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documents>documenta 12: a research project
The research project will investigate the discursive orientation of contemporary avant-garde art via a comparative study of the contents and forms of the early surrealist ‘review’ Documents (1929-1939), edited by the dissident surrealist Georges Bataille and the Documenta 12: Magazine project (2005-2007), an on-line editorial database-cum-magazine (‘magazine of magazines’) developed by the curators of Documenta 12 (2007) as an extension of and supplement to the sited exhibition. A caveat: although both projects function as delivery systems for information and discourse about art and culture, and so share a number of intellectual and formal features, for all practical purposes Documents and the Documenta 12: Magazine are very different beasts and so are fundamentally incomparable. Each is a product of a specific social, political and thus cultural context; each has a different set of critical objectives and different forms and modalities of expression. Yet, the variances between these publication projects are also telling: they reveal significant transformations in the frameworks within which a critical art practice is carried out, via media-based practice or otherwise. Hence, the study will be attentive not only to changing conceptualizations of avant-garde art itself, especially as it makes use of mass media tools, but also to the nature and kinds of political practice available to citizens of the 20th and 21st centuries. In sum: the research project will consider changes in media platforms, shifts in the creative and critical use of information/media technologies (as these changes mark or instantiate shifts in discourse about political reality), transformations in aesthetic dispositions, and new modes of political expression and participation.
Preliminary bibliography:
Baker, Simon “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006.
Bourraiud, Nocolas Postproduction ~ Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lucas + Sternberg, 2002.
Bürger, Peter Theory of the Avant-Garde, tranl. Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Documenta 12: Magazine Project http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/index.php
Foster, Hal, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.
Micheal Hardt + Anthony Negri Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000
Hayles, N. Katherine “Speech, Writing, Code: Three World Views,” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago + London, University of Chicago Press, 2005.
“Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=7&projectId=6 (2005)
Manovich, Lev The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.
Webber, Andrew J. “Manifestations: The Public Sphere,” The European Avant-garde 1900-1940, Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2004.
Cheryl Simon, February 2008
Monday, February 11, 2008
baker entry
Simon Baker “Doctrines [The Appearance of Things],” in Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.) Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006.
Simon Baker discusses the distinctive editorial rationale and design principles at work in George Batailles’ review, Documents’. Conceived as “a war machine against received ideas,” the journal adopted a radically disjunctive format to suit its deconstructive aims. Documents was full of ‘documents’: of rare coins and of sculptural and ethnographic objects, of pictures taken from the newspaper, from films and museum archives, pictorial documents of contemporary art works art photography, poetry and philosophy, discussions of music and a wide range of scholarship concerned with the appearance of a wide variety of things. The contents were diverse and the relationship between image and text informal—‘formless’ to borrow the term Bataille himself used to describe his critical organizational attitude. Images and texts were illogical in their positioning; categories of things and genres of representation were set against each other to disrupt the logic of the sequence, rather than in combination for illustrative purposes. Disciplinary boundaries were transgressed, cultural hierarchies demolished. More akin to the logic of a medieval curiosity cabinet than the modern museum display, these odd juxtapositions meant to destabilize the positive associations between meanings and categories that modern representational practices of all kinds made a habit of promoting. Bataille’s methods were deliberate and purposeful in their rejection of the predominating tendency in representational practice of the time—in popular and avant-garde circles alike—to find visual correspondences and poetic equivalents between ideas and things.
