Ben Baer on 20 Jul 2000 14:06:17 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] False Memory Syndrome |
False Memory Syndrome: Thoughts on "Exposure #0001: Information For The Other Sides Of Here" They say that if you can remember the 60s then you werenıt really there. "Exposure #0001: Information For the Other Sides of Here" seemed to be an act of re-memoration of a certain 1960s, by and for a group of people who were too young even to have been able to forget that decade. It seems that, to a certain extent, the Anglo-US artworld is in the grip of an attempt to "remember" the 1960s in some way or other. What has provoked the recent emergence of numerous publications re-thinking (or even just re-presenting) material from that era? Or, on the register of aesthetic production, works which specifically address themselves to the question of remembering, and mis-remembering or are they the same thing? the art practices of the 60s? (I am thinking most specifically of Silvia Kolbowski's "an inadequate history of conceptual art" shown recently at the Whitney Biennial, but Art & Language's recent exhibition at PS1 would do just as well as a way of asking about what is at stake in the desire to remember and re-present a history of a practice). Cary Peppermint's "Exposure #0001" seemed to try and capture something like the texture of an art event of the 1960s or early 70s, rather than be a more academic reconstruction of what might have "happened" at one. For someone of Peppermint's generation, that texture is, strictly speaking, historically unavailable. An exercise of imagination therefore becomes necessary, if something as hard to pin down and specify as a texture is going to be produced, or experienced. "Exposure #0001" took place in the artist's studio, just like many of the best events of the 1960s are supposed to have. Although that decade was to some extent the rediscovery of work done "outside the studio" (involving a critique of the site of production of art) it was also a moment when the studio itself was re-opened as a site of consumption and distribution. We know what has happened to the supposedly "critical" desire to exit the studio: Daniel Buren-style State Dada, Alfredo Jaar-style save-the-third-world-missions. Yet obviously, having a studio event today is nothing new, as the proliferation of studio-sited "alternative" art spaces attests, and Peppermintıs piece could simply be placed within this structure, which has itself become highly organized and institutionalized. The "alternative" space is itself another niche in the artworld, occupied by aspirants waiting for a more spectacular success elsewhere. In this sense we can say that the alternative is produced by the dominant, yet often presents itself as somehow oppositional. Peppermint is working with the painful implications of this situation, by trying to re-imagine an aspect of its historical emergence. As I have already tried to suggest, then, Exposure #0001 appeared to be displacing these problems into the thinking of a moment when they were a bad dream, or a monstrous premonition. The strange hermeticism of Peppermintıs piece, the rooftop beer-drinking session, the passage through the building into the studio itself, and the weird "party" held in the studio space, could have been ways of trying to bracket the world of pushy professionalism and aggressive self-promotion. Not that the 60s were devoid of these things: we are imagining they may have been attenuated in certain ways, compared to today. (For instance, a few days later one person asked me how much I had paid to get in to this event, and was surprised to hear that it was free, interpreting the lack of entrance fee as a lack of success on behalf of the artist. Of course artists need to eat, but the comment was symptomatic of a moment in which big, self-avowedly "transgressive" blood and-guts performance art brings in the dollars almost as efficiently as the Broadway musical Chicago). The event was loosely organized around three distinct spaces in the studio building (a warehouse on Harlem's west side, overlooking the Hudson River). The rooftop provided a scopic view of the street's car wash, the west side highway, meat markets, fortified supermarket, NJ etc. you couldnıt have asked for a better "life-art" dualism. This convenient viewpoint (art as elevated perspective) was itself overlooked by a pedestrian bridge, which emphasized the interstertial nature of the location, and detracted from the idea that this place might possess a privileged vantage point, as the topography of a studio rooftop or window would at first imply. Pissarro's 1890s paintings of Parisian boulevards seen from above may have been critical attempts to map the spectacular re-development of the city with a mobile, elevated perspective, but here the idea that art could even attempt to master the city-as-spectacle was subtly undermined in the placement of the first section of the event. Its autonomy was marked as fragile, and sheerly relative. Many of the elements comprising what I can only call the "props" for "Exposure #0001" appear to have been drawn from Peppermintıs personal grammar of memory: his father's taste for Budweiser Beer, for example, was manifested in the copious supplies of warm Budweiser consumed by the participants. The piece's main focus occurred in the studio room itself, in which a strange kind of party was held. To come back to the remembering of the 60s, the idea of artwork-as-party does not necessarily reproduce actual events (it probably does), but rather attempts to cathect the moment when an art community managed to connect art-making and sociality, however problematically and briefly. I am not saying that this does not happen anymore, but the age of the palm pilot and the teenage stockbroker leaves less and less space for hanging out, for extended, undirected discussion. Technocratically determined speed-up and workaholism have certainly pushed us into thinking fairly instrumentally about what we do, and this way of thinking is not necessarily a bad thing. We cannot afford the simple nostalgia of a world without instrumentalities. In a sense, Peppermint's staging of a party in which the participants were made very aware of their activities (by being videoed and photographed with polaroids which were then made available) was a way of trying to articulate this state of affairs. The participants were vaguely requested to behave as if at a party (talking, dancing etc.) but to freeze in position when the music and lights faded. These moments would be recorded on polaroids, which resembled shots taken of "life" rather than the tableaux they were. It was the interruption of sociality in a way that made visible another agenda, pointing away from the simple memorialization of a 1960s art-and-sociality towards an indication of the distance we are from that moment. The difference between the indexicality of the photographs, and the virtual imaging of video staged the time differential in an exquisite way. It has always struck me as ironic that the technocratic utopians of the 1960s promised that the automated future would mean an endless leisure utopia, where no-one would have to work. Of course it is quite the reverse. More technology equals more work, and more intense work. Peppermint's anxious attempt to remember a certain 1960s, while being obliged to interrupt that memorialization with the indices of "our time", was precisely an uncoercive "exposure" a setting-forth or laying-out in imagination. Ben Baer NYC 2000 ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold