[-empyre-] more thoughts on the discussion of Chinese new media
Timothy Murray
tcm1 at cornell.edu
Mon Nov 29 04:49:34 EST 2010
>Thanks so to everyone who has contributed this month. Before our
>discussion switches to next month's topic, I might add a couple of
>observations of the relation of new media to artistic practice in
>China.
Perhaps one of the difficulties in "tracking" new media in China
relates not only to the specificity of new media production in China
but also to the fluid geographical network in which many Chinese
artists have found themselves operating. I'm thinking of the period
through mid-2000s when Xu Bing and others were working in the US and
elsewhere. Now many of these artists work across borders, as does
the marvelous new media artist in Paris, Du Zhenjun, or the
multidisciplinary artist who works between Alfred, NY, Ithaca, NY and
Beijing, Chen Xiaowen, whose artistic contributions are a blend
between new media, printmaking, and painting.
One of the reasons that I worked so hard in 2002-03 to bring the Wen
Pulin Archive of Avant-Garde Art to the Rose Goldsen Archive of New
Media Art (http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/special/wen.php) , in
Ithaca, New York (for which we had to digitize 360 hours of tape in
Berlin and then ship the DVDs to the States so that they could be
secure in case any security/censorship issues would change) was
because of how effectively they trace the rise of new media in China
as a cross-disciplinary practice that arose as much from performance
and installation than as a derivative of video from artists such as
Song Dong. Indeed, one of China's leading new media artists, Feng
Mengbo who we've discussed before this month, preceded his work in
new media and programming by painting portraits of himself inserted
into the landscape of videogames. While Li Zhenhua has done
tremendous service to the Chinese global and new media communities
with his major curated shows, he's no doubt been aided by the
artistic sensibility in China that new media is but one media, called
"new", that functions in tandem and in dialogue with the many others.
This week's fantastically informative by posting by Ken Fields about
the presence of electronic and sound art is a great case in point.
It's interesting, in this context, that the Wen Pulin Archive
includes hours of footage of the rise of Chinese rock n' roll whose
sounds and rhythms are frequently surrounding or echo Chinese
installation performances in the 80s and 90s.
It's in keeping with this tradition that I found myself involved
with co-curating with Yang Shin-Yi (who wrote the first dissertation
on Chinese electronic art at Cornell) an exhibition of Chinese
realist paintings for Shanghai World Expo in September, "Awakening,"
which helped to situate the new media contributions of Xu Bing in
relation to the controversial history of realist painting by artists
whose work began to flourish while in Cultural Revolution reeducation
in Tibet or while in political exile in the West.
Another slippage that has occurred in new media across Asia is its
flattening condensation and interactive silencing in artistic
animation. This was particularly evident last year in Taiwan's Asia
Art Biennale that featured much more digital animation than
interactive installation. While we could begin to appreciate this
marking another example of the decline of new media, our fascinating
discussion on -empyre- of animation last spring certainly would
caution us against so separating the curating and criticism of new
media from that of animation.
While I hope to discuss with Robin when in Hong Kong next year the
promise of returning new media to the white cube, I'd also like to
make a strong shout out to the continued promise of the network. In
now working with Turbulence on a curating project, I've been
reengaged with my own curating of net.art over the past decade and
think that now could be the time to encourage continued
experimentation with networked and mobile practices. The question
here returns to an issue that we began with, that the network is much
more surveilled in China than are galleries (or perhaps it would be
more accurate to say "more censored").
But this can be a challenge in exhibition practice as well. Although
a travelling exhibition of American work in China, organized by Chen
Xiaowen, that included work by Renate for which censorship never
seemed to have been a significant issue for her installation pieces
with dialogue, I'm thinking of the contrasting case of MAAP 2002 in
Beijing whose Chinese censors required, as I heard, that either
certain works be excluded or more generally that no works coming
from outside of China contain overt political content.
