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outdated work, work that isn't new media art, or work at the most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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http://www.subtle.net/empyre
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre