The Medium Needs a Massage Appropriation, Mediation, Platforming and Tactical Media
Is this comedy or what? Now that you know it's not—it's pissing on velvet, that's what I'm doing… Is this painting? —?Lenny Bruce
I've often wondered if anyone ever tried to flush Marcel Duchamp's urinal. If so, they would certainly have found its mechanical infrastructure to be more than a bit lacking. The work is not equipped with a literal plumbing. As a metaphorical gesture, however, the piece is the undeniable fount from which art history's most destabilizing crisis of containment first arose—or, at the very least, was first acknowledged.
Nothing is art. Everything is art. Hence the theme of this issue: The Medium Needs a Massage. The work presented and discussed in the following pages does not attempt to expand or refute Marshall McLuhan's dictum the medium is the message (or massage if you prefer) but, rather, address procedural and contrapuntal modes of artistic practice that McLuhan could have never proselytized, even if we were to retroactively substitute "digital" every time the word "electronic" appears in his eloquent prose.
Artists who find solace in the ambiguities of creative production now span multiple generations, suggesting that tangible boundaries—the notion of categorizing art strictly in terms of medium—is, and has long been, obsolete.
Appropriation, mediation, new media, platforming, tactical, time-based media…are these simply twenty-first-century etymological catchalls required to uphold a semblance of structure in critical discourse? Or are these terms actually fluid enough to address the hybridity of contemporary practice? How does new media practice affect the concept and perception of authorship and objecthood? In terms of platforming, should we look to the ringleader or the dancing bear for answers? And what of tactical media? Of all the topics addressed herein, it is by far the most problematic. While its very constitution seems to echo what Edward Said called an "articulated program of interference," how do we address the work of artists who harness specific technological innovations with a premeditation to subvert their potency as tools of so-called progress?
Obviously, this issue of Art Lies intentionally seeks to raise more questions than provide answers. This issue also represents a first for Art Lies. While we have showcased "exhibitions in print" and individual artists' projects for years, The Medium Needs a Massage includes At Your Service: Escaping the Progress Trap, an exhibition-as-DVD curated by Andrea Grover, founding director of Aurora Picture Show in Houston. Aurora is one of but a handful of year-round venues (as opposed to the typical short-run festival format) that provide a stable home for film, video and new media, not just regionally but world over.
In At Your Service, Grover's curatorial prowess adeptly illustrates the contradictory proclivities of new media practice, furthering the ambiguity of categorical distinctions by suggesting contradiction itself as a means of artistic expression, which, ultimately, brings us back to Duchamp. After nearly a century of speculation, navel-gazing and debate, we find ourselves still standing in front of a glorified porcelain honeypot—still assuming the position, so to speak. So, should we hit it with a hammer or give it a proper scrubbing? I vote for the latter. Take aim! It is, after all, the throne we've inherited.
We live in a society where fear is measured by a Pantone chart. If one were to apply that same, seemingly arbitrary system to contemporary art that harbors a sociopolitical agenda, the array of tonalities between "orange" and "high orange" might finally carry some semblance of tangibility. Artistic collectivism would most certainly register at the top of the chart—a candylike, doomsday-button red (Pantone 032)—signifying the avant-garde's historical affiliation with sociopolitical dissent.
But even within the pantheon of collective practice, a continuum subsists, one that is best described in terms of ontological opacity. It would be ridiculous to lump Situationist International with gelitin, for example, although they do have some things in common: both are self-organized by constituent members allied by a shared agenda that intentionally disrupts the mechanics of polite society. Where they differ, quite obviously, is their affiliation with a coherent political agenda versus "radical chic." In other words, while Situationist International might actually place a finger on that bright-red doomsday button, gelitin would probably rather dye Easter eggs a provocative fleshy pink and hurl them at your grandmother.
Collectivity and Collaboration, the theme of this issue of Art Lies, explores contemporary collective and collaborative artistic practice and the radically different ways in which collectives are founded, motivated, organized, actualized and scrutinized. Guest editorial contributors Noah Simblist and Michelle White came up with this theme via the serendipitous occurrence of parallel events. Simblist had just begun working with Charissa Terranova on a series of projects about collaboration and collectivity, including a course and symposium on the subject at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and an exhibition at Conduit Gallery, also in Dallas. At the same time, White was working with Franklin Sirmans on an exhibition with the art collective Otabenga Jones & Associates at the Menil Collection in Houston.
Though the general theme of collaboration was central to both Simblist and White's activities, their primary concerns were as divergent as the compendium of art collectives currently in action. Simblist was concerned with the relationship between collecting, a solo sport based on consumption, and collectivity's historical legacy—rooted, as it is, in the avant-garde's resistance to the market system. White, on the other hand, was faced with the conundrum of curating an activist art collective in an institutional setting, and how to avoid letting the project slip into a didactic institutional critique.
