“I was seeing something that would only make sense later—I mean, something that only later would profoundly not make sense. Only later would I understand: what seems like a lack of meaning—that’s the meaning.”
Brad Johnson reviews Clarice Lispector’s “The Passion According to G.H.” (trans. Idra Novey) from New Directions.
“what occurs when language turns in upon itself, finds itself wanting, but nevertheless wants nothing but itself?”
To speak more generally, the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.
Let me suggest, finally, that the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.
[…]
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources. Of being (and I mean this in the most damning sense of the word) a consumer.
one more..
“To me, the idea that our dominant contemporary aesthetic is one that explores “a way of seeing that seems to reveal a blurring between ‘the real’ and ‘the digital,’ the physical and the virtual, the human and the machine” was kind of a no brainer. We’ve been covering projects that tackle this physical/digital grey area for years, but the recent proliferation of this aesthetic in mainstream culture is what seems to give it new weight and, according to Sterling, the makings of a new avant-garde.”
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“There really is no excuse for being technoculture illiterate if you’re under 40 and living in the Western world. You can plead ignorance of the technological specifics, but not of the cultural effects produced by the gadgets and interfaces that have invaded your life. Technology is not something that happens to other people, nor can you escape it by hiding out in “the humanities.” To be human is to be technological.”
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“The New Aesthetic isn’t Impressionism or Cubism. Revolutionary art is not shocking and provoking society, as it did in the case of Monet and Picasso. The New Aesthetic, as it exists in drone technology and Google Maps imagery and data surveillance, represents a ground-level change in our existence. Instead of shocking society, New Aesthetic art must respond to a shocked society and turn the changes we’re confronting into critical artistic creation. Artists are only just starting to take the raw material of the New Aesthetic and aestheticize it in a conscious, intelligent way.
What we need to do now is to go native, to stop gathering data points and start making things in the intrinsic language of New Aesthetic. Here’s my forecast for fulfilling the potential of this new medium: We will not just observe how machines act and perceive, but integrate how they act and perceive into our own sensory experiences and creative processes. As the digital and the physical move closer and closer, that combination will eventually look less like a hybrid and more like a united whole, the new aesthetic reality.”
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“The fact that your laptop is arguably “less intelligent than a goldfish” does not stop us from collaborating with machines to access new experiences and augment our creative capacity. Interacting with computers, with the world of information and each other through these interfaces has irreversibly transformed us.
The tools we make shape culture. The culture of technology is a human culture and a human experience. Reconciling with our inventions, we embrace the stylized pixel-goo as a reflection of ourselves. An aesthetic based on computational systems and their associated visual memes has become fashionable and beautiful, indicating a broader acceptance of digital prostheses as essential to contemporary life. That integration of visual technologies into our cultural lexicon will only continue.”
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“New Aesthetics is not simply an aesthetic fetish of the texture of these images, but an inquiry into the objects that make them. It’s an attempt to imagine the inner lives of the native objects of the 21st century and to visualize how they imagine us.
Moreover, as Object-Oriented thinkers, New Aestheticians are interested not just in the significance of face detection algorithms, surveillance drones, gesture recognition systems, image compression techniques, CCTV networks, book-scanning operations, satellite maps, and digital fabrication schemes for humans but they’re also obsessed with how these new 21st century objects impact the things we design and cohabitate with. They want to know what CCTV means for social networks, what book scanning means for iOS apps, and what face detection means for fashion. And again these objects are not just interesting to each other as a set of constraints and affordances for the objects’ human makers but for the hidden inner lives of the objects themselves throughout their existence.”
By assuming a curatorial role as an aspect of his artistic practice, Tillmans dislodges any clear-cut boundary between curator and artist. For instance, curators primarily select which of an artist’s works will be included in a museum exhibition. Whenever Tillmans’s work is shown, he determines the exhibition focus and scope and decides what to include and how. Of course to varying degree curators work with artists on an exhibition’s content just as Tillmans’s decision-making process includes discussion with curators. Yet he retains a great deal of control in this domain by having made curatorial activity fundamental to his practice. Tillmans creates exhibitory contexts with his photographs. Actively engaging in these situations interrupts the imposture of objectivity and disrupts the codes by which many art institutions disseminate art to publics. Tillmans’s belief in his own complex, flexible subjectivity—and the extension of its validity to one and all—inspire his methods, which subtly decenter institutional installation authority and redistribute display.
