MOCA celebrates contemporary art in Los Angeles at another exciting Engagement Party event with LIVE SPRAWL, a new interactive performance by Los Angelesbased artist collective Lucky Dragons.
spotlight on wildness
February 20th, 2010
spotlight on dss
February 20th, 2010
photo by cali dewitt
spotlight on butchy fuego
February 20th, 2010
blog your notes
February 17th, 2010Boris Groys lecture, USC Roski School of Fine Arts, Feb 16 2010
• why time based art now?
• russian modernist writers: “comrades, sleep faster”
• the present (modernity) is something you’d rather sleep through in order to get to the future faster
• rewriting history takes time
• how do we know where the past has ended?
• we have more history(ies) than ever before, thus more division / conflict
• our own contemporaneity becomes utopian – the impossibility of a unified history
• synchronization of contemplation-time and artwork-time
• traditional assumption of “see-ability” in art / theater / cinema
• escaping judgement / elusive definition BECAUSE it can’t all be seen
• digital = like musical score, illusion of sameness btw original and copy
• has to be performed in order to be seen (viewed / projected / accessed etc)
• krakauer: the method of presentation / production becomes more interesting than the thing being presented (old photographs / film / etc)
• digital images: “only originals”, but the aura gets lost in circulation (benjamin)
• INSTALLATION is opposite of reproduction / ciculation – - adds aura back (inscription of the copy with place / time, bringing it into history)
• destroys utopian ideal of “immaterial” art – the ideal viewer and the ideal image
• material art (paintings / prints / sculpture) is cheaper + lighter than “immaterial” art (video / new media / etc)
• looking at the screen and ignoring the cost of electricity etc.
• behind the digital image is the hardware
• “a material body of the virtual”
• mcluhan – hot vs cool media (social isolation / forgetting about one’s body etc vs. awareness buidling / engaged)
• the art exhibition – total installation as artwork – is the only true “cool media”
• visitors sit in the space to become artworks
• the less movement in the film, the more movement in the world (re-mobilization of the spectator)
• each spectator feels a necessity to decide whether to stay and watch, or walk away. one’s decision has consequences. you decide consciously to miss something, and to take responsibility for your own time.
• transition of art to mass culture (away from commodities market) – lectures at art fairs, eg
• venice / documenta / etc… how to police 2-3 million visitors contemplating?
• constant flow through an art landscape
• compromise between rotundas (for contemplating eternal beauty)and long galleries (for flowing like spirits through history)
• there is world economy, but not world politics, as politics is by nature local. art is a world state of the future. or, an experimental world state
• skepticism about infinity – materiality (finiteness)
• what is universal? what is conteporary? if it is not history, what is it?
• the gap between heterogeneous content and homogeneous presentation (photographs / video / facebook / youtube etc – “mechanisms of contemporization”)
• where are the international institutions?
• in national museums the role of the permanent collection goes down, they become more “exhibition spaces”
• “universality” is subversive… every curator presents his or her view of universal common history for 3 months or so
• art doesn’t need viewers, if the viewers don’t change the structure of the artwork.
• if art is only produced and not exhibited, however, it is furniture.
• art is not a peaceful activity.
• produce an un-viewability
• visual overkill – hirschorn eg
• how listening / viewing, as a form of participation, is political
• freedom of choice vs sovereign freedom – and the revelatory experience this contrast can produce
