digital bodies

The word digital comes from digitalis, meaning relating to the finger; and digit, deriving from digitus, meaning finger or toe.

The word and its etymology embodies the separate and discrete values that comprise all of the digital, its fingers and toes as its only body parts. But what use are fingers without hands enabling them to work together and in different combinations? The digital retains a language of ‘digits’ and independent entities that exists underneath all that merges, pours, and blends in discontinuous becoming continuous.  Despite its fingers and toes, the digital has come to speak of togetherness and openness where we can share ‘information’ freely without limit. Contradiction is its essential character.

In many circumstances the digital means to us transferability, and therefore easy collaboration and interactivity.  It bends our experiences of time and space, and (often) passes over social and cultural differences. There is an air of coolness and casualness in our ‘digital era’ – within its landscape art mimics social spaces, transposing the viewer as an interlocutor, and positively reeking of interactivity, participation, and democracy.  This is a projection that is given attention even when none of the above might actually happen.  What we take, and what we have to contribute in turn – even if nothing at all – is always worthwhile. And accordingly things take on a look, perhaps with MDF and bright colours, that somehow reads as this shifting digital communication in the space of the gallery.

Creative work-spaces or staff-rooms have sometimes adopted a similar tone that this openness suggests, with fun plants, colours and beanbags, indicating a place of idea-generation, flexible thinking, work and leisure, and welcoming of individual ‘personality’.

Thinking and talking on art might behave like we operate in a virtual world, but our bodies still walk through the space of a gallery. Most of the time.  Assembly at the Jerwood Space presented three works of artists working in relation to the digital, and in this way, the show also stimulates awareness of the gallery space conceived currently, in the many responses to the collaborative spark the digital produces.  Charlie Woolley’s installation occupies the entrance gallery with low tables and speckled beanbags, absurd hanging coloured canopies and potted plants. No one was in the space sitting on the beanbags and the plants were wilted – the supposedly active was inactive and experiencing a marked absence.  A sad face for participation. Either the space was waiting for something, or it was never going to happen. Fascinating though was how it was able to hold onto it’s sense of action, telling us how ingrained these signals now are that they can produce recognition by their visuality alone.

Walking through to the next room, a screen was showing slowly moving dancers,  slowed down further.  Like discrete fingers and toes, their bodies, contained in a dance studio, were moving independently to their own patterns and rules. Again the gallery was left empty,  bodies as virtual bodies flattened against the wall. Kim Coleman and Jenny Hogarth were ‘showing’ a live projected version of their blog, with participation meaning scrolling through, bringing your body to affect their virtual set up. Except that not too much could be affected. The blog was ‘exploded’, projected disjointedly across three screens, and therefore was simply transferred off onto a slightly oblique angle whilst remaining the stuck. Navigating through was invited, but confusing in its presentation – this was representation of the digital, rather than the open invitation it implied, maybe a deliberate hindrance and a comment on the uncollaborative collaboration we had just participated in.

I quit the blog by accident. Although this scared me – the gallery still holds a certain control over you, no matter what you are allowed to do – I thought in participatory art any contribution must by its action, be worthwhile contribution.  This was until the receptionist got someone to fix it.  The invitation wasn’t really an invitation after all.

I felt bad about my interactivity, the affect of my finger on the touchpad. We cannot have interactivity if interactivity is displayed and spoken of; not affected or embodied.

ICA : Soundworks / Bruce Nauman Days  180612

Social:

A collaborative project and a London premier, spliced together. Soundworks is a virtual exhibition, that is ‘housed’ by and exhibited via online platform. It professes to ‘engage’, to encourage ‘interaction.’  Soundworks presented an iPad in the upper gallery, for viewers to choose what the gallery presented, or to feel like that. Days is the sound of voices from flat panel speakers as they recite the names of days of the week in no particular order.  In a smooth concurrency/disturbance it provided a point to which all artist involved with Soundworks made a response.

The works brought people together but not necessarily in interaction about the work. The engagement that might be designed for the social space online, that disperses the possibility of engagement to anyone with access to the Internet, is somewhat displaced in this setting with a social exercise in peacocking.

