Re: [-empyre-] economics of the art system: the example of documen ta

[Melinda Rackham <melinda@anat.org.au>]

Hi all,
The whole documenta project looked like a fantastic opportunity  when
-empyre-s participation was first proposed to us by Alessandro Ludovico in
2005.

Christina took on an enormous amount of work  and did an amazing job
producing and editing the discussions and attending documenta forums in
Cairo and Kassel. As has been said this whole model of free artist labour is
conflicted as it is at once stimulating  and exciting and exhausting and
exploitative culturally and individually.

I was invited to attend and participate in documenta by Georg Schoelhamer
at a meeting we had about -empyre- during the Sydney Biennale in June 2006.
documenta had organized funding from the Australia Council to send
Australian artists and editors of participating  magazines  to the event.

Strangely this never eventuated, documenta requesting and the Australia
Council funding someone not associated with empyre  to attend.  The council
refused  to allow me to submit an application for personal funding to attend
as they considered my attendance not important for cultural development.

In the end  it has been been really unpleasant .. And the catalyst of  much
angst..  and I'm pleased its over. I will go to Kassel in September in my
capacity as ANAT Director to sort of pick over the bones of the project
after it has been well and truly ripped apart in the frenzy of criticism
which engulfed it. 

My pissed off attitude really slipped out sideways when I was a guest in the
"what is to be done"  forum, and  I was unnecessarily rude to  several
people on the list.. so my sincere apologies.

There is silver lining for me tho..
It has made me realize how much I miss day to day involvement in running
-empyre- and what a valuable, insightful and considered forum it is.

Thank you all for your contributions.

Melinda


On 30/7/07 11:26 AM, "Christina McPhee" <christina112@earthlink.net> wrote:

