On the one hand you could say we live in an age where the "big ideas" are no more, or, at best, are antediluvian (the rise of fundamentalist religion, for instance); but on the other, there's a culture of ideas being thrown around which can only be a good thing. This week alone there's been a number of conferences, in the North West, and elsewhere; and this afternoon, I was reminded of the ongoing intellectual freight of the country, when I was asked to be an observer at a PhD Viva at MMU. I was at a consultation for Manchester's Cornerhouse on Monday; and one of Cornerhouse's aspiration's is to build on its almost accidental role as a "creative hub." It's long been the unofficial capital of Manchester's literary community, as well as housing art gallery, bookshop and cinema. It's interest to surmise whether it is our art galleries and other cultural venues that are returning to a previous role as "salon". Perhaps the rise of the Universities since the 1960s has isolated cultural thought in the ivory towers - and now ideas are beginning to break out again.
Cornerhouse's "The Art of With" debate the week after next, has another contribution, this time from Tom Fleming, called "Embracing the Desire Lines." Things still aren't "open source", of course, but curated, invited, but I'm imagining that the new Cornerhouse - as a hub for ideas as well as art and film - may well need to think on how it might expand on this. Something like n+1's event/pamphlet series would come to mind. Their pamphlet on "A practical avant garde" is one of the most stimulating things I've read over the last few years - and, key to this, I think, brings the "ideas" culture beyond the big think pieces of Charles Leadbetter, Richard Florida, Malcolm Gladwell and others, and into more specific frameworks. It's why the Social Media Cafe in Manchester exists, as well, of course, to not be too prescriptive or "top down." Open source ideas have to come from the left field; from the audience; and - key to that - the participants need to be able to "curate" the ideas, not merely respond.
And I'm always keen to see art find its own place - I should get to Lancaster next week to see my first Litfest event, the launch of their exciting new Flax edition, "The Crowd Without."
Showing posts with label the art of with. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the art of with. Show all posts
Friday, June 12, 2009
Friday, May 15, 2009
Nothing is New
At the Manchester Social Media Cafe, after Thursday's Futuresonic, Dave Mee gave a fascinating thinkpiece on the "Merzweb" - basically an idea that German artist Kurt Schwitters, a fellow traveller to the Dadaists, was in many ways acting out in his work much of what we now see in the web and social media. It runs parallel with the presentation I gave a little while ago that much of our social media present and future is prefigured in avant garde literature.
For Schwitters art was all around us, was collaborative and participative, was mutable, never finished, but also locative. His "Merzbau" was a living organism - a house usually - a space becoming filled. If you think of the web as this structure, as this holder, then what people do with this space is very like Schwitters Merzbau. The mutability seems vital as well. One of the things that I imagine will come out of Charles Leadbetter's "Art of With" article for the Cornerhouse is a reappraisal of the value=permanence equation. The idea had took hold earlier in the day, at the Futuresonic debate, that perhaps our online presence, our blogs our facebook pages, our drunk photos when we were 16, that these should degrade over time. Of course the commmercialisation of 20th century art (or rather it becoming a value-holder, to be traded like gold or platinum - and this includes not just one-off visual arts masterpieces, but copyright in literature, film and music)is based on a belief in permanence that the Pharoahs would relate to. Perhaps, in many ways, the last vestige of our Abrahamic-based faith can be seen in that desire for permanence. Yet Shelley's Ozymandias, "look on these works, you Mighty, and despair", never seems more prescient.
The art of decay, of things being unfinished, or changing is challenged by a commercial artist like Damian Hirst, or rather by the business model around his success. Hirst's fascination with decay means that like the Merzbau, his sharks should, after a certain time, putrify, to be nothing more than cultural memory; yet the value invested in them is a late 20th century alchemy, turning these impermanent artworks into gold, not realising that there value is only in the beholder.
