at COFA-UNSW, for which we are very grateful, and to our
webmaster Nigel Kerstin at COFA. For D12, I edited over 300
pages of network generated content , from hypertext to linear text,
revised to standard publishable English , created pdfs (which of
course are completely invisible in the documenta 12 interface), and
the html; The number of hours I have given to this is easily equal
to 4 months of full time labor in 2005-2007.
The curation at the exhibition involved commodifying art objects so
that their innate power and resonance and ability to shock is
dampened to the point of indiffference. Works succeed in the
documenta exhbition when they provided within themselves, their own
contextualization, like Andrea Geyer 's suite of photos and text on
land rights and spiritual tenancy in the American Southwest. Even as
powerful an artist as Mary Kelley was trivialized through the
funerary kitsch of lurid color surrounding her project "Love
Songs" (at the Neue Galerie).
.
Taschen with presumably the leadership of D12 were able to set up
a monetarization of the public's moment to moment physical
engagement with D12's 'magazine project' (coming to D12, paying for
books in the bookshop), much like Adwords on Google. ---in part by
setting up a myth of cool amazing marginal heroic avantgarde
magazines and editors from around the world as a branding concept.
Why not indeed? Meanwhile the rules of the game required that if we
published anything online, copyrights were acceded to Documenta 12.
The problem was there was no monetary/ market pressure to actually
publish the huge cultural production that this initiative called
forth from artists, writers, and editors around the world in many
languages. The online interface really didn't have to work for D12
to be able to market its so called Magazine Readers. We are just a
lure, just a bit of perverse glamour: as Peter Sinclair of Radical
Philosophy (http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/ ) aptly noted when I
met him at D12, we are involved so that Taschen can make money. It
is the idea of us that matters, not what we are actually writing
about or publishing. We might as well be publishing a stock market
report.
So exploited as precarious labour, see http://www.metamute.org/en/
precarious_reader, or , if you want to get hard core about it,
volunteer slavery. Willingly, I did take this time, and so did you.
-empyre- is, with or without documenta 12, a resonant space for
discourse and even, a kind of powerful spontaneous electronic
literature. I loved setting up our conversations; yes, they were
over the top, thanks all. I am and will always be extremely proud of
the literary and critical quality of the texts (see March 2006, July
2006, and January 2007, accessible via pdf on http://www.subtle.net/
empyre and, at least to the end of D12 , in html at http://
magazines.documenta.de/frontend/
original hypertexts at
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-July/
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-March/
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2007-January/
Michele White was prescient. She predicted this scenario already
last summer. (Michele is theorist and author of The Body and the
Screen: Theories of Internet Spectatorship, MIT Press 2006).
Michele wrote to -empyre-:
[-empyre-] Documenta?
Documenta?s process of potentially
introducing some of the listserv material into a
magazine may seem to provide various engagements but
does not (at least yet) provide an open dialogue
between listserv participants and Documenta. This
structure articulates an inside and outside where
listserv participants seemingly engage and talk about
the empowered center but no one from the Documenta
structure answers. It creates even more press coverage
and engagement with Documenta and centers the event
but what does it do for the listserv? How do we keep
any control over our voice or write into the structure
that Documenta produces?
https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/2006-July/msg00097.html
What i observed at the Documenta Halle, was that the public was
really trying to actually read our magazines. This is why have sent
the MALMOE text.. How about other voices? Your voices, -
empyreans-. The commodification of the magazine project works best
when the slaves stay quiet.
-cm
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_______________________________________________
empyre forum
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