> Millie et al,
> 
> I don't have a comment here about exclusionary practices, if such may
> exist or not,  in new media curating. This would be a topic for
> another day perhaps.   My remarks relate exclusively to  documenta 12
> and its associated magazine project.  On the contrary, Documenta 12,
> if anything,  had few 'star' artists therefore did not play to any
> particular agenda  about who's in and who's out in the artworld much
> less the 'new media'  world, however defined.  Not at all.  My
> observations relate specifically to a certain numbing or anaesthetic
> effect that the mise-en-scene of Roger Beurgel and Ruth Noack's  self-
> described strategy of an exhibition 'without form' and documenta as a
> space, as they put it,  'where art communicates itself and on its own
> terms."  They go on,  "This is aesthetic experience in its true
> sense:  The exhbition becomes a medium in its own right and can thus
> hope to involve its audience in its compositional moves." ( This and
> all further quotes from Roger M. Beurgel, Ruth Noack, excerpt,
> English translation, from Preface, Documenta 12 catalog, 2007).
> 
> Because Beurgel and Noack discard contextualization of works of art,
> in a radical way (from the Latin, at the root), they must rely on
> something else, which they talk about as time lines of form, or, to
> quote again, "to approach the internal dynamic destinies of form not
> only theoretically but to actually show them, turning them into
> documenta 12."
> 
> Perversely this strong formalist intention maps their strategies.
> Formalist and, more,  essentialist, by which I only mean, dealing
> with 'essence' as a core value or intent in the object d'art.   Which
> could be really interesting of course, like any strongly held
> curatorial position.   And the results are interesting, to be sure,
> in a kind of horribly fascinating way.
> 
> In the installation, in every venue,  artworks seemed to be swimming
> in interiors that over determined their impact...kind of like artwork
> in a nightclub or something.   How has this come to be? And does this
> weird effect also extend to the silencing and marginalization of the
> magazine project?
> 
> According to their own remarks in the preface, the curators actually
> believe that the public in general  doesn't know about art ( i. e.
> how to interact with it),  and therefore has to somehow be led into
> conditions where they can be led to 'just see' the art.  The effect,
> when you go through the documenta spaces, can be somehow that the
> curating seems heavy-handed or non-existent (take your pick, people I
> talked to felt one way or the other, which comes to the same thing).
> 
> This is a bizarre situation.  Let's go to the curators' own writing
> on the subject of their intentions. The curators wanted to 'do
> documenta' (sounds pretty racey in English... like "Debbie Does
> Dallas"!) ---  They call it  "an exhibition without form, mean[ing]
> entering a field of highly contradictory forces".  They obseve
> accurately that "the fascination emanating from the show , as well as
> the expectations it raises are enormously high."  Then they make a
> stunning leap into the first of many unsupported assertions:   "This
> is due to the fact that people are not really well equipped to deal
> with radical formlessness."
> 
>   This last statement about 'people' in general  is not supported by
> any evidence in the text.  The curators offer this,  an opinion, as a
> fact or fait accompli.   Who 'people' are and what is 'radical
> formlessness' is left up for grabs.
> 
>   The curators set up shop as the friendly (if a bit arch)  folks who
> will help "people" who essentially, through some lack of apparatus,
> apparently can't deal with "radical formlessness"  , who"feel the
> challenge deeply" and here the object of the word 'challenge' is left
> vague--presumably the challenge of being stuck with a task to perform
> without the right  tool or equipment.   So the exhibition itself
> apparently is some kind of tool?
> 
> Without developing the equipment allusion further,  lest anyone get
> too curious about this,  (or God forbid, feel castrated or at a
> loss),   the writers rush to take refuge in the impersonal voice:
> "But how does one keep the balance between identification and
> fixation?"  Again we are awash in generalities.  How did the text
> suddenly move to 'fixation', and why is it necessary to 'keep' some
> kind of 'balance' between 'identification' whatever that is, and
> 'fixation' which they don't define.  Seems like some worry that the
> public will fetishize art objects unless the curators make some
> careful moves to keep everybody nice and balanced?  Is it bad to be
> fixated or to identify with art or with its content?  Who knew? ?
> 
>   The curators  claim that the role of art didactically is to keep
> the great unwashed (sorry, you folks out there in TV land)  from
> either identifying or fixating on art:  "But how does one keep the
> balance between identification and fixation?  Art can teach us this
> discipline, "  they stolidly assert.
> 
>   Why is this a discipline?  Why is art supposed to teach us not to
> connect with itself?  hmmm.. this gets quite puzzling if not
> downright daffy.   The curators want not to highlight artists names
> nor 'all-encompassing concepts' (again, this is left undefined.. do
> they mean aesthetic categories like 'tragedy' 'beauty' 'sublime'---
> one can only wonder).  Nor do they wish to 'favor geopolitical
> identity' , as -empyreans- have here observed with annoyance!  So
> what's left?  Well, they admit to liking certain artists ("certain
> artists matter to us more than others"_)
> and concepts ("of course particular concepts remain essential").
> Quite a dazzling nonchalance.  Wow,  we're now informed they've got
> some favorite concepts and favorite artists, and that's about it.
> 
> Then the coup de grace:  the curators assert in what (only) way
> exhibitions of art in general have value, as follows, "exhibitions
> are only worth looking at if we manage to dispense with preordained
> categories and arrive at a plateau (wait! I thought there were a
> thousand!!!) --- where art communicates itself and on its own
> terms."  Whoa!  Who the 'we' is in this statement is unknown.   Guess
> I could read it as 'we curators' or 'we human beings who are trying
> to look at art'  (and incidentally their characterization of
> exhibitions as scenarios for 'looking at' stuff is charmingly
> archaic).   And then, what art's own terms  may be once the  human
> factors of identity, place, subject, and content are stripped away is
> mystifying.   Like trying to conduct scientific experiments without a
> topic or an hypothesis.
> 
> Nevertheless  the curators desire that 'the exhibition becomes a
> medium in its own right and can thus hope to involve its audience in
> its compositional moves."   There it is.  The exhibition hopes to
> involve us in its moves.   OK!! That's the beginning and the end of
> the whole enterprise.   Documenta, for them, is a work of art by
> them, the curators.   If you follow their train of sentiments
> (calling these a line of 'thought' seems overly generous),   what you
> get is a situation in which the art and artists involved are just
> elements or incidents within a grand schema or sketch or flourish,
> made by.... you got it, the big guys, who know how to balance
> things.   The exhibition is supposed to  deliver 'its audience' into
> a state of suspension between 'identification and fixation'.
> Millie, its not about which artists are chosen or whether somebody's
> been excluded.  Its about  any particular artistic thought/action (eg
> art 'objects')   being neutralized within a larger scheme that weighs
> in as the positive value.  The flip side of all this positivity, is
> the negative referent, the ignorant public, who is the only subject
> left to this positive forcefield: here you and I  will be treated as
> we should be, pupils,  who need to be brought up (elevé, which means,
> of course, also, educated)  to a plateau where we may wander around,
> I guess, awash in  the mystery of 'art communicating itself'--- its
> 'self' being berift, finally, of anything except its colors, its
> mass,  its relative light or lack of lighting its placement next to
> or far from other objects,  its lack of identifying tags on the wall
> nearby.    If this isn't disturbing as an ethos,  I don't know what is.
> 
> -cm
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jul 30, 2007, at 1:24 AM, Millie Niss wrote:
> 
>> Christina,
>> 
>> It's good that there were so many good people involved who did
>> their best, and of course those people deserve all the credit they
>> can get.  What I don't understand is where these situations come
>> from when virtually all the actual artists that I have run into
>> seem to be ethical, hard-working, and doing legitimate work.  Who
>> gives these institutions so much money and power and where do they
>> find their personnel?  They clearly aren't drawing from the same
>> new media community that you and I and the rest of the list belong
>> to, where people help each other and do good work...
>> 
>> P.S. Sorry for the multiple copies of my message. My email is
>> broken in three different ways (literally) and I was using my cell
>> phone which has a tendency to want to send the message before I
>> have finished composing it.  I had hoped that I stopped it in time,
>> but apparently the "cancel" commands did not work.
>> _______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
> 
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre

Regards  
Melinda
--
Dr Melinda Rackham
Executive Director
Australian Network for Art and Technology (ANAT)
PO Box 8029
Station Arcade
South Australia 5000
ph: 61 8 8231 9037; fax 61 8 8231 9766
http://www.anat.org.au
director@anat.org.au

Australian Network for Art and  Technology (ANAT) is supported by the Visual
Arts and Craft Strategy, an  initiative of the Australian, State and
Territory Governments;  the Australian Government through the Australia
Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the South Australian
Government through Arts SA.