Practice as research

Considering the nature of capital in the production of objects is a theme that is inherent within artist practice, whether directly or indirectly. This concept relates to everything from the time and materials available to produce work (dictated by sources of income), through to considering the consumer market for these artistic products.

The art market as an ‘object based economy’ has been discussed by Nicolas Bourriaud (in week 84) as a way of solidifying the world through inventing “modes of representation… for a reality that is becoming more abstract each day”. However, other artists are reflecting this “landscape of the insubstantial” through more conceptually based practices, such as Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska’s 2001 project, ‘Capital’.

Capital
Capital was the inaugural project of the Contemporary Interventions programme, which was launched at Tate Modern in 2001. The programme was established to commission annual artistic projects in order to “enable artists and others to investigate and comment on the core practice of the museum”. As Lars Nittve, the director of the Tate Modern (1998-2001), described in his foreword to the exhibition catalogue: “With their project ‘Capital’, the artists [Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska] have cut through and laid bare layer upon layer of micro- and macro- systems of structure, meaning and value in the museum and… its place in society’s systems of value, production and exchange”. (Capital, p7)

In particular, the application of Marxist and anthropological theoretical frameworks to artistic practice enabled Cummings and Lewandowska to produce “a series of encounters… between two iconic institutions and the economies they animate; the Tate and the Bank of England… triggered by the issue of a gift [in the form of] a beautiful limited edition artwork” (Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska, ‘Enthusiasts, and the Enthusiasts Archive’). The project therefore, became the basis for a series of seminars, essays and interventions, which included an element where “arbitrarily chosen visitors [were] given a limited-edition print, issued by the artists, through a gallery official… Capital, the gift, [became] thus a gesture as much as a thing” (Capital, p13).

Gift Theory
This exploration of notions of value was predicated on the shared geographical space of the Tate and the Bank of England, as well as the utilisation of the gift in the formation of both organisations. As Frances Morris states in his essay ‘Gift, Economy, Trust’ in the exhibition catalogue for Capital: “Both Tate and the Bank of England were established by the act of giving. In 1694,  the Bank was initiated by a loan to the government raised by public subscription… [while] Tate was founded by a gift [of money, paintings and sculpture] from the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate in 1897” (Capital, p13).

The essay ‘I.O.U. Nothing’ by Jeremy Valentine further explores the notion of the gift through the work of the sociologist Marcel Mauss and the structural linguist and semiotician Emile Benveniste. According to Beneviste, “the common Indo-European roots of giving are indistinguishable from taking, by dint of ‘a curious semantic ambivalence’… Consequently,  giving is indistinguishable from the obligation to return, and thus debt.” This argument is continued by philosophers such as Derrida in his 1994 book ‘Given Time’. Here, he considers the “impossibility of the gift” due to the intention and expectation of the giver: ‘A gift requires that there be no “reciprocity, return, exchange, countergift, or debt. If the other gives me back or owes me or has to give me back what I give him or her, there will not have been a gift, whether this restitution is immediate or whether it is programmed by a complex calculation of a long-term deferral or differance”.’ (http://www.leithart.com/archives/002003.php)

Symbolic economies
Derrida’s explorations of the gift were a reexamination of earlier theories of the time of exchange by Marcel Mauss. In his 1923 book ‘The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies’, Mauss investigates the notion of the potlatch. As Jeremy Valentine describes, potlatch is “a communal festival in which the community is affirmed by the consumption of the resources on which it relies, and which in their production organises the social relations of the community itself which potlatch destroys in order for such relations to be rebuilt, thus giving purpose to the labour of production itself.”  (Capital, p50)

Although Valentine states that potlatch “constitutes a form of expenditure without return… (a pure gift)”, it also suggests a type of “symbolic economy” through which the production of goods is linked to the communities engaged in the exchange. (Capital, p50) These reciprocal networks of values and economies are the basis for the Capital project. As Cummings and Lewandowska summarise, “Objects – while acting as tools, products, works of art or commodities – are essentially vehicles for relationships between people” (Capital, p31)