Even in the internet's short life span there is a tension between decay and permanence. Seeing a website from 10 or 15 years ago now, particularly if its an amateur design, can be a jolt to the system. Yet the data on our Facebook page risks being around forever? We can only hope that some of these pages and websites disappear into nothing more than memory. Google has short-fused this process, at least for a time, for all data is now equal. It is the equivalent of the peat-bog find where it is not the mighty emperor who history now puzzles over, but the Tollund man. For art there is a challenge, but one that it shouldn't shirk. Our culture depends upon some kind of artistic inheritance, the "shoulders of giants", rather than letting "a million flowers bloom." I wonder if that is the tension that "The art of with" is now looking at...the tension between the forgotten sheath of letters from a literate woman in Victorian England, and the production of "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre". The internets million flowers are containers, more often; it is a container itself. Those YouTube videos with several million hits are unlikely to feature in any retrospective except out of chance. Earlier in the week I'd been to the Videogame Nation launch at URBIS. I've hardly ever been a gameplayer, so this 30 year old history was a museum piece of artefacts. "I like the shiny things" I said more than once, finding none of the nostalgic reverance that a game player would have found, but liking the styles, mannerisms and sounds of this commercial subculture. Every loft could probably furnish an exhibit for the exhibition; every car boot.
For me, what interested me about Mee's talk about Schwitters was its reminders that art hasn't always been about the single object; that in many ways this was a 20th century construction based upon two things:- the electronic recording (whether photo, film or record), and the legal (copyright) framework that necessarily sustained that. I could now, if I wanted, put my entire works on the web, to let it be found, or not found as is the case. As permanent as a thing can be (at least until the water needed for the cooling systems for the vast server farms runs out). I think there's another side to this though. The artist as entity. Its the challenge that I don't think is addressed by those calling for a more participative culture. In our short lives, artistic progress can take time, from gaining a facility, to finding the voice, to having something to say, to managing to say it. The "transmission mechanisms" for art are actually probably very good models that are being replicated across social media, rather than the other way round. "Open source" would be no new concept to the impressionists, the surrealists, the imagists, the PRB. Once an idea has been circulated, or the culmination of that idea has been made, then it is free to be disseminated. Wasn't Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment and those other salons of the day a meeting place similar to Tuesday nights? The cafes as Myspace or Twitter? Indeed you could argue that the transmission mechanisms then, letters sent back to friends in America or Britain ("You must come to Paris") were slower than email but as equally able to catch-fire.
The artist as an entity, as someone who wants to do this with their life, is actually the bigger challenge to the hierarchies of contemporary culture than anything else. History sees its more interesting work come from more interesting places, yet "old media" whether its the publishing industry or the BBC, is as dominated by Oxbridge as any other time. Those - like the Old Boys network - are "transmission mechanisms" across time; informal rather than formal networks, and therefore more powerful over time and space.
I think we can go back to the artist as entity, the idea of a "body of work", that can progress, that can change, that can grow, that can decay. Whereas celebrity culture spits people out for their 15 minutes, our gatekeepers are keener on having a fixed list of writers, composers, painters etc. Shouldn't those bright poets who made their mark in the early 70s be at least forgotten for a little while, at the very least so they could be rediscovered later? I kept being reminded of the great American chronicler, Walt Whitman, and his single work, his "Leaves of Grass," appearing in a range of different issues, orders, with poems changed, added, subtracted. This is a website for the 19th century, a written Merzbau, if you like. Whitman, saw America as a vast whole, but that to approach it you had to try different entry points, not start at an entry point in New York, and spread out like the settlers, but come from a thousand different points in the American landscape.
The artistic life lived sees change as inevitable, the works altering, both in themselves and in their context, or their intercontextual value. It is this, rather than the putting a price and value on a particular artwork, that is the more interesting. It is possible that the web will be like 20th century art, with a whirlwind of creativity passing through a different centre, leaving another -ism (another dot com boom) in its wake. Yet old websites, or ones with decaying audiences, are like empty properties after the boom has passed and the gold has run out; an artist goes on, repapers over the old canvases, changes, looks again, sees, in many ways, the bigger picture.
For Schwitters art was all around us, was collaborative and participative, was mutable, never finished, but also locative. His "Merzbau" was a living organism - a house usually - a space becoming filled. If you think of the web as this structure, as this holder, then what people do with this space is very like Schwitters Merzbau. The mutability seems vital as well. One of the things that I imagine will come out of Charles Leadbetter's "Art of With" article for the Cornerhouse is a reappraisal of the value=permanence equation. The idea had took hold earlier in the day, at the Futuresonic debate, that perhaps our online presence, our blogs our facebook pages, our drunk photos when we were 16, that these should degrade over time. Of course the commmercialisation of 20th century art (or rather it becoming a value-holder, to be traded like gold or platinum - and this includes not just one-off visual arts masterpieces, but copyright in literature, film and music)is based on a belief in permanence that the Pharoahs would relate to. Perhaps, in many ways, the last vestige of our Abrahamic-based faith can be seen in that desire for permanence. Yet Shelley's Ozymandias, "look on these works, you Mighty, and despair", never seems more prescient.