Interactivity:

Sound as immaterial art. The Soundworks project makes a link between this immateriality and its ease of collaboration and interactivity.  Speakerless speakers afford a seering sound that occasionally rises over other noise.  With no objects to negotiate – save the iPad in the centre of the gallery –  behaviour was freer. This was one of the few times I have lulled about the gallery floor, making me recall the time a fellow gallery-goer lying on the floor was told to get up by a gallery assistant.  He barked I’M ENJOYING THE FUCKING SPACE!  before being escorted out.

In Days this awareness of physicality was produced by the immaterial sound, the voices that seemed to hang in the air built a structure. So we ran in the gallery, down the column of sound.  The physical affect of the sound was such that where you placed yourself, the speed and direction at which you travelled, morphed the experience of sound.

Language and space:

Space is shaped by language, and language alters with movement.  Spoken language is the passing of time.

 

“Philosophy privileges contemplation. Theory privileges action and practice—and hates passivity. If I cease to move, I fall off theory’s radar—and theory does not like it. Every secular, post-idealistic theory is a call for action. Every critical theory creates a state of urgency—even a state of emergency. Theory tells us: we are merely mortal, material organisms—and we have little time at our disposal. Thus, we cannot waste our time with contemplation. Rather, we must act here and now. Time does not wait and we do not have enough time for further delay. And while it is of course true that every theory offers a certain overview and explanation of the world (or explanation of why the world cannot be explained), these theoretical descriptions and scenarios have only an instrumental and transitory role. The true goal of every theory is to define the field of action we are called to undertake.”

Groys

Miroslav Tichý

“If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world.”

 

Can we turn our idea of excellence to include other forms of excellence? What are ways we can show non-compliance, not to ‘fight’ against, but to withdraw from the pressures of a certain idea of action and to reach productivity from another side?

Art thoughtz: like a perfect storm of banality

‘maybe he has an affinity with brit-pop.. and thinks he’s a member of Oasis..’

 

Hirst’s work is exhibited across the Gagosian Galleries. and as with most people I yawn at discussions of Damien Hirst.  As an artist that is an example held up for all that is ‘wrong’ with the artworld, I feel apathetic to the complaints as well as him. It is hard to FEEL anything for something is part of something so foreign, uncontrollable and so sprawling.  I don’t see the absurd value of Hirst’s work as a being all that is wrong with art incarnate, because although the works you can take or leave, rather it is the depersonalised-personage that is the real quandary.  And all the fuss and screwed up value on him. It could have easily have been someone else.

But this isn’t good or possible, and saying you don’t care is ‘the thing’ to do after all.  We do have things to fight against, despite being told otherwise, exactly because we have felt like we’ve had nothing to fight against.

We cannot approach it head-on.  So, bad humour in these strange times is important:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5y_8DWg5W0w

[Friedrich Kunath]

Gerhard Richter, Tate.

Gerhard Richter’s work shows us the many things that painting can be.  But an exhibition of his work does not have to expel energy proving wrong the idea ‘painting is dead’. His work has a plain strength that denies any discussion of this.

His retrospective at the Tate Modern, entitled Panorama and aiming to present the full visual range of Richter’s work, communicates from one ‘edge’ of painting to the other with photorealist works beside large-scale paintings of bold abstract gestures.

It is this – being unable to grasp him as an artist, and his consistent evasion – that gives Richter appeal when an inflated art market suggests to us bloated egos.

The colour grey appears throughout, and this stands too for his evasion of definition as an artist: ‘[grey] makes no statement whatsoever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations.. Grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape.’

It is clear, though, that the curating of the show works on the contradictions found in Richter’s work. Following the obvious oppositions of figuration and abstraction come others – erasing and revealing, colour against grey, past and present, structure and chance, and the double that is the reflected image shown in the painting as it is in the mirror.

It seems the deeper-running double is the consciousnesses of Richter’s work. Richter fled East Germany for Düsseldorf in 1961, months before the Berlin divided east and west.  Whilst remaining reluctant to speak about his work, he has spoken through his work on historical and political incidents, not with statements of opinion or evidenced emotion but with a quietness that is as provoking.

The other consciousness is the possibility of art referencing itself. A whole room shows Richter as influenced by Marcel Duchamp for example with Ema (Nude on a Staircase 1966) as following directly from Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase no.2. 1912.  Duchamp’s work itself can be understood as a kind of break in art, turning art in to look at itself and its conventions of making.  As well as his use of objects ‘becoming’ art in their presentation, he also treated colours as readymade commodities to be used.  This prefigured the attitude of many post-war artists that colour could not be used for meaning, instead being selected by chance or a process without ‘feeling’ or symbolism, and much of Richter’s work has resembled bought colour swatches as commodified colour.  In 4096 colours, 1024 colours were generated mathematically and painted in a square grid, with each colour re-produced four times.

