Allison Ullmer's Seminar Blog: February 2010

Sunday, February 28, 2010

" Welcome to the disposable world: a world of customized destinies, governed by the inaccessible mechanism of an economy that, like science, is developing in a state of complete autonomy with respect to lived reality." (pg.80).

I understand that the 'inaccessible mechanism' as a relation to the oscillation of value, but what exact kind of mechanism is Bourriaud hinting at?

I would like to know if my fellow grads feel that 'our modernity is developing on the basis of this collapse of the long term'? (85)

Bourriaud states that the current era has no master narrative and that the prevalent or visible player is a semionaut: a creator of paths in a landscape of signs. Bourriaud portrays the semionaut as a contemporary figure not yet seen in the history of art. However Christine Buci-Glucksmann, in Allen Weiss' Mirrors of Infinity, explains baroque spatiality:

"In opposition to the homogeneous, geometric and substantialist Cartesian space, the open and serial baroque spatiality, with its development and metamorphosis of forms, proceeds by overlapping, coexistence, the play of light and force, the engendering of beings by means of the serpentine line and ellipse. These are the traits of a topological space which is precisely oblivious to the identification and fixed localization of objects at rest." (23)

Does not this entire paragraph, especially this last sentence, hint at the support structure behind the culture/space in which translation, altermodernism and the semionaut function in? 'Serial baroque spatiality' principles are those that can 'mingle and multiply by means of combination. . . .[there is] constant multiplication' in the baroque as Bourriaud says there is for altermodernism.(83) However this is true than those fundamental principles of art history oscillating from classical to baroque still hold sway and thus the radicant world shares a link with the radical.

Last week in class we discussed whether using material not our own was ethical. Many seemed to believe there was nothing wrong with it whether you had the permission of the artist or not. However what about artists such as Kendell Greeves who acknowledges that his work stems from 'pure theft' of others (mainly corporate) material? There is no hiding behind patents or public material. There is an acknowledgement of theft, which becomes part if not all of the content of the work. This, is innately activist art, is it not?

Doug Aitken, Electric Earth, 1999

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zdSMVhqOsQ

Kim Soo-Ja

A Needle Woman by Kim Sooja (30 seconds silent short)
Uploaded by OUTVIDEO. - Independent web videos.

Vito Acconci - Three Adaptation Studies (1970)
Uploaded by Video_Blog_REWF. - Watch original web videos.

Marthine Tayou, Plastic Bags

Stories are Propaganda, 2005 link:

http://www.airdeparis.com/parreno/stories/stories.htm

Matthew Ritchie

Kelly Walker

Nari Ward

Subodh Gupta


Merz: Cera e Gomma (Wax and Rubber), 1968	Michelangelo Pistoletto: Uoma seduto (Seated Man), 1962-63


Michelangelo Pistoletto: Marzia con Bambina (Marzia with Child), 1962-64	Mario Schifano: Tempo Moderno (Modern Times), 1962

Gilberto Zorio: Per purificare le parole (To Purify Words), 1969

Kurt Schwitters

Jenny Holzer

vs.

Cady Noland

Monday, February 22, 2010

Crystallization of Readable Concepts

Tsuyoshi Ozawa's piece below seems to be an exemplary image for what Bourriaud is deeming a 'nomadic sign gatherer'(39). What human can't relate to food and weapons, right?

He says that altermodernity is vested in translation and the work that's going to arise will deal with this type of communication where no language holds a larger sway than another.

On page 77 he states, 'It is proving all the more important to crystallize this culture around readable concepts. . . . Altermodernity emerging today is fueled by the flow of bodies, by our cultural wandering . . Ultimately, then, radicant thought amounts to the organization of an exodus.'

However how can there be a 'crystallization of readable concepts'? If what Bourriaud is saying is true, than that means we are in a constant state of flux and change. Like Girl Talk, as soon as one thing is completed, it is dissected and used for another's purpose. Or is Bourriaud hinting that altermodernity, the radicant's mass exodus, the language of translation is going to be the new religion? What other large connection or relationship truly bonds people who have no other form of communication between them than symbols: cross, synagogue, mosque? There will always be some sort of common ground, ie readable concepts whether based in theology, nationality or a mass of radicants.

'The notion of otherness is questionable because it postulates a common ground, which needless to say is Western."(67)

Is Bourriard against a common ground because of it's 'westerness' or its 'otherness'? Is not a 'crystallization of readable concepts' a common ground?

It seems his use of Serge Daney and Victor Segalen and their rejection of the 'other' makes way for a new kind of visual leadership that will lead this mass exodus into some other organized set of rules and imagery. What can be taken from these two sentences:

-'If the codes of the dominant representation of the world are based in abstraction, that is because abstraction is the very language of inevitability.' (59)

-'The fundamental requirement of an ethics of diversity is to travel in order to get back to oneself, to start off "from the real",. . . the context where happenstance caused you to be born, a context whose value is not absolute but circumstantial.' (67)

Does this all come down to inevitability and happenstance? How does this personally identifiable, singular culture of abstraction come about in this globalized economy? We can not turn the tables and erase what globalization has done to this planet. Homogenization has not just begun but has infiltrated, outside of a petri-dish I don't see how Bourriaud's ideal will come about, let alone flourish.

Segalen, 'The source and driving energy of all beauty is difference.' (63) Does this mean it is difference that can be beautiful, or that it is the alternating, unsymmetrical nature of this world that creates space for the beautiful, or both?