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filipenegrão

Registrado em: Quinta-Feira, 6 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 3

Enviada: Qua Abr 19, 2006 6:07 pm Assunto: Balkan Wars
Apresentação de Karin Ohlenschlager sobre a obra/jogo The Making of Balkan Wars: The Game – http://www.balkanwars.org http://www.personalcinema.org/warport/index.php?n=Main.KarinOhlenschl%E4ger _________________ Filipe Negrão Pós-graduação em Mídias Interativas, SENAC, 3º semestre.

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Nani Brisque

Registrado em: Quarta-Feira, 12 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 7

Enviada: Sáb Abr 22, 2006 1:49 am Assunto: Daniela Kutschat e Rejane Cantoni

Contribuo para a pesquisa de Daniela Kutschat e Rejane Cantoni, basicamente pelo meu interesse no estudo de interfaces homem-computador e pelas dinâmicas de experimentação sensorial que seus trabalhos sugerem.
Minha contribuição na bibliografia é o DVD que pode ser encontrado no SENAC Scipião:

KUTSCHAT, Daniela. CANTONI, Rejane. OP_ERA:uma jornada através de dimensões paralelas e experimentos multisensoriais - São Paulo: 2003.

Este DVD mostra o conceito do projeto OP_ERA através das palavras de Rejane Cantoni e Daniela Kutschat, além de imagens da interatividade do usuário no ambiente proposto.
_________________
Nani Brisque (Elaine Brisque) é estudante do curso de Tecnologia em Design de Multimídia, Senac, 3° sem., 2006.

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lais.cerullo

Registrado em: Segunda-Feira, 3 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 12
Localização: são paulo

Enviada: Seg Abr 24, 2006 9:21 pm Assunto: op_era
a obra op_era estava no Itaú Cultural, na exposição Homos Ludens, no início deste ano. Não sei se vcs tiveram oportunidade de interagir ao vivo com ela, infelizmente não consegui vê-la. _________________ Laís Cerullo pós mídias interativas - 3º semestre

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Marcelo Amorim

Registrado em: Segunda-Feira, 3 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 5
Localização: são paulo

Enviada: Qua Abr 26, 2006 12:28 am Assunto: "Liar's Poker" Texto de Brian Holme

Blefes no jogo da arte...

"Liar's Poker"
Representation of Politics/Politics of Representation"
Brian Holmes

Basically, what I have to say here is simple: when people talk about politics in an artistic frame, they're lying. Indeed, the lies they tell are often painfully obvious, and worse is the moment when you realize that some will go forever unchallenged and take on, not the semblance of truth, but the reliability of convention. In a period like ours when the relationship to politics is one of the legitimating arguments for the very existence of public art, the tissue of lies that surrounds one when entering a museum can become so dense that it's like falling into an ancient cellar full of spider webs, and choking on them as you struggle to breathe. Now, the mere mention of this reality will make even my friends and allies in the artistic establishment rather nervous; but it is a reality nonetheless. And like most of the political realities in our democratic age, it has directly to do with the question of representation.

Picture Politics

Does anyone doubt there exists a politics of representation? Such people have clearly not looked at the television during a political campaign. But worse, they have not looked at social movements. They have not witnessed the endless capacity of people who do not occupy positions of elite power, and who do not enjoy direct access to major media, to project their messages nonetheless, by means of signs, images and gestures. Nor have they realized how effectively artists can work in such »outside« contexts: one need only think of Gran Fury, amidst the New York Aids activism of the eighties; of Ne Pas Plier, with the jobless people's movements in Paris in the nineties; or of the many artists who have participated in recent counter-globalization demonstrations and campaigns. Artists can play a vital role in this kind of »picture politics«.

At the same time, it is easy for artists to heed the injunction of the museum, the magazines and the market, which say: »Picture politics for me.« Do a picture or a sculpture of politics, carry out the representation of political conflict, as in the installation piece by Thomas Hirschhorn, Wirtschaftslandschaft Davos, shown at Kunsthaus Zürich when Hirschhorn won the prize for »Young Swiss Art« in 2001. This work uses model houses, toy soldiers, real barbed wire and other ready-made materials to represent the besieged Swiss valley where the world's most powerful people annually meet. Hirschhorn's style can be referenced to »dadaist collage«, observes one critic; but his major source is »the practice of excluded people who know perfectly well how to get their messages across, by using whatever they find.« [1] In this case the excluded people are those who confront the barbed wire at the World Economic Forum. And since counter-globalization has been a hot subject, representing them is a perfect way to become popular in a museum.

Hirschhorn goes further, though, because he turns a bit of ordinary life into a representation of politics, with his Bataille Monument in a Turkish quarter of Kassel. This life-sized library, snack bar and makeshift TV studio is a participatory project, whose effects in the neighborhood itself I won't presume to judge from a distance. What concerns me is the way he manages its relations to the artistic frame. On the »taxi stand« where visitors awaited to be ferried from the Documenta 11 to the site of the monument, Hirschhorn placed a quotation from the American artist, David Hammonds: »The art audience is the worst audience in the world. It's overly educated, it's conservative, it's out to criticize, not to understand and it never has any fun... So I refuse to deal with that audience, and I'll play with the street audience. That audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart. They don't have any reason to play games, there's nothing gained or lost.« Hirschhorn claims to have abandoned the framing structures of contemporary art, for a more authentically engaged social practice. But if that's the case, why the taxi, why the exposure of the site to visitors' eyes, which turns the social project into a representation? What kind of game is he playing?

