[-empyre-] games as art or art as game (was/should-be Institutionalisation)

[Julian Oliver]

..on or around Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 02:00:08AM +0200, Ilias Marmaras said:
> hey Julian how you doing?

pretty good mate, you?

> well you say:
> 
> ''would it be such an ordaining hierachy (archive.org being an example) if
> the users of that archive were in control of the nomination and
> modification of terms, if the taxonomy was read-write: eg a community
> editable del.icio.us like system.
> 
> where is the 'institutionalisation' in this case?''
> -------------------------------------------
> 
> Ok i agree there are differences (although its difficult to say
> ''differances'') between institutional forms. Its a quite big issue to deal
> with, in a mail list that is mostly concerned with game studies. Still even
> if del.icio.us  or few other similar nets are not so ''vertical'' in their
> organisation form, they belong as subgroups to a group. By belonging to a
> group they share and support a status , a consensus.
> And this group, that is at the same time the expression of the frame
> context,in other words the way that perception should be
> restricted, defines  the burning point of this discourse.
> And that , is no other that an institution. And historically speaking, this
> is not the epitome of the  age of enlightenment , that established the
> modern form of it, that we actually deal with, but in the contrary, it is
> the opposite a failure on the issue of govermentality and administration.
> Something that has a strong influence in the cultural structures we face now
> , as we are asked -in order to find a place in this very cultural structure-
> to reverse engineer things. And present the maintenance and the
> dissimulation of a failure as a future success.


(disclaimer: this written as a brain dump. will probably be off topic
and at times incoherent).

--

it seems that you're implying that any act of cultural organisation is a
consensus and that because any consensus asserts a 'frame context' it is
therefore simultaneously a process of institutionalisation. 

this trajectory, i think, can be quickly abstracted to places that
easily overlook the real relationship between an institution and an
artistic movement, an artist or body of work. 

an example of this abstraction, developed intuitively from what you've
offered, is as follows: 

if we're to take any consensus as an institutionalising effect, then
sense itself must 'institutionalise' the content in question.  surely
then, even with an audience of one, sense itself is a kind of ordering,
a personal consensus. this, by corrollary, implies that
'institutionalisation' happens at the moment an artwork is considered to
be culturally meaningful, expressed as consensually asserted value.
therefore, the assigning of cultural value is itself the process of
institutionalisation..

as you can see, i don't think this is always such a useful direction to
take ;)

[...]

my understanding of the apparent problem is this:

complaints about institutionalisation speak more about how we choose to
value Art than any /intrinsically/ asserted hegemony over the regulation
and dissemination of cultural meaning. institutional power, i think, is
precisely the power we give it.

by complaining about a given institution on the basis of it ordering and
regulating meaning - the 'conditioning' of an artwork - people are
simultaneously granting that institution power to order and regulate
meaning. secondly - and by doing this - we're granting the artefact
power over the ideas it supposedly contains.

when did we all start doing this bizarre thing? 

we're so hung-up on Art as the sole, copy-protected container of
meanings and ideas that when the artefact is behind glass we think the
ideas themselves are magically innaccessible. this is pretty weird i
reckon. in reality 'artefact' refers to the body of stuff we demarcate
as the referent; it's just stuff, a mutually perceptable,
human-readable, symbolic link to interesting ideas.

we, the audience, let Art come between us and its ideas. the
institution is just following along. 

it's both beautiful and strange, i think, that we still configure Art as
inextricably dependent on the artefact, as a speaking vessel of ideas.
it's even animistic to feel that an art object should be 'liberated'
from its cage in the museum, or from a prison of terms in the archive.

"setting the art free" to me reads as some sort of theodicy argument, a
(romantic) case for 'returning' art as original, un-socialised
expression in the face of a formalising, institutionalising evil.. 

artist's give institutions this power all the time, firstly by
exhibiting their unique copy-protected artworks with them and then
complaining in harmony with audiences about the injustice of it all.
chicken meet egg.

moreso this is a very convenient and fashionable topic, one that any
museum in its right mind will be the first to support: the modern museum
embraces the squat just as it does the sarcastic and antagonistic
artist. it can't afford not to and the artist will accept again and
again. the modern museum loves to be reminded by artists of the power it
has over them, of it's institutionalising power. it's a perfect kind of
flattery.

if people complain about the 70 odd Fluxus games being unplayable in a
'mausoleum' it is not because institutions have magically stolen the
power of the Game, undead as the mere memory of its former wildness, a
stuffed animal. rather, it's because not enough copies of the game's
apparatus were made such that a million curious people could play them.
that's hardly the fault of the museum (that bought an object from the
person that John Hendricks or Maciunas sold it to). the games were
presented as sole artefacts and were distributed and archived as such.
the value was ascribed to those 'things'.

games, however, are not the sum of their artefacts. games are a
transformative conversation, performed through action, between a
person(s) and a system of conditions. that system of conditions is
sometimes represented by graphics, text and patterns presented on
specially designed material (the artefact).

i play one or two of the Fluxus games at home: the museum doesn't come
between me and those ideas, let alone playing with them.  so called
'artistic videogames' are in a great position in this regard, as are
conceptual/situational games that can be distributed in word-form, as
algorithms of action and rules.

Contemporary Art is born seeking institutionalisation, it seeks to be
ratefied by being embalmed. i reckon it's best to simply admit this.  if
you don't want your work institutionalised take it to the streets, write
HOWTOs, make copies and give them away. most of all, don't brand it
Art (or only as Art).

the only makers i know that are truly on the outside - and with
intention of changing the world - would never be so foolish to call
their art Art ;) 

cheers!

-- 
julian oliver
http://julianoliver.com 
http://selectparks.net 
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