Further reading:
Artist Jean McEwan uses ideas of gift and reciprocity in her practice in order to produce photographic and participatory work. You can find out more about her project at: https://www.a-n.co.uk/blogs/reciprocity

Also, Dave Beech’s ‘Art and Value’, expected publish date February 2015 http://www.brill.com/products/book/art-and-value

http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/is-this-still-capitalism/#.VGn2ufmsU-5
http://cdn.chtodelat.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/martin_autonomy.pdf

In previous weeks I have discussed the term ‘post’ in relation to postcards, blogging and networks, as well as the Post-Internet phenomenon. Post-Internet art explores artists relationships to the web and the way that it is changing artistic production. Nicolas Bourriaud has previously framed these new forms of art making as part of a broader pattern, which he refers to as ‘Post production’. In this case, “the prefix ‘post’ does not signal any negation or surpassing; it refers to a zone of activity”.

Post production
In his book of the same name, Bourriaud outlines the term ‘post production’ as an analogy for artistic practices: “Post production is a technical term from the audiovisual vocabulary used in television, film, and video. It refers to the set of processes applied to recorded material: montage, the inclusion of other visual or audio sources, subtitling, voice-overs, and special effects. As a set of activities linked to the service industry and recycling, post production belongs to the tertiary sector, as opposed to the industrial or agricultural sector, i.e., the production of raw materials”. In other words, artists are increasingly making work as references, interpretations or reproductions of pre-existing forms of art and culture.

He describes this practice as “the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption”, otherwise referred to as prosumer culture, which has become more prevalent with the expansion of Web 2.0. Writing in 2002, Bourriaud situated this as a recent phenomenon and suggested that this was in response to the ever increasing proliferation of forms and images available to us through the expansion of the internet. However, these types of behaviours have previously been theorised in relation to neomedievalism, and can also be seen in the work of artists throughout history (see image).

Neomedievalism
I first encountered the term ‘neomedievalism‘ back at the start of my PhD, so it’s interesting to come full circle, especially in light of all the additional research I’ve done around my topic in relation to Aby Warburg. The relationship between post production, prosumer culture and neomedievalism is addressed in my earlier blogpost on the neomedieval economy.

“The neomedieval economy references changes in the means of production made necessary due to large scale pandemic [or similar economic disaster. In 1349] in the aftermath of the Black Death, with the population of Europe having been severely diminished, improved production methods were required to make up for the decrease in skilled labour. In his book, Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Chris Anderson suggests a marked development of this kind of ‘prosumer’ society, where DIY culture, coupled with increased access to new technology, leads to more opportunities for democratising production processes in a similar way to the post-plague era”.

Categories of post production
However, although Bourriaud’s ‘post production’ appears to be based on the false premise of ‘new’ responses and behaviours by artists, his book does outline some of the developments of these practices including artists working self-reflexively and questioning a particular “modernist ideology of originality”, alongside the increase and development of new technologies to enable the acquisition, reproduction and dissemination of new works.

He separates the artists into categories in order to describe the ways in which they remix art and popular culture. These categories include works that make use of existing art objects, images, styles, and forms to explore how artists “testify to a willingness to inscribe the work of art within a network of signs and significations, instead of considering it an autonomous or original form”. Particular examples of this type of practice include Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy’s use of actors and models to produce new interpretations of Vito Acconci’s work in ‘Fresh Acconci’ (1995), and Douglas Gordon’s ’24 Hour Psycho’ (1997) in which the artist projected a version of the Alfred Hitchcock film which had been slowed down to run for 24 hours.

Labour and capital
Another theme running through these practices is one of labour and capital. The artists’ use of objects which have already been produced, Bourriaud argues, references Marx’s theories of capital: “a mixture of accumulated labor and tools of production”. He cites Marcel Duchamp’s readymade ‘Bottle Rack’ as a work which brought “the capitalist process of production… into the sphere of art, while at the same time indexing the role of the artist to the world of exchange”.

