Practicable From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art Pdf
Clocking in at nigh 900 pages of dumbo text plus alphabetize, Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Fine art, edited by artist and researcher Samuel Bianchini and curator and critic Erik Verhagen, is a door-stopper of a volume. Its ambition is equal to its mass—information technology proposes to rewrite postwar Western art history in order to trace the emergence of a heretofore unrecognized organizing principle of art that serves as the volume'due south title. Works that merit the designation "practicable" subvert the "do not touch" mentality of art as a sacred object of veneration; instead they are those in which, as contemporary parlance would accept information technology, the user feel is central. And equally that term suggests, many of the more than recent works of the practicable use digital technology and characteristic mediated interactivity, but that is not a necessary condition of their being. Indeed, a number of the works discussed in the book are decidedly low-tech even as they embody conceptual foundations that are forward-looking.
The book is both an historical survey and a theoretical treatise. It starts with a genealogy of the practicable dating back into the 1950s and in particular the influence that the development of cybernetics has had on its emergence. Information technology highlights key artists and movements and then brings broader humanities and social science perspectives to acquit. Other sections focus on performativity and methods of exhibiting the practicable. The book ends with several instance studies and interviews with artists, curators, and critics, the most memorable for me being the final one, with the incisive critic of relational aesthetics, Claire Bishop. The entries are generally short, assuasive for a plethora of voices to enter the conversation and explore the practicable in all its multiplicity.
The start-mover of part I, "From Cybernetics Onward," is non Norbert Wiener, who coined the term cybernetics in 1948, simply English author, inventor, and educational theorist Gordon Pask, whose side interest in musical theater provided the venue, in works such as the 1968 Colloquy of Mobiles, to examination the way various information systems and human beings could collaborate in conversations and adapt to one another. The sections on fine art movements and artists contain a welcome internationalist bandage, including the Brazilian Concretists and Neo-Concretists, the French Groupe de Recherche d'Fine art Visual (GRAV), and Polish artist and architect Piotr Kowalski. The usual suspects are there as well, including Robert Rauschenberg, whose collaboration with artists and engineers in the Experiments with Art and Technology (Eat) organization in the late 1960s and early on 1970s opened the door to emergent practices of intermedia of various sorts, and Yoko Ono, whose 1964 Cut Slice—in which the artist sat motionless while members of the audience cut abroad pieces of her article of clothing—became a feminist symbol of gender-encoded passivity and vulnerability and its potential for violation, made manifest a decade later by Marina Abramovic in a performance that took place in a Naples gallery where a mostly male audience, using various implements, subjected her to intimate groping and concrete injuries that drew blood on her denuded body.
Yoko Ono, Cutting Piece, 1964 (Excerpt of a1965 recreation).
A key concept running through the book is "dispositif," a French word that the editors note has no easy English translation. Information technology is ofttimes rendered every bit "apparatus" or "device," giving it a somewhat mechanical connotation, leaving open the possibility for missing the more agile, constructive notions of its alternate definitions as a plan of action, a legislative pronouncement, or a legal provision in a contract. The term entered the contemporary critical lexicon via Michel Foucault, who began ruminating on it subsequently in his career, earlier his untimely expiry from AIDS at age 50 in 1984. Foucault was interested in three things that thinking through the concept of the dispositif might reveal: to place systems of various elements such every bit bodies of cognition, social, cultural, and political institutions, physical structures, scientific theorems, philosophical and moral precepts, etc., and their interrelationships; the specific connections inside and disjunctures betwixt various elements that might establish ways of understanding, both explicitly and implicitly, or what in Foucauldian terms would be understood as regimes of truth; and the ability, both positive and negative (which for Foucault is always the ultimate question), that these operative nexuses might have at key historical moments.
Leaving it untranslated, the editors suggest a usage of dispositif, as it relates to contemporary art, every bit "arrangements...that organize...operating capacities or...the way the conditions of a existent or potential process are bundled." Works of fine art surveyed in this volume—those which the various contributors empathise as practicable—manifest, engage, and sometimes competition dispositifs in that they establish conditions, the effects of which are non always predetermined, that create situations that are non only aesthetic, just oftentimes social and political also, and which typically piece of work in collaboration with a public. Practicable fine art works are conditional; they are not only experimental but tin be experimented with.
As the editors note in the introduction, practicable approaches to art beginning to announced in Western civilisation at roughly the aforementioned time as theories of participatory democracy. What is not noted (although Bishop does hint at it) is that both coincide with the ascendance of neoliberalism in which self-reliance becomes not an aspiration but a mandate. (That connexion is the subject of another book, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization by Jasper Bernes.) From that perspective, participation, and the practicable fine art that embraces it, may non constitute a model for a new form of revolutionary liberte, egalite, fraternite (freedom, equality, fraternity), but augurs a new dispositif, what can be termed, following Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, a new spirit of capitalism, in which we are set loose to rely on one some other not because we want information technology but because there is no alternative.
Source: https://motownreviewofart.blogspot.com/2017/05/practicable-from-participation-to.html
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