In his case there are certainly things to be won — like the prize for Young Swiss Art, or the Marcel Duchamp prize for the promotion of French artists, awarded to Hirschhorn by the ADIAF association in the year 2000. The Duchamp prize is sponsored by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a transnational consulting company, specializing in mergers and acquisitions. Kunsthaus Zürich, where Wirtschaftslandschaft Davos was shown, is regularly funded by the Private Banking subsidiary of Crédit Suisse, which ranks 31st on Fortune's Global 500 list. Documenta 11 was sponsored by Volkswagen, Deutsche Telekom and Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. Does all this sound familiar? In the contemporary art game, the picture of excluded people's politics is worth a lot to the included — including transnational corporations. Of course I'm aware that the prize commissions are independent, just like exhibition curators. Their independence supports the notion of an autonomous artistic sphere, separate from the economic nexus that sustains it. These kinds of separations, between abstract financial decisions and their substantive effects, are exactly what the protestors at the Davos meetings refuse. Hirschhorn retains an interest in the artistic frame he claims to leave behind. Yet he seems particularly uncomfortable there; and it's intriguing to see how he ups the symbolic stakes in the Davos piece, formulating a direct critique of transnational capitalism even as he is pursued and courted by the corporate-backed prize commissions.

How does picture politics work, when it is associated with a proper name and presented within the contemplative frame of the art institution? Invariably it produces statements like these: »I represent the people«, or »I represent a social movement«, or »I represent the excluded« — which are the classic lies of representative democracy, when it serves to conceal private interests. [2] Of course, this root fact makes myself, a self-styled ›critic‹ writing in catalogues and magazines about the relations of art and politics, into one of the baldest liars of them all. And for some perverse reason I want to tell you how it's done.

Rules of the Game

Liar's poker is easy to play. The deck is composed of kings and aces. One person draws, and names the card in his hand; the other judges if he's telling the truth. If you draw an ace, it's easy: you have no choice but to say it's an ace. If you draw a king, then the game begins: because you can always bluff. Each time you claim to hold an ace, the other player must look in your eyes and decide if it's real. If he thinks it's not, he calls your bluff; and if he's right he wins a dollar, or ten, or a hundred, depending on how high you've set the stakes. If he's wrong, you win the same. And if he doesn't do a thing, he loses fifty cents, or five bucks, or fifty dollars, and the card goes back into the pack, so that no one ever knows if you were telling the truth.

For our purposes, the artist draws the cards, and the public calls the bluffs. Nowadays, of course, the artist often plays as a team with the curator or the critic; so those relations are never entirely certain. As for the cards, the ace is political reality, and its image in the museum is highly attractive. This gives the artist a great advantage: because to prove an ace is a bluff, you have to go out looking, whereas the public prefers to stay inside the museum. The artist, however, also has a great disadvantage, which is that the house — I mean the people who run the game, the founders, the funders, the boards and directors — actually can't stand aces, and if they think the artist really has one, they will never let him or her set foot inside the museum. So in both cases the artist has to bluff his way through, either claiming political engagement to live like a king inside the white cube, or hiding it to siphon off money, resources and publicity for use by a social movement. Occasionally, when the lie is too grotesque, the public will call the bluff; and then the artist has to give up some cultural capital. Even more rarely, it turns out that the artist is really involved in a social movement, in which case he or she is soon fated to disappear from the museum.

Now there's an obvious question: Why would anyone want to play such a game? In fact the question can be asked about anyone playing by the unbearable rules that hold in almost every social field today. These are the rules of inequality, exploitation, domination — those nasty realities we have to lie about in polite democratic society. When Pierre Bourdieu developed his theory of the semi-autonomous, rule-governed social fields, he first had to ask why people participate. He pointed to different forms of interest. Individuals can have a monetary interest in participating in a given field, they can do it to acquire economic capital. They can also have an interest in the relations to be formed with powerful people, so they play to acquire social capital. But in the highly professional world of art, even more than in most other fields, social capital is at least partially acquired through the accumulation of cultural capital, which can be conceived as the ability to produce and display the very specific types of signs, images and gestures which are most valued within a given field at a particular period. Accumulating cultural capital means mastering complex fetishes of meaning which have been constructed and transformed over time. Thus it becomes apparent that a powerful function of belief is at work. You must believe that these fetishes are really valuable, or ›interesting‹. Bourdieu came to call this belief illusio, which he defines as »the fact of being invested, caught up in and by the game.« »Being interested«, he continues, »means ascribing a meaning to what happens in a given social game, accepting that its stakes are important and worthy of being pursued.« [3] In the game we are discussing, the fundamental interest (or illusion) is the attainment of autonomy: a historical ideal whose terms are open to endless struggle. [4] There is a passion of this illusio without which it would be impossible to understand what happens in the artistic field today — in particular its lies, its bluffs, its representations.

Can the illusion that accounts for the very coherency of the field be transformed, gravitationally shifted, so that its prestigious objects — the signs, gestures and images — are reevaluated? Such a result could only come about through a shake-up in the system of positions occupied by specific players. This is what we are now witnessing. In the artistic game of liar's poker, certain players are increasing the stakes, and steering the conventional bluff of picture politics to the point where the contract that holds together the artist, the curator, the public and the house — that is to say, the museum as a social institution — finally breaks. When you can bluff your way to a very dramatic break, then there is the possibility of changing the field itself, of beginning to play a different game.

Upping the Stakes

Let's recall certain wagers that link the 1997 Documenta (dX) to the 2002 edition (D11). The former attempted to reknit the ties between poetics and politics, within a history considered on a world scale. Its major innovation — the 100 Days lecture program organized by Catherine David — was a Napoleonic conquest of neoliberal globalization as an object for artistic discourse. Indeed, the exhibition as a whole could be criticized for using intellectuals and historical artists to represent a protagonism that the consensus of the European scene could not offer. An essay in the catalogue by Masao Miyoshi, illustrated with a geopolitical map by the late Oyvind Fahlström, sums up the equation. Entitled »A Borderless World?«, it gives a detailed account of the rise of the transnational corporation and the attendant changes in the hegemonic functions of culture. Miyoshi asks the key question: »Are the intellectuals of the world willing to participate in transnational corporatism and be its apologists?« [5] But what no one said is how the world's artists, critics and curators could convincingly answer, in the negative.