Bourriaud concludes that contemporary artists building on these traditions of the readymade may also be responding to the abstraction of economic globalisation, of which prosumer culture is a part: “Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes. When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a result of economic globalization, when the basic functions of our daily lives are slowly transformed into products of consumption (including human relations, which are becoming a full-fledged industrial concern), it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialize these functions and processes… Not as objects, which would be to fall into the trap of reification, but as mediums of experience: by striving to shatter the logic of the spectacle, art restores the world to us as an experience to be lived. Since the economic system gradually deprives us of this experience, modes of representation must be invented for a reality that is becoming more abstract each day”.

Further information:
http://www.cobgallery.com/?exhibition=pastiche-parody-piracy
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/315025/copyright-guidance-creatorsowners.pdf

Much of my research is currently related to the relationship between the object, image and text, in particular the way the Internet has influenced and perpetuated translations between different media formats. Previously, I discussed how the ephemeral, narrative and networked nature of postcards can be likened to some extent to the blog post, which led me to consider how my work relates to the phenomenon known as Post-Internet art.

What is Post-Internet art?
There have been a number of different definitions used to describe post-internet art, including dimensional artwork that uses the aesthetics of the net eg. web browsers, glitches, programming language, through to the possibilities of image sharing afforded by sites such as tumblr and instagram. All of these definitions however, conform to an overall understanding of the term which is discussed in Artie Vierkant’s 2010 essay The Image Object Post-Internet, in which he details the history and development of the concept.

“Post-Internet Art is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog ‘Post Internet’ during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh’s definition it concerns “art responding to [a condition] described as ‘Post Internet’ – when the Internet is less a novelty and more a banality… Post-Internet is defined as a result of the contemporary moment: inherently informed by ubiquitous authorship, the development of attention as currency, the collapse of physical space in networked culture, and the infinite reproducibility and mutability of digital materials… Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination.” (Vierkant, 2010)

On/Offline
Although people have expressed problems with the term as a sequential description, the ‘post’ in this sense refers to the idea of creating ‘after’ the internet, with the internet as a priori which contributes to the production of dimensional media. In this way, post-internet art uses technology as a tool, a network or a concept, rather than a medium – in the case of net art or new media. My interest in the term is not necessarily in defining my work, but in how it describes a particular trend in my practice between my use of the internet and the making of object-based art.

These reciprocal translations between online and offline also extend into the realisation of the object, with artists producing multiple versions of the same object in different forms and media. For example, “Oliver Laric’s ‘Versions’ exists as “a series of sculptures, airbrushed images of missiles, a talk, a PDF, a song, a novel, a recipe, a play, a dance routine, a feature film and merchandise,” [while Seth] Price’s ‘Dispersion’ [takes]“the form of a widely reproduced essay, an artists’ book, a freely available online PDF, as well as [a] sculpture.” (Vierkant, 2010)

Dissemination, translation, appropriation
Despite, the objecthood of Post-Internet art, it may still utilise the internet as a medium for dissemination, as with Dissociations, the web documentation of Berlin-based artist Harm van den Dorpel’s studio practice. Similarly, in the work of performance artist Paul Kindersley, the web as both form and concept are addressed through his series of videos mimicking YouTube makeup tutorials which are then uploaded to the video sharing site.

The web also allows for the possibility of participation, with some artists encouraging their audiences to appropriate an remix works through licences such as creative commons. As Vierkant writes: “Just as Barthes’ proclamation of the “death of the author” is in fact a celebration of the “birth of the reader” and the “overthrow[ing of] the myth”, culture Post-Internet is made up of reader-authors who by necessity must regard all cultural output as an idea or work in progress able to be taken up and continued by any of its viewers… Artists after the Internet thus take on a role more closely aligned to that of the interpreter, transcriber, narrator, curator, architect.” (Vierkant, 2010)

Artist curator
These propositions suggest various correlations with my work, through the use of social media in curatorial projects, research into online image archives as inspiration for my practice, and sharing my writing online. In considering the definition of Post-Internet art, I hoped to find a strategy to understand how the different aspects of my practice fits together, and how I can tackle some of the more problematic issues of appropriating cultural objects. However, despite the contentious term, I feel like I have found some affinity with the idea, which is expressed in the last section of Vierkant’s essay.

