1. Technology has meant that we are creating more, apparently ephemeral things, which take up less physical space, but more of our time (by their quantity).
2. Things always take up time – but it was time with a particular purpose. For example, we would make time to go to galleries, which would then be dedicated to experiencing art, art-time for art.
3. (Maybe we got frustrated if the art makes demands from outside of art. Somehow cheating us of our time).1
4. These thoughts arose from time spent browsing through my blog reader, and not having enough time in general, but this general tendency towards less physical things and experiences is a good thing, maybe one day we will end up with no trace outside of some digital signature, and THAT reminds me of Flusser:

… to write is structurally the gesture of a historical and scientific being-in-the-world. Should this gesture fall into disuse, (and there are many symptoms at present which would seem to suggest this), the universe of history and science will fall into oblivion, or at least it will cease to be the universe we live in. Because that universe is a “fiction”, (the result of the technique of writing), and materializes only in the form of surfaces covered by letters. Thus if the art of writing is lost, it will not be missed by future generations. But for us, who are programmed by it and for it, not to be able to write means that life is not worth living.2

1. [I ended up with too many "quoted" words which I converted to italics for a change. I always think words need further clarification, and putting them in quotes suffices to indicate this, and I somehow think this is then enough explanation.]
2. Flusser, Vilém, The Gesture of Writing. Retrieved 16 June, 2009, from http://www.flusserstudies.net/pag/08/the-gesture-of-writing.pdf

More radically than Heidegger and Gadamer, it is Jacques Derrida who deconstructs metaphysical assumptions about origins, foundations, and transcendence. Derrida would opt for the interpretive practice ‘which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who … throughout his entire history – has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play’. He offers the metaphor of a ‘bottomless chessboard’, to which ‘there is no meaning beyond itself, no deep, underlying ground that supports it and speaks through it’. The difference between Eliot and Derrida is that whereas Derrida affirms the endless regression and play of interpretation Eliot, with his acute sense of the element of error in all interpretation, doe not. His vision, in his early philosophical work, may have approximated to that of Derrida’s ‘bottomless chessboard’, but he looked for a meaning beyond it. Unlike Derrida, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Eliot does not rest at at critique of foundational knowledge.1 [my emphasis]

For Derrida…texts are an endless series of ‘traces’ or ‘tracks’; they are traces in the sense of being products of previous traces, and tracks in the sense of moving ‘on the way to’ other traces. If language is like a chessboard, Derrida uses the metaphor of the ‘bottomless chessboard’: there is no underlying ground to support it, and play has no meaning beyond itself…Because the sign is a trace or a mark, it needs to be left intact. But because the sign is a trace in the sense of a track that encourages onward movement, the mark also needs to be erased. It stands both as a fleeting presence, and as that which must be ‘under erasure’. Thus Derrida will write a word, cross it out because it is not accurate, and print both the word and its deletion because, in his judgment, both are necessary.2

1. Jain, Manju (2004), T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 151.
2. Thiselton, Anthony (1992), New Horizons in Hermeneutics, Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, p. 108.

My work is about the body. My figures are never engaged in dramatic physical battles, it’s about the little gestures between bodies…The imaginary interests me. Eroticism is when something hasn’t yet happened…»

• Dumas, Marlene (1996), Marlene Dumas in dialogue with Gavin Jantjes 1996,
  Iniva – Institute of International Visual Arts. Retrieved 10 June, 2009, from http://www.iniva.org/publications_shop/voices_on_art_amp_culture/a_fruitful_incoherence/marlene_dumas_in_dialogue_with_gavin_jantjes

“What Else Could We Talk About?” [Venice Biennale, Mexican Pavilion by artist Teresa Margolles] addresses the increasing violence and record homicide rate in her home country with a series of visually understated installations including several rooms left empty except for a bucket and mop, which are periodically used to wash the stone floors by one of the pavilion’s attendants. The wall text reveals that the water has been infused with the blood of murder victims, so, in a sense, we are walking on dead bodies. But my major problem with the work is this: if any of the rules are bent over the course of the six-month exhibition – the blood not real or the buckets filled with ordinary tap water, then the work loses its efficacy and authenticity. A work like this can’t simply be a metaphor: the execution should be strictly faithful to the concept; any deviation cheats the audience and makes the whole work disingenuous.1

I think this is too essentialist a view for my liking – the idea that an artwork consists of rules and they must be followed for it to be successful (do I mean that? There are many works that I value because they are convincing expositions of their raison d’être, which is where their power comes from). When the meaning of art is in the head, à la Conceptualism, the actual form is demoted in importance. As arch-Conceptualist, Sol LeWitt said:

In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.2

So, in this case, I already get the idea behind the piece, but does it matter if—in reality—it’s real blood being used? And, if it’s the actual blood of murder victims? Personally, I think not.

