This week Fillip co-hosted two events in Vancouver. The first was a talk by the New York-based artist and my friend David Horvitz, which he delivered at the Or Gallery. The second, which was co-presented with the Contemporary Art Gallery, was a poetic grapple with Paul McCarthy’s Pirate Project by John C. Welchman, who sits on the Fillip advisory board. I’d like to share some thoughts on each as a post facto mainly because the proximity of both presentations [They took place over two concurrent evenings] occasioned a particular set of questions for me, especially regarding how the role that society, as a hybrid of digital/analogue spheres, does or does not enter into artistic production today.
In Horvitz’s talk, which was informal and conversational, we received an overview of recent and upcoming projects, including The Wikipedia Reader, [which Fillip participated in], Kiosk, [to which, in the interests of full disclosure, I contributed], the Drugstore Beetle project, and a work he is developing for Rhizome in the No Soul for Sale exhibition at Tate Modern. During the talk the audience shared a number of insightful observations on the work especially regarding his consistent engagement with systems of distribution and circulation [Holly Ward pointed this out early on in the discussion]. I personally think this is a rather significant feature of the work, which underscores the power of selection and framing in the online universe both in terms of its abilities to open up authorship and data networks, but also in closing down, or authorizing a limited network or set of networks. Part of my thinking derives from the scholarship of Matteo Pasquinelli, whose text on Google PageRank breaks down this phenomena into concrete terms through an analysis of the technology and political implications behind these masters of the (digital information) universe.
A common thread running through Horvitz’s projects is curatorial-type use of selection and framing, often involving the creation of some framework or armature on which to hang works of some kind. The manifestation of these structures is multiple; a set of instructions that become an archive of photographs that anyone can print at a local pharmacy photo kiosk, an invitation to create 30 works for 30 art libraries, a request for a set of links furnished by participants who collect them as they engage in their own meandering and often unwieldy wiki research. In looking at this work I cannot help but think of an ongoing question that artists have taken on over the centuries, which is what authority does the artist have, and what mediums are available to artistic expression? To some degree, these projects demonstrate how the artist has a new kind of authority to create a network that resembles Fluxus and Mail Art, but is distinct from these precursors. [By the way, I have taken this position as an artist and solicited others' participation for my own projects.] In my discussions on participation with Markus Miessen, David Goldenberg, and Patricia Reed, it has become clear that participation presents both an opportunity to co-create, or collaboratively author, a work, and yet, at the same time, it further invests in the authority of the artist, who sculpts, frames, welds that particular participatory framework, thereby suggesting the limitations of any concept of co-authorship.
What interests me immensely about Horvitz’s projects is that he is not simply investing in his own authority, which is something that Tonik Wojtyra, I think, was trying to say in the Q and A, but is actually using the network to bring visibility to his participating artists and their specific expressions. And, this is key because, on the one hand, Horvitz has the power to put together and present a networked “inquiry”, but, on the other hand, he is showing us that this is a highly endowed power. It’s exactly this power that Google possesses and achieves by renting the “common intellect” as Pasquinelli puts it. It’s exactly this ability that the curator possesses for the gallery is, all romance aside, in a brutally simple sense a container for pre-selected ideas, objects, etc…Horvitz, I think, seems to get at this material fact and takes that into contemporary experience and our, or at least my, understanding of this communications paradigm we inhabit and have not yet named.
+++
In Welchman’s talk, we were presented with a wealth of effort and articulations. To McCarthy’s excesses and repetitions, perhaps, we find a quantitative corollary in Welchman’s verbosity. And, this is not a bad thing. It’s at the level of language that Welchman provides the audience a feast undoubtedly.
I cannot in any fairness accurately represent the talk he gave, but I will say that it did engage not only with McCarthy’s Pirate Project in great detail, but it also addressed the artist’s recurrent interest in the image and space of the studio. Much of this information is perhaps well known to McCarthy’s fans, which include myself, but I have not heard it put together before with as much passion as Welchman clearly has for the artist and his work.
Afterward, I had a number of thoughts and questions that I think arose in relation to Horvitz’s talk, which I attended the night before.
For instance, one larger question I had was what does McCarthy’s work mean in an era of even more intense simulation and mediation of the body where communications increasingly take place online and prosthetic limbs outfit soldiers who engage in wars I experience through online newspapers and blogs exclusively? Welchman, at one point, mentioned that McCarthy’s use of violence is not well discussed in the critical literature concerning his work. It made me think that it is important to especially consider that McCarthy’s violence is undeniably mediated violence because the body, in as much as it is put forward as a spotlighted site, is always represented in a hybrid sense-a real body amplified by prostheses [noses, ears, bellies], masks, wigs, and fake blood, shit, etc… [i.e. condiments intended for consumption that are alien or invading synthetic foodstuffs, or condiments, more precisely, designed to make consumption more palatable]. This violence is, of course, also mediated in another sense-because the way we, as viewers, experience it is through video, photography, etc… While McCarthy’s work used to be based on live performance, it is not now experienced as documentation of a live performance event. The effect is that the violence is removed. This is much the same way that I both thankfully and peculiarly experience violence in my own life – always online [e.g. news articles, youtube clips] or in a film. It is something that takes place somewhere, but not in my here. I know it exists, but I cannot verify it. Moreover, corporeal life is further becoming more indirect, more mediated–i.e. I check the weather online to layer appropriately before leaving home, I monitor ingredient labels to see what I am going to eat, or look up restaurants for a place to go, and so forth. In these examples, I access my body through information that talks to me – of course not all of the time, but definitely more often than not.
I guess, with all of this in mind, I am wondering, from my own place in the world, and my experience of it, which is deeply hybridized [public/private, mediated/real, virtual/physical, global/local] what I am thinking about and wondering is perhaps why this particular aspect of mediation not entering into Pirate Project? I tried to ask Welchman about this during the q and a, but failed to articulate what I really meant, so here is a re-articulation. McCarthy’s choices in showing bodies and violence in the ways that he consistently has relies upon mediations and hybridizations that involve costume, prostheses, and the entertainment industry [by which I mean film, TV, and Disney]. It just seems like a really important space or opportunity to consider further given that the digital domain is not separate from all the other hemispheres we traverse in daily life. Moreover, I might say that the immaterial aspect of the digital domain lends itself to thinking about the highly abstract nature of financial markets that have concrete, corporeal consequences…what I call magical financial realism. And, of course, it is precisely the highly specious work of financial institutions during the Bush years and today that makes a legitimate case for inaugurating a pirate insurgency, or at least imagining and imaging one. How else can we give voice and body to something we have no seemingly tangible hope of accessing or redressing?
+++
In looking back over these two talks I get the sense that perhaps due to generational variances there are corresponding differences in interests. I have the great fortune of having lived before the Internet and remembered what it felt like. I am now very much attached to it as a communications and information prosthetic of my own, so in one way I feel a technological-chronological hybridity as much as I feel other kinds. This situation has only slowly and partially channeled itself into a discernible figure-ground.