Identity is irresolute. Self-construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction are vital dimensions of Tillmans’s artistic formation. His practice reflects continually shifting subjectivity, necessitating that design always be new. The artist’s conviction that identity is flexile and unclassifiable, and his concomitant repertoire of display stratagems, make it possible to sustain an active relationship to his history—through his images—and to presentational formations that mediate meaning. As David Deitcher has aptly observed:
Tillmans’s installations, with their elaborate recombination of old and new photographs, demonstrate his belief in the capacity of such networks of images and of meanings to suggest the multivalent complexity of a life… . In these situations Tillmans has found, not just a new and challenging way to work with photographs in the spaces of galleries and museums, but to underscore the depth of his engagement with contingency. By “contingency” I mean the way in which meaning, but also subjectivity, sexuality, gender and identity, are all the unstable and temporary results of dynamic processes at the heart of which is difference.
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Each photograph Wolfgang Tillmans takes and prints is part of a collective, which provides a framework for difference and dialogue. An ever-growing community of images is the dynamic repertoire from which various pictorial and symbolic alliances and juxtapositions form, disassemble, and reform in his installations and publications over time. This is not to say that the individual element is unimportant, but that the artist’s conceptual and visual processes expand to making accessible the solidarities that exist concretely as well as ephemerally between photographs. Tillmans’s belief in collectivity is reflected in a multiplicity of images as form, which engages viewers’ subjectivities through multiple points of entry and their navigation of relational dynamics between images. Such configurations encourage active audience engagement and require viewers to identify and project themselves into the visual and ideational world that Tillmans carefully orchestrates. Viewers’ focus is not overdetermined; understanding is not scripted. “The viewer should be encouraged to feel close to their own experiences of situations similar to those that I’ve presented to them in my work. They should enter my work through their own eyes, and their own lives—not through trying to piece together mine.”
“It is the modern possibility of photography (whether art or technique matters little here) that combines death and referent in the same system […] the immediate proof given by the photographic apparatus or by the structure of the remains it leaves behind are irreducible events, ineffaceably original.” - Derrida, ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’.
For Derrida, after Barthes, the photograph haunts us with its effortless likeness. This perception of photography as brute, unadulterated representation is what allows it to work as an archival process - the strength of photography qua document or evidence testifies to this quality. But at the same time, photography and its mute realism freeze at an irreducible, irretrievable point. Compared to cinema (once described by Derrida as “the art of ghosts”), which unfolds as both sound and image in time, the stasis of photography has a different phantasmic quality. Photography’s arrested likenesses provokes in thinkers such as Derrida and Barthes a pierced experience of death in its very impossibility, but simultaneously the infinite weight of the present in all its reality. Or, to put it another way, the spectrality of photography is not only that of seeing a ghost, but of seeing the ghost in oneself.[…]
As I have mentioned, each medium is spectral, and almost none is so in a more troubling way than digital media. In fact, we might say that digital media tends towards a limit condition of spectrality. Digital media and storage are fast approaching a point where the archive is effectively absolute. Of course, this absolute condition is impossible, insofar as all material is guaranteed to disappear eventually, but when compared to the cognitive capabilities and comprehensible timescales of the human observer, the minimal decay of digital material, its functionally infinite reproducibility and its functionally infinite capacity for storage spell the practical end point for our own capacity to experience the decay of the archive, which is what connects it to our own experience of memory - a perfect and unchanging body of past knowledge is by no means the same thing as history. But at the very same time, the immateriality of digital media is the very experience of this ephemerality taken towards its limit. Digital media is the both the end and the triumph of spectrality, in that the digital is both the most immaterial yet faithful reproductive apparatus.
Plato placed the sudden, in a similar way to von Hausswolff, between eternity and time. Time suddenly emerges out of eternity, but the moment itself belongs neither to time nor to eternity. Since the sudden gives rise to opposite becomings it is a pure starting point. Everything that begins, or comes into existence, comes suddenly, and from that follows different becomings.
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This suddenness must be understood as a relationship between the viewer and the picture, as the internal relation of an extended picture. To understand this relation in each separate case would be to understand the pictures from within, as they would understand themselves. When von Hausswolff talked about her works she mentioned this presence that appears in the sudden. Because of this unique time in which her images are situated, and because that is what they are, they become, as she says in an interview, ”pure visuals”. So in the sudden, as in the presence of pure visuals, there is this peculiar unity between sight and the seen. Plotinus wrote about moments when you both see the object and yourself looking, and you realise that the object and the subject for a moment are one in the vision.34 Much later, Schopenhauer turned all of that into a philosophy of art, and spoke about the absolute identity between the subject and object in the aesthetic contemplation.
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Deleuze and Guattari write that there have always been two ways in which one can understand life. Either you understand it as a subject (a force or a soul) who acts but is itself nothing (but the acts), or as a passive subject who is but does not act.41 In relation to the picture as time, as presence, on a material level, the viewer is without a doubt the latter. The viewer contributes a passive life. But it is still to contribute, since contemplation takes place in passivity, that of entering the material, becoming absorbed by it, like a child who ”is in the fabric”. Without that contemplation, the two aspects of the picture would not merge, but lifelessly fall apart. How that ”being in the fabric” comes into being, how you contemplate and thus create (a unity in the Picture) by simply keeping together the material and the Ersatz–image as a multiplicity, ”that is the mystery of passive creation”.42 The existence of the picture, its effectiveness, is completely dependent on the viewer being in such a passive state. Then the viewer can contemplate all details as they are, with the insight that things could also be different, at the very same time as the viewer is constantly in the material, ”eternally now”.
Post-irony, as I understand Pallasvuo using it, as opposed to sincerity, is a strategy that still steeps itself in irony, uses it as a jumping off point. Therefore, “sincerity” is somehow something completely new and different in the context of art concerned with the Internet and our relationship to it. Pallasvuo suggests that “sincerity” is what will finally slaythe old and cold, bitter and dry net art and what might be the “new casualist” aesthetic in painting.[2] Yet – obviously – nothing is 100% “sincere” / “authentic” and the creation of these categories is problematic. What is sincere is not opposite to what is ironic: many of Pallasvuo’s pieces, like much of today’s net art, leans heavily on a nostalgic affection for early 90′s internet and “folk” aesthetics (the title of his blog being DawsonsCreek.info). To me, constantly referring to a sort of overall objective nostalgia for the early Internet is yet another layer of distance placed between the artist and his intention. As viewers, we get in on the joke, which is a trademark move by ironists.
Some net art uses poetry and emotional content opposed to what I consider to be the predominant ironic, distanced, slick and surface-based aesthetic of the (art of the) “information age.” Perhaps as we continue to suffer from the Internet’s commoditization, alienating and distancing power over us, we are finding the positive parts of it. The parts that allow us to meet other people, and to be honest online about ourselves – or not. There is an extremely varied way of codifying our emotions online, and these artists emphasizing how we can defer our emotions through technologies, or at least face them.
Still, there is something of interest for us in sticking to photographic tradition that is beyond historical nostalgia and the ideals of pedagogy: that is how the drawn-out process of accomplishing the image, culminating in the work of photographic development and its ritualistic bathings, builds up a momentum of expectancy that indexes the photographer’s desire to see the image. Here, memories may resurface of that first photograph having come into sight in the darkroom. On the other hand, whose memory could recall the first digitally processed photograph?
Time was that photographers had to wait for their images. Then, photographers took images that they, in fact, could not verify. Taking an image revealed to them, first of all, nothing. All they could see was the images they had imagined to see. What the photographer captured remained just that: captured. For hours, days, weeks… Impressed on film, plates or other light-sensitive matter, the photographic image would affirm itself only after some time. In the meantime, however, it was hidden, invisible, latent. Digitized photography, on the other hand, has compressed the course of the image’s emergence into instances of seconds and less. Indeed, thanks to real-time rendering, the taking of a photograph is itself based on an already displayed image, presenting the image to be taken as image. Even now, the act of taking an image has been profoundly reconfigured, from a practice that geometrically frames the subject through the viewfinder to a practice that points out the subject through the intensities of the images on display. Whereas digitized photography may no longer perceptibly suspend the image in latency between its capture and development, effects of latency come to bear in the digital storing of the image and the moment of its visualization. Latency has not, therefore, been dispensed with in digitized photography. The immediacy of digitally stored images and their potential visualizability may be customarily assumed just as information technology may promise us its reliability, yet in actuality the visual reconstitution of the image should not be taken for granted.
Regardless of the ways in which the photographic image becomes suspended in latency, it is its suspension that allows us to think about the extent to which the photographer is invested – economically and libidinally – in the emergence of the image.
We live in a time when young artists look at each other’s Facebook pages more than each other’s art. The affect of Facebook may be why so few artists online actually make much art–because they aren’t being rewarded for anything so much as the performance of their own personal brand online. Thus, the strongest ties artworks in today’s group shows often share are the Mutual Friends the artists have rather than the work itself.
