Dear
Eduardo and Net Art Review,
I was really interested to see the interview with Raul on Interactiva05
today...since I know how agonizing the last experience was, as he describes
in his interview --with the loss of equipment, space, etc at the last
minute. So I decided I wanted to respond to Raul about InteractivA05
because it stimulated new questions about my own conceptual practice
strategies
in a media world wherein, as you and Raul have noted here in
NAR, the old
school conceptual techniques of dematerialization and re-assemblage on
meta levels (the trump card of hyper reality) have been occluded by mainstream
cultural and political forces such as, obviously, the Bush White House.
How can the work of art in a meta-media context become a touchstone to
the ‘real’? Or can it? It seems that Raul thinks, yes, it
can, and so can curatorial projects-as-interactive art. These questions
give
me pause within the swirl of production and curating that attends the
launch of Carrizo-Parkfield
Diaries,
including an online live data diaries project in the context of a multimedia,
architecturally scaled installation at Transport
Gallery, here in Los
Angeles (through April 16, 2005).
In my experience, the flow is the inverse complement of Raul’s:
the interactive art project-as-curatorial project, especially with respect
to the interaction and integration of physical media and presence with
the online
diaries at
my collaboration with writer Jeremy
Hight and programmer
Sindee Nakatani. As Raul says in your NAR interview, so much is compelling
about
the 'post-digital' condition in which photography, painting, etc are
part of a mélange of processes rather than keeping to a utopian/
modernist attitude towards the digital or even towards the idea of data.
A very recent
interview with a Wired reporter (the magazine canned the article so it
didn't make print) explores this point, see towards the end of http://www.christinamcphee.net/carrizoparkfielddiaries/texts/
InterviewChristinaMcPhee.htm (under: "SW:
I'm wondering also if you have any feelings toward the limitations of
data. Sometimes data
purports
to reveal more than it actually does").
In this connection you
(Eduardo Navas) are careful to cast light on the usage ‘conceptual’, not as it may be commonly
misconstrued as 'non-material', rather, in historical context as a specific
strategy devoted to 'dematerialization and institutional critique --this
in a recent thread on Rhizome ("Miles Davis and new media")
February 21, 2005:
To be clear, conceptual
art, at least in the United States, was an ideological strategy that
deliberately focused on the
dematerialization of the work of art. Its common use of text, photo
and performative aspects were specific strategies used to critique
the various
aspects of the art institution that artists at the time found problematic.
In the past, there have been other creative media that did not use
actual objects and which were not considered conceptual. For example,
Luis Bunuel
was considered "surreal" or Goddard "structural" because
of their ideological approaches to film making. The medium was the same
for both of them; it was the interest with which they used the medium
and the group of people they were involved in that defined them as "surrealist," "structural." That
the medium may have traces of particular tendencies may be true, but
this does not automatically mean that the work that uses such material
can easily be labeled as an extension. I make this example because
film does not leave an actual object behind, yet it is not automatically
considered
conceptual. So just because Net Art may share some of the elements
of conceptual practice does not automatically mean that it is an extension
of conceptual art.
|
Is
it possible that the strategies in Carrizo-Parkfield could be thought
of as conceptual practice as a strategy devoted to rematerialization...
and possibly, as you write elsewhere, in the 'constant reinvestment in
culture’, in my case, "landscape"-- plural, non-iconic,
fluid, neither subject nor object, based on the local conditions arising
from the place and the sense of place itself, - the contingencies and
echoes of an unstable space full of both epiphanies and oubliettes (dark
holes)... just as Raul seems to imply that his conceptual practice as
a curator is a social art making within the economic reality of the region
where he lives, creating communities of exchange...to enrich social process,
such that as with my project, its not about him, its not about me, rather
its about a multi subjective cultural presencing:
…interdisciplinary laboratory that employs an
alternative vision of the art. How I made it, that is the secret of the
working team and the “Interactivos” (the participants). I
couldn’t define anything. I don’t consider myself an
authority, but a curator with a vision closer to the production of
a proposal like
a work of art; a vision that consider the economic reality of artistic
production in the region where I live; and, one that tries to create
communities of exchange to enrich our social process of apprenticeship
and development. As you see, the definitions of traditional exposition
say other things.
Speaking
of oubliette, it's one of my most favorite complexes of meaning, idea;
image. A metaphor
for being trapped inside
the internet, or behind the screen, maybe as you say in your essay on
blogging as production, the cultural producer gets lost in the oubliette
of ideologies meta = meta = meta = meta = etc. I have done a series of
20 or so paintings as oubliettes--they all preceded coming out of the
oubliette, breaking out of the dark hole, and starting to take the documentary
field notes that became "Carrizo-Parkfield Diaries." The problem
of the oubliette paintings was, the sensation of not being able to get
out from behind the door, i.e. that each oubliette painting is a door
to the underground prison behind which the consciousness and the conscience
of the subject spins in a desolate cycle. It was thanks to the landscape
here itself, its seismic unpredictability; its live-ness that I got out.
Naxsmash.net was still ‘in’, as in, lost behind the screen:
it is 'vox cyborg', or, the distressed signals of a traumatic topology
Out, in the landscape, I as ‘producer’ am the reflexive and
self reflexive output of the 'landscape' itself, such that seismic memory
is a loop between scape and inscape, between human and geologic, continually
reconfiguring itself after shock. Oubliette as amnesia: the French imprisoned
people in the dark hole and forgot about them, the door on the surface
of the ground locked down and the key thrown away. Escape from the oubliette
means escape from forgetting what is, what is really there, what are
the actual conditions, for Raul, in the 'economic reality of the region’,
for me, in the reality of seismic instability and big data feeds in my
immediate neighborhood', into a condition in which it is possible to
move around and investigate, participate, remediate.
Thanks for bringing up these themes and reading through
this musing (if you've gotten this far, congratulations on your endurance).
Best wishes,
Christina
www.christinamcphee.net |
