tiny thoughts

It is strange, at times i felt like we rushed over some really interesting ground instead of trying to unknot some of the concepts. While i also found it difficult to surmise each topic from week to week being that they were so often in the scope of one and another. But be that as is may what we did cover was very engrossing and seemed consistently embedded in a progressive and expansive investigation of art, art-making, politics and the social/cultural climate. Moreover this course has provide me with a plateau on which consider and discuss diverse practices and an opportunity to draw on other ideas and trajectories which are not exclusive to art.
But above all i have been acquainted with new avenues on which to track down and many new books have found their way to a permanent home on my bookcase. So for that, Thanks.

Cradle to Cradle: remaking the way we make things

Cradle to Cradle is a manifesto co-written by William McDonough and german chemist Michael Braungart advocating the alteration of human industry based on ecologically intelligent design. The duo claim that the current conflict between industry and environment is a unnecessary consequent of opportunistic day-to-day based design, a repercussion of the industrial revolution. Stating that today our understanding of the living earth has culminated to a plateau in which we are able to let go of these outdated structures limiting the cooperation of ecology and design.

C2C is a subsection of MBDC - Michael Braungart Design Chemistry, Cradle to Cradle™ Design's approach to sustainability models human industry on the biological metabolisms of ecosystems, developing what is seen as an equally effective technological metabolism. The firm offers innovative strategies for business to realise sustainable product design.

The MBDC also offers a Cradle to Cradle™ Certification program which evaluates and certifies products which have a positive effect on the environment, human health and social equity.

While these two practice may not have a direct connection, there is an an underlining affirmation that production, be it artistic or business based, need not be dislocated from preexisting natural relations. Both deal with re-evaluating the way we see a particular 'field' (again artistic or business) as working and attempt to re-form these pre-concieved (notably the RA model in terms of 'tending') structures into something expansive and communicative rather than closed and perpetual.

Between is and that.

In Franz Kafka’s The Giant Mole (from The Great Wall of China and other stories) the narrator discusses (with the reader) the phenomena of a giant mole sighting by a local school teacher. The school teacher, a humble and under appreciated member of the local community, has previously attempted to bring the existence of the mole to the attention of the public through a small pamphlet which describes the place, time and physical characteristics of the mole. However the scientific community, which the teacher was most interested in involving, is unconvinced of the legitimacy of the event and the pamphlet goes relatively unnoticed. As the story unfolds the narrator seems to become emotionally involved in the quest for recognition on the part of the school teacher and begins his own pseudo-scientific [re]account of the event. Despite the narrators elevation in the ‘academic’ world he is also met with derision and on top of that he seems to offend the integrity of the school teacher’s initial sighting. The story culminates when the school teacher and the narrator meet to discuss the intentions behind each pamphlet and the story ends in an open conversation. The reader is thus left to define the conditions of the mole themselves and to structure its meaning on the two incongruent and sometimes conflicting accounts given by the narrator and the teacher.
As with Zizek’s example of Robert Schumann’s Humoresque in They Moved to the Underground what is missing is exactly what structures the piece. It is the ‘absence’ (of the mole or melodic line) which causes one to [re]construct the ‘real’ mole and melodic line, which then stabilises the physical presence of the other characters and left-hand/right-hand piano lines. Zizek follows on to point out that the ‘modern subject emerges when its objectal counter part disappears.... the subject [correlates] with the ‘impossible-real’ who’s existence is purely ‘virtual’, ie. the modern subject is post-object a combination of differences and disruptions.
By the same token it is the ‘absence’ or ‘unspoken’ narrative in Laibach's music that overtly suggests the tense relations between Germany and Slovenia, while the coupling of their songs with music videos that recycle Third Reich, Communist, Nationalist, Modernist and Christian propaganda leaves the interpretation up to the viewer.
Towards the end of the article Zizek suggests that our post-modern, post-structuralist, world is incapable of assimilating practices like Laibach and other Eastern European reactionary groups without co-opting or neutralising them as reactive and thus weakening their position. In the case of Laibach their ‘position’ was propted by the schism caused after Slovenia gained its independence between 1989 -1992 and became an ex-socialist society struggling to merge into a new EU accepted society. Zizek suggests that the schism is one between community and a common-unity, between individuals as they exist and individuals as they appear. The disruption is a result of the displacement of the biological self from the ‘virtual’ (that which applies to record, statistics and law) self and a distortion of the appearance of things. To this distortion of appearance Zizek links the contemporary clash between the Arab and American civilisations and paraphrases Walter Benjamin’s idea ‘that every clash of civilisation is a clash of the underlying barbarianism’.
So to return to Laibach, the groups overt staging of oppressive regimes is a spectacle of the underlying essence of the regimes.
What is called for at the end of the article is another Laibach-like [re]action that will liberate us from the ‘semblance’ of these present clashes and illuminate the essence [of the action] which is hidden behind and obstructed by appearance.

community

The term ‘community’, used generally, refers to a group of people living together spatially. However in contemporary art it has come to denote the recognition of an individual as a important component in the summation of the whole and as an active force capable of inciting change and social awareness. In The Social Contract Rousseau maintains that society is organised by an implicit contract determined between the members of society and that the conditions of this contract are justly decided by the general will of the people.
Similarly, artists working within the notion of ‘community’ use it as a departure point for opening up and illuminating current issues facing a certain social group. The individual's ‘place’ or sense of belonging is thus determined by the relation it has to the identity of the group and the identity of the group is likewise structured by the general concerns of the individuals.

