Sam Durant "We are the People" 2003
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Sunday, February 28, 2010
The Radicant Respone 2.
1. I found this subject of Bourriaud's writing to stand out...
"...cultural choices are options that can be combined and superimposed. Nothing counts, since nothing really binds us or requires us to commit ourselves. Let us recall the great Nietzschean question of eternal return: are you willing to relive for all eternity the moments you are experienceing right now? Transposed to the realm of art, this question entails a commitment to values, a space traversed by conflicts, by wagers with consequences for the future." pg. 80
This has a lot to do with the "precarious" and "radicant" nature of society today. We live in a world now that has the ability to pick up and move, change identity, transition, translate, remix and hybridize cultures so rapidly. A wanderer, a transitory person, has no commitment to something solid. Why would they want to, when that would only hold them back from their wandering character.
It is almost too easy to gather information and take ideas from all over the world, all over space and all over time. With this excess of of material to work with, it makes it much more difficult for artists to commit to one particular value. With this being said, what makes somthing more important than something else? With this much material to use, how can something truely count?
I think that the Neitzchean statement about reliving your choices is something that not many think of these days. There are so many choices to be made when given so many options; it is more likely that one would think they have the option to change what they've done and try again with something else, rather than thinking harder about their initial decision.
2. Control + S (universe)
Bourriaud comments that our universe is able to hit Control+S and move on. I am in total agreement with this idea of our lives becoming hard drives of information storage. I can relate to this in a couple of ways. One with photographs. The internet and computer world have allowed us to download our camera's photographs, save as many as we want (hundreds, thousands, millions???) and look at them later. Print them later? I don't think so. We take thousands of snap shops knowing that someday we can go back and look at them or use them later. But what happens to their value when they are just merely stored on a thumb drive, a cd, an external hard drive or just a memory card. I think that the preciousness and value of not just photographs, (emails, journals, art image catalouges, documents) is lost when it is stored away in a tiny chip.
Yes, we can access things as many times as we please. But how does that change one's reaction to something when they are able to view it at any time, rather than only in its initial state? Do you really take in the "aura" of that photograph, video, journal article? Or do you skim through it, knowing someday you could return to it?
3. Nicolas Bourriaud: the radicant himself:
This reaction is simply and observation of the criticism of Nicolas Bourriaud. He discusses the present day artist as a radicant thinker, a wanderer and a remixer of time, culture and global content. I feel that he writes in the essence of a radicant as well. He describes the different locations in which he writes (hotel rooms, etc). Knowing that he is not sitting in a study writing his material, it can be assumed that he takes the role of the radicant by traveling (which is only necessary for artists and art critics to do in order to gain their material). He is constantly remixing and piecing together his writing with quotes of others to form new ideas. His thoughts are hybrids of his own with a direct "hyperlink" to others of the past and present - joining content through space and time, much like a radicant would do.
An example of this can be found on page 92, when Bourriaud references twentieth century art critic, Baudelaire.
4. I think that Bourriaud's reference to Gregor Schneider's house construction is a clear example of our past coming out through the present. I think of the present as a wheel barrow moving through space. The contents of the wheel barrow are collected and dispersed whenever and wherever the driver wishes. I am believer in Bourriaud's quote, "the past is always present".
Gregor Schneider "Dead House"
5. Geocustomization
Bourriaud is correct when he describes our world to be completely seen in every corner through statellite programs such as "Google Earth", Global Positioning Systems, Mapquest, etc. In the virutual internet world, we have discovered every inch of land. There is no unknown space. However, I think that we are very much like early cartographers who have seen the world for the first time. It was up to them to make the public aware of their global opinions, whether they were factual or not. We have the evidence and data to create our own worlds, much like the earlier cartographers did and sold to the public. They were maps, or conglomerations of the imaginary and their perception of reality.
Bourriaud references artists, Julie Mehretu, Miltos Manetas and Matthew Ritchie as artists who create "Geocustomizations" of our planet. I think that their use of line and drawing are formal evidence of the cartographic and topographic world that we live in, depicted in their own imaginary way. He also is clear when he discusses the language of moving through time and space with line - and not just in one dimension.
"Topography used so much by contemporary artists, defines a pictorial site that is geared to the viewer's real movements in everyday life. Walking constitutes a text in itself, which the artwork translates into a language of topology." pg 121
Saturday, February 27, 2010
"copies, forever transitory"
Kelley Walker "Black Star Press" 2007
Wade Guyton "Untitled" 2008
Seth Price "Vintage Bomber" 2008
"Iconography of the Precarious World"
Subdodh Gupta "21-24" 2005, Frieze Art Fair
Nari Ward "Glory" 2004, exhibited at the 2006 Whitney Biennial
David Hammons "African-American Flag" 1990
"The artist sets signs in motion"
Gabriel Orozco "Samurai (Invariant 2H) 2007
Jacque Villelge "Metro arts-et-Metiers" 1983
Bernd and Hilla Becher "Winding Towers, Belgium, Germany" 1971–91
"Social play of Shopping"
Idealogy: Jenny Holzer "Projections" 2007 North Adams, MassMoca
Marketing Desire: Jeff Koons "Balloon Dog Blue" 1994
Identity: Cindy Sherman "Untitled (#477)" 2008
Exchange Value: Haim Steinbach "is III-1" 2008
Monday, February 22, 2010
"If Europe were condensed into one piece and combined as one cell, what would be left behind as residue? Two extremes: a very dense condition and a big void.