No one on the center stage, that is. But part of the dX bluff was to include a cutting edge, the so-called »new technologies«. The Hybrid Work Space would be inhabited, among others, by artist-activists making their first uses of the Internet, for a ten-day workshop called »[über die grenze]«. I quote from an interview with Florian Schneider that appeared on the sans-papiers website founded by a French social movement shortly after the occupation of Saint-Bernard Church in Paris in 1996:

Q: »About the Documenta, here, you can talk about illegal people in a very famous art exhibition. I think it is not so easy to do such things in France. Do you think it's easier in Germany, or is there something special here, at the Documenta? You're talking about illegal people!...«

A: »Yes, sure, we are also a little bit surprised. On one hand we obviously have a fool's license here, we can declare everything, we can also nearly practice everything. On Sunday, we opened a passport exchange office, and we asked people to give us their passport to pass it on people who need it much more, which are undocumented or so called illegal people. A policeman appeared, and he asked ›Is this art or not? what are you going to do with the passports?‹ And we asked him for his passport. He refused to give us his passport, but he promised us to talk with his superiors about the action, and that was what we wanted to reach. So it seems that we could do everything we want. It's great and very funny, but in the same way, it makes me nervous a little bit, because there is even no reaction by the other side. That's the main problem in the art context. We decided to use the possibility to make politics here because it's very important at this moment to spread the campaign we started, and to spread the aims we have, spread them very widely.« [6]

The participants of »[über die grenze]« broke the conventional contract with the art institution, by refusing to stop at the borders of representation. Taking literally the corporate rhetoric about freedom of movement under globalization, they used dX as a physical and virtual platform to spread a new campaign, indeed, a new form of self-organization: the social movement »Kein Mensch ist illegal«, which over the last five years has not ceased to grow and metamorphose, continually changing names, languages, spokespeople, participants, tactics... D11 recognized the importance of this autonomous, non-representational politics by inviting Florian Schneider to speak at the first of its »Platforms«, held in April 2001 under the title »Democracy Unrealized«. [7] A year later, a »No Border«-camp was organized by activists in protest against the Schengen Information System in Strasbourg, while D11 raked in the tourist crowds in Kassel.

Personally, I had entirely missed the Hybrid Work Space in 1997. But I did take part in the recent »No Border« camp with the conceptual group »Bureau d'études«, distributing a cartographic work — or what you might just call a »tract« — entitled »Refuse the Biopolice«. One of the best encounters in Strasbourg was the Publix Theater Caravan bus, with a multimedia laboratory inside, a traveling café on top and a theater troupe performing anti-deportation interventions in public space. A week after the camp I found myself in Kassel, amazed to see a tremendous spectrum of precise and moving artworks, whose focus, in the majority of cases, was either oppression and imprisonment, or even more often, the contemporary border regime. The activist pretensions of an experimental group in 1997, and the direct action of a social movement today, seemed to be justified, extended, deepened by almost every piece in the immense exhibition.

By searching across the world, D11 found the artists to support the critique that had been formulated in the previous edition. After watching Amar Kanwar's video on the Indo-Pakistani conflict, including fascinating shots of the ritual closing of the militarized border, I stepped out into the sunlight to discover none other than the Publix Theater bus, parked in front of the Fridericianum. But the next surprise was a police officer ordering the bus to leave, under the guidance of a Documenta security manager. The troupe chanted over their PA system, »Thank you, thank you to the German police for this beautiful performance, free speech is being silenced everywhere, thank you, thank you.« And then someone walked up to the manager and the chief cop and handed them »Refuse the Biopolice«. Both proceeded instinctively to roll it up into the form of a military man's baton — as though artworks, in the hands of power, could only be a weapon and nothing more. [8]

Playing the Ace

»Artistic freedom is a fundamental right. And we feel free to promote it«, proclaims the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe in the pages of the D11 catalogue. You wonder how they feel about all the artists participating in the current round of social struggles. Take one example: Las Agencias, a group which came together shortly before a week-long conference and workshop in October 2000 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, with an impressive list of picture-politicians (®™ark, Reclaim the Streets, Kein Mensch ist illegal, Ne pas plier, Communication Guerrilla, London Indymedia...). The program was called »On Direct Action as One of the Fine Arts«. Held at the public's insistence outside the museum, in an anarchist union hall, it was a great success. Work continued for months thereafter on subjects like free money, activist fashion design, the practical use of pictorial shields, and a traveling »Show Bus« to bring culture to the people. Then, on the day of huge demonstrations organized against the World Bank in March 2002 — when 500,000 people took to the streets of Barcelona — the local police came to raid the bar of the MacBa, used by Las Agencias. And in the weeks after this event, the Show Bus was attacked and destroyed in broad daylight — undoubtedly by undercover police. It goes without saying that the breaking point had been reached: Las Agencias could no longer be funded by the museum. Pursuing their détournement of consumer ideologies, the group started a new campaign around the theme Yo Mango, a slogan referring to a trendy fashion brand — but which also translates as »Just Nick It«. Yo Mango practices redistributive shoplifting, in the spirit of thousands of unemployed Argentineans whom the international banking system left with no other choice but to steal their dinner, ransacking transnational supermarket chains. Is this artistic freedom? Yo Mango has become a social movement, crossing the border of representation. But from time to time — to the rage of some former members — they still exhibit in museums. Meanwhile the MacBa continues, more legitimately and subversively than ever, its inquiry into the relations of art and politics.

Political involvement is popular in art right now, and for good reasons. How do art professionals maneuver in this environment, between pressures from the public on the one hand, and from the financial backers of the institutional »house« on the other? What kind of game do they play? Bourdieu has this to say about moments of aesthetic transformation: »Revolutions in art result from the transformation of the power relations constituting the space of artistic positions, a transformation which itself is rendered possible by a coincidence between the subversive intentions of a fraction of the producers and the expectations of a fraction of their public.« [9] We have seen this type of situation emerging over the past few years, as the globalized, flexibilized economy shakes up the hierarchy of social positions, rendering new alliances imaginable. And it is clear that some art professionals are playing the beginnings of a transformative game. But it would be naive to think that others do not see these situations unfolding. The art of maintaining social balances through the management of cultural trends has long been developed by the European social democracies, and is being taken over by the privatized institutions. [10] In other words, we must suppose that a fraction of those in power seek to manipulate the public, by instrumentalizing the cultural producers who play their tricks for them.