But what is it that we call “work?” Alternatively one could argue that in this situation, if the ultimate goal of an artwork is to in some way transform the consciousness of the individual receiving it (to follow a traditional model), what is happening as we speak between artists who connect with each other via Facebook and other social networks could be seen as cutting out the aesthetic middle man.
The traditional method of interaction between Artist and Other is through exhibition, i.e., generating a scenario in which a predetermined Artist exists and individuals who happen upon the work in space or through images are transformed into Viewers. When the primary audience for the work becomes a core network of selected peers, the traditional boundaries of Artist and Viewer can no longer be solidified in the same way. Rather than creating discrete moments of exhibition and reception, the artist-viewer and other artist-viewers are caught in a sphere of perpetual reception and distribution.
This liberates the practice of aesthetic consciousness transformation from the confines of the art-object-as-delivery-method. In its place, people are understood from within their peer group as Artists, every public or private act taken within social relations acts as an influence on consciousness at a minute level. Rather than sharing or enforcing a certain aesthetic value structure through a set of objects, this same information is transmitted through a direct, consumable lifestyle projected by said peer through a sequence of posts. This could account for the condition of Artists Without Art: rather than artists producing identifiable aesthetic works, their disruptive and compositional energy is used towards relational exchange. Why go to such great lengths to make and photograph a painting that will net 5 Likes when a photo of you and your friends eating 50 McChickens could net hundreds?
Is this to say that interactions on Facebook are now artists’ work? If so, how may we qualify a ‘good’ work of art on Facebook? Is it a meaningful conversation? Is it commentary that draws attention to the apparatus being communicated through? Is it merely a personality capable of drawing attention by whatever means necessary? My perception of artists’ social media personas is that they are a vehicle for creating an authorial context that viewers may use to better understand the vantage point an artist’s ‘actual’ work is coming from (i.e. what they’d exhibit in a gallery or show on their portfolio website). Be it ‘politicized’, ‘sexy’, ‘ironic’, or anything else, the artist’s online brand tends to function as a kind of live-action role playing artist statement. Though these brands tend to eclipse an artist’s work due to the amount of attention (perhaps wrongly) heaped upon them, I doubt many artists would categorize what they do on Facebook as their art unto itself, however socially performative they may be. To call these online exchanges ‘relational’ would shift authorship to the creator of the context the social exchanges take place through, meaning the makers of Facebook are the artists and we are merely participants in their system.
It’s really necessary to click the link and see the text the way it should be formatted.
It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring-with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine-the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it.[…]That’s all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer’s own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason-if the words are in any way blurred-the reader’s eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved.
So what else is new? This seems to be a rather mundane point, but for some reason we don’t really believe it. We don’t believe shaping is enough. So, to bring design out from under the thumb of content we must go one step further and observe that treatment is, in fact, a kind of text itself, as complex and referential as any traditional form of content.
A director can be the esteemed auteur of a film he didn’t write, score, edit or shoot. What makes a Hitchcock film a Hitchcock film is not the story but a consistency of style which winds intact through different technologies, plots, actors, and time periods like a substance of its own. Every film is about filmmaking. His great genius is that he is able to mold the form into his style in a genuinely unique and entertaining way. The meaning of his work is not in the story but in the storytelling.
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The span of graphic design is not a history of concepts but of forms. Form has evolved dramatically from one year to the next, and suggests a profession that continually revises and reshapes the world through the way it is rendered. Stellar examples of graphic design, design that changed the way we look at the world, are often found in service of the most mundane content: an ad for ink, cigarettes, sparkplugs or machinery. Think of Piet Zwart’s industrial work. Think of the posters by Cassandra or Matter or Crouwel. In these, form has an essential, even transformative, meaning.…
This deep connection to making also positions the designer in a modulating role between a user and their world. By manipulating form, the designer reshapes that essential relationship. In this way form is replaced by exchange. The things we make negotiate a relationship over which we have a profound control.
All three kinds appear among the new books about the Internet: call them the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the Ever-Wasers. The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment. One’s hopes rest with the Never-Betters; one’s head with the Ever-Wasers; and one’s heart? Well, twenty or so books in, one’s heart tends to move toward the Better-Nevers, and then bounce back toward someplace that looks more like home.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/02/14/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz1hCKydf11
really good article.