To be honest, I think that if you find yourself raising questions like this, it reflects a deficiency in the piece itself: it could just as easily have remained an idea. The execution (as light as it is) actually pushes the piece over the edge into heavy-handedness. But as an idea it’s a pretty lightweight response to the subject matter, and raises practical questions like: how is all this blood being obtained? Questions which are not entirely irrelevant, but perhaps subsumed to the original meaning of the work, and end up being distractions. I think if you’re asking questions like this, it’s a good symptom that the work has failed in it’s purpose.

UPDATE: More information about the Teresa Margolles piece:

For the last two decades, the artist has brought to light the bureaucracy and protocol that has arisen in order to process the dead in Mexico City’s morgues, many of whom are casualties of police corruption, gang violence, drug wars, and poverty. Her work is an attempt to create a memorial and a space of contemplation for the cyclical violence that has prematurely ended these lives by using the material traces left behind– the water used to wash corpses, the blood stained rags from the clean up of a scene of an execution, and the shards of glass embedded in the skin of a victim of a drive-by shooting. The exhibition was staged in the crumbling, dilapidated sixteenth century Palazzo Rota Ivancich in the Castello district, whose uneven floorboards, peeling baroque wallpaper, and rusted light fixtures recalled an aristocracy that had long since vacated the premises. The interior was left exactly as is, and each day the floors were washed with water containing blood from damp rags used to mop up crime scenes after the official forensic work was complete. These same rags were hung up and hydrated on the ground floor of the building, and the pools of water collected underneath were then used in the next day’s cleaning. The interdependence between Mexico’s drug wars and a globalized economy were brought to the fore by the artist’s intervention in the Giardini grounds a week before the opening. Margolles hung fabric infused with the blood of executed people from drug-related crimes in the northern border of Mexico on the entrance of the United States Pavilion, signaling the U.S.’s inextricable ties to the Mexican drug trade and resulting violence.…Margolles and Todorovic’s investigations of the fate of the human body vis-à-vis biopolitical control underscore the fact that artists often do not have the privilege to make worlds, but must create in the worlds made for them.3

1. Lange, Christy (2009), Editors’ Blog: Postcards from Venice – Part 6: The Awards, Frieze Magazine. Retrieved 8 June, 2009, from http://www.frieze.com/blog/entry/postcards_from_venice_part_6_the_awards/
2. LeWitt, Sol (1967), Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, Artforum, No.5 (Summer 1967). pp.78–83. Retrieved 8 June, 2009, from http://www.ddooss.org/articulos/idiomas/Sol_Lewitt.htm
3. Moss, Ceci (2009), A Whole New World? On the 53rd Venice Biennale, Rhizome.org. Retrieved 12 June, 2009, from http://rhizome.org/editorial/2695

walks without walls or works

works without walls or walks

In their archives there’s an interview (perhaps more of a conversation) from early 2008 between Ed Peto, a Western journalist living in China, and one of his editors, Lua Zhou, about a review he had been asked to write for InMusic about the Radiohead album ‘In Rainbows’. The piece goes into some detail about the differences between Chinese and Western music writing, and why, in this particular case, a Western writer was selected over locals. I found the parallels between music writing in China, as described here, and art writing in China, as I have experienced it, impossible to ignore.

The points raised in the piece reflect a very similar view to a certain level of art writing here in China. I’m really referring to the standard catalogue text, which seems to dwell almost exclusively on feelings aroused by a work of art, with a lack of what this article calls a “technical” approach. I guess you could call this a formalist approach, in art-speak, and one which is explicitly linked to a “Western” style of writing, distinguished by being “colder”. This is linked to the vagueness of genres here in China, which is said to be a product of the market’s immaturity:

There is no clear line between categories of music as the genres are not mature enough, it is not so clear what type of music you are playing so things are described in a more general way. Reviewers do lots of comparisons – Say compare this album to Kid A. I don’t think they can do as much technical analysis. Traditionally they don’t do this. They always start with a factual band introduction – which I normally cut – then go into the spiritual side, the meaning of the lyrics and how it makes you feel.