The art of decay, of things being unfinished, or changing is challenged by a commercial artist like Damian Hirst, or rather by the business model around his success. Hirst's fascination with decay means that like the Merzbau, his sharks should, after a certain time, putrify, to be nothing more than cultural memory; yet the value invested in them is a late 20th century alchemy, turning these impermanent artworks into gold, not realising that there value is only in the beholder.
Even in the internet's short life span there is a tension between decay and permanence. Seeing a website from 10 or 15 years ago now, particularly if its an amateur design, can be a jolt to the system. Yet the data on our Facebook page risks being around forever? We can only hope that some of these pages and websites disappear into nothing more than memory. Google has short-fused this process, at least for a time, for all data is now equal. It is the equivalent of the peat-bog find where it is not the mighty emperor who history now puzzles over, but the Tollund man. For art there is a challenge, but one that it shouldn't shirk. Our culture depends upon some kind of artistic inheritance, the "shoulders of giants", rather than letting "a million flowers bloom." I wonder if that is the tension that "The art of with" is now looking at...the tension between the forgotten sheath of letters from a literate woman in Victorian England, and the production of "Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre". The internets million flowers are containers, more often; it is a container itself. Those YouTube videos with several million hits are unlikely to feature in any retrospective except out of chance. Earlier in the week I'd been to the Videogame Nation launch at URBIS. I've hardly ever been a gameplayer, so this 30 year old history was a museum piece of artefacts. "I like the shiny things" I said more than once, finding none of the nostalgic reverance that a game player would have found, but liking the styles, mannerisms and sounds of this commercial subculture. Every loft could probably furnish an exhibit for the exhibition; every car boot.
For me, what interested me about Mee's talk about Schwitters was its reminders that art hasn't always been about the single object; that in many ways this was a 20th century construction based upon two things:- the electronic recording (whether photo, film or record), and the legal (copyright) framework that necessarily sustained that. I could now, if I wanted, put my entire works on the web, to let it be found, or not found as is the case. As permanent as a thing can be (at least until the water needed for the cooling systems for the vast server farms runs out). I think there's another side to this though. The artist as entity. Its the challenge that I don't think is addressed by those calling for a more participative culture. In our short lives, artistic progress can take time, from gaining a facility, to finding the voice, to having something to say, to managing to say it. The "transmission mechanisms" for art are actually probably very good models that are being replicated across social media, rather than the other way round. "Open source" would be no new concept to the impressionists, the surrealists, the imagists, the PRB. Once an idea has been circulated, or the culmination of that idea has been made, then it is free to be disseminated. Wasn't Gertrude Stein's Paris apartment and those other salons of the day a meeting place similar to Tuesday nights? The cafes as Myspace or Twitter? Indeed you could argue that the transmission mechanisms then, letters sent back to friends in America or Britain ("You must come to Paris") were slower than email but as equally able to catch-fire.
The artist as an entity, as someone who wants to do this with their life, is actually the bigger challenge to the hierarchies of contemporary culture than anything else. History sees its more interesting work come from more interesting places, yet "old media" whether its the publishing industry or the BBC, is as dominated by Oxbridge as any other time. Those - like the Old Boys network - are "transmission mechanisms" across time; informal rather than formal networks, and therefore more powerful over time and space.
I think we can go back to the artist as entity, the idea of a "body of work", that can progress, that can change, that can grow, that can decay. Whereas celebrity culture spits people out for their 15 minutes, our gatekeepers are keener on having a fixed list of writers, composers, painters etc. Shouldn't those bright poets who made their mark in the early 70s be at least forgotten for a little while, at the very least so they could be rediscovered later? I kept being reminded of the great American chronicler, Walt Whitman, and his single work, his "Leaves of Grass," appearing in a range of different issues, orders, with poems changed, added, subtracted. This is a website for the 19th century, a written Merzbau, if you like. Whitman, saw America as a vast whole, but that to approach it you had to try different entry points, not start at an entry point in New York, and spread out like the settlers, but come from a thousand different points in the American landscape.