Our problem is to account for the strange duplicity of art institutions. Consider Documenta again. Why did the people who run what used to be the ideological set-piece of »Western art«, created during the Cold War less than fifty kilometers from the East German border, with the transparent aim of exalting the abstractions of subjective freedom in the face of socialist realism, suddenly decide to pick as curator, first a French woman with a lingering Marxist mentality and a strong interest in Brazil, then a Nigerian man with an intense investment in postcolonial theory and historiography? The only realistic answer I can find is that those who make the decisions saw that the first post-89 edition, curated in 1992 by Jan Hoet — a chic, friendly and mildly patronizing art-world type with »good taste« and a willingness to have fun without rocking the boat — was perceived within the artistic field as a gigantic flop. Just more of the same, looking paunchy and overprivileged. How then could Documenta remain at the cutting edge? If the Cold War was over, shouldn't the flagship »Western« exhibition now somehow engage with globalization? Did not that first entail finding out something about what globalization is (Catherine David's highly intellectual show), then diving right into and producing its multicultural legitimacy by actually exhibiting living artists from outside Germany, England, Italy, France and the USA — people who had never made the cover of »Flash Art« or »Artforum«?

The institutional »house« now seeks its interest in a complex game, which alone can reconcile the economic nexus it provides with the cultural capital its seeks among the more radical factions of the artistic field. It must ask its cultural producers for the ace of politics, while proving all the while (with the help of the police, if need be) that this ace is merely a bluff, that it is really a king (the sovereign power of illusion in representative democracies). And yet it is through this double game that new symbolic possibilities for conceiving and shaping the ways we live — what Nietzsche might have called »the transvaluation of all values« — can be distributed on the scale that an exhibition like Documenta offers. The Nietzschean dance happens not in some glorious void of the contemplative intellect, but in the real world. You have people whose genuine radicality is also a beckoning chance for career advancement, being instrumentalized by others wanting to add legitimacy to a globalized society facing a groundswell of critique. And the instability of the game — the depth of its gaping contradictions — has rarely been so great as today, while the corporate rhetoric unravels and everyone must face the reality of their positions in the contemporary economy, with its proliferating borders.

An example of how these contradictions unfold was the ad hoc »Platform 6«, called for 24 hours on the lawn in front of the Fridericianum, by No Border again, in collaboration with Rom people facing expulsion from Germany. This time the obvious parallels between the activist demands and the artistic arguments developed within the show itself helped overcome the resistance of the security team. Just imagine, for a moment, the different kinds of cultural capital that suddenly appeared on the table: »Okwui Enwzor, künstlerischer Leiter der Documenta, rief aus New York an. Die Kuratorin Ute Meta Bauer und andere MitarbeiterInnen und KünstlerInnen unterstützten und vermittelten. Thomas Hirschorn und andere KünstlerInnen und Documentas diskutierten aufgeregt über Documenta-Hierarchien und das Sicherheitssystem. Eine aufgeregte Nacht alles in allem.« [11] The institutional struggle becomes visible at unexpected moments like these, when everyone involved must take a public stand on the value of the symbolic cards they are playing.

Beyond Representation

These observations are pragmatic, based on personal experience. The truth is that the strategies of liar's poker are inevitable today, as cultural institutions both public and private try to mediate between the logic of profit and prestige and the desire for alternative valuations. But that can be put more bluntly: in the age of corporate patronage and the neoliberal state, art is becoming a field of extreme hypocrisy. [12] And so it directly reflects the crisis of the representative democracies. The temptation is then to cease playing the game (the anarchist solution), or to simply exploit the museum's resources for other ends (»radical media pragmatism«). Both positions are justified, from the activist point of view. But there are disadvantages to leaving entire sectors of society to rot, as each new swing to the neo-authoritarian right is there to prove. The most interesting question within the artistic field then becomes: How to play the exhibition game in such a way that something real can actually be won?

The very notion of cultural capital shows how domination operates through forms that need no longer have anything to do with rarity or accumulation. And the beauty of art in its turn away from the object is precisely that you can give it away: Dinero Gratis, as the Yo Mango group proclaims. Art today is one of the few fields open to experimentation with the technologies, habits and hierarchies of symbolic exchange, fundamental to a media-driven society. But these experiments can only take on a transformative power in the open, evolving context of a social movement, outside the cliques and clienteles of the artistic game. Which is why even the work of someone as outwardly radical as Thomas Hirschhorn appears so dubious. How can anyone be sure of its success, when the reception is dominated by his proper name?

The rising fortunes of interventionist art, the multiplication of exhibitions devoted to sociopolitical issues and activist campaigns, are proof enough that something political is at stake in the artistic field. And the stakes keep rising, as artists, curators and critics vie for radicality, relevancy, effectiveness and meaning. But one must constantly question what kind of currency we'll get when the chips are cashed in. The only way to go beyond the small change of individual prestige on the institutional market is to radically reverse the valuations effected by the critical gaze. And this requires an effort from a great many players of the game: a transformation of the very definition of cultural capital, a shift in the illusio of the artistic field. What is ultimately at stake is the very definition of autonomy, which can no longer be established in the sphere of representation alone.

Right now, the greatest symbolic innovations are taking place in self-organization processes unfolding outside the artistic frame. And it is from the reference to such outside realms that the more concentrated, composed and self-reflective works in the museum take their meaning. The only way not to impoverish those works, or to reduce them to pure hypocrisy, is to let our highest admiration go out to the artists who call their own bluffs — and dissolve, at the crisis points, into the vortex of a social movement.