Simon Baker discusses the distinctive editorial rationale and design principles at work in George Batailles’ review, Documents’. Conceived as “a war machine against received ideas,” the journal adopted a radically disjunctive format to suit its deconstructive aims. Documents was full of ‘documents’: of rare coins and of sculptural and ethnographic objects, of pictures taken from the newspaper, from films and museum archives, pictorial documents of contemporary art works art photography, poetry and philosophy, discussions of music and a wide range of scholarship concerned with the appearance of a wide variety of things. The contents were diverse and the relationship between image and text informal—‘formless’ to borrow the term Bataille himself used to describe his critical organizational attitude. Images and texts were illogical in their positioning; categories of things and genres of representation were set against each other to disrupt the logic of the sequence, rather than in combination for illustrative purposes. Disciplinary boundaries were transgressed, cultural hierarchies demolished. More akin to the logic of a medieval curiosity cabinet than the modern museum display, these odd juxtapositions meant to destabilize the positive associations between meanings and categories that modern representational practices of all kinds made a habit of promoting. Bataille’s methods were deliberate and purposeful in their rejection of the predominating tendency in representational practice of the time—in popular and avant-garde circles alike—to find visual correspondences and poetic equivalents between ideas and things.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
revised: february 4th readings
Please read something of or on the subject of Empire by Hardt + Negri
wikipedia entry on Empire
SUGGESTED readings:
From Empire
Part I: The Political Constitution of the Present
1.1 World Order
1.2 Biopolitical Production
1.3 Alternatives within Empire
one of the (many) responses to this book, in
Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 13 Issues 3 + 4 (September 2001) available via Concordia’s E-Journal service
(I haven’t read them all, but Galloway, Szeman, Villalobos-Ruminott, Mutman and Zizek, as well as Negri + Hardt’s response [p.2] are all interesting and informative]
C Theory Lectures: Politics in the Age of Empire Symposium
Rob Walker
Warren Magnuson
James Tully
Arthur Kroker
wikipedia entry on Empire
SUGGESTED readings:
From Empire
Part I: The Political Constitution of the Present
1.1 World Order
1.2 Biopolitical Production
1.3 Alternatives within Empire
one of the (many) responses to this book, in
Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 13 Issues 3 + 4 (September 2001) available via Concordia’s E-Journal service
(I haven’t read them all, but Galloway, Szeman, Villalobos-Ruminott, Mutman and Zizek, as well as Negri + Hardt’s response [p.2] are all interesting and informative]
C Theory Lectures: Politics in the Age of Empire Symposium
Rob Walker
Warren Magnuson
James Tully
Arthur Kroker
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction (page 22-23)
THE USE OF OBJECTS
The difference between artists who produce works based on objects already produced and those who operate ex nihilo is one that Karl Marx observes in German Ideology: there is a difference, he says, between natural tools of production (e.g. working the earth) and tools of production created by civilization. In the first case, Marx argues, individuals are subordinate to nature. In the second, they are dealing with a “product of labor,” that is, capital, a mixture of accumulated labor and tools of production. These are only held together by exchange, an interhuman transaction embodied by a third term, money. The art of the twentieth century developed according to a similar schema: the industrial revolution make its effects felt, but with some delay. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited a bottle rack in 1914 and used a mass-produced object as a “tool of production,” he brought the capitalist process of production (working on the basis of accumulated labor) into the sphere of art, while at the same time indexing the role of the artist to the world of exchange: he suddenly found kinship with the merchant, content to move products from one place to another. Duchamp started from the principle that consumption was also a mode of production as did Marx, who writes in his introduction to Critique of Political Economy that “consumption is simultaneously also a production, just as in nature the production of a plant involves the consumption of elemental forces and chemical materials.” Marx adds that “man produces his own body, e.g., through feeding, one form of consumption.” A product only becomes a real product in consumption; as Marx goes on to say, “a dress becomes really a dress only by being worn, a house which is uninhabited is indeed not really a house.” Because consumption creates the need for new production, consumption is both its motor and motive. This is the primary virtue of the readymade: establishing an equivalence between choosing and fabricating, consuming and producing—which is difficult to accept in a world governed by the Christian Ideology of effort (“working by the seat of your brow”) or that of the worker-hero (Stakhanovism).
KARL MARX, A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, TRANS. S.W. RYAZANSKAY, ED. MAURICE DOBB (NEW YORK: INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, 1970), PP. 195-196)
The difference between artists who produce works based on objects already produced and those who operate ex nihilo is one that Karl Marx observes in German Ideology: there is a difference, he says, between natural tools of production (e.g. working the earth) and tools of production created by civilization. In the first case, Marx argues, individuals are subordinate to nature. In the second, they are dealing with a “product of labor,” that is, capital, a mixture of accumulated labor and tools of production. These are only held together by exchange, an interhuman transaction embodied by a third term, money. The art of the twentieth century developed according to a similar schema: the industrial revolution make its effects felt, but with some delay. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited a bottle rack in 1914 and used a mass-produced object as a “tool of production,” he brought the capitalist process of production (working on the basis of accumulated labor) into the sphere of art, while at the same time indexing the role of the artist to the world of exchange: he suddenly found kinship with the merchant, content to move products from one place to another. Duchamp started from the principle that consumption was also a mode of production as did Marx, who writes in his introduction to Critique of Political Economy that “consumption is simultaneously also a production, just as in nature the production of a plant involves the consumption of elemental forces and chemical materials.” Marx adds that “man produces his own body, e.g., through feeding, one form of consumption.” A product only becomes a real product in consumption; as Marx goes on to say, “a dress becomes really a dress only by being worn, a house which is uninhabited is indeed not really a house.” Because consumption creates the need for new production, consumption is both its motor and motive. This is the primary virtue of the readymade: establishing an equivalence between choosing and fabricating, consuming and producing—which is difficult to accept in a world governed by the Christian Ideology of effort (“working by the seat of your brow”) or that of the worker-hero (Stakhanovism).