I’m kind of interested in this idea of “immaturity”. Why is this style of writing a display of immaturity? It’s not as if the way writing manifests itself in China (and Japan, according to the article) has not had a long history. It would be wrong to see this as a progression, a development, writing is essentially non-evolutionary and can pick and choose it’s styles and tropes as it pleases. Some styles may only be possible after a certain point, but this would represent a small-scale development not a grand scheme. It’s just as easy to forget history as it is to remember it, and “fitness for purpose” holds little meaning.

The style of music writing criticised in this piece and apparently common in China, is presumably there for a reason, as a result of pressures which have led to this being the accepted and appropriate way to express oneself at this point in time (hmm, is that evolution after all? But I think it could just as easily go in a completely different direction without any other reason than fashion, for instance). Now other styles are being seen as useful and appropriate in this context and the result is this editor’s need to call upon the Western journalist to fulfil this need.

I could jump to the trite conclusion that this is as a result of China’s opening up to Western influence, but we have also been given the example of Japan which has a much longer and more in depth relation with the West than China has at this point. Perhaps the respect for set forms of tradition is that much more in Japan, keeping this style alive, whereas China seems to thrive on absorbing any and all influences with an equanimity in the face of change.

So when the article says that China is “a real mash-up country”:

We just listen to different stuff. The record shops don’t tell us what is what, they just put all the records together and you take all different styles at the same time.

… I think this holds a clue to the Chinese way of managing the many influences that affect it, and the new-found need to incorporate a “Western” style of writing.

What I have tried to avoid in this post, is looking at the “Chinese” style and the “Western” style as in some way in conflict, or in a hierarchy, which is how they are being presented in the original article. I think judgements like this mask the constructive aspects of each side and are detrimental to an understanding of what they are doing.

How do you handle competition for key work?

Like everything else in life, you earn your way up the ladder. You promise the best environment for the art. You give works to museums. And you mix a great drink.*

* From Isenberg, Barbara (2007). What Makes a Great Collection? Time Magazine. Time Inc. Thursday, Mar. 29, 2007.

There are narrative fragments but there is no linear coherence. We are encouraged to read vertically, through association, across the relations of text to image, along the terms of the primary processes of condensation and displacement. No longer consumers at the margin of a finished work, we are drawn onto the site and onto the process of meaning itself. In this process our sexed subjectivity and its pleasures in representation are also implicated, and indeed become the subject matter of the work. [a discussion of the films of Victor Burgin]

• TICKNER, Lisa (1984). Sexuality and/in Representation: Five British Artists. In: ed. Preziosi, Donald, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1998, p.364.

If we consider the works of Alois Riegl and of Heinrich Wölfflin … we see that, despite differences in detail, they are both informed by a polemical concern for the autonomy of art history, by a desire to break it free from the history of civilization and thus to break with the tradition associate with the name of Jacob Burckhardt. I will try briefly to summarize the forces behind this struggle and their consequences for the methodology of the subject.

…

3. The antithesis of form and matter thus finds its logical counterpart in the theory of an autonomous development of art, which views the entire process exclusively in terms of form, assuming the latter to be the constant factor at every stage of history, irrespective of differences both of technical production and of expression. This has both positive and negative consequences: it involves treating the various genres of art as parallel with each other—for, as far as the development of form is concerned, no one genre should be any less important than another; it also involves levelling out the differences between them—for no one genre can tell us anything that is not already contained in the others. In this way we attain, not a history of art, which traces the origin and fate of monuments as bearers of siginificant form, but, as in Riegl, a history of the autonomous formal impulse (Kunstwollen), which isolates the element of form from that of meaning, but nevertheless presents change in form in terms of a dialectical development in time—an exact counterpart of Wölfflin’s history of vision (Of course, this conceptual scheme is quite different from Wölfflin’s. There is no simple division of form and content, but a complex relationship of dynamic interaction between a conscious and autonomous ‘formal impulse’ and the ‘coefficients of friction’ of function, raw material, and technique.…)*

• Wind, Edgar (1930). ‘Warburg’s Concept of Kunstwissenschaft and its Meaning for Aesthetics’ from The Eloquence of Symbols: Studies in Hamisi Art (1983). Oxford: OUP.