Although reluctant with opinion, the paintings do not give off moral numbness as with some pop-art repetitions, but instead a feeling of the difficulty with art’s response. Prevalent in the exhibition is how Richter is situated as responding to these decades post-war, processing a changed world through his work – for example through aerial photographs of bombsites and the architecture that replaced them.

These two subtleties of his work are offered with clarity in Betty (1988). Both historical and personal, it offers a historical understanding with a self-referenced understanding of art itself. A daughter turning away from her father, and a generation turning away from the past, she is looking into his painting. In Richter’s understanding a painting acts like an image in a mirror – present, but not where we see it.

This way of seeing is reflected in the glass and mirror works exhibited with the paintings. 11 Panes (2004) is a glass structure that repeats the viewer’s image, and this blur has a visual likeness to his painting. In this repetition we cannot determine the ‘real’ image, a withholding and hesitance towards truth or responsibility that is a constant in Richter’s work.

The curating shapes the work to themes, giving some kind of story. But these paintings are part of a series, in no particular given order, and in their initial exhibition mirrors re-adjusted their arrangements in each viewing. The exhibition does not make the most of this shifting, operating by way of the – at times frustrating – dependable and digestible sequence of ‘bodies’ of work.  These opposites are the veins running through the works, yet a structure cannot be fitted so neatly over half a century’s worth of work and life.

Making sense is the danger of the retrospective.

In fact, the exhibition ‘ends’ in 2006 with a supposed reconciliation of the opposites structure and chance, through Richter’s admiration of John Cage’s work as setting up of structures in his music to produce chance. Richter’s silence throughout his career can be seen in relation to his recognition of John Cage’s silent music – perhaps we can see his most famous work 4’33’’ in Richter’s abstract paintings for their orchestrated randomness and for their abstraction that is silence as noise.

But interestingly, quoting Cage’s famous sentence ‘I have nothing to say, and I am saying it’, the wall-text, and perhaps Richter himself, does not finish Cage’s sentence – ‘and that is poetry’.

It’s clear then that Richter’s ability to say is in sureness of uncertainty, and in not wanting to offer too much self-professed significance. Richter said around 1964 ‘Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures.’

Whilst we are taken through descriptions and insights by the curators, Richter’s works are powerful without fuss.  They do not claim too much for themselves – with reticence, silence, and grey.

‘A high premium is placed on signalling this culturally aware urbanity and theoretical engagement, rather than necessarily enacting it. If the modern city displays, as Raban puts it, ‘a pornography of taste’, these signals are crucial to our recognition of the art professional’s authoritative self-image. It is a form of subcultural recognition, which can run from the micro – two students, for instance, who might each clock the fact that the other is wearing the current male art school uniform of deck shoes, waxed Barbour jacket and 1940s-goes-1980s short-back-and-sides haircut – to the macro, such as the way an art magazine squares up to its readers. Interviewed in Thornton’s book, the former Artforum editor Jack Bankowsky observes that ‘You have to understand the pieties […] Seriousness at Artforum and in the art world in general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want the magazine to be serious even if they have no real co-ordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty signifier of seriousness abused.’10 You have to understand the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many times their name crops up on e-flux announcements; someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze; the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by plane, you must be high-powered because your business reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.’

Dan Fox

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‘‘artists look like everyone else, worry about their weight, book foreign holidays’’

Dan Fox

x

“Suppose..

.. an artist were to release the work directly into a system that depends on

reproduction and distribution for its sustenance, a model that encourages contamination,

borrowing, stealing, and horizontal blur.The art system usually corrals errant works, but

how could it recoup thousands of freely circulating paperbacks?”

 

Seth Price [Dispersion]

x

“..Art’s addressee

no longer necessarily even a gallery-goer, is reconfigured as a participant, interlocutor, guest, peer, comrade and so on; the white box institutions in which we encounter art have adapted by mimicking libraries, cafes, laboratories, school rooms and other social spaces.”

Dave Beech?

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