I was impressed by the intellectual rigor of both of their pursuits, as well as the potentiality embodied in the vast difference their individual approaches to the same subject allowed, editorially speaking. The result of our collective inquiry is the document you have before you. Ultimately, in the process of putting this issue together, I guess you could say that Simblist, White and I formed our own, albeit short-term, collaborative. We have not come up with a name. Something along the lines of "the three least likely people in the world to have a weekly conference call" comes to mind, but it doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
Speculating about the future does not suspend the present. Rather, it intensifies it. (One really should know where they are before they engage in conjecture.) But what of the present—the now—retroactively reconfigured as the future? Time, for me, has never felt linear. It hops, drags, even bites its own ass on occasion. Strangely, in these moments of suspension, I am antipathetically lucid: hence the theme of this issue, Future Perfect, a prefigured shift in tense. With this fluid topic in mind, I set out to find a co-editor with a similarly ambivalent attitude toward linearity, only to realize that the perfect candidate for such an exercise was already known to me. I met curator Raimundas Mala--auskas by chance last year while we were both working on freelance projects in Mexico City.
The more I learned about Mala--auskas' work, the more impressed I was with his ability to engage in heady curatorial projects in a witty, oblique and yet unpretentious manner. During his tenure as a curator at the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) in Vilnius, Mala--auskas began an investigation of "eventology," the speculative generation of new ideas channeled through the past. He once hired a psychic to conduct a séance with Fluxus founder George Maciunas, delivered a lecture in which he forwarded telepathic messages from Robert Barry to Jonathan Monk and is currently involved in the elaborate 419-style e-mail scam, The John Fare Estate. As Mala--auskas continues to add to the lexicon of art history, each chapter will inevitably be reviewed with a slight tilt of the head—an angle I find appealingly subversive. His contribution to Art Lies, subtitled 50.01, unpacks from the center of the book and unfurls into a sort of pliable funhouse mirror, conflating past, present and future in texts, images, insertions and projects by Goda Budvytyte, Heman Chong, Mariana Castillo Deball, Gintaras Did--iapetris, Ryan Gander, Morten Norbye Halvorsen, Larissa Harris, Gabriel Lester, Benoît Maire, David Reinfurt and Aaron Schuster.
Artists Dennis Balk, Eileen Maxson, Gean Moreno, Eric Zimmerman and curators Regine Basha and Gilbert Vicario all further this speculative venture. Balk and Moreno's eerie graphic novella, Maxson's clever handling of a delicate situation-to-come (passing her crown to the next Arthouse Texas Prize recipient), Zimmerman's lovely Utopian landscapes and Basha's VISUAL SPACE project all mesh with this issue's theme. Finally, the introduction to Gilbert Vicario's interview with Roberta Smith, this year's speaker at The Art Lies Annual Critics Lecture Series, appears here in print and continues online at www.artlies.org—a teaser if you will—another subtle reminder of things to come.
Sometimes I wonder why we revived you. Why do we turn to you in times of acute hesitation? As if you could beam forward the future of your own future by reassembling the past. You are a funny totem, you know, so full of sacred error…you were too busy going after humanism's suspects you had no time for a new inflection of being. — Avital Ronell, Crack Wars (1992)
In Crack Wars, Avital Ronell revives Flaubert's Madame Bovary in order to recast this literary archetype as a study in modern disassociation—as a terminal apoplectic addicted to a self-induced state of perpetual dissatisfaction. And while Ronell successfully creates a parceled reality in which the death drive—not gender—is key, the phantasmagoric creature she conceives is undeniably feminine and irrevocably pathetic. She is damaged, weak, an exile from reality and the antithesis of the feminist ideal. Strangely, however, when taken out of context, the words above could easily be read as an indictment of the feminist movement itself…you were too busy going after humanism's suspects you had no time for a new inflection of being. Hmmmm.
For several months now, feminism has been le mot juste in the art world. But feminism is today what it has always been: women of privilege rallying for the rights of the unempowered. Thus, any discussion of feminism is ultimately a discussion of failure—of the as-of-yet unrealized goals of a social movement. A debate about the relevance and underrepresentation of feminist art is something altogether different. Art is social theory once removed: it is the manifestation, not the means. As such, it should not be subject to rigid paradigms. Further, while people are still making work that reflects—even furthers—a feminist agenda, feminist art is neither a movement nor a genre. I firmly believe that art should be confronted subjectively but aesthetically, not biologically. This does not discount the importance of a work's intent, subject or subtext, be it gender or otherwise identity-based; it simply insists that the quality of any given work be considered first. Relegation, after all, can quite easily lead to ghettoization.
Sitting in the park one afternoon, a small child approached me. Pulling up her dress and pointing at her panties she said, "I have a vagina." After congratulating her, I turned to her parents and suggested that their next sit-down might include a discussion of not talking to strangers. The worst of what we now call feminist art carries as base a sentiment as that three-year-old child's understanding of her own anatomy. It's counterintuitive and counterproductive. I'm with Ronell. It is high time for a new inflection of being: one that is celebratory without resorting to revisionist conceits and, most importantly, is inclusive. That's how we messed up the first time around…and the second. The jury is still out on the third, but don't expect a verdict anytime soon. I think they got distracted by a non-specific object.
The Escaping the progress trap collection is fascinating and the videos are linked at Art Lies magazine www.artlies.org - a recent book of the same name, and inspired partly by Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the right side of the brain" assembles evidence that avoiding this trap is also an ecological must. www.progresstrap.info