The artistic life lived sees change as inevitable, the works altering, both in themselves and in their context, or their intercontextual value. It is this, rather than the putting a price and value on a particular artwork, that is the more interesting. It is possible that the web will be like 20th century art, with a whirlwind of creativity passing through a different centre, leaving another -ism (another dot com boom) in its wake. Yet old websites, or ones with decaying audiences, are like empty properties after the boom has passed and the gold has run out; an artist goes on, repapers over the old canvases, changes, looks again, sees, in many ways, the bigger picture.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Whatever Happened to the Northern Intellectual?
A fascinating kickstart to a new round of debate, by Charles Leadbetter: an essay entitled "The Art of With", which allows paragraph by paragraph comments. It's a kickstart because it will be followed by a one-day seminar and other activity at Manchester's Cornerhouse. The nature of the essay and its structure makes it wrong to try and paraphrase it, though it's relatively accessible and easy to paraphrase. (I would argue that in art, if not in criticism, our ability to paraphrase the art rather than read/watch/engage is one of the key fallouts of "accessible art" - its the art that you can't paraphrase, John Ashbery say, or Gillian Wearing, that most interests me).
But, though I'd ask you to read the original, I'll summarise a few thoughts here. The "art of with" begins with the idea that the avant garde (in itself not defined in the article: and I've a little interest in that definition) has traditionally been "separate" - rejecting the consumerism of the 20th century, but being part of arts institutions that are themselves based upon the consumerist model. Is the web, with its ethos of "shared" and "collaborative" experience a different model? Perhaps. Yet, I've asked the question before whether Fordism is alive and well in the Googleopolis - as Google's "business model" is not mine as an artist. (There's a particular thing here of course: Google wants to give away YOUR art for free, and collect the payment not for you, but by using you.) Yet there's definitely something about the modern communication infrastructure that the internet is part of which offers the artist - and the avant gardist - a chance to "up" - whether that's upskill, or upload. I'm less convinced that the "mix culture" that Leadbetter talks about - and which has been bandied around for a while as a new way of creation - is either new or edifying. I've blogged before that writers in particular (but I would say visual artists and others as well) risk becoming middlemen in the cultural value chain, rather than originators in their own right. This is not just about "influence" but about value-added. Hip hop as the original share-culture of populist art remains a vital touchstone, because it created something defiantly and definitely new, from what was already there (and unused) - often the instrumental breaks on the b-sides of old James Brown records. The cut and paste fun of say, Girltalk, is more stars-on-45 for pseuds, because the end result is not something NEW, like "Paid in Full" or "Paul's Boutique", but something reversioned. A reversioning is not a problem - but it seems somehow lesser.
But without going much further at this point into Leadbetter's article - it does raise a couple of key questions about the "creative classes". Our institutions (and their gatekeepers) remain too powerful in this sense. The real lesson of "open source communities" is that they are outsider communities, one way or another. It's almost an impossible paradox talking about the UGC communities coming out of mass-market products like Flickr and Youtube, at the same time as discussing the open source software community, for the former is only concerned with content and will use whatever tool is appropriate; the latter wants to define and design the tools. In some ways, open source development mirrors its own enemy - for where else do you find a puritanism about "design" and "function" other than in the exclusiveness of the Eames chair or the Apple Mac?
Yet it is the open source community model which makes most sense for art, and for the avant garde artist. I would strongly disagree with the idea that the avant garde was ever non-collaborative (often entirely the opposite), but it does seem that we need to be aware of where great art comes from, and though it can be very much helped by institutions, it cannot be determined by them. (The art school gave us the Beatles, Bowie, Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, for instance - not what they were developed for, but not a bad unexpected consequence, nonetheless). And, around this, and this is why "The art of with" debate is timely, there needs, to be frank there to be an intellectual and critical discussion. I wonder whatever happened to the Northern Intellectual? Our city and regional leaders wouldn't fit that description - and nor, come to think of it, would many of our other high profile figures. When its debating time in Manchester we roll out the interesting, the practical, and the well-known, whether its Guy Garvey, Ian Simpson, Wayne Hemingway or Dave Haslam. Nothing wrong with any of them of course; but there's a sense of either the streetfighter tamed, or the Grammar school boy acting down for the masses. It's why Tony Wilson had the streets of Manchester to himself, where 2nd-hand situationism, and a day job at Granada could make for an intellectual high water mark. On the day that MMU/Chorlton-based Carole Ann Duffy most likely gets the Laureate, our professor of contemporary poetry is praised for her humour, accessibility and popularity, not for her intellect. Main rival, Simon Armitage, is always careful to hide his intellect under a laddish cover of northern dry wit.
