open source art school

Let's get outta here

2006-08-13T02:22:00.000+10:00

as they say in all the best movies.

The new website is open for business at

www.opensourceartschool.com

in fact it's been sitting there quietly for several months while I sorted out various odds and ends. All the existing content here has been moved over there and in a week or two I'll delete it from here leaving just this link. Anyone can now post after registering as a contributor and anyone can set up wiki pages. So get going!

PS if you want to comment on it, do it over there, not here.

war of molarity

2006-08-06T23:04:00.000+10:00

Some quotes from a book by Brain Massumi who takes his cues from Deleuze and Guattari.

“The life cycle of a plane of transcendence: 1) production of a coded image, 2) application of the code to bodies / infolding into habit, 3) unfolding into life’s paths, 4) reproduction of the code in new images (most likely with selective modifications).” p.114

“It is imperialist by nature. A system of interiority, the plane of transcendence has no mechanisms by which to interact with the outside as outside, no terms with which to understand it in its own right. It can only deal with an unidentified body by putting it to the test, either assigning it an acceptable category and taking into the fold, or assigning it a bad category and attacking it. Incorporate or annihilate. Anything perceptible to the forces of molarity, but resistant to selective evaluation, is reacted to as a potential threat to the purity of the plane of transcendence and the stasis it polices. Molarity cannot tolerate anything remaining outside its purview, it must constantly expand its domain in an outward drive of conquest of the “Other,” identified as Enemy. That becomes the catch-all category, the operative category. If bodies can be duplicitous, passing as one identity while continuing to incarnate another, every body is a potential enemy. Any body might prove to be an intruder threatening the beloved identity with masked subversion and contamination by foreign matter. Molarization is as paranoid as it is imperialist. Any suspicious movement, even on the part of a duly identified body – particularly one assigned a devalued identity – lands it in the enemy camp, an internal enemy answering to the enemy from without: a potential defector from habit, a subversive and degenerate. A new front of domestic conquest widens the war for molarity. Institutional regularization becomes ever-more severe (discipline), and selective evaluation increasingly vigilant (surveillance). Discipline requires rigid segregation of bodies according to category, in order to prevent unseemly mixing of the identity blurring it may lead to. Surveillance requires a carefully maintained hierarchy, a pyramid of supervisory and command positions.” p.115

From
Massumi, Brian
A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia- Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari
Cambridge, MIT Press, 1992.

Art of war

2006-07-21T13:02:00.000+10:00

Anything I could say about this would be inadequate. Thanks for the link, Zanny.

The ultimate cause is clueless right wing US politicians. If you want proof of how clueless some of them are, check this out, it's another artist's reponse to a different political issue, a musical version of Senator Ted Stevens bizarre and ignorant speech supporting corporate proposals to create a two class internet allowing priority access for the rich, crappy access for the rest of us. The Daily Show's explanation is very funny.

a not unrelated event...

2006-07-08T19:39:00.000+10:00

related in the sense that its work by a contributor to this blog, while also being related (if a little tangentally) to that contributors contributions. for those who have trouble reading the invite the here are the details

Opening- Wed 12th July 6-8pm
Runs from Thurs 13 to Sun 23rd July
Open- Thurs-Sun, 12pm-6pm
at
Pelt
Unit 2, 46 Balfour Street
Chippendale
Sydney, NSW 2008

Nothing is what it seems...

2006-06-27T20:23:00.000+10:00

All you art students out there, learn this immediately!

Slowly Turning Nasty

2006-06-27T01:15:00.000+10:00

The feeble watery conceptualesque style that has been the official art for the last twenty five years or so was built from the stylistic mannerisms of the earlier conceptual art of the late 60s and 70s. Where the earlier conceptualism was as much a political protest movement as it was an art movement, the later conceptualism was more a marketing movement than an art movement, a way of producing cheap easily marketable clone art but also a way of drawing the claws of political conceptualism. Thus we have had the travesty of institutions entrepreneuring artist that they claimed were “subverting the institutions” and various other examples of the way capitalism can absorb and destroy all protest.

But it does not always work and the earlier conceptualism was an example of that. It launched many artists (including me) into activism where we used our art skills as tools in a variety of political struggles. The basic catalyst of this activism was the Vietnam War, an unjust and pointless war that provoked an intense scrutiny of the institutions of any country that supported it. We all came to the sudden and horrifying conclusion that so much of the art we admired was being used to promote imperialism, regardless of the intentions of the artists.

That period in the late 60s was in fact terrifyingly similar to now. It is one of the reasons that I have been arguing that social art is an effective form of resistance far more radical than it at first appears. But other things are also starting to happen . The crypto-fascism of the Howard Liberals (and Beazleys Amateur Liberal Party) is quite tolerable compared to the overt fascism that is developing in the US which is now starting to develop resistance even within the institutions.

In that context, read the following story about the resignation of curator Chris Gilbert from the Berkeley Art Museum. So that the sequence can be read more easily I have lifted it in its entirety from a post by Brett Bloom at the great Temporary Services , plus a subsequent post, a letter from Gregory Shollette. I think it will be seen as another defining moment in the culture war that we are all part of whether we want to be or not.

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Chris Gilbert's resignation letter from the Berkeley Art Museum
May. 24th, 2006 | 10:35 am

Chris Gilbert is one of the most thoughtful curators that Temporary Services has ever worked with. He was working at the Baltimore Museum of Art when we first met with him. He organized a series of shows called Cram Sessions, which sought to bring new and critical practices into one of the most conservative museums you can imagine.

I had the pleasure of seeing Chris's latest curatorial efforts at the Berkeley Museum of Art last month when in the Bay Area for a presentation of Prisoners' Inventions at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It was the first installment of a year-long series. It was called "Now-Time Venezuela Part 1: Worker-Controlled Factories."

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibits/nowtime/index.html

This ambitious and deeply inspiring video installation was by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler. It was a gorgeous documentary broken up into several smaller parts. Each video consisted of interviews with workers at several worker-run factories. Interspersed between the interviews were stunning shots of machines making the different items produced at each factory - chocolate, ketchup, aluminum and more. This installation was both drop-dead gorgeous and politically relevant. It challenges both the ways in which we can think of how businesses are organized as well as the kind of art work museums can present. During the entire time I spent watching the videos, I kept thinking "What if Chris tried to re-organize THIS museum. What would that look like and how would the art change?" This work really stood apart from the other work on display at the museum, which did act to reinforce the dominant ideology of museum culture and by extension capitalist forms or sociality. Chris's letter is a partial answer to my speculations. It would be amazing to see a museum the size of BAM regularly devoted to work that didn't always come straight from commercial galleries via the collector-class - like the incredibly vapid work of Jeanne Dunning that had just been there!

Way to give them hell, Chris!

---

Chris Gilbert - statement on resigning 5/21/06

I made the decision to resign as Matrix Curator on April 28, but my struggles with the BAM/PFA over the content and approach of the projects in the exhibition cycle "Now-Time Venezuela: Media Along the Path of the Bolivarian Process" go back quite a few months. In particular the museum administrators -- meaning the deputy directors and senior curator collaborating, of course, with the public relations and audience development staff -- have for some time been insisting that I take the idea of solidarity, revolutionary solidarity, out of the cycle. For some months, they have said they wanted "neutrality" and "balance" whereas I have always said that instead my approach is about commitment, support, and alignment -- in brief, taking sides with and promoting revolution.

I have always successfully resisted the museum's attempts to interfere with the projects (and you will see that the ideas of alignment, support, and revolutionary solidarity are written all over the "Now-Time" projects part 1 & part 2 -- they are present in all the texts I have generated and as a consequence in almost all of the reviews). In the museum's most recent attempt to alter things, the one that precipitated my resignation, they proposed to remove the offending concept from the Now-Time Part 2 introductory text panel (a panel which had already gone to the printer). Their plan was to replace the phrase "in solidarity" with revolutionary Venezuela with a phrase like "concerning" revolutionary Venezuela -- or another phrase describing a relation that would not be explicitly one of solidarity.

I threatened to resign and terminate the exhibition, since, first of all, revolutionary solidarity is what I believe in -- the essential concept in the "Now-Time" project cycle -- but secondly it is obviously unfair to invite participants such as Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler or groups such as Catia TVe to a project that has one character (revolutionary solidarity) and then change the rules of the game on them a few weeks before the show opens (so that they become mere objects of examination or investigation). At first, my threat to resign and terminate the show availed nothing. Then on April 28, I wrote a letter stating that I was in fact resigning and my last day of work would be two weeks from that day, which was May 12, two days before the "Now-Time Part 2: Revolutionary Television in Catia" opening. I assured them that the show could not go forward without me. In response to this decisive action -- and surely out of fear that the show which had already been published in the members magazine would not happen -- the institution restored my text panel to the way I had written it. Having won that battle, though at the price of losing my position, I decided to go forward with the show, my last one.

One thing that should make evident how extreme and erratic the museum's actions were is that the very same sentence that was found offensive ("a project in solidarity with the revolutionary process in contemporary Venezuela") is the exact sentence that is used for the first Now-Time Venezuela exhibition text panel that still hangs in the Matrix gallery upstairs. That show is on view for one more week as I write.