Of great promise and interest are Melinda's references to the
aaaijiao and Mao's thoughts about computing/cybernetics being about
adaption rather than control-
about systems theory and connected intelligence. These clearly are
the kinds of cloudy issues the envelope Chinese new media and that
beg for more 'clouding' in discussion, analysis, and performance.
Of course these kinds of issues return us, as Robin suggests, to a
"media historical/visual studies" approach, which I think actually
has motivated a lot of the new media work coming from inside China in
any case.
Hope these concluding thoughts are helpful. Many thanks to Melinda
and her great guests for treating us to this important topic of
discussion.
Best,
Tim
>I've unfortunately reached the end of my time active on the list here
>this month as I'm now on the road, so I won't be able to answer in as
>much detail as I would have liked, but I would like to point to a few
>directions that I think our coming curatorial research into new media
>art forms in China might wish to approach.
>
>1. More situated research methods. At present many of our modes of
>research, as Li Zhenhua has demonstrated with the links he has been
>posting this month, involve externally-determined collections of data
>on artists: that is to say, locating artists already assumed to be
>working in new media in some way, and then asking them questions about
>their practices as if the activities of these artists constitute an a
>priori field of media art. I believe it would be constructive to take
>a more nuanced theoretical approach to the arts of new media as they
>function here, attempting to fit various curatorial models to the
>presently existing situation of artistic practice rather than allowing
>the works and ideas of a certain group of artists to overly influence
>our impressions.
>
>2. Return to exhibition construction. This appears to be an
>appropriate time to move curating back into the white cube, at least
>partially--with the failure of the eArts festival and, to a lesser
>degree, the Waterland Kwanyin circuit it would seem that China now
>experiences a fortunate reprieve from the circuit of media festivals.
>Curating, with regard to new media, has moved much too far away from
>exhibition practice, and many artists working with an interest in
>technologies and media forms lack potential platforms on which to
>present these ideas in the (non-spectacular) exhibition format.
>
>3. A media historical/ visual studies approach. As I mentioned
>previously, the "brief" historical moment of media art in China is
>often assumed to imply that such practices emerge out of a vacuum,
>which of course is absurd. Unlike the situations of Western Europe and
>the U.S., where fields of media archaeology and visual studies have
>provided a rich historical and social background to more explicit art
>histories, very little of this work has actually been carried out in
>China, particularly for the period prior to 1949. My personal research
>has been taking me increasingly toward pre-cinema modes of viewing,
>which I believe will ultimately provide a fascinating basis upon which
>to analyze our current viewing practices: relating, for example, the
>viewing "event" of the literati scroll to later forms of moving
>imagery, and eventually our digital scrolling practices on Art-Ba-Ba
>and elsewhere.
>
>Just a couple quick thoughts, unfortunately, but I look forward to
>seeing how others conclude these conversations over the coming days.
>
>All best,
>
>Robin Peckham
>Society for Experimental Cultural Production
>2/F 716 Shanghai St., Mongkok, Kowloon, H.K.
>www.kunsthallekowloon.org
>+852 5181 5156
>
>
>
>On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Melinda Rackham
><melinda.rackham at rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>>
>> The idea of (intimate?) nuanced intellectually engaging work is
>> alluring.. and for clarity i useually use the term "emerging practices"
>> or "emerging artforms" to cover a wealth and breath of mediated,
>> distributed and constructed concepts environments and objects eg the
>> parallel conceptual and material merging of media art and diy
>> traditional craft practices. Could you post an example of the sort of
>> emerging practices you are speaking of?
>>
>> best wishes
>>
>> Melinda
>>
>> Melinda Rackham
>>
>> Melinda Rackham
>> Adjunct Professor
>> School of Media and Communications
>> RMIT University
>> _______________________________________________
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>> empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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>_______________________________________________
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--
Timothy Murray
Director, Society for the Humanities
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/
Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library
http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
27 East Avenue
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York 14853
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