The $12 Million Stuffed Shark

I have been reading about another art machine - the market! The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art and Auction Houses is a fascinated read, written by Don Thompson and published by Aurum Press Ltd in 2008, it maps the ludicrous system of the art market in relation to all other economic forces.

Who really rules the (art) world when money is no object and time is the scarcest resource left?

The art market is its own disconnected ecosystem; removed from (and even in some cases opposed to) many of the defining structures of the broader marketplace. The book analyses this art market from within the auction house. Therefore video, performance, film and photography have been disregarded - categorisation itself becomes a slippery subject. Where are the boundaries?

‘In 2003 a twenty-five-year-old student named Clinton Boisvert at The School of Visual Arts in New York was asked to produce a sculpture project showing how the emotion elicited by art could impact on life. Boisvert created three dozen black boxes each stencilled with the word ‘Fear’. He had just finished hiding the last of these in New York City subway stations when he was arrested. A dozen stations were shut down for several hours while police squads retrieved the sculptures. Boisvert was convicted of reckless endangerment, but received an ‘A’ for the project.’

The book then goes on to argue that when there is nothing left to trust within art, when taste and instinct are no longer applicable terms, the only thing that those investing in the works have is BRANDING - there is no time to invest in knowledge. ‘Branding is the end result of the experiences a company creates with its customers and the media over a long period of time.’ Christie’s and Sotherby’s are the biggest value adding components. Branding has substituted aesthetic judgement. However there are other branding systems too - not just the auction house itself but the time of the auction (evening auctions are superior), then there is the gallery, the dealer, the establishment of the artist, each which come with their unique stamp of approval (or not depending). But this is not all… the city of sale is also a factor - New York and London for example are brands in themselves. It is a terrifying system out there, and one with increasingly little to do with any work content it seems to me. I shall read on and update more later.

The case of the disappearing 'liveness'

Is 'liveness' losing its meaning?

In 2008 the ICA announced the closure of their 'Live and Media Arts Department' with the director's statement that, 'the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency.' Never, in my opinion, has it been more urgent to locate the points of differentiation between 'liveness' and mediated, pseudo-reality. Did you hear about the man who spent so long playing computer games that when he steps outside, empowered by the projection of himself onto his super-hero character, he instantaneously got hit by a car and died? More broadly, think of the numerous studies on children proving that the long term effects of violent video games produce a two way effect of imitation violence and desentivity to violence within their audience. "When you're exposed to violence day in and day out, it loses its emotional impact on you. Once you're emotionally numb to violence, it's much easier to engage in violence."

Dr. L. Rowell Huesmann, director of the Research Center for Group Dynamics at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research

'In 1932 Bertolt Brecht imagined a future in which radio would cease to be merely a one-way 'apparatus for distribution' and become 'the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes.' In writing this he anticipated what we know now as internet culture and the possibilities of interactive media in 'theatre'. Almost concurrently, in 1936, Walter Benjamin, wrote 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.' According to [Philip] Auslander in his contribution to Interfaces, 'Benjamin's concept of reactivation provides a starting point for thinking about the relationship between mediated performances and their audiences'. Mediated is a useful term here as Auslander has proposed that we live in a world where the concept of 'liveness' is losing its meaning.'

Interfaces in Performance edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Janis Jefferies and Rachel Zerihan, Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2009

Digital multi-media performances have the ability to 'reactivate' (in the words of Benjamin) 'liveness' or at the very least create awareness of its slow decline. Activity, however, requires support (but obviously not from the ICA).

