[-empyre-] is: institutionalization was: art games pre computers
Gianni Wise
gana at iinet.net.au
Sun Mar 23 12:53:23 EST 2008
Hi Paul .. wondering what you meant by the talk wasn't very well
received. I am curious as to how how they justified their (reactive)
position.
Another quick point - perhaps a slight contradiction in your own
position - I may have misread you- but when you support the
legitimisation of the early computer period - 1960-1980 is this not
institutionalisation in itself? (thinking here of fluxus and
institutionalized extension of the bourgeois mechanism of production
and distribution etc)
Gianni Wise
http://gianniwise.blogspot.com/
On 23/03/2008, at 7:50 AM, Paul Brown wrote:
> I once gave a talk to the curators of a large state art gallery
> where I compared acquiring contemporary art for the collection to
> the 19th century practice of going out to Africa, seeing a
> beautiful lion wild in the savannah. Killing it, having it stuffed
> and then exhibited in a diorama as "the real thing". The talk
> wasn't very well received!
>
> However it seems to me that contemporary practice doesn't or
> shouldn't last forever - it evolves and changes (another concern is
> the turgidity of the mainstream artworld since the 60's which
> Hughes has referred to as "The New Shock of the New" - but no time
> for that). So two things can happen to it. It can be
> institutionalised by the mausoleums and thus became a "legitimate"
> part of the historical record. Or it dies with the artist(s) and
> is effectively lost and forgotten though (like early computer art)
> may assume some "apocryphal" status.
>
> Sean mentioned the recent CACHe project that i was involved in
> (Computer Arts, Contexts, Histories, etc...). This was a funded
> initiative intended primarily to legitimise an apocryphal period of
> British art history (the early computer period - 1960-1980). It
> was very successful - the Victoria and Albert Museum (the UK's
> leading mausoleum for the arts and crafts) now have a major
> collection of this work (over 1000 pieces) and have appointed a
> senior curator of computer art - and a number of books are about to
> appear, etc... In Germany Bremen Museum recently acquired Herbert
> Franke's collection of over 2000 early works of computer art.
>
> This initiative is broader and covers many areas of "forgotten"
> late modernism. In a recent post I referred to Gustav Metzger who,
> after a lifetime of abject poverty, is now receiving due
> recognition with several recent shows and books. Someone referred
> to Fluxus games - as a young artist I worked as an assistant for
> some of these game/performances in the UK. The following is an
> initiative that is trying to preserve the spirit of Fluxus but in a
> way that tries to prevent the "stuff it and put it in a diorama"
> approach:
>
> March 22, 2008
>
> <px.gif>
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>
> <logo_eflux_medium.gif>
>
> Follow Fluxus - After Fluxus
>
>
> <1205940488image_web.jpg>
>
>
> <px.gif>
>
>
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>
> Emily Wardill
> is the first laureate of the
> Follow Fluxus–After Fluxus grant!
>
>
> Follow Fluxus - After Fluxus
> ll\ NKV
> nassauischer kunstverein wiesbaden
> wilhelmstr 15
> 65185 wiesbaden
> germany
> info at kunstverein-wiesbaden.de
> http://www.kunstverein-wiesbaden.de
>
> <px.gif>
>
>
> <px.gif>
>
>
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>
> The first ever Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus grant for young
> contemporary art called by the NKV nassauischer kunstverein
> wiesbaden and the State Capital of Wiesbaden and doted with 10.000
> Euro goes to British video and performance artist Emily Wardill.
>
>
> Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus /
>
> Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus supports young international artists
> whose work suggests ideas inherent to the Fluxus art movement in
> order to keep the art current alive. The establishment of the grant
> was inspired by the “Fluxus Festival of Very New Music” which took
> place in Wiesbaden in 1962. This Fluxus event provided the first
> real broad impact for the new art movement and started off what is
> now seen as the first international movement operating in a global
> network.
>
> The endowment of 10,000 Euro is provided annually for a residency
> in Wiesbaden from June through August. Living quarters and studio
> space is provided by NKV during this time. The work stipend
> concludes with an exhibition of the artist’s created work in the
> following year between September and May and includes a
> publication. The grant holder should reside predominantly in
> Wiesbaden for the duration of the grant period.
>
>
> Emily Wardill /
>
> Emily Wardill's fresh and insistent pictorial language and her
> ambition to tap the full potential of the medium film convinced the
> jury to elect her as the first ever Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus
> laureate of the NKV and the State Capital of Wiesbaden.