The details of all this are important though, of course, its general outlines, which play out the familiar patterns of class struggle, are of greater interest. The class interests represented by the museum, which are above all the interests of the bourgeoisie that funds it, have two (related) things to fear from a project like mine: (1) of course, revolutionary Venezuela is a symbolic threat to the US government and the capitalist class that benefits from that government's policies, just as Cuba is a symbolic threat, just as Nicaragua was, and just as is any country that tries to set its house in order in a way that is different from the ideas of Washington and London -- which is primarily to say Washington and London's insistence that there is no alternative to capitalism.

I must emphasize that the threat is only symbolic; in the eyes of the US government and the US bourgeoisie, it sets a "bad" and dangerous example of disobedience for other countries to follow, but of course the idea that such examples represent a military threat to the US (would that it were the case) is simply laughable; (2) the second threat, which is probably the more operational one in the museum context, is that much of the community is in favor of the "Now-Time" projects -- the response to the first exhibition is enormous and the interest in the second is also very high. That response and interest exposes the fact that the museum, the bourgeois values it promotes via the institution of contemporary art (contemporary art of the past 30 years is really in most respects simply the cultural arm of upper-class power) are not really those of any class but its own. Importantly the museum and the bourgeoisie will always deny the role of class interests in this: they will always maintain that the kinds of cultural production they promote are more difficult, smarter, more sophisticated -- hence the lack of response to most contemporary art is, according to them, about differences in education and sophistication rather than class interest. That this kind of claim is obscurantist and absurd is something the present exhibitions make very clear: the work of Catia TVe, which is created by people in the popular (working-class) neighborhoods of Caracas, is far more sophisticated than what comes out of the contemporary art of the Global North. The same could be said for the ideas discussed by the Venezuelan factory workers in the Ressler and Azzellini film that is shown Now-Time Part 1. (Of course, it is not because these works and the thoughts in them are more sophisticated that we should attend to them; what I am saying is simply that it is clearly an evasion and false to dismiss anti-bourgeois cultural production -- work that aligns with the interests of working class people -- on grounds of its being unsophisticated.)

To return to the museum: I believe that the enormous response to the "Now-Time" cycle -- there were 180 visitors to the March 26 panel discussion that opened "Now-Time" part 1 and if you google "Now-Time Venezuela" you get over 700 hits -- put the class interests that stand by and promote contemporary art in danger, exposed them a bit. I suppose some concern about this may have given a special edge to the museum's failed efforts to alter my projects.

I think it is important to be clear about the facts that precipitated my resignation: that is, the struggle over the wording of the text panel, which fit into months of struggle over the question of solidarity and alignment with a revolutionary political agenda. That issue is discussed above. However, it is also important to understand the context. Again, it is too weak to say that museums, like universities, are deeply corrupt. They are. (And in my view the key points to discuss regarding this corruption are (1) the museum's claim to represent the public's interests when in fact serving upper-class interests and parading a carefully constructed surrogate image of the public; (2) the presence of intra-institutional press and marketing departments that really operate to hold a political line through various control techniques, only one of which is censorship; finally (3) the presence of development departments that, in mostly hidden ways, favor and flatter rich funders, giving the lie to even the sham notion of public responsibility that the museum parades). However, to describe museums and other cultural institutions as simply if deeply corrupt is, as I said, too weak in that it both holds out the promise of their reform and it ignores the larger imperialist structures that make their corruption an inevitable upshot and reflection of the exploitive political and social system of which they form a part. Such institutions will go on reflecting imperialist capitalist values, will celebrate private property and deny social solidarity, and will maintain a strict silence about the control of populations at home and the destruction of populations abroad in the name of profit, until that imperialist system is dismantled. Importantly, it will not be dismantled by cultural efforts alone: a successful reform of a cultural institution here or there would at best result in "islands" of sanity that would most likely operate in a negative way -- as imaginary and misleading "proof" that conditions are not as bad as they are.

In fact, with conditions as they are, a different strategy is required: there should be disobedience at all levels; disruptions and explosions of the kind that I, together with a small group of allies inside the museum, have created are also useful on a symbolic level. However, the primary struggle and the only struggle that will result in a significant change would be one that works directly to transform the economic and political base. This would be a struggle aiming to bring down the US government and its imperialist system through highly organized efforts.

We live in the midst of a fascist imperialism -- there is no other way to describe the system that the US has created and that exercises such control through terror over populations both inside and outside. History has shown that to make "deals" or "compromises" with fascism avails nothing. Instead a radical and daily intransigence is required. Fascism operates to destroy life. It installs and operates on the logic of the camp on all levels, including culture. In the face of that logic, which holds life as nothing, compromises and deals at best buy time for the aggressor and symbolic capital for the aggressor. One should have no illusions: until capitalism and imperialism are brought down, cultural institutions will go on being, in their primary role, lapdogs of a system that spreads misery and death to people everywhere on the planet. The fight to abolish that system completely and build one based on socialism must remain our exclusive and constant focus.

Chris Gilbert

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Chris Gilbert's Resignation: Service In the Name of Whom?
Jun. 11th, 2006 | 10:35 am

Chris Gilbert's resignation letter has caused quite a stir bringing him both supporters and detractors. Gregory Sholette recently sent out this letter about Chris's resignation and the controversy it has caused.

-------------------------

Chris Gilbert's Resignation: Service In the Name of Whom?

"With conditions as they are, a different strategy is required."
Chris Gilbert

28 year old 1st Lt. Ehren K. Watada of Honolulu disobeyed orders of deployment in Iraq by tendering his resignation on grounds of moral indignation over the war. The army refused to grant his request and Watada now faces a dishonorable discharge as well as several years in prison for defying commands.
"Never did I imagine my president would lie to go to war, condone torture, spy on Americans, or destroy the career of a CIA agent for political gain. I would rather resign in protest, but the army doesn't agree." (Watada.)

No doubt many who read this will praise this young man's ethics and bravery. Then why is it, in the wake of curator Chris Gilbert's letter of resignation from the Berkeley Art Museum, has there been a divided response from within progressive art circles with many people questioning this young man's motivation? (Gilbert's letter is copied here at Bay Area indymedia: http://www.indybay.org/news/2006/05/1824808.php with responses posted on Mute http://www.metamute.org/?q=en/node/7834 and Nettime http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?q=rosler+gilbert&ul
=&cmd=Search%21 )

When a soldier walks away from serving in Iraq we praise her or him for the ethical conscience expressed. When a curator walks away from what he believes is service to the same imperial interests he becomes suspect. Why is it so difficult to accept Gilbert's letter at face value? Do we immediately see every player in the art system as inherently flawed and opportunistic, unlike the ethical purity of the soldier? What does this say about the nature the art world as an institution, something we inevitably support through our labors, even when we do so with reservation? I find all of this curious.
In times of past US wars, the art world's players have protested, even gone on strike against the institutions that fed them. Art Workers Coalition, Black Emergency Coalition, Guerilla Art Action Group, Artists Meeting for Cultural Change among many others directly targeted prominent museums, their wealthy supporters, and their Boards of Directors demanding action in solidarity with those opposed to the War in Vietnam. Something similar happened in the mid-1980s with Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. Yes, these were collective actions, not individual resignations, or solitary acts of protest, and that is a notable difference with Gilbert's situation. And yes, the soldier - curator comparison is somewhat of a stretch, I admit, but examples of scientists, or government employees resigning as a response to the current state of US politics are difficult to find. (Although they will no doubt rise in visibility as this horrific war drags on.) And yes, Gilbert's resignation took place in friendly territory, the people's republic of Berkeley. Still, I wonder if the museum had been located within a "red" state would people be so quick to doubt the principles behind his actions? Nevertheless, what Gilbert's letter specifically focuses attention on is the nature of the institutional position he was supposed to uphold: the a-political, unbiased, cultural administrator.

This was not the first clash between Gilbert and cultural institutions over politics. Prior to his position at the Berkeley Museum of Art he was the Contemporary Curator for the Baltimore Museum of Art (BAM). While employed there Gilbert opened up a breach within that traditionally reserved institution's edifice with his four-part series entitled Cram Sessions. Inviting collectives, local activists, theorists, and students to participate, including myself, Gilbert produced several temporary, inter-active exhibitions that not only highlighted interventionist modes of art making, but which also began to generate a sustained inter-activity with local artists, students, and activists. The museum made it clear this work was not deemed appropriate, yet Gilbert stood his ground right on up to the moment that Berkeley hired him.