Community art is often activist in nature and functions as a deliberate attempt to integrate and socialise both the artwork and the community/groups with which it works.

this didn't seem to post last week.

Robert J. Yanal, in The Institutional Theory of Art illuminates George Dickie’s concept of Institutional theory by way of Arthur C. Danto’s ‘artrelevant paradox’. As Yanal sees it, Dickie is furthering Danto’s Theory of Aboutness, which partitions Art as occurring not by manner of any of its perceptual qualities, but by it’s relation to some larger context.
If X and Y are aesthetically identical, yet X is art and Y is not where does the distinction between the two lie?
“it is the decisions of persons, paradigmatically though not exclusively artists, that make objects Art” (Dickie)
As a whole Institutional theory does not tell us what exactly art is, but rather that an artwork fits into social context - the Artworld. This system for honing in on what is or isn’t art has thus, it would seem, becomes a question of consenus.
Again we are left in a state of openness, it is us as a collective whole who decides. However this openness stems from the roots of the ‘artworld’ and must therefore have a participatory relationship with it.
“the artworld is the totality of all artworld systems” (Dickie)
If this is true, would it not then mean that our understanding adheres in some way or another to the systems of this artworld? Whereby isn’t this openness just as open as it is closed, for as Yanal points out our ‘understanding’ is made up of a belief in the artworld and the acknowledgment that the artworld contains options for presentation of art works. It seems to me that this ‘artworld’ is entering a state of Ourboros(ness) in which the artwork and artworld are connected mouth and tail.

generally speaking

Relational Aesthetics does not posit itself within the historical field of ‘beauty’, but instead exists as a tract to consider it’s inherent ties with the ‘outside’ world. It is not a new field of aesthetic purism but an ‘extra’ aesthetics. It is an aesthetics in general that relates to the ‘other’, to the space outside of, and is somewhat untouched or un-determined by meaning and form. This shift in proposition allows RA to question the idea of the ‘essence’ of art and to undo its limitations, whereby creating a critical strategy in which it can move beyond the strictures of historical ‘truth’.
In The Will to Power (p.453) F. Nietzsche states, “Art is worth more than truth” because it is ‘the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life’’. Given that he was relating the ‘denial of life’ to that of religion and nihilism, the underlying rationale has similarities to notions that are adopted within RA - the importance of openenedness and pushing at the closures of the ‘essential’ (or Art proper).

However, as Claire Bishop points out, there are a few problems that can occur as a result of openenedness and a generalized aesthetics. Often RA interventions, or what Bishop terms an “experience economy”, tread the line of being almost indiscernible from a purely market or entertainment based practice. Thus causing what may be thought of as an obliteration of the potential of art and/or a reinscription of "being into having’’. This critique of the ambiguous nature of RA work needs to be acknowledged, yet it should not cause a fault in the overall motivation. A weariness of these problems can, as a sceptical eye in any discipline can, lead to a greater understanding of the premises of art and incite a more productive, energetic and critical potential.
Furthermore doesn’t Guy Debord say, in The Society of the Spectacle, that “the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society..... a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers” (p.16)?

On a similar vein to Debord’s idea that the world is mere appearance and that as ‘being in itself’ it is unaviodable, Moses Herzog in Saul Bellows’ Herzog refers to himself as “a prisoner of perception, a compulsory wittness” to a world rich in detail and riddles.

Finally, in response to the question of who created who? the chicken or the egg..
Autopoeisis - ‘“auto self creation”, coined as a system description for the nature of living things by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varel.
Autopoesis is the transforming and degenerating matrix of production of components that are perpetually regenerating and registering the processes that produce them.
Art/Culture is both a reflection and production of society.

As a side note; i am in no way trying to elevate art to a some super status. When F.N says 'truth' it is meant in an entirely moral sense (the principles of right and wrong in human behavior) and has a human construct.

RA

As Bishop puts it the term RA is applied to work that is openened and resistant to closure. An interactive “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object. Artworks seem to be based on a system of ideas, as something ideological rather than collection-based.
Instead of the interpretations of the artwork being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself has become the constant flux. However my main concern with RA, and Bishop touches on this as well, is that it seems to set up social division of labour as a model for producing socialised art. The production of art becomes the subject and the participants become the creators. Yet more often then not these participants are ‘unwillingly’ lead into this circumstance of individual will becoming subordinate to the identity of the whole, with the artist (individually) still holding the symbolic capital - authorship. I see this as happening in works like that of Mark Asher.
While this alone is no real defect it seems that the ‘model’ in itself can be problematic. If RA is meant to be a spontaneous convergence of intellectual and ‘manual’ labouring doesn’t the model lend to imitation rather than autonomy. In Camera Lucida R. Barthes speaks the nature of constantly mimicking one’s self in front of a camera - of acting ‘appropriately’, as one should. For if one was aware of the goings on of the RA model and therefore not an ‘unwillingly’ participant does that take from it’s spontaneity? (if one is already aware of how to act)
Yet on the other hand, without this ‘model’ of post-aesthetic art production how can RA possibily define itself? It has to acknowledge itself as art before it can define itself as outside of art.