[-empyre-] Steve Redhead' First Post - 'The art of the accident'

[Verena Conley]

Virilio is right. Every technology brings with it a new form of accident.
The present "catastrophe," however, is more economic. It cannot be separated
from technology and networks but it has more to do with human doings. The
question too is who is experiencing this as a catastrophe and who is not.
Some folks are doing very well and profiting immensely from this mess.

I am interested in the question of art. D+G were really keen on the
possibilities opened by technologies but also cautioned against its
recuperation in the system. Lowry, the director of MoMa waxed poetic last
November during a presentation on the proliferation of art and galleries all
over the globe. More and more people see and collect art. Benjamin Buchloh,
a Frankfurt school critic, countered that it was just capitalist art. D+G
distinguish between art as an interruptor of sorts and "vitamin fed" art
(FG). Is this a productive distinction? What do we do with all the network
art and circulation? To come back to Virilio, his take on art is often quite
conservative or rather, classical.

Verena

On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 10:17 AM, <S.C.Redhead at brighton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Hi Empyreans
>
> It is good to expand the discussion, I think, to catastrophe and
> artistic response in general (rather than Virilio in particular) but
> there is still  a little mileage in Virilio's provocations as a
> self-styled'critic of the art of technology'. He predicted, after all,
> the effects of speeded up, interlinked stock exchange trading programmes
> twenty years ago which are so prescient now in the Wall Street, Tokyo
> and other crashes of 2008.
>
> For Virilio what really counts is not so much the technology itself but
> the need to show what he sees as fallibilism in scientific and
> technological development in what is more and more an accelerated
> culture filled with danger. The demand by Virilio is for our global
> culture to go beyond an ideology of progress, linear and interrupted,
> excluding the importance of the mishap or the beneficial mistake. To
> expose the accident, to exhibit the accident, in what he calls the
> accident museum is the crucial task for Paul Virilio the artist. As
> artist and exhibition creator, the job is to expose the unlikely, to
> expose the unusual and yet inevitable, recognising the symmetry between
> 'accident' and 'substance'. The accident museum is necessary in
> Virilio's thinking in order to preserve for posterity the collapsing
> buildings, high speed plane crashes and other accidents (or attacks) of
> accelerated culture - 9/11 for instance (hailed by Stockhausen and
> Damien Hirst as an art work).
>
> As a critic of the art of technology (rather than any sort of
> conventional social theorist) Virilio jettisoned the televisual form and
> settled for the art gallery in his quest to preserve for example the
> 'accident' of 9/11 along with hundreds of other disasters, catastrophes,
> urban network failures, crashes and explosions for his own real life
> museum of accidents. A little over a year after 9/11, Virilio helped to
> create the accident museum's first concrete realisation in a major
> French contemporary art exhibition (officially entitled 'Ce Qui Arrive'
> in French or 'What Happens' in English), published in English as a
> catalogue entitled Unknown Quantity. The English version of the
> catalogue included diverse textual commentary on the theory of the
> accident by Virilio plus hundreds of photographs and other artefacts.
> Virilio created the exhibition with a number of other artists at the
> Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris (opening in November
> 2002, closing in March 2003) explicitly incorporating photographic,
> video and other visual material from the event of 9/11 as well as
> assorted plane crashes, earthquakes and high rise collapses from all
> over the world. Virilio, in the main, provided the concepts for this
> pioneering art exhibition while curator Leanne Sacramone mapped them
> onto a series of artworks. As an addition to the catalogue of the
> exhibition Virilio interviewed Svetlana Aleksievich, the author of a
> book about Chernobyl victims and witnesses. Virilio's emerging ideas on
> the accident formed the text of the catalogue's long introduction, under
> subheadings such as: the invention of accidents; the accident thesis;
> the museum of accidents; the future of the accident; the horizon of
> expectation and the unknown quantity. According to one contemporary art
> commentator on the Paris exhibition, 'as war between nation states gives
> way to the less defined area of international terrorism, so the
> distinction between acts of war, man made accidents and natural
> disasters becomes less distinguishable'. This situation 'in turn leads
> to a panorama in which acts of God and events such as Chernobyl and
> September 11 together occupy an undifferentiated position at the centre
> of the world stage'. Paul Virilio's museum of accidents, then, in this
> context is a twenty-first century equivalent to the 'traditional war
> memorial's "lest we forget"'.
>
> All the best from credit crunched England
>
> Steve Redhead
> Professor of Sport and Media Cultures
> Chelsea School
> University of Brighton
> UK
> http://www.steveredhead.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
> http://www.subtle.net/empyre
>



-- 
Verena Andermatt Conley

Department of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages
and Literature
Dana Palmer 202
Harvard University
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tel: 617-495-2274; 617-496-6090
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