There is another angle to this story, a collaborative element in fact. Gilbert's long-time partner Cira Pascual Marquina was employed by the nearby cultural center known as The Contemporary, which is also in Baltimore. Temporarily crowned "acting director" about a year ago, Pascual Marquina quickly moved to amplify the activity Gilbert had generated at BAM. She chose not to keep the seat warm while the Board of Directors selected a permanent executive, but instead pushed the administrative structure she was handed full-throttle into supporting an intense, summer-long program of critical engagements not set inside the institution, but outside, in the warp and woof of Baltimore's urban politics. For like other post-industrial cities starting with New York in the 1980s, Baltimore is now undergoing its own version of the neo-liberal makeover. Gentrification, displacement, loft conversions, capital concentration, de-funding of social services, there is no need to elaborate because most of us know the score, even battled it in our own locale. But Pascual Marquina's project Headquarters is a truly daring effort to redirect institutional funds into local acts of sustainable resistance. One group of artist-interventionists that call themselves Campbaltimore have been meeting for months not with other artists, but with the fragmented array of community housing, labor, and urban activists opposed to the systematic privatization of the city's resources. Gilbert's recent actions therefore have a rich and forceful history, one that I wish his passionate letter, no doubt written in collaboration with Pascual Marquina, had made more evident. (Or would more focus on his past career simply added fuel to those who read his act as self-serving?)

Gilbert's resignation and the letter that explains his deed are part and parcel of one person's effort to radically transform the role of arts administrator into that of engaged, political participant. I suspect nothing less than that seemed appropriate to him in light of the material he selected, or that selected him, for his inaugural exhibition about current revolutionary circumstances in Venezuela. For despite all of the structural, economic, and historical reasons that efforts to transform the affect of arts administration from one of passivity to passion, from neutrality to commitment, will end in some form of defeat --my own, short-lived curatorial tenure at the New Museum included-- there is every reason to seize these opportunities to reveal, as Gilbert states, the museum's bourgeois values which are "really in most respects simply the cultural arm of upper-class power." After all, it is the institutional frame and the servitude it extracts that must be demystified, most especially now, with conditions as they are.

Gregory Sholette June 8, 2006

Fight or Flight

2006-06-24T09:29:00.000+10:00

Tatlin demonstrates the Letatlin

A bizarre little wrangle on The Art Life about whether there is an avant-garde has finally crystallized some thoughts that have been brewing away ever since mayhem’s not so recent posts on the current precariousness of art, communities and intellectual life, here and here.

We all have a major influence hidden away somewhere in our skeleton closet like a long lost first great love, and mine is Vladimir Yevgrafovich Tatlin, for me a far greater artist than Picasso or the current conventional favourite, the court fool turned king, Marcel Duchamp. Of the three, only Tatlin with his slogan “Art into Life” dared to step beyond the art world. By embracing utilitarianism in his designs for workers clothes and his stove and his aeroplane designs he extended the debate about the nature of art beyond anything that we have been able to grapple with until now.

Ultimately his whole project faltered because its ambition ran headlong into Stalin’s tyranny. At that point he deftly stepped sideways into his own version of the artist fool by producing the Letatlin, the winged bicycle that would give every worker the freedom of flight. Its lovingly constructed inadequacy and its obvious inability to soar to the heavens neatly encapsulated both his own history and the absurdity of the failed Bolshevik state. It is hard to believe that the authorities were so lacking in a sense of irony that he got away with it and survived the purges of the 1930s. I see his final years in the decade after the second world war, painting apparently conventional flower paintings, as a sort of consciously Voltairean ending, (“Cela est bien dit, répondit Candide, mais il faut cultiver notre jardin”) an apparent surrender that still triumphed by celebrating the most fundamental joys of life in the face of totalitarianism. It’s a solution that still appeals. In other words Tatlin is the artistic patron saint of the times to come, or the times that are already upon us.

Which brings us back to the present. Most of my life I have despised the very idea of an artistic avant-garde just as I despised notions of a vanguard party leading us workers to revolution. It has been an easy position to take given the way the whole idea (like “subversiveness” and “transgression”) had been appropriated by the art business as a marketing slogan. But I have become increasingly uneasy about dismissing it. For starters, the wonderful Susan Buck-Morss has demonstrated how complex a concept “avant-garde” was in the cultural political ferment of post revolutionary Russia. And over the last decade I have become aware of numerous artists and groups all over the world working in marginalised collaborative groups and communities on uncollectable highly politicised projects, so many in fact that it must now be clear that they do constitute a sort of avant-garde again. Or at least they do as long as they continue to work for the communities where they live rather than becoming content providers for the art corporations like the biennale franchises.

And don’t get me wrong here, we all should make money out of our art, it is just a case of that subtle distinction between being the master or the slave of your own work and the art system. But mayhem rightly points out how inevitable commercialisation is, and the best of intentions will become overwhelmed by the mendacity and greed of many who will jump on the bandwagon – already social art is the buzzword and it will be used to justify endless banalities - trust me, in my lifetime I’ve had to sit through hundreds of hours of abysmal "workers" theatre. So this new radical art will only have a limited life span before it is destroyed by repressive tolerance and capital’s ability to commodify anything.

But before that happens I think we could have a lot of fun.

And on the subject of great minds think alike, go and have a look at this.

CONES OF ZONTACT

2006-06-07T10:39:00.000+10:00

Loose Projects are doing an err... intervention into the biennale on sydney which opens this week.

In spoonerising the theme of this year's biennale, Loose are prviding a catalogue and a series of events tyring to showcase the actual art practices exisisitng in sydney - and align them with the internaitonal art star juggernaut of the biennale.

the CONES Of ZONTACT launch will be held this thursday 8th June at Level 2, 168 Day street Sdyney.

There''ll also be a roundtable discussion on this saturday 10th June from 6-8pm. same place.

Guest Speakers are:

Ian Milliss,
Rheuban Keenan
Zanny Begg
Margaret Mayhew

since 2 of the speakers are on this blog - I thought it would be worth promoting on the OSAS site!

I think the organisers hope to have a more general floor based discussion on the possibilities and limitations of the whole biennale thing in its currently evolved format.

is it parasitic? derivative? derogatory? bloody amazing? boring? irrelevant?

exscuse banal questions above and hope to see you at one of the above

cheers

mayhem

Back to the Program

2006-05-16T12:55:00.000+10:00

this is meant to be a brief little thing - to get people posting again.

The art life has had some feisty comments wars about the non maquarification of East Sydney Teach- and so maybe that's where the steam from this forum is going?

maybe?

or is everyone hunkering down to the onerous tedium of scrabbling on the edges of the culture industry and knowledge economy....shows, marking, proposals, aquittals, teaching etc.....?

I am interested in the condition of precarity as generative of creativity, of ideas, of activity. where threat is a source of interesting things.

the millis show - was a nice reminder of this - how the sixties communities of service economy fringe workers plus 'emerging' artists, and ye olde grande working class, were a soruce of really amazing social ferment......

so different to the isolate pockets of latterday warehouse squatters, occupying discrete not yet colonised zones of real estate in bland bourgeois suburbs like balmain and pyrmont....... or not?

but i segue.

in my own little corner of the sandstone academy. hell i don't even have a corner, it's a space i pass through on occasion - a series of tracks and encounters, but lets call it a corner anyway...

....I'm acutely aware of the current precarity of research,teaching study in arts. Academic merit is a fraught and weak justification for continuing to fund schools of research. Universities are meant to be cash generating corporate cows.

in some circles, i've heard phD students describe their research practice as 'a job', with people actually saying 'I treat it as a job, I go to work and I achieve outcomes.' as if introjecting this neoliberalist bullshit will save them from the cold nasty fact that intellecutal endeavour is NOT valued in our society, and is constantly under threat.

I'm sorry if I incite moans all round by citing Walter Benjamin, but his view of the present, of making hisotyr, of acting in the present as a historical moment but I really believ ethat this sense of CRISIS is what makes any work really CRITICAL.

I woke up today and thought 'what if I found out that I was going to die in the next 6 months?', and I realised that I would keep doing what I'm doing. that this matters to me that much, and that this is my 'life work' - in the beuyssian sense. I would define 'life-work' as that activity that we continue in the face of the immanence of death, with an immense sense of the precarity and fragility of our activity and our life, and of something that we give ourselves to in that moment of accepting the precarity of life, the terror of death and the awareness of its inevitability.

I believe that art is any activity which encompasses this 'life work'. It includes writing, teaching and social interventions of play, encounter and community building. I think any institution, grouping, porject which wants to attch itsllef to 'art form', must somehow embody this form of life work, and a strong sense of the precarity and precioussness of what this means.

In relation to my former art school, I'm aware of the rich sense of community I gained by attending it, but this is one that has largely flourished outside of its walls. so I'm wondering what will happen to this commuity as the art school is faced with its own collapse or transformation.