1 »Thomas Hirschhorn, Wirtschaftlandschaft Davos«, by Patrick Schaefer, in L'art en jeu, online magazine: http://www.art-en-jeu.ch/expositions/hirschhorn.html

2 Cf. Bureau d'études, »Cadavre de l'autonomie artistique«, in Autonomie artistique et société de communication 1 (Paris, 2002).

3 Pierre Bourdieu, Réponses (Paris: Seuil, 1992), p. 92.

4 Bourdieu devoted an entire work to the historical constitution of the ideal of autonomy, and to the field of struggle it opens up: Les Règles de l'art (Paris: Seuil, 1992).

5 Politics/Poetics, Documenta X — The Book (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1997), p. 193.

6 At http://www.bok.net/pajol/international/kassel/florian.en.html

7 Video available at http://www.documenta.de/data/english/platform1/index.html

8 Cf. the press release at http://zone.noborder.org/x11/templ/news_det.php?itemid=11. I am told that an Israeli delegation, visiting that day, had asked for maximum security. But of course this precise request is part of the worldwide security and border system.

9 Bourdieu, Réponses, p. 81. For a full development, see the last chapter of Homo Academicus (Paris: Minuit, 1984).

10 In Europe, the most relevant model of this takeover process is Third-Way cultural policy in Britain; see former culture minister Chris Smith's book, Creative Britain, and the discussions in Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite (London: Verso, 1999), chaps. 6 and 7.

11 http://zone.noborder.org/x11/templ/news_det.php?itemid=18

12 Gregory Sholette offers a precise observation about the »fool's license« given to a certain kind of critical art: »What has been revealed by the institutional critique is one persistent and disturbing fact: many cultural institutions are led by the private interests and personal tastes of an invisible elite, rather than by their stated philanthropic and educational mission. Yet while the institutional critique has directly focused significant attention on this cultural contradiction for the past thirty years, it now appears to provide a degree of closure by reinforcing the notion that the museum offers an uncompromising democratic zone for engaging in civic dialogue.« »Fidelity, Betrayal, Autonomy: In and Beyond the Post-Cold War Art Museum«, Third Text, Summer 2002.
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lais.cerullo

Registrado em: Segunda-Feira, 3 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 12
Localização: são paulo

Enviada: Qua Abr 26, 2006 12:16 pm Assunto: ainda sobre a op_era

matéria publicada no site do estadão.

segue link:
http://www.link.estadao.com.br/index.cfm?id_conteudo=3490

Dupla mostra arte digital nos EUA

EXPERIMENTAÇÃO MULTISENSORIAL - A artista Daniela Kutschat interage com instalação do projeto OP_ERA em versão de 2003

Pesquisadoras que desenvolvem o projeto OP_ERA desde 1999 ganham bolsa para expor na Universidade da Califórnia

André Mascarenhas

Aparentemente, arte e física não têm muito em comum. Mas isso é mera ilusão. Ambas conseguiram provar ao longo de suas histórias que a realidade pode ir além daquilo que o homem consegue ver objetivamente.

Foi com uma proposta que explora essa inusitada intersecção que as artistas brasileiras Daniela Kutschat e Rejane Cantoni conquistaram no ano passado uma bolsa-exibição do Beall Center for Art Technology, oferecida pela Universidade da Califórnia, nos EUA. A estréia da exposição será amanhã, na cidade californiana de Irvine.

Batizado de OP_ERA, o projeto premiado é também objeto de pesquisa científica da dupla. Cantoni gosta de definí-lo como uma "ferramenta de experimentação multisensorial de conceitos de espaço".

A idéia, explica, é investigar as questões relativas ao corpo e ao espaço colocadas pela física e pela arte. "A física fala da existência de mais de 11 dimensões. Então, já que sozinhos só conseguimos ir até a terceira, porque não pegar o espectador e jogá-lo na quarta dimensão, por exemplo? É um pouco esse o barato do projeto", completa.

Para alcançar esses objetivos, as artistas – ambas com sólida formação em arte e tecnologia – utilizam como principal recurso a realidade virtual.

Fruto de uma parceria que começou a tomar forma em 1999, a instalação do OP_ERA que será apresentada nos EUA é a sexta montagem do projeto, e leva o nome de Sonic Dimension (dimensão sônica).

A cada nova versão, Kutschat e Cantoni procuram discutir diferentes aspectos relativos a modelos cinetíficos e artísticos de espaço. "Agora nós estamos atrás de discutir a dimensão sonora do experimento", explica Cantoni. A idéia, segundo a artista, é pensar como um cego perceberia a passagem de uma dimensão a outra, uma vez que, nas instalações anteriores, o elemento visual era ainda determinante. Inédita no Brasil, a obra será, de acordo com a dupla, uma espécie de instrumento musical virtual.

"Um aspecto muito importante no nosso trabalho é a experimentação multisensorial", reforça Kutschat. "A gente busca criar sistemas em que a expressão não é só visual. Ou seja, todos os sentidos do corpo podem ser ativados e podem colher informação do ambiente", resume. E é exatamente o trabalho com computadores, justifica, que possibilita transformar o pensamento do artista em diferentes formas de respostas para o espectador. "Nós vivemos em um mundo analógico e recebemos as informações de uma forma analógica. É justamente por isso que as interfaces são importantes. Ou seja, o computador capta informações analógicas, as processa de uma forma absolutamente abstrata e depois dá um retorno, também analógico, que permite ao usuário sentir o que o artista propôs", filosofa.