Primarily, European cities have not been planned; they have emerged and evolved over time. They are the result of layers of history and war, development, destruction, mixing, migration and changing populations. They are a collage of ideas, profound and superficial.
In conceiving Europolis David Adjaye has extracted information from the capital cities of the European Union and condensed it into a single entity. Europolis is not a traditional city but the idea of the city as phenomenon. Its organic form contains all the information about those cities from which it is drawn: material texture, population, time, scale and occupation.
David Adjaye is a British architect whose work is characterized by the originality of its materials and a sculptural approach to light. Alongside many international commissions, his work spans exhibitions, private homes and artist collaborations."
http://www.manifesta7.it/artists/355
"Educational Complex"
1995
Synthetic polymer, latex, foam core, fiberglass and wood, 51 x 192 x 96 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
1995
Synthetic polymer, latex, foam core, fiberglass and wood, 51 x 192 x 96 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
"'Educational Complex' is a model of every school I ever went to, plus the home I grew up in, with all the parts I can’t remember left blank. They’re all combined into a new kind of structure that looks like a kind of modernist building. I started to think about this structure through the Gesamtenswerk, the ‘total artwork’, of Rudolf Steiner, where he tries to combine all the arts and develop a kind of rule system according to which every art form is related."
- Mike Kelley
- Mike Kelley
Sunday, February 21, 2010
The Radicant Response 1.
1. I'd like to respond to Bourriaud's reference to Google Earth. I've recently used this internet program and was incredibly surprised to see how much we can actually see (I'm referring to its recent update of satellite images of Haiti). I think that Bourriaud responded to this phenomenon as a reference to the world as being available.
"...Thus, satellite images have made it possible to fill in the last empty spaces on the map of the world; there are no longer any unknown lands. We are living in the era of Google Earth, which allows us to zoom in on any point of the on the planet from our computers. Across this divided-up planet, a globalized cultural stratum is developing with stunning rapidity, nourished by the Internet and the networking of major media outlets..."
I think he is slightly touching upon the idea of publicity and privacy within our planet, but I don't think he reaches this side of the argument thoroughly. I think there is more to say about the idea of intrusiveness and privacy that is at stake with this program and the internet in general.
"... Can we achieve a position in which we would no longer be dependent on the cultural determinisms, the visual and mental reflexes of the social group in which we were born, the forms and ways of life that are etched in our memories?.."
I think that as much as the internet has given us the ability to delete items, move them, link them, hyperlink them, save them in files far far away never to be seen again, there is no way to remove items from the history book of reality. In reality, there will always be the existence of our culture, our origins and our beginnings. As much as someone would like to delete them and act like they do not exist and do not connect to their current reality; there will always be a presence of the past. It is up to the individual to filter out its presence in the future.
I think that there is something to say about 'Cultural determinisms'. Their existence are flexible as long as the viewer is flexible. It is in the eyes of the viewer to make these determinisms.
3. I'm trying to grasp the idea of a monoculture: the what, when, where, why and how?
I can see this happening through the broadness of the internet world, travel and nomadic lifestyles that Bourriaud touches upon. However; there will always be the historical origins of place. Each place in the world is different. It is the differences that makes life interesting and it is the differences that keep cultures distinguished from one another.
4. I think that the point Bourriaud makes on page 74 about creolization in the work of Mike Kelley is a strong one. He defines the experience of multiple cultures, objects, and traditions as combining into an "urban archipelago". This place is communication of a journey that does not define its parts as being major or minor or at all in comparison to the "classical Western culture". There is no dominating factor; rather a globalization and creolization of different islands, all equal in production.
5. If you break down creolization into very simple terms, it can be as easy to understand as basic arithmetic.
x+y=z
Two separate parts with totally different meanings, combining together, and forming a new whole. The formation of an original part (x) was created by two or more other parts combining to create it. This is the same for cultures. There are many factors that make up a culture and many cultures that make up areas of "creolization" or what Mark Auge calls "non-places". I disagree; these are places. They are just new places made from hybridization of other places.
I've previously posted a piece created by David Adjaye for the 2008 Manifesta 7 at the European Biennial called "Europolis" in which artist and architect, Adjaye gathered information from history regarding the planning of the major cities in Europe. He combined all of these parts into one enormous whole and created a new city: Europolis. This is a clear example of multiple parts combining to create a new whole; however, those separate parts still exist on their own.
Dan Graham
"Two Two-Way Mirrored Parallelograms Joined with One Side Balanced Spiral Welded Mesh"
1996
"Girl's Make-up Room"
1998-200
"Heart Pavilion"
1991
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