Yet, elsewhere in the city, the very strengths that Richard Florida noted in Manchester in his essay on the creative classes, all those years ago, are strong and well. So, there's a challenge for "the art of with" and the Cornerhouse, and that's about Manchester itself. Charles Leadbetter is fine and dandy, but its when the city doesn't have to import its intellectual discussion, but leads on it, that the city's undoubted knowledge economy will come into its own.
But, though I'd ask you to read the original, I'll summarise a few thoughts here. The "art of with" begins with the idea that the avant garde (in itself not defined in the article: and I've a little interest in that definition) has traditionally been "separate" - rejecting the consumerism of the 20th century, but being part of arts institutions that are themselves based upon the consumerist model. Is the web, with its ethos of "shared" and "collaborative" experience a different model? Perhaps. Yet, I've asked the question before whether Fordism is alive and well in the Googleopolis - as Google's "business model" is not mine as an artist. (There's a particular thing here of course: Google wants to give away YOUR art for free, and collect the payment not for you, but by using you.) Yet there's definitely something about the modern communication infrastructure that the internet is part of which offers the artist - and the avant gardist - a chance to "up" - whether that's upskill, or upload. I'm less convinced that the "mix culture" that Leadbetter talks about - and which has been bandied around for a while as a new way of creation - is either new or edifying. I've blogged before that writers in particular (but I would say visual artists and others as well) risk becoming middlemen in the cultural value chain, rather than originators in their own right. This is not just about "influence" but about value-added. Hip hop as the original share-culture of populist art remains a vital touchstone, because it created something defiantly and definitely new, from what was already there (and unused) - often the instrumental breaks on the b-sides of old James Brown records. The cut and paste fun of say, Girltalk, is more stars-on-45 for pseuds, because the end result is not something NEW, like "Paid in Full" or "Paul's Boutique", but something reversioned. A reversioning is not a problem - but it seems somehow lesser.
But without going much further at this point into Leadbetter's article - it does raise a couple of key questions about the "creative classes". Our institutions (and their gatekeepers) remain too powerful in this sense. The real lesson of "open source communities" is that they are outsider communities, one way or another. It's almost an impossible paradox talking about the UGC communities coming out of mass-market products like Flickr and Youtube, at the same time as discussing the open source software community, for the former is only concerned with content and will use whatever tool is appropriate; the latter wants to define and design the tools. In some ways, open source development mirrors its own enemy - for where else do you find a puritanism about "design" and "function" other than in the exclusiveness of the Eames chair or the Apple Mac?
Yet it is the open source community model which makes most sense for art, and for the avant garde artist. I would strongly disagree with the idea that the avant garde was ever non-collaborative (often entirely the opposite), but it does seem that we need to be aware of where great art comes from, and though it can be very much helped by institutions, it cannot be determined by them. (The art school gave us the Beatles, Bowie, Roxy Music and the Sex Pistols, for instance - not what they were developed for, but not a bad unexpected consequence, nonetheless). And, around this, and this is why "The art of with" debate is timely, there needs, to be frank there to be an intellectual and critical discussion. I wonder whatever happened to the Northern Intellectual? Our city and regional leaders wouldn't fit that description - and nor, come to think of it, would many of our other high profile figures. When its debating time in Manchester we roll out the interesting, the practical, and the well-known, whether its Guy Garvey, Ian Simpson, Wayne Hemingway or Dave Haslam. Nothing wrong with any of them of course; but there's a sense of either the streetfighter tamed, or the Grammar school boy acting down for the masses. It's why Tony Wilson had the streets of Manchester to himself, where 2nd-hand situationism, and a day job at Granada could make for an intellectual high water mark. On the day that MMU/Chorlton-based Carole Ann Duffy most likely gets the Laureate, our professor of contemporary poetry is praised for her humour, accessibility and popularity, not for her intellect. Main rival, Simon Armitage, is always careful to hide his intellect under a laddish cover of northern dry wit.
Yet, elsewhere in the city, the very strengths that Richard Florida noted in Manchester in his essay on the creative classes, all those years ago, are strong and well. So, there's a challenge for "the art of with" and the Cornerhouse, and that's about Manchester itself. Charles Leadbetter is fine and dandy, but its when the city doesn't have to import its intellectual discussion, but leads on it, that the city's undoubted knowledge economy will come into its own.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)