C108
Article
Dislocate,
Renegotiate and Flow - Part II: The Practice of Process
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Azorro: Hamlet, 2002, video
stills, Prague Biennale; courtesy the artists
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This is Part II of a three-part
investigation by Regina Gleeson into globalisation's impact
on art practice. This work was commissioned by the Arts
Council of Ireland / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in association
with Critical Voices 2003.
Part I of this series, which appeared
in the previous issue of CIRCA, focused on the
physical and conceptual entity of the 'non-place' by looking
at how political disharmony has boosted global nomadism.
The cultural repercussions of this phenomenon were discussed.
This new section of the series builds on that investigation,
outlining the changes in approaches to making art - the
practice of art processes.
After the austerity of the minimalist
aesthetic that pervaded the mid-twentieth century, there
was a period of adjustment towards engaging in the 'hypernarrative'
and the pluralistic non-linearity (temporal mixing) inherent
in our digital society. The shift in physical and psychological
geographies created both by physical relocation and by
the digitised, global village has introduced the artist
to an extreme of multiplicity, a multiplicity in excess
of anything experienced in response to mechanical reproduction
at the turn of the previous century. With such changes,
a multiplistic, often disjointed artistic statement began
to be seen as having more specific relevance to our time,
rather than a single statement. This was because the cultural
tendency towards a lack of order echoed the increasing
normality of being bombarded with all kinds of information.
An artist's attempt to render the contemporary tower of
Babel coherent does not necessarily require the distillation
of its essence from a single perspective. Focusing on
its disparate components facilitates understanding from
a more diffuse perspective, offering a deeper engagement
than simple cultural interpretation.
For all of the previously stated
reasons for relocation - through human dislocation and
ubiquitous electronica - the world in relation to the
human has become infinitely smaller, with the world in
relation to information becoming, in contrast, infinite.
Postmodernism signalled a move away from the physical
art object and towards the process by which that object
was conceived and created. Postmodern practice has been
further exposed to new dynamics by the whirlwind of globalisation.
Culturally, globalisation has enabled cross-cultural interaction,
exchange between local and global knowledge, and circulation
of information through people - people as medium. The
focus on the process of making art has foregrounded the
element of chance; this has often translated into a serendipitous
art practice that is founded on fluidity in disciplinary
boundaries.
Modernity's mechanical reproduction
changed the emphasis from 'what' (the object) to 'how'
(process). This shift in focus expanded to 'for whom'
(performance and public-space intervention) and 'across
what dimension of time' (nonlinearity). Global connectedness,
and likewise global disarray, has changed the conditions
of production and realisation of art. This change in rhythm
has been responsive to the digitised world's development
of the multiplistic narratives and also to society's search
for transparency.
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Katie
Holten: Laboratorio della Vigna, 2003, installation
shot, view of downstairs; photo / courtesy the author
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The practice of analysing the conditions
of the object has been a move towards making visible that
which is invisible yet intrinsic to the object. Attention
to the deconstruction and subsequent demystification of
process has occurred across a broad range of disciplines,
from art, literature and architecture to music, new media
technologies and science. Experimental musician Brian
Eno has been a pioneering figure in interdisciplinary
collaborations, concerned as he has been with beginnings
and cultural trajectories. His practice has focused on
reshuffling the unfinished work, whereby the process of
realising the work is in fact the work itself. With the
dissipation of the art object, and with the finished statement
demoted, the collaborative project of the new, multidisciplinary
school is born.
Escape Program from Moscow is a prime
example of a collaborative group using just such a mode
of collective contextualisation to highlight sociopolitical
issues.1 This collaborative
group is made up of four members of differing backgrounds,
ranging from financial services to art criticism. One
of their most recent pieces of work, Quartett,
describes the impossibility of cultural translation. They
create art using their contrasting fields of knowledge
to formulate a coherent response to globalisation. Similar
to their collective is the Azorro Group in Poland. Their
work challenges what they experience as sociopolitical
doctrine and, in response, they devise a kind of creative
manifesto for making sense of it all.
These networked systems of knowledge,
skill and production are the framework for a current mode
of art practice that mimics a kind of cybernetic infrastructure.
In response to the ripples of globalisation, collaboration
has become one of the elementary ways for contemporary
artists to contextualise the world in which we live. It
is a resolute attempt at creating a structure within which
to formulate a greater understanding of ourselves, our
hectic society and our universe through an interdisciplinary
Theory of Everything.2
Katie Holten, last year's Irish representative
at the Venice Biennale, was chosen because of her deep
engagement in the process of weaving together disparate
elements from a collaborative network. Her work shows
an ability to draw strands from numerous disciplines -
Fine Art, music, literature, engineering, architecture,
psychiatry, aeronautics, environmental science, sociology
- into a web of activity that offers the viewer a set
of conceptual points of entry. There is no linear pattern
and therefore no given beginning and end; there are only
clues as to the direction the work is moving. Her work
in Venice, Laboratorio della Vigna, consisted primarily
in producing a series of booklets entitled Nothing,
Love, Paper www, Flying, Guide, Me
and Devil, Water, and also a leaflet, What
Civilisation of Work. These were available to read
at the Irish pavilion, where some rough tables and chairs
had been organised to encourage the viewer to stay a while
and browse through the booklets. In a corner in the upstairs
room of the exhibition space was the cluttered table and
work area, as seen in previous Holten shows. There was
neither visual charisma nor visual dynamism, because her
work was built on an organic multidisciplinary structure
independent of those specific visual parameters.