Além da bolsa que possibilitou a ida do OP_ERA para os EUA, as artistas já conquistaram outros prêmios importantes, como o Transmídia, do Itaú Cultural e 4º prêmio Cultural Sérgio Motta.
_________________
Laís Cerullo
pós mídias interativas - 3º semestre

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Nani Brisque

Registrado em: Quarta-Feira, 12 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 7

Enviada: Qua Abr 26, 2006 2:26 pm Assunto: daniela kutschat e rejane cantoni

Aqui está um artigo que consta citações das obras de Daniela Kutschat e Rejane Cantoni, autoria de Arlindo Machado. No texto temos como situar a produção destas artistas no contexto estético cultural.

www.bb.com.br/appbb/portal/hs/exp4d/Apresentacao.jsp

Creio que há possibilidade de visitação à caverna digital da poli-usp com horário previamente.
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Nani Brisque (Elaine Brisque) é estudante do curso de Tecnologia em Design de Multimídia, Senac, 3° sem., 2006.

Editado pela última vez por Nani Brisque em Dom Jul 30, 2006 3:22 am, num total de 1 vez

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Marcelo Amorim

Registrado em: Segunda-Feira, 3 de Abril de 2006
Mensagens: 5
Localização: são paulo

Enviada: Sex Abr 28, 2006 10:36 am Assunto: Brian Holmes::artigo

Warhol, Murakami, Luther Blisset...sobre como subculturas são cooptadas pela indústria cultural.

http://ut.yt.t0.or.at/site/index.html

Warhol in the Rising Sun
Art, subcultures and semiotic production

by Brian Holmes

I'm turning Japanese
I think I'm turning Japanese
I really think so

hit song by The Vapors, 1980

In the wake of Andy Warhol, the artist-producer Takashi Murakami is looking for his quarter-hour of fame—or better, his quarter-century. Murakami is the creator of computer-assisted wallpaper works, but also the designer of manifesto-exhibitions, which claim to define a new Japanese art. The most recent of these, on display in summer 2002 at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, was called Coloriage, or "Coloring Book." Inspired by the mangas—a flagship product of the Japanese cultural industry—the exhibition brought together a short list of artists and a mind-boggling series of children's toys: mascot characters, action figures, animated films, Pokemon cards and comic books. Murakami's idea is that a veritable renaissance of Japanese culture is being asserted in these commercial works: "Today we create new outlines on our own—disordered perhaps, but ours, without any origin in the Western 'fine arts.' This new movement finds its origins in what the West calls subculture. Coloring Book is created by Japan, a country which does not distinguish between culture and subculture." In this way, he concludes, a "new Japonisme" is emerging.1

Also in Paris, the Palais de Tokyo—"site of contemporary creation"—wants to blur the distinction between art and commercial subcultures. Here, "the visual arts play the role of a search engine leading to design, cinema, literature and fashion."2 Halfway between the art center and the nightclub, the Palace aspires to be a theater of lived events, where the visitor can seamlessly drift from the contemplation of objects—art, design, fashion, etc.—to experiences of use and participation. This is a legacy of "relational art," which posed the aesthetic object as a catalyst of subjective formations. The discourse of relational art functioned perfectly on the French scene of the 1990s. It acquired a touch of exoticism and a higher potential for distribution with the addition of the signifier "Tokyo," connoting nomadic lifestyles and the enigmas of meaning in a multicultural world, but also the automation of a high-tech society and the fascination of media products. The same signifier has been added to an entire series of projects: Tokyo Games (works for video consoles), Tokyo TV (artist's clips), Tokyo Books (art world opinion polls), Tokyorama ("alternative" tours through the museum's luxury neighborhood)... In this way the Palace seeks to develop into a hybrid workshop, where artists can try their hand at all the genres of semiotic production,3 which they individualize and develop in a minor mode. But what results from such a transformation?

Takashi Murakami claims a double heritage from Warhol. On the one hand, as a painter-illustrator working with a team of assistants (about twenty) to produce canvases that are at once sophisticated and kitsch; but also, in a more complex way, as a promoter of fashions and trends, via events conflating art works, media glamour and commercial design. The Palais de Tokyo, as an institution, takes its place within the larger turn of contemporary art in the 1990s toward teamwork processes modeled on audiovisual production and interaction design, integrating the public's reception of the work.4 In this way, using new tools and addressing a far wider public, the Palace seeks to functionalize Warhol's experimentation in the Factory, where the practice of film served to transform marginal subjectivities—members of the gay and lesbian subcultures, drug addicts, bohemians escaping their class origins—into "superstars," in a transgressive parody of the Hollywood system. The Factory can be seen as a deliberate subversion, not only of the standardized model of the postwar culture industry, but literally of the mass-production system and its Fordist discipline. This subversion took the form of collective expression from below: the irruption of subterranean cultures into the normative frame of the cinema. But that was forty years ago. Today, Takashi Murakami gestures toward the same potential when he appeals to the creativity of a very different subcultural fringe: the otaku, those young Japanese who increasingly remain hooked on mangas and video games, even after the age of thirty when the passage to adulthood is supposed to be definitive. And the Palais de Tokyo also adopts this subcultural pose, disguising itself as an artificial squat, complete with graffiti, raw walls, and (fake) disconnected plumbing, smack in the middle of the chic 16th arrondissement of Paris. What is the meaning of such postures today, in the postfordist era? And what exactly is a subculture, if it is no longer to be distinguished from the official, normative one?

To ask these questions is to open up a double analysis: both of semiotic production and of contemporary control (or biopower). But it is also to confront the enigma of the otaku: those playful creatures of pure consumption, who devote their adult lives to an artificial childhood, and pierce reality's bubble with their joysticks. Abandoning oneself excessively, but in a deliberately trivial way, to all the traps of the entertainment industry; risking one's adolescent revolt on a bid to become the perverse, but perfectly willing appendage of a product or an image: this would seem to be the dream of these Japanese youth, yanked off the standard track by their overstated allegiance to a dominant ideal.