KARL MARX, A CONTRIBUTION TO THE CRITIQUE OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, TRANS. S.W. RYAZANSKAY, ED. MAURICE DOBB (NEW YORK: INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS, 1970), PP. 195-196)
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Hayles: Summaries
N. Kathleen Hayles, “Speech, Writing, Code: Three World Views,” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago + London, University of Chicago Press, 2005. (a copy has been left in my mailbox,please copy and return)
A more theoretical than interpretive examination of informatics, Hayles is concerned with the conceptual and aesthetic values of different modes of linguistic expression. The text reviews key aspects of Saussure and Derrida’s linguistic theories so to consider similarities, differences and intersections between analog and digital forms of communication (hierarchical vs. spatial models of signification; aesthetic and interpretive value placed on presence vs. absence, arbitrariness vs. exactness…) Level of difficulty: high.
N. Kathleen Hayles, “Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, (2005)
Here Hayles seeks to understand the exact nature of the relationship between traditional and new media story forms. The author addresses problems with Lev Manovich’s opposition of database and narrative form so to develop more nuanced understanding of digital storytelling. The essay explores ‘assumptions’ about subjectivity that are embedded in narrative theory (human p.o.v. is understood as meeting place of concept and form) and argues for revision to accommodate “database” forms of storytelling with machine intelligence. The paper analyzes a range of hypermedia/hypertext fictional works (some available on-line via linking) and elaborates a set of relations generated by such works in appendix form. Level of difficulty: low.
N. Kathleen Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October 66 (Fall 1993) available via Concordia e-journal choose JSTOR
Hayles discusses the material and conceptual effects of digital modes of communication on processes/practices of signification and interpretation; and describes shift in conceptual logic of presence/absence underpinning analogue forms of representation to a logic of pattern and randomness in computer messaging. Her stated thesis: “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body…and a change in the message… [the discussion] weave[s] back and forth between the represented world of contemporary fictions, models of signification implicit in word processing and information technologies, and the technologies themselves (76).” Level of difficulty. medium.
C Theory Interview with K. Hayles
During the hour-long, video-conference interview with Arthur Kroker, Hayles discusses themes and issues addressed in her various publications: the aesthetics of electronic textuality, concepts of intermediation, the complexity of digital subjectivity (or the post-human subject) and the impact of the ‘regime of computation’ on the cultural era succeeding postmodernity. Level of difficulty: medium.
A more theoretical than interpretive examination of informatics, Hayles is concerned with the conceptual and aesthetic values of different modes of linguistic expression. The text reviews key aspects of Saussure and Derrida’s linguistic theories so to consider similarities, differences and intersections between analog and digital forms of communication (hierarchical vs. spatial models of signification; aesthetic and interpretive value placed on presence vs. absence, arbitrariness vs. exactness…) Level of difficulty: high.
N. Kathleen Hayles, “Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, (2005)
Here Hayles seeks to understand the exact nature of the relationship between traditional and new media story forms. The author addresses problems with Lev Manovich’s opposition of database and narrative form so to develop more nuanced understanding of digital storytelling. The essay explores ‘assumptions’ about subjectivity that are embedded in narrative theory (human p.o.v. is understood as meeting place of concept and form) and argues for revision to accommodate “database” forms of storytelling with machine intelligence. The paper analyzes a range of hypermedia/hypertext fictional works (some available on-line via linking) and elaborates a set of relations generated by such works in appendix form. Level of difficulty: low.
N. Kathleen Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October 66 (Fall 1993) available via Concordia e-journal choose JSTOR
Hayles discusses the material and conceptual effects of digital modes of communication on processes/practices of signification and interpretation; and describes shift in conceptual logic of presence/absence underpinning analogue forms of representation to a logic of pattern and randomness in computer messaging. Her stated thesis: “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as an epistemic shift toward pattern/randomness and away from presence/absence, affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once, as a change in the body…and a change in the message… [the discussion] weave[s] back and forth between the represented world of contemporary fictions, models of signification implicit in word processing and information technologies, and the technologies themselves (76).” Level of difficulty. medium.
C Theory Interview with K. Hayles
During the hour-long, video-conference interview with Arthur Kroker, Hayles discusses themes and issues addressed in her various publications: the aesthetics of electronic textuality, concepts of intermediation, the complexity of digital subjectivity (or the post-human subject) and the impact of the ‘regime of computation’ on the cultural era succeeding postmodernity. Level of difficulty: medium.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
schedule
January 7 Introductions, objectives, schedules…
January 14 dada > data will discuss changes in a.g. theory and practice over time and consider how a.g. practice is now imagined and enacted. The introduction will survey classic Dadaist projects, including early media practices, poetry, happenings and installations and contemporary manifestations of similar forms considered in comparative terms: Harun Farocki – strategic montage; Thomas Hirschhorn –materiality of information; Golem Levin, Lev Manovitch, Pall Thayer – database art.