I went to a very odd meeting at the sandstone pillar yesteday. Amidst gargoyles, desks and the fusty murmures of atrophied adolescent neuroticism, there was a subtext of the immense fragility of our endeavour. The university is an institution which begrudgingly supports academic research or intellectual endeavour, and teaching and research are primarily forms of cash generation. Art departments, even arts departments are under threat. the activity of researhc has to be concealed, disguised, somehow fudged beneath the requisite administrative parameters of KEY PERFMRANCE NDICATORS. (like levels of coursework enrollments, or timely phD completions) Within this i'm intrigued to see how people behave. Intrigued to see who bury themselves further into their little burrows of books, words, dreams. Waiting out their tenure, while counting their superannuation, acting the cynic. their dusty gloom, barely aleviated by catty snipes at other academics researchers. Playing dead. Immense adolescent impotence, that evokes images of Casuauban from eliots middlemarch. Insipid dreams of the morally dead. However other profs, chat, move, respond. Still talk, form links, still teach. find new activites, new entres, new endeavours, new exchanges. Universities are still immsensely privileged sites of encounter, of words, books, bodies, classrooms, access to absorbing, circulating and creating ideas, and community.

i'd stilll say the main benefit of the institutions i've attended has been access to social networks. Art school, enabled me to learn the rules in order socially negotiate 'the art scene', and university did much the same. Hell so did squatting. In fact most of the people I know now - are through networks of squatting or study! (even internet networks usually feed into or feed off real world connections in these other spheres) Why is that?

is it the precarity? the limited time? the proximity of physical and idealised community? is it the site?
or is the activity?

this question is going to make me sound horribly elitist and privileged, but, WHAT DO WORKERs DO? How do people, stuck together spending vast amounts of time collectively living a form of psychic death (and don't EVER try to tell me that work, the labouring monkey suit, flouro gear, rubber gloves hourly rate watch the clock shit is ANYTHING but psychic death) actuallly create honest and meaninglful relationships? OK there's always the pub later, but spending 8-10 hours a day, lying to yourself and lying to other people cannot be washed away wiht a few cold schooners.. And most sydney pubs suck. How do people survive in the burbs? I've only lived in country towns or around newtown, so I don't know. Apart from life modelling, none of the jobs I've had have offered even the remotest connection to rich social networks. How do people cope?

I'm asking these questions here, because whatever we mean by open source, does need to consider the social geopgraphies of what we'd like to promote in our walless pedagogical project. I'm also painfully aware of my own extremely limited experience in creating comunities and wonder how that impacts on what I'd be able to constribute to such a project.

what do other people think?

Consider yourself invited

2006-05-02T23:16:00.000+10:00

I apologise for this self indulgent misuse of our blog, but you don't have a retrospective every day (thank imaginary deity).

You are invited to the opening of my retrospective and website
on Wednesday, 10 May 6-8 pm at Macquarie University Gallery

Key thinkers - an open source

2006-05-01T19:09:00.000+10:00

i can't think of a better place to plug free talk fests.
Last year's series of lectures was packed out - and I remember befor eI went bakc to uni tha tI was always desperate to find some intersting source of ideas.

So here's the cut and paste. Hope its useful

The Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences presents the
2006 Key Concepts Public Lecture Series. Seven free public lectures
presented by prominent University of Sydney thinkers exploring the
issues that affect our common existence.

Enlightening, at times entertaining and certain to provoke conversation,
the series will be presented on Wednesday evenings from 6.15pm to 7.30pm
at the Footbridge Theatre, Parramatta Road, The University of Sydney.

Launching the 2006 series, Andrew Fitzmaurice will present a lecture on
the concept of 'Terra nullius'.

The term has roused emotion ever since it first entered public debate in
the 1980s because it captured our sense of the injustice of Aboriginal
dispossession. In the past two years terra nullius has become doubly
emotive as a number of political commentators have sought to show that
the idea had no part in our history. Terra nullius certainly is
conspicuously absent from the historical record in Australia.

In this lecture, Fitzmaurice will propose, however, that terra nullius
was generated by the history of European colonisation, or European
'expansion'. It is because terra nullius was created by our historical
experience that it has exerted such a hold on contemporary political
imagination.

Other lectures in the series are:
10 May 'Nationalism' Glenda Sluga
17 May 'Freedom' Duncan Ivison
24 May 'Truth' Huw Price
31 May 'Racism' Ghassan Hage
7 June 'Death' Jennann Ismael
14 June 'Globalisation' Raewyn Connell

Details of the full program can be found at www.rihss.usyd.edu.au

Venue: Footbridge Theatre, Parramatta Road, The University of Sydney
Time: 6.15pm - 7.30pm, Wednesday evenings
Entry: Free. No bookings necessary.
Contact: Nicholas Haskins
T: 9036 7219
E: nicholas.haskins@rihss.usyd.edu.au
W: www.rihss.usyd.edu.au

Please join us for refreshments after the lecture.

Just talk amongst yourselves

2006-04-24T13:43:00.000+10:00

This post is related to berkeley's comments in one of the other posts, but I've put it here on its own because it needs its own clearly distinct discussion.

On one level, I agree wholeheartedly with berkeley's comments, with the proviso that although its time to start extending I also enjoy the current free form nature of this blog, so it is the eternal political battle between the tyranny of structure and the tyranny of structurelessness.
You should also remember that this blog had only been going for a week before there were people on TAL saying the same thing berkeley is now saying (although less politely). Spiv had great fun going on about it. Things take time, and you need to have fun along the way. This won't last long if we set deadlines and turn it into work, or if we prescribe the form, it has to just evolve as we all have time to do things. I love the way gricegrocers wants to use colours, a different typeface, and poetic structure, or mayhems dyslexic stream of consciousness, and I hope they enjoy or at least tolerate my windy ruminations. The last thing I want is po faced academic rigidity, or at least I want it contained within the areas where it is valuable ie areas where we accumulate confirmed statements of fact that must be 100% accurate.

But that also raises the point that berkeley obviously has a quite clearly worked out idea of what the OSAS should be and it would be nice to hear it spelt out even further, not just in terms of how we might do it eg a wiki but exactly what might be the content of that wiki. Wikis are only useful in certain situations, ad an web2 style wiki like wikispace is as limited as this blog.

There is no doubt at all that the current basic blog structure is only of limited short-term use, but we all knew that. It was simply a case of seeing what happened for a while and then deciding where to go from there. I don't think it is all that limited, however, because we have always made it clear that anyone can post things if they contact the reader and ask to be given posting rights. Obviously there is a mild sort of control could be exercised but no one who has asked has been refused and there is hardly any reason anyone would be. And of course anyone can comment. So if you want to make more developed proposals just mail the reader and ask to be put on as a contributor.

So to sum up, I think the issue,boils down to this.... How do we create a site that allows the most free-form contributions possible with other highly structured contributions in an atmosphere of glasnost and perestroika, (so to speak, openness and transparency).

My humble suggestion is as follows

1. We set up a new site. We regard the site as a portal to a whole range of different sites and manners of contributing.
2. We create that portal using an off-the-shelf CMS like WordPress because it is very simple for non programmer users. It also has reasonable tagging capailities to help in categorising and searching material.
3. Within that we create static pages to structure the site. Static pages can be headers for interest areas that can then contain ongoing blogs on particular issues.
4. Some of these static pages would link to sub domains or completely different websites run by others people.
5. Other static pages would link to wikis on particular interest areas. Wikis are best for building accumulations of info, how tos, histories. Mediawiki (as used for Wikipedia) has great features like the ability to run discussions around each of the changes made. But it is inflexible and stodgy. Nonetheless it would be excellent for some subject areas. TikiWiki can be customised more for particular uses, it would be better for other interest areas.

Finally there have been a few emails around about all getting together in real space to bounce a few of these ideas around. I will finally have time in mid June , but I'm not sure how others work loads will be by then.

What does everyone think?

ART the manifesto part 1

2006-04-15T20:15:00.000+10:00

You can see I'm getting very bored. I've put half of this on this blog and the rest is on artandmayhem so none of the other OSAS's come up here and wring my neck...

This is a great point for me to try to articulate something that I don't think I'm doing at all. It's like trying to explain Spanish or playing the piano or growing cell cultures. But it makes a nice break, from trudge typing through long slow meandering interviews - that seem to make about as much point as a bloody cricket test match. Green. White. Sun. Red ball. Yellow bat. Green grass stains. Yes its all good, yes its all no good. It's no good, god its good. Not. Gaaaah!

I like Elizabeth Grosz's last biofetish explanation of ART. That it’s some animal fecund thing. I heard that and saw glistening bits of Bataille and Deleuze sparkling around my head in a sensuous excess of autumn leaves and really drippy pink sticky flouro oil paint. Multiplying madly. Creatures create. Creatures do shit that makes no sense, that is not economically rational at all. It is not deterministic and the rationality is one that is aligned with process rather than product. Like playing solitaire or stupid board games. Lining up leaves or collecting blue things, or having a reproductive system based on menstruation. What kind of evolution is that?

I've been meaning to read Popper’s later work - the one where he goes 'they took it too far, my anti-determinist thing - those pesky humanities philosophers - I just wanted a more flexible framework for understanding experimental change - damn those postmodernists'. but, yeah, I get distracted. I've been meaning to get back into the studio too.

So art could be, can be, has been anything, right?

So why do I cringe when some sad fuck at some party comes up to me and says, yeah, err, I'm kind of an artist, you know, I do this stuff where we organise information and.... (and like, he works in RETAIL or something)???

Why do I cringe when I walk past that nice dykey cafe with tall the well publicised 'queer art exhibition' that makes me want to rip my fingernails out?

