matthew fuller on Sat, 8 Jun 2002 00:58:31 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> the form, the social, the rest. re: 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art' |
Dear Florian, Thank you for your useful essay, 'Concepts, Notations, Software, Art' recently posted to nettime. In the spirit of it being a new version of an old text, I'd like to suggest a plug-in. At the very least, a brief patch may be required if we are not to have a repetition of the usual scission, in the last few paragraphs, between the simply 'formal' and simply, and woollily, 'social'. (The twentieth century is dotted with too many of such debates.) I'd like to make two short suggestions: 1 'Formal' operations do not occur alone. There is clearly a current of art using computer networks or instructions which believes itself to be primarily formalist. However, this belief is the result of a particular perspectivalism that cleaves the work from it's more messy or productive implications and connections. In order to clarify this, two examples drawn from the text: 1.1 Hugo Ball's poem Carawan. Do we misunderstand the work if it is read in relation to certain of the Dada Zurich artists' ostensive reference to 'African' speech and symbolism, to further read this in relation to the predatory colonialism of Europe, or in relation to Ball's own yearning for a mystical language of immediacy (along the lines of that which you usefully describe in 'Language as Virus') which could be accessed via such poetry? 1.2 Sol LeWitt. LeWitt's work exists both as a series of instructions, and their execution. There are two ways in which we can understand this simple formalist limit to the work as requiring an expansion. 1.2.1 Organisation: the work is addressed to a possible executor - a socius of two or more is thus composed. This at the very least allows the work to be carried out and shown without any trouble to the artist, one can also note that it is one of the mechanisms which allowed conceptual exhibitions to be mounted by post and by phone in across the world in several locations at low cost. (See Katherine Moseley's excellent catalogue, 'Conceptions, the conceptual art document'.) Further, if you wish to include an authorised LeWitt in an exhibition it is necessary to contact his representative in order to receive permission to carry out the particular set of instructions you wish to have realised. As is common in much of the conceptual work begun in the sixties there is a deployment of a particular set of apparatuses which define roles, often by contract: representative, artist/instructor, executor, and so on. It is clear that such arrangements are immediately 'social' in a variety of ways. Making the notary an explicit rather than implicit transactor of some art systems is one of the minor ways which certain conceptual works addressed themselves to the political and economic dimensions of such systems. 1.2.2 Material 'substrate': one of the problems of an approach which allows for a simple formalism is that it reduces the components of its realisation to a simple 'substrate' through which the work is realised. A kind of matter is captured and given form by an idea. What might usefully be proposed instead is that particular works, including those you discuss, operate by arranging combinations of material, organisation, perception etc. LeWitt's work here for instance might be seen to operate as a particular realisation of a certain combination of the propensities of: postal and fax networks; orthography, geometry, and the materials wall/paper and pen/pencil for their actuation; alphabetised language, linguistic technologies of description; art economies of desire, command, and authorship, art economies of objects and spaces, of publications, or theorisations and naming; the pleasure of repetitive exercise and expectation in the person/s of those actuating the work, the conditions of employment of gallery assistants who carry out such work; etc. The particular compositional terms by which such an arrangement is made, correspond in some way with what is reductively described as the 'formal'. However, such a way of engaging with a work immediately connects art to the question of what to do with life, with the world, without loosing any of the power assigned to it under the schismatic and reductive term, 'formal'. 2 Such compositional terms are dynamics are generated in order to be launched into an outside. To name or describe such a system, the modes of a dynamic, the terms of an arrangement, calls it into being - with one or another degree of virtuality. Each such act depends on the arrangements that it is part of in order to become actuated and mobilised. For purposes of presentation, Forkbomb.pl, for instance, uses both the actual script and the operation of the program within a computer where a sound / graphics generation program is also running. Forkbomb 'competes' with this program for resources as it gradually uses them up. As the number of fork commands increases it gradually makes the operation of this other program impossible, producing variation in sound and image. This variation allows the perception of the two programs' interactions to become perceptible in a different way - to different senses and aesthetic codes, and in terms of duration. The production of sound and image is also notably varied by the configuration of the particular machine that the work is being run on. Part of the work in deciding how to best mobilise Forkbomb is therefore to bring it into some kind of arrangement with the contexts it operates in, as well as cpan and the normal routes for code distribution, these include exhibitions and conference presentations. Part of a work is also its means of promotion, its mobilisation in 'secondary' contexts, the way it appeals to certain kinds of interpretation, or of remobilization by or participation in certain kinds of discourse - such as this. Utilising various ways of making it 'sensible' are a way of generating its operation in an 'outside', the contexts in which it appears and to which it is addressed. (This does not of course preclude things occurring or being repurposed in other contexts). To remove the possibility of such a work being understood as 'social' would therefore seem to deny part of what is important in what is brought together in its different actuations. I have not touched up the presence of what you describe as simply 'formal' in the those works you describe as simply 'social' because for the purposes of this text that would be unnecessary. The work mentioned, other related work, as well as the texts around them give no grounds for the repetition of this doubly useless scission. The above couple of proposals of course make only a slight amendment to the tail-end of what is otherwise a valuable argument - I look forward to seeing more! # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net