>
> Following sources of philosophy, science and culture, in her films
> Emily Wardill recomposes text and image material from the history
> of ideas – such as the motives of medieval church windows or
> theoretical treatises from Ruskin to Rancière – and develops a many
> layered and intense meshwork of autonomous statements and concepts.
> Her work is concerned with strategies of communication and the
> implicit connection between the structure of a language and the
> media conversion of the pre-existent text and image material.
>
> Based on one single metaphor, one carefully chosen motif, Wardill
> plays with the sensuous possibilities of filmic narrative. With the
> thus surging social and psychological implications, she pulls the
> spectator into an intense tableau vivant. The expectation of a
> complex overall meaning is fed by hidden leads and encoded clues
> for possible interpretations: The visitor’s perception is wooed
> along a labyrinthine path of intellectual seduction.
>
> This is where the jury sees the point of contact in the further
> development of George Maciunas’ ideas. Primal for the jury’s
> decision was not an artist’s self-image as an heir of historical
> Fluxus but rather a body of work which transpires the Fluxus
> spirit, free of any categorical boundaries.
>
>
> The Jury 2008
>
> / Prof. Thomas Bayrle, artist and Professor at the Staedelschule
> Frankfurt
> / Michael Berger, Collection Berger, Wiesbaden
> / René Block, Curator of the Fluxus Trilogy Wiesbaden 1982 - 1992 -
> 2002
> / Rita Thies, Head of Cultural Department of the city of Wiesbaden
> / Elke Gruhn, Director and Curator of NKV and Dr. Ursula Schaumburg-
> Terner, Board Member of NKV
>
>
> Follow Fluxus – After Fluxus is a cooperation of the ll\ NKV
> nassauischer kunstverein wiesbaden and the State Capital of the
> City of Wiesbaden.
>
>
>
> <logo_eflux_small.gif>
>
>
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>
> 53 Ludlow street
> New York, NY 10002, USA
>
>
> On 23 Mar 2008, at 03:35, jonCates wrote:
>
>> i wanted to bring this backup in relation to the issues of
>> institutionalization + archiving efforts:
>>
>> On Mar 18, 2008, at 12:07 PM, Julian Oliver wrote:
>>> of note is an interesting irony pointed out by Celia Pearce, a
>>> (video)game
>>> theorist at Georgia Tech:
>>>
>>> There is deep and tragic irony in going to an exhibition of Fluxus
>>> artifacts#. Objects whose entire purpose was to elicit play exist
>>> now
>>> only as the corpses of their former selves, trapped in a "Mausoleum"
>>
>> the ability of artworlds to absorb institutional critique,
>> colonialize outsider arts or incorporate anti-art movements is an
>> important point to keep in view but i would say its not so much
>> ironic as it is expressive of the ability of capital to move/flow
>> + encompass oppositional strategies.
>>
>> so, this move/flow is the quicksand that can entrap + freeze
>> movement, capturing corpses to be presented in "Mausoleum" shows
>> or the kind of slow death that i think/feel Christian, you were
>> referring to when you wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 21, 2008, at 10:13 AM, Christian McCrea wrote:
>>> Daphne, I think you're quite right in that a pure
>>> archive just adds another coat of white paint to the walls. Video
>>> work
>>> of lets say, Brody Condon's Lawful Evil of 2007
>>> (http://www.tmpspace.com/lawfulevil.html).. instantaneousness is
>>> great
>>> for some projects, and being able to reproduce that moment is
>>> better -
>>> but specifically some game-based art, and specifically in an
>>> archive -
>>> you are freezing the d20 in time
>>
>> + yet the d20 has to stop rolling in order to allow for gameplay
>> as well as for an attempt @ documentation, let alone archiving +
>> preservation. an N-Dimensional die infinite rolling towards
>> greater + greater degrees of infinity while calculating aleph sets
>> is a wonderful entity/process to imagine (+ in fact was often
>> conversationally invoked among the core.developers of
>> criticalartware, of which i am 01, back in the days when we were
>> guests on empyre) but it never stops to display a result, a
>> number, to work from or respond to in your D&D campaign. so
>> freezing the die, @ least momentarily, is a necessary moment in
>> order to play the game. + rolling the die again is also important.
>> as Julian reminds us, we also roll + reroll our taxonomies when he
>> wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 18, 2008, at 4:00 AM, Julian Oliver wrote:
>>> taxonomies can be considered an ecology of vectors, vectors that are
>>> tested and expended in the distribution and production of
>>> culture. they
>>> are used in the conception and process of making work itself:
>>> even if
>>> taxonomies exist to be argued, rejected, to be battled against, then
>>> that is a valid rationale to create them (apologies to Voltaire).
>>
>>
>> i want to comment that there are other options + approaches taken
>> by + in: institutions, organizations, museums + mausoleums, white
>> cubes + black boxes, etc...
>>
>> for instance,
>>
>> @ the ZKM Exhibition:
>>
>> "Algorithmic Revolution. On the History of Interactive Art" -
>> Peter Weibel and Dominika Szope, Katrin Kaschadt, Margit Rosen,
>> Sabine Himmelsbach (2004.10.21 - 2008.01.06)
>> http://tinyurl.com/35jpsv
>>
>> Digital and New Media Art, Artware + Fluxus work was all included
>> in a consideration of instruction sets or code-based art practices
>> + as parts of an (institutional) account of the "History of
>> Interactive Art". while this major exhibition, by a major
>> institution, included Fluxus work, when i saw the exhibition i
>> personally thought/felt that it was an inclusion that did not
>> deaden the Fluxus work but rather activated it in a way that
>> included/engaged it in New Media Art Histories in ways that helps
>> reconnect the work to (what we in the criticalartware project)
>> refer to as 'rightful unruley pasts'.
>>
>> the Algorithmic Revolution also reconnected the History of
>> Interactive Art to games via the section "World of Games :
>> reloaded". about this section, they wrote:
>>
>> "Interactivity is best illustrated by video and computer games..."
>>
>> "World of Games : reloaded is an extension of the previous
>> presentation of video and computer game ‘classics’ of recent
>> years, which from now on is to be updated at regular intervals..."
>>
>> +
>>
>> "The history of these games is illustrated in an 'ancestral
>> portrait gallery'. Artistic installations document the wide area
>> of applications for game technology, while a selection of the
>> latest games illustrates the state of the art."
>>
>> these quotes point towards the difficulties + challenges of
>> exhibiting, documenting, archiving, preserving, researching +
>> including these kinds of works in historical accounts but include
>> also important insights into how to achieve these efforts through
>> considerations of interactivity, play, extension + a framing/
>> enframing of commercial corporate/military/academic/entertainment
>> technologies in the ancestral portrait gallery'.
>>
>> by contrast, i recently saw:
>>
>> 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 -
>> Clarisse Bardiot (2007.11.10 - 2007.12.08)
>> http://www.fondation-langlois.org/flash/e/index.php?NumPage=571
>>
>> at Tesla in Berlin:
>>
>> http://tesla-berlin.de
>>
>> 9 Evenings Reconsidered was an exhibition/event which was
>> connected to:
>>
>> re:place 2007: The Second International Conference on the
>> Histories of Media, Art, Science and Technology
>> http://www.mediaarthistory.org/replace/
>>
>> which, btw, included:
>>
>> Open Score - Robert Rauschenberg (1966)
>>
>> a performance/interactive/happening project that based on/
>> appropriated parts of the game of tennis.
>>
>> Open Score + the other works in 9 Evenings Reconsidered were in my
>> experience presented much more as historical/anthropological
>> artifacts under glass in display cases more removed from their
>> original states as playful interactive forms than the FLUXUS work
>> in the Algorithmic Revolution show even though (@ least for me)
>> Tesla has the feeling of being much more of an alternative
>> cultural space as compared to the ZKM as institutional museum space
>>
>> ...which is a long way of saying that these issues are complex +
>> that inclusion of projects such as these, Art Games or any other
>> interactive or playful forms, in archives or exhibitions/events
>> entails a complex set of considerations but can + should be
>> constructed + navigated in ways that maintain, sustain or even
>> reactivate the actual + potential energies of the work
>>
>> // jonCates
>> # Assistant Professor - Film, Video & New Media
>> # The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
>> # http://saic.edu/~jcates
>> # Game As Art, Art as Game
>> # http://
>> artgames.ning.com_______________________________________________
>> empyre forum
>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
>> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>
> ====
> Paul Brown - based in OZ Dec 07 - Apr 08
> mailto:paul at paul-brown.com == http://www.paul-brown.com
> OZ Landline +61 (0)7 5443 3491 == USA fax +1 309 216 9900
> OZ Mobile +61 (0)419 72 74 85 == Skype paul-g-brown
> ====
> Visiting Professor - Sussex University
> http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/ccnr/research/creativity.html
> ====
>
>
>
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