“The goal of organizing appropriated cultural objects after the Internet cannot be simply to act as a didactic ethnographer, but to present microcosms and create propositions for arrangements or representational strategies which have not yet been fully developed…. What matters is that in the presentation they have created a proposition towards an alternate conception of cultural objects… [Post-Internet art] marks a denigration of objects and our relationship to space: if an object before us in a gallery is only one of an infinite multitude of possible forms that object could take, its value to the viewer becomes little more than a curiosity… [Post-Internet art] is a constellation of formal-aesthetic quotations, self-aware of its art context and built to be shared and cited.” (Vierkant, 2010)

Further reading:
http://new-aesthetic.tumblr.com/about
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/post_internet_art
http://eyecontactsite.com/2013/07/post-internet-art
https://www.academia.edu/5021395/Digital_Primitivism_Gentrifying_the_Web_On_Aids_3D_2011_
http://metropolism.com/features/post-internet-kunst/english
http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/nov/1/postinternet/
http://www.cornerhouse.org/bookstore/product/you-are-here-art-after-the-internet

 

I’ve been reflecting on the term ‘partial connections’, which I discussed in the previous week, in relation to working with postcards in my practice. The term, which explores the meanings of objects produced by relational networks, is also reiterated to some extent by James Clifford in his 1997 essay, ‘The Museum as Contact Zone’. ‘Contact zones’, first coined by Mary Louise Pratt, refers to “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power…”.

Within the notion of partial connections, Strathernian anthropology dictates that levels of complexity remain the same regardless of scale. Therefore, as Pratt’s undefined ‘social space’ becomes condensed into Clifford’s ‘museum’, so the site of the contact zone can be concentrated within a single object. Furthermore, within ethnographic practice, this object may also be represented by text or image translation.

The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and beyond
In trying to find links between my work and anthropological ideas of partial connections, contact zones and translation, I began to read Jacques Derrida’s 1979 book ‘The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and beyond’. In the first section, Envois, he describes purchasing a large number of the same postcard with which to send letters to a loved one. Each entry is printed along with the date it was sent, as an epistolary novel.

Although my interests in the work were initially related to the postcard format, I soon found links to other aspects of my practice, including autoethnography and online writing. The act of translation, through the sending, receiving and decoding of information, is also prevalent in the text. As I am reading the 1987 English version, there is a foreword with translation notes, which includes a glossary of terms to elaborate on the way that the translator, Alan Bass, understood the original French. Additionally, Bass traces the etymological networks of prominent terms within the text including ‘post’ as a noun, verb and prefix.

Post pəʊst/
1. To display (a notice) in a public place.
2. To announce or publish.
3. To submit (a message) to an Internet message board or blog.
4. (Brit.) The official service or system that delivers letters and parcels.
5. (Brit.) To send (a letter or parcel) via the postal system.
6. After in time or order.
7. Used in names of newspapers i.e. The Washington Post.
8. (in bookkeeping) To enter (an item) in a ledger. To record.
9.  A position of paid employment; a job.
10. To send (someone) to a place to take up an appointment. mid 16th cent.: from French poste, from Italian posto, from a contraction of popular Latinpositum, neuter past participle of ponere ‘to place’.
11. A long, sturdy piece of timber or metal set upright in the ground and used as a support or marker. i.e. signpost, starting post, etc.
12. (archaic) With haste.

Relational meanings
These definitions, which focus around the act of sending, announcing, publishing, recording, etc, set up a correlation between the postcard and the blog post. This is reflected in Derrida’s work, through the open format of his postcard writings and the potential network of recipients of his text. The inclusion of Freud’s fort/da experiment as the (im)possibility of its arrival with the intended recipient, also produces the blog-post-card as contact zone between sender(s) and receiver(s).

This leads me to consider my blog, not only as a reflection on, but also as an aspect of my practice, and the postcard, as “sparse, indigent, insignificant, anecdotic, fragmentary… [with] limits to what it can contain” as a useful analogy for the museum. (Wills, 1984)

Further reading:
Arka Chattopadhyay, Jacques Derrida and the Paradox of Translation
John Philips, Reading The Postcard
http://articles.latimes.com/1987-07-12/books/bk-3302_1_jacques-derrida
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3684813