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Katie
Holten: Laboratorio della Vigna, 2003, installation
shot, upstairs; photo / courtesy the author
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The installation in the upstairs exhibition
space showed what appeared to be forced evidence of the
process. The pamphlets downstairs were rough at the edges,
but this was part of their charm. What they contained
were a naïve, free and happy appreciation of 'place'.
Their meanderings were refreshing because they unashamedly
expressed joy and curiosity in that which is small and
insignificant. They were oblivious to both the commodification
of pop culture and the esoteric arrogance of high art.
The upstairs installation and the contents of the booklets
downstairs cohabited uneasily, because of the overt efforts
upstairs to expose both the process and the element of
disorder out of which the artist draws her inspiration
and influences. Randomness for its own sake is just another
system, but randomness with a purpose is a way to enter
a system.3
Randomness is essential to my
work. But so is failure. So is research. The booklets
(Papers) in Venice contain disparate material - but there
are many ways to connect it all. It's open - people can
join the dots for themselves.
Katie Holten.4
Evidence of the process, for the
sake of showing the chaos out of which the ideas are plucked,
is an awkward entity in the collaboration. Katie has stated
her conscious decision to refrain from offering the public
a well-rounded visual piece of work or "art bauble".5
This work inhabits the terrains vagues between
the art object, the process as artwork and the creation
of directions as opposed to starting and ending points
of reference. Laboratorio della Vigna is a perfect
example of the vein of art practice that breaks down the
boundary between living and working. However, it is also
an example of the vein of art practice that functions
on transparency but, having been so involved in the actual
process, has trouble when it doubles back on itself to
prove its honesty about its conceptual and practical journey.
Holten's booklets are rich with incongruent
bites of information and ideas whose value far outweighs
the project's lack of visual stimulus. As Gabriel Orozco
has identified, the artwork begins and ends with ideas,
and Laboratorio della Vigna is certainly effervescent
with ideas.6 However, this
highlights the dilemma of the collaborative art practice
and the restructuring of the visual hierarchy. The collaboration
is enormously enriching for the participant practitioneers
- artists, writers, scientists, designers, etc. - who
are creating and exploring an exponential learning curve.
The experience for the viewer who encounters some public
manifestation of this collaboration might not be the same.
The viewer may find the fact that there is no visual impact,
no 'object' and no absolute assertions a fatal impediment
to accessing the work that can, on first encounter, appear
to have no sense of place and no identity. Social exchange
is what makes the collaboration worthwhile, so if there
has not been enough impetus towards communicating with
the viewer then the fruits of the collaborators' labour
have not come close to their potential.
Art practice has freed itself from
the white lies of the aesthetic stylisation of the finished
art object's surface, in favour of renegotiating structures
of time, duality, place, shared thinking and exposing
the transparency of the process. These efforts at exposure
extend to the way we see things, the way things are constructed;
an exposure of truth instead of efforts at concealment
behind a curtain of aesthetic fallacy. In artworks that
manifest themselves in the process itself, the interface
between public and artwork is crucial to the assimilation
of the work's concepts. The difficulty is not in engaging
in the flow of data in preference to interpreting it,
but instead, the point of public engagement is the point
of success or failure of the collaborative work - visual
or otherwise.
In addition to the broad realm of
Fine Art, the artists' network is focused on contextualisation
through the fields of mathematics, geometry, physics,
technology, philosophy, sociology, et cetera, in a vivacious
effort to offer a cultural exploration of the aforementioned
Theory of Everything. So, with the intermingling of disciplines
and the waning exclusivity of both 'artist' and the artworks'
visual dynamic, where is the epic in present-day art practice?
The epic dimension exists in the work's potential. The
epic lies in the inclusive, nonelitist move to contextualise
our surroundings through whatever best suits the ideas
of the work, even if that means moving outside the boundaries
of what is strictly understood to be Fine Art.
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Katie Holten: Laboratorio della
Vigna (detail), 2003, installation shot, upstairs;
photo / courtesy the author
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This all-inclusive modus operandi
would seem to suggest that the birth of collaborative
art practice signals the imminent death of the artist.
One wonders how this could be a positive element in cultural
development, when the collaborative project came about
as a means of discovery and was never instigated in an
effort to quieten the individual artistic voice. Perhaps
a more precise account would be that collaborative practice
relegates the supposed grandiosity of the high artist
to a cultural margin, leaving the business of artists
open to the honest and energetic process of creating work
in any of many diverse disciplines relating directly to
the time in which they have been created. The question
now arises as to who initiates or facilitates the collaborative
unit. The rise and rise of the curator is happening concurrently
with the growth of the collaboration and has already seen
the curator's position take centre stage at some of the
major international exhibitions of 2003. Could it be that
the death of the artist would be the birth of the curator?
Part III of this series will be published
in the next issue of CIRCA, number 109. It will
discuss the structural rearrangements required of curatorial
interventions in order that they facilitate the public's
engagement with art that is evolving as sets of starting
points. It will uncover whether the death of the artist
is in fact the birth of the curator.
Regina Gleeson is a writer
on art and technology.