Mirrors of Reception
Since the introduction of the consumer society on the island in the decades after the Second World War, the Western gaze wants to see the "normal" Japanese citizen as totally passive, subjugated to the fascinations of fashion. The otaku then becomes the disquieting figure of this passivity.5 In parallel, theories of active reception developed in the West. Since the emergence of British cultural studies, an entire scholarly literature has arisen to illustrate the possibilities of subjective development offered by the mass-produced product, when it is diverted by singular uses. Initially, the idea was to point out class differences in the reception of standardized messages. One of the most famous works in this vein, Dick Hebdige's Subculture, or the Meaning of Style (1979), analyzed the way that fashions in clothing and music could be used by proletarian and immigrant youth communities in London as identifiers in a play of semiotic differentiation, constantly evolving across the urban territory. While these "deviant" practices were packaged by major record labels for national and planetary audiences, Hebdige himself, caught up in the excitement of early punk, dreamt of a style that could dissolve into the air at will, escaping from the capture devices. But his dream of exodus would be oddly lacking in the great unfurling wave of reception studies that followed. With the passage to Australia, then to the United States in the eighties, these studies came increasingly to bear on identifications with the stars (Madonna, Travolta) or on the most banal consumption situations (hanging out in the local mall). From an adversarial subdiscipline, cultural studies became almost hegemonic: so that in Japan one can now aspire, in all seriousness, to the status of a majority subculture.

In the mid-nineties, Thomas Frank and Dave Mulcahey did a scathing parody of these theoretical trends, suggesting the uses they could unwittingly serve. The text takes the form of an article counseling the purchase of a particular stock, like those you find in the publications of the Bloomberg group (one of the sponsors of the Palais de Tokyo):

Consolidated Deviance, Inc. ("ConDev") is unarguably the nation's leader, if not the sole force, in the fabrication, consultancy, licensing and merchandising of deviant subcultural practice. With its string of highly successful "SubCults™," mass-marketed youth culture campaigns highlighting rapid stylistic turnover and heavy cross-media accessorization, ConDev has brought the allure of the marginalized to the consuming public.6

In a flash of wit, this text shows exactly how the functionalization of subcultural styles gives rise to a regime of semiotic production, inseparable from an imperial mode of control. The music industry offers the clearest example. A musical style from a "problem neighborhood" is plucked from its context (anywhere in the expanding planetary ghetto), cleansed of its local dross (struggles too complex for a single chorus), recoded for transmission in a standardized medium (CD or video clip) and broadcast to the clientele of the global entertainment corporations (Sony, MTV, Virgin Megastore). Here is one of the mainsprings of the postfordist economy. The advantage of the process, in terms of control, is to break up the development of resistance groups on the local territories through a destabilizing injection of money, even while holding out a mirror of "recognition" to the bearers of an ephemeral subculture—a glittering mirror that becomes the object of desire for all those who haven't yet "broken through." Variations of style, even attempts to put together a counter-style (as in the territorial struggles described by Dick Hebdige), continuously serve as raw material for the functionalization of new products and images. Despite the occasional exceptions (bands like Zebda or the Asian Dub Foundation), this mechanism has proven extremely difficult to resist. And all that helps us to understand at least one of the meanings of a condition where culture is no longer distinguished from subculture: it is the now-hegemonic condition where minority styles and even individual forms of subjectivization are constantly surveilled, but constantly encouraged too, so that they can be brought into relation with mirror-products capable of stimulating their differences—before they are parasitically captured at the opportune moment, for functionalization and translation into economic profit. In this way Warhol's Factory, a vanguard experiment of the Fordist era, has become the model for the contemporary social factory, under the regime of semiotic production.

We are clearly very far from the hopes of the academic researchers who gathered around Stuart Hall in Birmingham in the early seventies, thinking that they could find a kind of gap, or even a possible space of emancipation, in the semiotic variations that emerged between the processes of broadcasting and reception (or, as they said, between the "encoding" and the "decoding" of media messages7). One could even suggest—but it's all too easy in retrospect—that the Birmingham researchers did not look closely enough at the ambiguity of Warhol's treatment of the subcultures converging at the Factory. Because there is no doubt that Warhol took a genuine interest in the subjectivity of his haphazard stars (Edie Sedgewick, Gerard Malanga, Mario Montez, the Chelsea Girls...), with whom he carried out a process of collective experimentation, even while using photography, film and video to record the entire range of emotions and interactions that could arise between the participants. But at the same time, and with no less determination, he sought to appropriate Hollywood's means of production and distribution. In a perspicacious text, Juan Suarez remarks that Warhol's deepest desires for success were frustrated by the lack of access to the distribution machinery, and also by his actors' scanty fame. Only through the exploitation of his own status as a painter in the media glow, and more, as a kind of avant-garde impresario gifted in the eyes of his audience with an almost magical power to create, could he achieve the distribution he sought: "Through his ability to turn marginal performers into superstars, daily objects into art objects, and gestures and styles into media images, Warhol incarnates the absolute producer, able to make the most out of the least, to increase the value of whatever came into his orbit, no matter how banal or inconsequential."8 Beneath the camera-eye of the absolute producer, an entire group of haphazard artists can attain their "fifteen minutes of fame"; but the producer himself will build a far more enduring legend. The directive powers accruing to this privileged role of the artist-producer—which Takashi Murakami, like so many others, seeks to fill today—is what the exponents of cultural studies did not take into account, when they located a subjective gap between the moments of encoding and decoding, of distribution and reception.

A Japanese Turn?
The ambiguity of the artist-producer is that of the political entrepreneur, theorized in the studies of immaterial labor.9 A charismatic figure, but always dependent on his project team, the political entrepreneur works in creative fields such as fashion, music, or audiovisual production. He can choose to channel the collective activity of the team towards his own ends, in order to parasitically extract a monetary gain; or he can lead the project in such a way that the working collective develops its diverse capacities and finally dissolves, leaving behind a gain in competence and charisma for everyone. The same model applies to the artistic field. Thanks to the progress in miniaturization, carried out notably by Japanese engineers, we live in societies where the means of image production are within everyone's grasp: the artist's role becomes that of catalyst, of organizer. Positioning himself among the multitude of image makers, the artist-producer can orient his work to encourage subjective multiplicity; or he can invent capture-devices, playing on mirror-products and reception-effects. The "relational artists" whom one finds at the Palais de Tokyo (or at the Musée d'art moderne just next door) find themselves at grips, perhaps unwittingly, with exactly this choice between two outcomes. And curiously enough, it is through the diversion of a Japanese manga film that a group of these artists—circling around two "producers"—now offer us a kind of logical conclusion to the work of the Western theorists on the question of reception. They have created a collective portrait of the artist as otaku.