Part of me, does after all, embrace bad art. I love the excrescence of it, the towering piles of shit surging from people’s small minds and inept fingers everywhere. At a certain point, bad art makes less sense and does less damage than bad surgery, or bad writing, or bad computer programming. And it’s often easier to ignore than bad music too, and it lasts much less than bad acting.

I decided to go to art school about a decade ago - when that book 'the artists way' came out. I heard about it from a North American woman - who used to go to the same community college painting class that I was attending. This was great - because self-help books are always far more fun when read out in a Californian accent. It was a fantastically cheesy tome, playing on the romanticist myth or the artist - and constructing the perfect authentic self - based around notions of autonomy and imagination and play. And then it was such a best seller that when the sequel came out 'the artists way at work' no one really seemed to notice!

But yeah, I bought the myth of authenticity, or autonomy, of serious play, and I still do. (you know that line at the end of Foucault’s the order of things about Humanism – being like a face drawn in the sand that gets away by the tide of history? – THAT SCARES ME). I'm just a bit more knowing and cautious about the structures whereby that's managed. My own art training was in painting, at a reasonably traditional school (well, modernist) - which I attended - mainly because there was no HECS on the then diploma course. Actually at art school I was barely interested in painting at all - and could hardly draw, and barely learned, but painters seemed to get the best deal, and my friends were in painting so that's where I stayed.

I probably learnt more about paint afterwards. And I learnt, not only the technical stuff, but also the imaginative stuff, how minds and experiences are formed - while forming - and are - while not entirely constructed by language - then certainly mediated - by - not even language - but 'meaning making structures'. I think that meaning making structures - are patterns and habits and forms of play by which we structure our interactions with our selves, our own thoughts, our own bodies, the spaces around us, the materials we have. The stuff we touch and shape and use.

In terms of THE ART PROJECT - then I have to write about my metier - my media/speciality - because that's the one that I know. I'd call myself a painter - just because I've had a reasonably serious relationship with paint for the past ten years. There are certain words that I only know in Spanish or French or English -and certain sensations, expressions, states that I only know in 'paint'. I know what type of gestures, consistencies, colours and marks make me happy or sad or awkward or anxious in the same way that certain sounds delight my ears - or certain physical touches arouse or repel me. I know painting like I know my own body, or my (ex) lover's body. The texture, my habitual movements, the ones I fight against. The bits where I fuck up or fail or stumble -and where things flow and fly like magic.

Maybe this is why I’ve hardly been near my studio for the past month. Can I still call myself a painter, when I’m not painting? And how long can that go for? I’m spending more time wrestling with words at the moment. My sex life, rage, tears, grief, hysteria, pain, joy, lust etc. – contorts itself inward and gets hammered out on the keyboard as my bum hardens on the seat below me. Fine stuff but it’s not paint. There’s no drip, no odd gestures. No flays of pink, no flinging of Payne’s grey. No working up of yellows and greens with the right bits of oil, no transparent slicks, no sacred muds. This time my thoughts aren’t being worked out in the movement of arms and legs. No pacing up and down before my easel, no panting. I’m not even listening to music. The thoughts get pushed right down. I try to walk them off – because I need to feel this space, this stillness of words. It’s not painting. It’s not mad movements in space with some coloured semi liquid – semi solid hanging off and object in my hand, or smeared across my elbows and hips, on my face, in my hair. Hopefully some of it ends up spread across a surface that arbitrarily ends somewhere. The only rule for painting, is that you use paint, or something like it. Like using letters or a script if you’re writing. That’s it. I wouldn’t call myself a writer if I wasn’t writing, so why call myself a painter if I’m not doing it?

The best analogy for my artistic metier (painting) is sex. Not only because it tallies nicely with Liz Grosz's animal play kind of thing, but also because there's a lot of cultural attention given to sex - and its something people can identify with. Sex is constantly fraught with anxiety, failure, incompetence - as well as intense joy, crazy pleasure - mad terror, tears, weird smells and messy fluids. I can't really say that our culture allows much space for that sort of thing at all - I mean even food has been gourmetted within an inch of its life - or dulled down to scary bland industrial pap. Most food experiences in anglo industrialised societies are intensely simulacral - we're just consuming a bunch of signifiers, rather than having some sort of rich physical interaction with stuff that could have an element of surprise...... I think that's why I'm also fascinated with pornography - because it represents an increasing cultural colonisation and commodification of what has been a reasonably private and largely secretive experience. Look at the way vulvas have entered the regimes of public bodily maintenance - with every second beautician offering bikini waxes! Even scrotums and perineums are part of consumer cultures personal maintenance. How many men getting a sack and crack wax check out their own perineum in the mirror? Its not that easy! so why do people bother? and what has this got to do with art? or OSAS?

I'd like to think that ART - as a culturally contested zone where desires, play, surprise and rules get mediated. Of course this means that any activity that is 'avant garde' is placed immediately in a position of recuperation within consumer culture and this is largely what ART institutions are designed to do: manage creativity so it can be harnessed and projected back into the capitalist imaginary. The specualtive art market is just the financial fetishizing of this very significant cultural role that ART actually plays in consumer society. I also think that 'outsider' art is just as implicated within capitalist cultural management as anything else. And I don’t see kitsch as some sort of quasi-primitivist authentic parallel universe. I think shunting art into this little space of ‘outsiderism’ often just facilitates the acute conformity, either of the individuals concerned, or of the society that champions it. The most bourgeoise boring fucks in the world wet themselves at the idea of the artist as ‘enfant terrible’, and the real tragedy of genuinely madness – is that mentally ill people are incredibly boring. There are few surprises in a solid word salad.

So I think art is implicated with capitalism. Artists do operate largely as extreme sports entrepreneurs. Most of us are just fledgling bits of the petite bourgeoise who find new forms of real estate (from squats to warehouse apartments), new fashion (obvious) new communication systems (blogs, podcasting, film) and other accroutements. And also new forms of self sufficiency. Artists work from home, work odd hours, don’t unionise, don’t separate themselves from their work. We’re a perfect model for the new TEAMCREW corporate slaves of the new knowledge economy. Why is it that so many artists either come from middle class (open minded but cautious parents) families, or drag along huge suitcases of their aspirational class resenting baggage?

I shouldn’t be so cynical should I? Why do I cane the avant-garde – when so much art, especially in Sydney is not even aspiring to being avant-garde? Its just really drab flat stylised shit – that’s about as transgressive as a misspelt cappuccino in a country town? You know the kath & kim stuff on Glenmore road, or the evil evil toadlike shit of Pro Hart & Charles Billich, that sucks the soul out through your eyeballs. People reckon they are “aussie heros” but people also vote for John Howard. There’s no excuses for confusing demagogy with popularism.

I think its because the avant-garde still represents the capitalist imaginary and its an imaginary that still holds true for most people – and almost certainly for the readers/contributors of OSAS. How many of us are scraping by the fringes of academia/curatorship – or some other little fucked up corner of the knowledge economy? (Who else is living off a trust account? Or an inheritance?) Just on the edge of some nice hidey hole – that we try to despise while clinging to like a life-raft as we drift on the sea of precarity… Hell! there’s no way I’d say no to a lectureship or some nice curatorial position – would you? Isn’t OSAS also about creating our own circulations – our own new niche that can allow us to wedge our way into the systems that exist. I’ve heard that a couple of uni lecturers now mention my BLOG in their art writing courses. It gives them easy kudos to be talking about blogging – when they only publish where they can earn DEST credit points, and it might help me brow-nose my way into the odd guest lecturing scam – where I get paid to be the officially sponsored freak for an hour. Queer theory anyone? Would you like it illustrated or served with Deleuze? Then I can say I’m an artist, maybe show a coupla slides from some naked whacky performance piece – but no, not my oil paintings. No that won’t quite do, will it?

the big B (aka Pierre)

2006-04-01T20:33:00.000+11:00

OK This is going to be a bit of a work in progress because my brain is in the toilet. So this may be a blog style wiki attempt to engage in some theoretical discourse. - and maybe - that's what we could start doing on this blog perhaps??? - ya know? - "the stupid as a painters guide to critical theory"????

Ghassan Hage (cool anthropology dude from Sydney Uni) gave a really nice introductory lecture on Pierre Bourdieu last year at sydney University. The lecture was free and open and if he runs it again - I'll let people know. Ghassan has done lots of qualittative ethnogrpahic researhc on contemproary communities - particular pelstinian disapora - and he has written some punchy but elegant stuff on contemrpoary austrlaina racism. I *think* he takes a structured/sociological approach to analysing racism inpopular culture - and he uses PB's framworks to do this..... (but i've read his stuff very quickly and briefly - and I need to read books 3 times before my brain remembers anything

Life Facts: Pierre Bourdieu (In strine say his name as Bored Yer) came from COrreze in central france (same region as Jaques Chriac). Its a hole of a place and I bet he was glad to get out. He was a university sociologist - doing lots of nice qualitative ethnography - partcularly of the culture industries (see books I have read below), but in recent years - decided to adopt a higher profile as a public intellectual. I think the later years were inspired by Jacues chiracs government. Apparently PB was extremely worried about the possibility for independent research continuing when the naiton was being run by a bunch of right wing ingorant crypto fascist clots - and he decided that research could only be independent - if it was acutally contested and fought for in the public sphere. so in addition to writing cool books and journal articles, he went on demos and strikes and stuff and went on lots of chat shows. He became a bit of a leftie saint in the media in France. Nouvelle Observeteur did a big frature on him when he died - but that doen't detract from the quality of his writings. since he died (end of 2001) he's become a bit of a hotshot word to bandy around Australian critical cognoscetti circles. this isn't helped by the fact that Artspace ran some big symposium "the Rules of Art" in homage to 2002. I was working that day and couldn't go - and I'm still quite cheesed about the fact - but if anyone did go or knows how to get copies of the proceedings - lemme know.