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/family/11/03/healthmag.violent.video.kids/

Red Road

Two days ago I finally got round to watching Red Road, a film written and directed by Andrea Arnold released in 2006. Red Road is a gritty, Glasgow based drama about a woman working as a CCTV operator, seeking to avenge the death of her family when she discovers that the culprit (a crack addict who lost control of the wheel of his car while driving) has been released from jail. The film shots move from the CCTV screen image (a screen within a screen) to 'real' footage in rapid succession as, unbeknown to the culprit, his every movement is tracked. Perpetrator and victim switch roles, the power control between the characters shifts, mediated by technology. The CCTV camera becomes the victim's (turned victimiser's) weapon of choice. But where do we, the twice removed viewers, come into the equation? The CCTV system this film represents is not, as some thought, some kind of Orwellian sci-fi fantasy, but the reality. In an interview with The Guardian Arnold say, 'you've got to try and present the truth, haven't you? Whatever that is.' Ironically the same interview also states, 'she's almost phobic about [the public's] gaze falling on her.' The ugly truth of the matter is this, for all the pleasure of watching, there is always a counterbalancing quantity of discomfort in being watched!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/oct/18/londonfilmfestival2006.londonfilmfestival1

I found an image of a projection space in the April edition of Frieze set up by Katarina Zdjelar to show her piece 'Shoum' in Rotterdam 2009. It is an amazing idea – to set up a semi-free standing dark grey wall against a window. The light emitted by the window behind the partial cube seems to accentuate the sharpness and brightness of the image contained within. The partial cube, partial screen gives the space a sort of modernist stage set aesthetic, neither walled in nor totally free but acts as a 3D mount for the work. There is no adequate description for the limbo-like status of this projected space and I cannot find any internet reference image. Tomorrow I shall follow this entry with a sketch to give a more useful impression. For now this is merely a statement of my appreciation.

Strategies of Exposure

Are all performances really about the audience? Patrick Primavesi discusses in the book Interfaces of Performance (Ashgate Publishing Ltd 2009) the underlying goal of any performance being to, 'de-construct the 'us' and attempt to inscribe oneself in a mythical community.' I have written extensively about the recent development of the re-enactment as an attempt to retrieve the unrecorded past. However, I recently discovered the artist group 'Gob Squad' a German based collective, who play with the notion of re-enactment when they staged a revised version of Andy Warhol's Kitchen in 2007. Primavesi says, 'the audience is moved both emotionally and physically by the possibility of taking a step behind the screen into the film.' It becomes a work about existing on the threshold, in-between sender and receiver, stage and audience, physical and mediated presence. When an emotion becomes a simulation of itself it takes on a different reality, as Andy Warhol once said, 'they're faking it until it becomes real.' In Gob Squad's Kitchen the screen acts as a membrane (not between fact and fiction, for these are no longer diametrically opposed) but as a barrier which is slowly broken down during the course of the performance as actors and audience switch roles. Their work Saving the World comprises of seven screens arranged in a semi-circle to create a panoramic view of a public square. I find the fact that they choose the number seven very interesting for the fact that it was the number that Ray Eames selected for his seminal work Glimpses of the USA in the Moscow World Fair Auditorium in 1959, 'a credible number but not so many that they couldn’t be scanned in an allotted time.' Gob squad locate and expose the interdependence between 'live absence' and 'mediated presence' where voyeur, witness and participant take on a fluidity of meaning. Like Tadek Kantor's stage set, the screen that Gob Squad use is not a blank surface to be layered onto. It is, in itself, a sign to be worked with not over.

Who would have thought that preparation of a space could cause so many issues? There should be a degree show manual for all the hoops you have to jump through. A white cube (within a white cube) can only have a paper roof if there is no electrical equipment inside the cube, it can only have a fabric roof if the fabric is fire proofed, you have to make (and pay for) your own roof in any circumstances - who would want a cube after all that? Then there are all the forms, health and safety, press forms, statements, forms so you can climb up ladders, down ladders, put paper over windows, paint studios (as long as they are painted back to the white cube afterwards). It is a full time exhausting job and that is before you’ve walked paint splattered feet across the shiny new black floor to even start putting work up (with a form of course). I have now been sanding walls in the same room for three days and while it is very satisfying to see a white room get whiter and a little sharper around the edges, this is not what I think is or should be important. I’m sure many would disagree, but the most exciting spaces for me, are not the unnaturally polished studio, but a space with a set of ready-made conditions worked with rather than against. A studio is still a studio - surely white washing the walls will only highlight the paint splatters on the floors.