Required reading/viewing:
Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto, 1918”
Concepts of the avant-garde
Futurist Manifesto
Surrealist Manifesto
January 21 Language and Mediation: Speech, Signs, Codes will examine the material and conceptual exchanges and implications of different systems of communication and different instances of communication—i.e. between humans and humans, humans and texts, humans, texts and machines—with reference to select database artworks and experimental literary works.
Required reading/viewing:
N. Kathleen Hayles, “Speech, Writing, Code: Three World Views,” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago + London, University of Chicago Press, 2005. (to be distributed)
or N. Kathleen Hayles,
“Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, (2005)
or
N. Kathleen Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October 66 (Fall 1993) available via Concordia e-journal
C Theory Interview with K. Hayles
January 28 Post-Media/Post-Production: New Media + Political Economy
considers the political economy of new media and new media art. We will discuss the affects of the loss of media specificity in an age of digital data flows, and the social, cultural and political values of ‘rear-garde’ actions and ‘relational aesthetics’
Required reading/viewing:
excerpts from Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Relational Aesthetics’ in Participation, Claire Bishop (ed.) London + Cambridge,Mass.: Whitechapel and MIT, 2006 and from Postproduction ~Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lucas + Sternberg, 2002 (to be distributed)
Michael Hardt + Antonio Negri, “Postmodernizaton or The Informatization of Production,” Empire, Harvard U. Press, 2000
Mark Amerika: Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction Art: A Counternarrative
February 4 Documents (1929-30) to Documenta 12: Magazine Project (2007) will broadly consider the various and changing views of mass media in avant-garde practice, with specific reference made to key publication projects—the Dadaist and Surrealist journals, Fluxus posterings and later a.g. documents
Required reading/viewing:
excerpts from Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.)Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006 (to be distributed)
http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1
http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/
February 11 Visitor: TBA
February 18/Break
February 25 - April 7 Student presentations ~ groups of 2 to 3
March 24/university closed
January 14 dada > data will discuss changes in a.g. theory and practice over time and consider how a.g. practice is now imagined and enacted. The introduction will survey classic Dadaist projects, including early media practices, poetry, happenings and installations and contemporary manifestations of similar forms considered in comparative terms: Harun Farocki – strategic montage; Thomas Hirschhorn –materiality of information; Golem Levin, Lev Manovitch, Pall Thayer – database art.
Required reading/viewing:
Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto, 1918”
Concepts of the avant-garde
Futurist Manifesto
Surrealist Manifesto
January 21 Language and Mediation: Speech, Signs, Codes will examine the material and conceptual exchanges and implications of different systems of communication and different instances of communication—i.e. between humans and humans, humans and texts, humans, texts and machines—with reference to select database artworks and experimental literary works.
Required reading/viewing:
N. Kathleen Hayles, “Speech, Writing, Code: Three World Views,” My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, Chicago + London, University of Chicago Press, 2005. (to be distributed)
or N. Kathleen Hayles,
“Narrating Bits: Encounters Between Humans and Intelligent Machines,” Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular, (2005)
or
N. Kathleen Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October 66 (Fall 1993) available via Concordia e-journal
C Theory Interview with K. Hayles
January 28 Post-Media/Post-Production: New Media + Political Economy
considers the political economy of new media and new media art. We will discuss the affects of the loss of media specificity in an age of digital data flows, and the social, cultural and political values of ‘rear-garde’ actions and ‘relational aesthetics’
Required reading/viewing:
excerpts from Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Relational Aesthetics’ in Participation, Claire Bishop (ed.) London + Cambridge,Mass.: Whitechapel and MIT, 2006 and from Postproduction ~Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Lucas + Sternberg, 2002 (to be distributed)
Michael Hardt + Antonio Negri, “Postmodernizaton or The Informatization of Production,” Empire, Harvard U. Press, 2000
Mark Amerika: Remixology, Hybridized Processes, and Postproduction Art: A Counternarrative
February 4 Documents (1929-30) to Documenta 12: Magazine Project (2007) will broadly consider the various and changing views of mass media in avant-garde practice, with specific reference made to key publication projects—the Dadaist and Surrealist journals, Fluxus posterings and later a.g. documents
Required reading/viewing:
excerpts from Dawn Ades + S.Baker (eds.)Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents, London + Cambridge,Mass.: Hayward Gallery + MIT Press, 2006 (to be distributed)
http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1
http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/
February 11 Visitor: TBA
February 18/Break
February 25 - April 7 Student presentations ~ groups of 2 to 3
March 24/university closed
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