The Bourdieu I have read - are basically 3 books: "the rules of art", "the love of art", and "distinctions". I've read them only in translation in english.

"Rules of Art" - is more about literary than art criticism, and is based around Gustave Flaubert (who wrote Madame bovary). I guess Flaubert is the 'field' that PB analyses. PB was a sociaologist first and the reason why he is intersting to art(s) writers is because he brought a fresh approach to analysing artworks/practices. rules of Art is nice - because he gave an acocunt of the Frnehc 19C avante garde as a socilogical entity - and had nice defamiliarisation things going on so the narrative of 'the assent of modernism' was able to be looked at in a context - and some of its limitations accounted for sensibly and clearly.

"the love of art" - is a classic ethnographic style text. He and the other guy (the co-author whose name I've forgotten) did a whole heap of interviews with patrons at big french art gallleries - and analyised their income, aspirations, backgrounds, views of art etc. In france, ART is this freaky fucking state religion that the grande bourgeoise totally wet themselves aobut all the time - and it is an extremely elitist aspirational kind of thing - so analysing art like some exotic little social practice - was a bit subversive in this context. Especially since it was done in the 1960's.

"distictions" - was written in the 1980's - and covers similar turf to the love of art - but he uses more sociological discussion of various layers of the art public. actually my mind has gone completely blank - even though i've spent the past 2 years reading bits and citing bits of it in bits of writing that i've done. It could be because I've got a full bladder and am arrranging my evening by SMS.

Distinctions has more of the famous Bourdieu stuff about "habitas" in it - plus his analysis of how aspirationaism actually works itself out in cultural practices.

PB is interesting because he's analysed class not as a fixed thing - but looked at what happens as poeple negotiate their class mobility and identity. I guess this is why his stuff on the 19C parisian avante garde is so interesting - because he was one of the early people to describe artists' own quite complicit role in challenging but also supporting? err - being supported by capitalsm - particulalyr the more entrepreneurial end of emerging bourgeouises.

Bascially if you've ever wondered why 'arty' suburbs slide so fast into the morass of new money boringness, then Pierre's the man you should be reading.
Habitas? - kind of a funny term - where you want to be, where you imagine yourself to be, whihc is not always where you are........

Pierre also had some great postmarxist sociology on time, retirement and the uselessness of leisure, which is right up my Raole Vaneigem (situationist)loving little street.

I think I like distinctions - because he analyses various pretentionus wankers seriously, in the sense of showing the inflected and contested nature of originality, authenticity and appreciation in art. Other people have done this further since - sociology of art -and in some art-pedagogy..... I'm interested in it for my own research because he provides a model - not only for doing sociology with various art communities (contmeprary, professional, amateur, traiditonal etc.), and emphaiszing wha practics occur and the attitudes that form them.

I also find his approach an extremely refreshing change from the semiotic emphasis in a lot of art theory - which focusses on finding meaning in certain images or objects (or artifacts of practices) - and which I find overly textual. i'm interested in why poeple do bad drawings, why people make certain kitsch shit, or do things which seem meaningless......... and what meaning they derive from that.

Art after conceptualism

2006-03-15T18:29:00.000+11:00

I’ve wanted to comment to comment on the last few postings for weeks but been too busy. However the mini debate on TAL has prompted me to pull my finger out. Reader, I’m not in any way opposed to theory in the broader sense i.e. thinking and writing about what you are doing and your understanding of what you are doing. But I think the most pertinent quote was Raymond Williams in which he expresses the complexity of the interaction between theory and practice. Nonetheless it boils down to the realization that changing the world or changing your understanding of the world is a false dichotomy because there is an interaction and I’m always amazed at the ability of academics to dress up a truism like that as some sort of profound and original insight. As reader says, the guys gotta make a living.

The problem I have with the great god “POMO Theory” as it has developed in the art world over recent decades is that it is both narrow and shallow. I have a passable knowledge of a whole range of other type of theories (pattern languages, for instance) that can be applied to art with equal relevance and I’ve never come across anything in pomo theory that I hadn’t already found in some types of Buddhist theory written over two thousand years ago - that makes you realize how ethnocentric and fashion driven most of this discussion is.

In the end it all boils down to power relationships. There are more stakeholders in the art world than artists who are merely the worst paid stakeholders, and powerless because they are constantly competing against each other. No matter what artists think they are doing, and no matter how good they are at doing it, their conventional success is entirely in the hands of the other stakeholders and they are almost powerless to influence that except by signing up with one of those other groups of stakeholders. Each group then promotes and supports the art and artists that support them. Academics support artists who illustrate theory (e.g. the lovably incompetent Sunday philosophers of Art & Language) because that makes academics look important, commercial galleries support artists who manufacture easily handled saleable objects (the art equivalent to the glowing red but flavorless supermarket tomato or perhaps the fifty different varieties of water that are all just, errrrr... water, with fifty different labels), collectors love fashionable art because first you look cool then it can be turned over for a quick profit (you know whose work I mean), institutional galleries support BIG ART because that justifies BIG GALLERIES and run by directors on BIG SALARIES, curators and artists both love installation and performance art designed for events like biennales because it can justify and pay for lots of free travel to install/perform it, and so it goes on and on.

So what is to be done? Well, you just try and survive and swap your art works for Italian villas if you can (actually it was just a very small farmhouse of a few rooms in very bad condition) and enjoy life, as Kosuth does. Important as Kosuth was, he had pretty much used up his only idea by the mid 70s. The Art & Language group in general had the same problem, their theory did not allow much room to manoeuvre and the interest since then has been in seeing how they could play it out once the group collapsed in the mid 70s. Burn made a smart move in latching onto the more lively and radical Sydney activist political art scene and Mel Ramsden did equally well in developing a viciously witty line in art world self satire. Kosuth has been left slowly foundering with a product line of over produced neon light quotes, an over blown rehash of his early work that adds nothing to it although the installations are usually beautiful and impressive.

So when I say theory is just another word for doing nothing I mean that it is very easy to theorise change but extremely difficult to bring it about. Can it be done? Yes, but it means giving up, permanently, any expectation of conventional art world success, in fact it means giving up most conventional ideas of being an artist. How many people who enter the art world are really prepared to then risk their entire identity as an artist by operating in the multiple complex, demanding and unglamorous roles necessary to create real change? Very few as far as I have ever been able to see although there is a thinly spread community of them across the whole world.

Reflections on JK

2006-03-05T23:51:00.000+11:00

The last couple of posts have involved quotes taken from Art After Philosophy and After. There's a couple of things that are worth mentioning in terms of the subjectivity of the position that I find myself reading from. Firstly, as I've realised through the process of re-reading this book it was pretty important to my development as an artist when I first read it in the second year of my undergraduate studies, and it was important because many of the imperatives that Kosuth identifies are as relivant today as when I first read them, ( re-reading has made me conscious of the fact that I have, up until this point unconsciously incorporated many of the positions Kosuth articulates into the way i think and talk about art). The other aspect of the lens through which I am re-reading Kosuth's writing is that of having seen one of his more recent installations at Sean Kelly Gallery.

Trying to reconcile this work with his more radical writings is a difficult task. If you click on and scroll through the photos in the link above you'll get an impression of the the minimal/conceptual slickness which dominated my experience of this installation. This work is immaculate. From the stainless steel fittings holding up the sheets of glass, to the text and the mounting for the fluros behind, the whole show oozes the very aesthetisization of conceptual practice that Kosuth so eloquently attacks in some of the pieces he wrote soon after conceptual art gained widespread institutional acceptance. So I guess I've been asking myself, what weight does radical theoretical writing hold if it isn't being reflected in practice? Maybe this is a case of what Ian Milliss describes as theory just being another word for (or perhaps worse an excuse for) doing nothing.

But then I can't totally dismiss Kosuth's writing on the basis of how he makes a buck. Sean Kelly is a commercial gallery and the dude has to make a living, (in unsubstantiated rumor i heard that Kosuth once swapped one of his works for a villa in Italy). I guess for me selling work through a commercial gallery or swapping it for prime real estate is perhaps where a more radical work can begin with the art market simply providing the financial resources to pursue other less profitable avenues. However in Kosuth's case I have yet to come across any evidence that this is what he is doing and given his emphasis on the artist fighting for the meaning of their work it seems like either his ideology or his practice has gone astray.

continuing process

2006-02-21T22:39:00.000+11:00

I do not believe we can go on posing a change of institutions and a change of attitudes as alternatives. From each polarity follows a rigid programme: in the first case, destruction and then innovation of institutions, imagined at some finite point in time; in the second case, a rejection of politics and social activity, with criticism becoming an activity in itself only by an acceptance, however sullen, of all other existing social habits and structures. Each position shares a negative character: an instransigent group against the whole social structure; an intransigent group against the whole intellectual structure. As such each corresponds to the positive needs of many intellectuals in our society; each attitude, I may say, forms almost every day in my mind. Basically, they are the last, and of course serious, positions of our pre-democratic politics; change, there, is essentially against others; to change with others is seen as compromise. Each group, similarly, accepts the liberal separation between individuals and societies, and the related separation between cultural content and cultural institutions; the divergence comes only when one or the other separate entity is seen as decisive.
... The individuals and the institutions will have, essentially, to change together, or they will not change at all. And my reason for going on working on these lines is that I know, from observing myself and others in very different institutions, that this is a continuing process, in which the moments of choice and of direction are often subtle and delicate, though the comitments they lead to are often profound. What I have tried to envisage is a radical change which yet includes a human continuity and i believe the pressure for this, in our actual society, is the most intense and valuable pressure we have. The job of any of us working in this field is articulation, for it is when it is articulate that the pressure becomes a discipline and a programme.

Raymond Williams

Still re-reading Kosuth's writings, that's cited by him in "Comments on the Second Frame"

just another word for

2006-02-02T15:17:00.000+11:00

"Don't, for heavens sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

it seems we begin with two points: an institution and a conversation. An art school, simply put, is a representative of the institutionalization of art. It represents the world as a collection of rules, practices, traditions, habits -about art- that are organised within a social order. The presumptions and prescriptions that are taught there are a de facto description of what art is. When you describe art, you are also describing how meaning is produced, and subjectivity is formed. In other words you are describing reality. By teaching a description of reality you are engaged in constructing it, and in this sense an art school is a political institution as much as a cultural one (insofar as one can separate them to begin with)."

from "Teaching to learn (a conversation about 'how' and 'why')", Joseph Kosuth.

Ok so that's probably a bit more on the theory side of the equation. and I have to admit I haven't had much of a chance to work on the practical aspects of establishing something a little more functional than this blog when it comes to the OSAS. but I guess I felt it necessary to post and represent the much maligned theoretical aspects of this endeavour and renew what for me is the power of theory and words to drive practical developments. In this case theory might be another word for "doing what you can" with the recognition of the place of reading and digesting through writing, in inspiring action.

I think theory and discussion are also useful at this early stage because they provide a space to be totally idealistic about what an OSAS might become. In the spirit of that sort of idealism there is the chance for an OSAS to shift Kosuth's description of the art institution. If we accept that "By teaching a description of reality you are engaged in constructing it" then by engaging all, (not just the "teachers"), in constructing the teaching process, it might be possible to arrive at a kind of "meta-point-of-view" from which it becomes possible to see not only the way we construct reality through the knowledge we engage with, but also how we construct that knowledge.

to complete the loop we might return to the Wittgenstein quote. In this instance non-sense might be what emerges in terms of teaching, but if we pay attention to the function and functioning of the non-sense then important insights can emerge. To follow that one step further one way of paying attention to the non-sense might be to ask why Kosuth started his article with that quote and why am I reiterating it. for me it is for the sake of the second of the two points that Kosuth starts with. The conversation. Without the institution the conversation is all the OSAS has. So at this stage I would heartily encourage all dialogue, whether sense or non-sense and when the heap of shit gets too big then let the moderators move in.

Bobby McGee

2006-01-08T23:02:00.000+11:00

I love the idea of doing an artschool wiki review post......

I've been transcribing interviews with art school directors about art education AND THEY ALL SAY EXACTLY THE SAME THING about traditional skills ..... its quite uncanny.

If only I wasn't scheckled to a university ehtics protocol, I'd do a mix and match puzzle with the comments and each head of school........

Guess its a post-doc project.........

Theory's just an other word for doing nothing

2006-01-08T12:39:00.000+11:00

So let stop theorising and start to develope some objectives. However there's no point to reinventing other peoples mistakes so here's a few links about the history and process of interactive web development.

If we are talking about creating the medium for an OSAS then we are talking about creating a low level type of social software. Visit that link to see a definition and taxonomy of social software so that we know we are all using the same terms. And check out this link to see some interesting comments and lots of other links on how you structure contributions to make it work. As a long term user of forums, etc I would endorse all those comments, the ones I have seen succeed have all worked in the way he suggests. And the ones that fail usually don't conform in one way or another (like flock which with Konqueror is my favourite browser but showing all the signs of collapsing without even getting to a version 1 release). So we do need to discuss process and we could let it develope as a thread of its own.

But there is no point to that discussion without getting on with the real issue which is for some Producers to produce some Content. My art history wiki is progressing but won't be up and going for a few months. I think something that someone (not me) might do is a listing and links to every known art school and course in Sydney with some comments about the quality? Comments from students who have done a particular course might provide a bit of a guide for other potential students (and provide infinite potential for defamation cases so a bit of light moderation might be in order). But these are just ideas to begin what I think is the very necessary thread outlining and beginning a few projects that we ourselves could do or at least start to do so that there is a bit of real content to attract others to this site.

1st Degree Merda

2006-01-04T03:39:00.000+11:00

1st Degree Merda- a shit qualification

Part of the reason for my intermittent contributions to this blog to date is because I am currently in Mexico. This is only relevant inasmuch as it has given me a slightly different perspective from which to reflect on the social and cultural circumstances that have led to a group of artists voicing their interest in the creation of an OSAS.

In the background

For the sake of discussion we might trace the current thread back to the pre- HECS days of free university education. Since that time we have been steadily moving toward a user pays system that continues to put the squeeze on areas, (such as the visual arts), who’s research interests don’t connect with those of the corporate world. At an academic level this might be seen as a process of weeding out those lecturers whose research refuses the hegemonic pull that would make all knowledge a commodity, while at the student level knowledge already is a commodity. A visual arts graduate in Australia will pay at least $15 000 for their degree, with many likely to be indebted to the government for a considerable period of time. And all that for a degree which is unlikely to secure you work in your chosen field (a shit qualification).

In Mexico

In order to see the specifics of this situation it is worth making a couple of comparisons. Firstly, here in Mexico, it is still possible to receive a free education at the UNAM in Mexico City. While under-equipped in comparison to even the most thread-bare Australian art school, there is a level of intellectual rigor and teacher/student contact at the UNAM which many universities in Australia can no longer muster. Add to this the fact that a degree of any kind (even in visual arts) is very valuable in terms of securing decently paid work in Mexico and you start to see that with a different set of circumstances the imperatives for the creation of this project may be quite different or may not exist at all.

In the States
Half a million dollars for a degree from CALarts.

Back in Aus
So here we are responding to a set of specific circumstances. The units that Ian identifies of Producer-Medium-Content-Audience seem to be useful in responding to these circumstances. From my point of view perhaps the most important contribution that we can make to an OSAS at the moment is at the level of developing the medium. It would seem that a well organised, yet highly flexible structure is one of the keys to an OSAS gaining momentum. The logic I’m following here is that an effective medium will encourage both contributions (content) and audience. Ian’s post maps what seems to be a sensible way of proceeding in the development of the medium.

I would envision that an OSAS would have a section that would be dedicated to the development of the medium (including a space for suggesting improvements and another for effective communication between those working on improvements, in a similar vein to the Ubuntu Linux link posted by Ian). I think David’s point about anonymity is worth adding to. Given the fact that this is a reoccurring question in many blog discussions I think it would definitely be worth organising the various points of view on this question into another section so that people can locate there own position within the overall debate on anonymity and contribute to an informed discussion, while also understanding the implications of a choice to contribute anonymously or otherwise.

I think it is both the great strength and the weakness of an OSAS that any ideas that we suggest at this stage are most likely to be realised (at least in part) by those who are making the suggestions. This connects with what David says in relation to Richard Greyson’s Ideal work. Ideally an OSAS would be as speculative space which would morph with the suggestions and work of the students. Yeah this is idealistic, but it is an idealism that is grounded by its connections to a specific set of very real circumstances. Those circumstances which I outlined above are amongst my motives for contributing to this project and are part of the reason why the idea of an OSAS made so much sense to me when it was suggested.

Greetings from afar

2005-12-27T01:40:00.000+11:00

Dear all

I'm a tad cyber challenged in the banlieus of Paris so will lurk quietly on this until I get back to OZ.

am still extremeley interested so hope to contribute more in the autumn

cheers

mayhem

Get educated, not credentialled

2005-12-13T20:53:00.000+11:00

My apologies for being the late Ian Milliss, just too much end of year work to do. I also did not have this in mind a week ago but it fits in with so many other things I’m working on that it deserves to be followed up. Well done Ben for taking the initiative.