The project No Ghost Just A Shell began in 1999 when Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno purchased the rights to a low-end manga character (few distinctive features, no pre-written biography). The title refers to an animated film, Ghost in the Shell (1996), the first "Japanimation" blockbuster to be released simultaneously in the US, Japan and Great Britain; it relates the tribulations of a female cyborg, Motoko Kusanagi, concerning the existence or non-existence of her soul. The game will then be one of breathing various artistic souls into the empty manga shell, which nonetheless receives a name, Annlee. Huyghe and Parreno launched the process with very simple animated films, where the former asserts that Annlee is a "deviant sign," and the latter, that she "belongs to all those who can fill her with whatever kind of imaginary materials." Some fifteen creators did so, replaying on the artistic stage the well-known miracle of cultural studies, whereby the standardized product is individualized through its reception. The computer-graphic commodity opens its mouth, becomes a speaking being, endowed with multiple tongues. The artists' collective comes to form a kind of ephemeral subculture, identifying itself around the product that it transforms. And then the owners of the rights to the character orchestrate the transfer of these rights to a non-profit association, whose aim is to "withdraw" (or, they also say, to "liberate") Annlee from the domain of representation, by forbidding any ulterior use of her image. The existing sum of visual interpretations is brought together in an exhibition, the exhibition as a whole is sold to a Dutch museum, and the entire project is consigned to our reflection in form of a luxurious volume, published by the purchaser, the Van Abbemuseum, and signed by Huyghe and Parreno.10 Their quarter-century of fame now appears certain.

And yet everything remains unthought here, concerning the status of majority subcultures and the functions of reception theory. We know that Warhol gave up the name of the Factory in the early eighties, remarking that we had shifted to the era of the "Office"—that is to say, of management. The decade was marked by the "monetary turn" of the American economy, and by the emergence within the financial sphere of what the economist Yoshihiko Ichida calls "the imperial circuit," funneling Japanese capital to the USA.11 The regime of semiotic production, which had emerged with the use of informational just-in-time techniques in Japanese factories, but also with the miniaturization of computers, now imposed itself in the West; there it gave rise to the new forms of flexible management, both of a highly mobile global workforce and of highly volatile financial instruments. The distance separating Japan from the European countries became more relative, as all the cultures (including America's) became the "subcultures" of Empire. And it was in this context that the analysis of reception—whose great ambition had been to transform the cultural hegemony by introducing "other" voices—itself became a management tool, in the service of a new hegemony. One of the great techniques of biopower, closely intertwined with semiotic production, would now consist in "making people talk" about commercial objects—somewhat the way that the disembodied intelligence of a futuristic secret agent, in the film Ghost in the Shell, seeks first to make the cyborg Motoko Kusanagi speak, then to occupy her body.

How to escape this paradigm? In the course of the nineties, movements of cultural rebellion began to constitute themselves in excess of any identifiable signature, through the playful exchange of multiple names, which became "collective phantoms" open for unlimited appropriation. Elsewhere I have described the subversive potential of this cultural trend, whose best-known avatar is the ubiquitous Luther Blissett.12 These practices of collective dis-identification gesture toward broader fields of cultural experimentation, marking an exodus from the mercantile and bureaucratic system that imposes strict controls on the circulation and use of its knowledge-products.13 But the current development of the art world's institutional market, based on its own star system, leaves little room to explore such inventions in the museums. The signature of the artist still acts as a mechanism of closure, of copyright, as the now-completed story of Annlee seems to demonstrate. Only when artists finally abandon these closed spaces—overflowing their bounds through practices of unlimited circulation—will a new sun rise finally over the world of art, which the dark star of Warhol still dominates today.

Notes
1. See the exhibition descriptions at .
2. Quoted from the press package distributed for the opening of the institution.
3. The "linguistic turn" of postfordism has been described by C. Marazzi, in La place des chaussettes, l'Éclat, 1997; Italian edition 1994. For a succinct description of what I mean by a "regime of semiotic production" see Marcos Dantas, "L'information et le travail," in the anthology Vers un capitalisme cognitif, L'Harmattan, 2001.
4. Pioneer, a Japanese manufacturer of audiovisual equipment and content, whose American subsidiary has commercialized the Gundam action figures presented in the Murakami exhibition, is among the sponsors of the Palais de Tokyo.
5. A typically sulphurous image is provided by E. Barral: Otaku, les enfants du virtuel, Denoël, 1999.
6. T. Frank, Commodify Your Dissent, Norton, 1997.
7. S. Hall, "Encoding/Decoding" (1973), in Culture, Media, Language, Hutchinson, 1980.
8. "The Artist as Advertiser," in Bike Boys, Drag Queens, Superstars, University Press, 1996, p. 246.
9. For the ambiguities of the political entrepreneur, see A. Corsani, M. Lazzarato, A. Negri, Le Bassin de travail immatériel (BTI) dans la métropole parisien, L'Harmattan, 1996). A definition of the artist-producer, with a central reference to Warhol, has been furnished for the French art world by Dan Graham in "L'artiste comme producteur" ("The Artist as Producer," 1988, in D. Graham, Rock/music Textes, Presses du réel, 1999).
10. No Ghost Just A Shell , Walther König, 2003.
11. See Yoshihiko Ichida, "Circuit monétaire impérial et capture financière de valeur," in Multitudes 13, Paris, Spring 2003.
12. See my text, "Unleashing the Collective Phantoms," originally published in Mute, available at .
13. For a useful text on the cooperative production of informational and cultural goods, see Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," available at
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