I agree with David that an OSAS would be neither an alternative nor a rival to the conventional art schools, like him I see it as a clearing house for info on art schools and art school alternatives, a place to find a wider range of art resources, art information sources and viewpoints, history, theory, art activities of all sorts. In other words a way to get educated about art in as wide or as narrow a way as you might choose. And I emphasise education, the acquisition of information and knowledge and hopefully wisdom, rather than the acquisition of credentials.

And it is interesting how this has sprung from Art Life, now busily claiming credit on the principle that you should never be modest because if you don’t claim credit then someone else will. Of course we commentators claim credit for the modest success of Art Life on the principle that we are what people read, not the reviews which are merely there to trigger the shit fights. See comments further down.

Being practical as well as cynical as well as idealist I want t get straight to the point about a few things. All activities like this have four components:

a producer
a medium
content
an audience

And unless all are functional you will fail. As David says that’s not the end of the world, we can all walk away with nothing lost but a bit of time. But we may as well try and even if we fail we may lay the groundwork for some others to succeed, I’ve been involved in a lot of projects that ended up like that in my time.

Producers
Open source projects are of course by definition the product of many hands and minds all contributing in different ways. However, despite the naïve beliefs of some people, they have to be highly organized to succeed. There is an enormous body of debate stretching back at least a decade on the issues involved in the necessary organization. For anyone interested you can start to get an idea of the complexity of issues involved if you look at the organizational pages of Wikipedia. Obviously we are not talking about operating on that scale but the same issues exist at every scale. If there is interest I’ll put together a whole post at a later date about the debates in the management of interactive and cooperative web based projects. The short version is that too much management will kill involvement and too little will kill involvement and your credibility. The immediate solution is just to get on with it in a few achievable project areas setting up ad hoc procedures as required while being aware of potential formal frameworks. In case anyone wants to get all romantic and bullshitty about freedom etc etc etc it should be pointed out firstly that the reason the extreme right is always in favour of formlessness (small government, deregulation, freedom in the George-Bush-in-Iraq sense of the word) is that it makes it easier to exploit and bully people and secondly that it makes sense for us to learn from the history of similar projects rather than reinventing their disasters. Some level of structure and moderation that defines equality will defend the rights and involvement of everyone. It helps if you assume a level of good will on the part of everyone involved (always difficult when you consider the way the ArtLife trolls drive away all but the very thick skinned like us).

In the shortest term while we work some general ideas, the way Ben is proceeding by giving posting rights to whoever contacts him by email is the right way to go.

Medium
As Ben pointed out early on, blogger is not the best way of going about this, but it is OK in the short term. We should set up a few links, or rather some posts full of links , to similar projects in existence elsewhere.

The next step would be to set up a CMS based web site with a blog section discussion forum, links to developing projects, wiki area for proposals and ideas for projects etc. There are endless numbers of models for this now in existence. A fairly elegant example is the Ubuntu Linux site - check out the community tab for some excellent solutions to the organization issues mentioned above.

Content
At the risk of sounding complacent, this is an issue that is going to have to solve itself. We have projects of our own, there could be other content from the most banal ie the existing art schools, but with comments added by whoever wants to, art classes by artists, the real studio system ie working as an artists assistant, all the way to things like the University of Openness and icols. I suppose I would draw the line at people cyber squatting and using up our bandwidth for projects with no discernable relevance. Other than that I think it should self regulate ie we should have a system for reviewing and rating contributions, in other words you can do anything but you will have to be prepared to cop criticism for it. This is the part where everyone involved would need to work to involve others, if content doesn’t grow it all won’t happen.

Audience
Or students or whatever you want to call them. The issue here is how to get them to visit the site and use it or even get involved in creating it. The key to this is interesting and/or useful content and getting as much publicity as possible through the media, through structuring the site for best google results, and through word of mouth.

Whose property?

2005-12-10T04:41:00.000+11:00

"The more our resources, needs, pleasures, and experiences are socially and legally defined as "property," the more the state is authorized to infiltrate our lives and regulate disputes of ownership. This is happening in the realms of leisure, work and, as stated earlier, international relations. Current consumer technologies of music and image make reproduction inevitable so, as we see when high school kids are busted to make an example, legal and repressive measures are the only way to enforce ownership. In the case of transgenic seeds, farmers sign contracts foregoing the right to reproduce, save, sell, share or give away any of a product which, if used as directed, will reproduce itself. The leading holder of patents in agriculture, Monsanto, has investigated and harassed over 500 farmers in the U.S. for breach of this property agreement which is very similar to an MTA but with much more draconian consequences.[12] A fundamental tenet of membership in the WTO and of all U.S. and E.U. trade agreements with developing nations insists that the trading partner establish and enforce intellectual property regimes consistent with those in the global north. One of the reasons that the U.S. is so eager to help multinationals get transgenic agriculture rooted in the extensively rural global south is that it is practically a one-step process to drive patents and IP into the most basic register of their life and economy."
from
http://www.caedefensefund.org/reflections.html

an opening on an open discussion

2005-12-09T13:12:00.000+11:00

just elaborating on what you said about everyone having to produce and modify the curriculum, it could be that "enrolling" in the open source art school might involve a compulsory contribution to the curriculum, with the initial "students" (we would all be students right?) providing material which would then be rewritten by future students as part of their course work, (course work would be literally just that, working on the course). It seems to me that blogs and discussion groups would be the obvious place to start with a view to making the open source art school as accessible as possible (I mean that in a practical rather than intellectual sense, course content would obviously be left to those who fiddle with it).

Some Provisional thoughts

2005-12-09T07:58:00.000+11:00

Thanks Ben for setting this up. I am not sure where to begin. I guess the best place to start is to throw up some thoughts.

Its been great to see some positive response to the idea over at TAL and also interesting to watch the doubters turn up straight away. Interesting times. Its strange I never thought we would see ourselves trying to start something like this. Obviously we all feel committed to the idea of it working in the true sense of Open Source ie, no gatekeepers (moderation is a question though) - but I am wondering if a remedy to the guru/ cultish perception that might occur is to have some, or most of the content go into a pool anonymously. This would really dampen down the cult of personality side of things and give space for people to come and go as they please - but a list of real names could be displayed somewhere else as members if people chose to make that association, with email address's to facilitate real world projects if people thought that was appropriate. And large pre-existing projects may have authors names attached - say in the instance of Ian's wicki on Australian Art History etc I also have had a few brief chats with Andrew Frost about creating an archive somewhere on the web of artists documentation and catalogue writing.

For me one of the most exciting aspects of the idea is the opportunity to do things that would never be possible in an Art school environment within a University at the moment - such as say, engage in a series of long walks in the desert as a valid experience - - or do a difficult canyon in the wollemi or go to the caves on the nullabor. I know this sounds like an outdoors club or something, but why not ? I know one can do this anyway but framing some of these activities within this context might be really productive - the Otira project set up by Julain Stephenson and the Physics Room in Christchurch was a great example of this kind of thing. http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/oblique/otira/document/ though the web design looks a bit faded.

Increasingly within University environments these days its very hard to organize these types of more open ended projects because they become tied up in red tape. However its not my personal intention to set up an replacement for the traditional setting (though for some it might be a valid replacement and for others this might be a strong motivation), others might be much more militant on this question.

I do think though that institutional logic in the tertiary sector, in its increasing compression has a daily tendency towards a limited way of thinking about things, is rooted often in scientific positivism, has lost its ability to analyze and critique its own power relationships. I don't want to dwell on this because at the end of the day for me this is about the process of Art.

I see another important potential of the OSAS as a storage house for points of view - links to resources and info on the web, an archive for Artists writing - a portal into the community - a way of re-injecting a bit of madness, a highly radicalized educational model as an artform. If through its open source nature it turned into the opposite - a highly conservative space, then I guess the answer is simple, I would simply go elsewhere with no regrets. The really alarming horizon I think for all of us is things like what is going on in Singapore with its biennial - fascistic forces cynically grabbing a stake in contemporary Art in order to appear to be open and mask their oppressive system. One of the reasons I seem to be a defender of Capital A art is precisely because of this contemporary syndrome of mask and camouflaged you know the score when people start telling you that this add for a chocolate bar is a great bit of Art etc when we know that Art is something vastly different to the desire to sell chocolate bars or go to Film school for that matter.

The space for a virtual gallery is totally doable.

I am reminded of Richard Greysons project the ideal work. What appears might involve a lot of fiction a lot that is unjustifiable and unaccountable. One of the things I like about web pages is that it only takes one hyperlinks to end up in a space that has a completely different perspective - if the whole thing is open to everybody, it will grow different branches with vastly different viewpoints. Some may be entirely pragmatic answers to a problem and others might be way out there on the margins. One of the things about ICOLS that is so enjoyable is the way you are free to put in content without satisfying but Bronia and Suzy also facilitate projects. ICOLS might be a nice adjunct to this particular adventure or a bridge into a kind of practice. h ttp://www.icols.org

Some have talked about the idealistic nature of the project - indeed it is, but this is only a problem when you rigidly hold fast to a particular idealistic aim and feel disappointment when it doesn't turn out as expected - I am fully prepared for this thing to be a total farce, a drunken bit of madness, an embarrassment - or as I think it will be, a little bit of fresh air.

cheers