Synopsis:
In his essay "The Artist as Historian," Mark Godfrey highlights recent art practices whose points of departure are not only researching past events but also "the way in which such events have formerly been narrated or indeed ignored in received historical writing." Godfrey himself uses history, linking the formal strategies of these contemporary practices to Conceptual Art as well as the Pictures artists of the 1980s. While noting that a new generation of artists are using similar media when compared to the canon of conceptual and appropriation art (e.g. text and the indexical image), Godfrey distinguishes the former from the latter two movements by observing that today's artists are using these media to specifically critique modes of historical representation. He then focuses the remainder of his essay on analyzing the works of a current practitioner who exemplifies the "artist as historian"- Matthew Buckingham.
One of several works Godfrey appraises is Buckingham's The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, In the Year 502,002 C.E., 2002. Its subject matter, the creation of Mount Rushmore in what is now South Dakota, is used to critique the patriotic master narrative that Mount Rushmore symbolizes as well as the corresponding modal hegemony of linear narrative itself. Godfrey's analysis of the work's form and content compliments Buckingham's own theoretical approaches to historiography, which, according to the author, are informed by Walter Benjamin's writings on history. One of the main ideas employed by both artist and critic is Benjamin's notion of history understood not as a set of events "disappearing behind us," fixed in a chronology, but as a "real-time" tool used for critical assessment in the present.
Using theoretical models gleaned from Benjamin is a fairly routine practice in art criticism and much of today's politically minded art. It is difficult to overestimate just how much of an effect his work has had on contemporary art theory and practice. Yet given the particular subject matter of Six Grandfathers- the critique of historiography within the context of the Lakota Sioux Indian- it would be unfortunate if the link between Benjamin's historiography and Sioux conceptions of historical consciousness were not made more apparent. I would therefore like to offer less a refutation of Godfrey's interpretation than an extension of its theoretical bases by understanding Six Grandfathers through native conceptions of history, which share much with Benjamin's historical materialism. I shall also like to conclude with a reappraisal of Buckingham's Six Grandfathers through a uniquely Native American concept: that of history as received through space/place. I believe doing so will not only expand the reading of Buckingham's piece but also help to move beyond the tendency of historiographical work to produce post-colonial, guilt-laden results while keeping its discourse comfortably within the confines built around stalwarts like Benjamin.
- - -
Synopsis:
The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed a renewal of political and social art in the United States and Europe. It was in 1985 that American artist Andrea Fraser first used the phrase "institutional critique" to describe practices specifically operating both in question of, as well as within, the systems of public and privately funded arts organizations. A few years later French curator Nicolas Bourriaud would develop a way to describe a breed of artists that, while working in some respects with the traditions of institutional critique, were doing so in intersubjective and participatory ways that complicated the traditionally static roles of artist, art object, and audience: "relational aesthetics."
Curiously, neither the discourses of institutional critique nor relational aesthetics, despite their shared emphasis on the interconnections that constitute social and institutional structures in order to illuminate new- to use Bourriaud's word- "microterritories" of engagement, make much mention of similar artistic strategies that were happening outside of the US and Europe at precisely the same time. Just as Fraser was solidifying institutional critique as a movement, China's '85 New Wave Movement was flowering into life, summoning a cadre of artists who, at the end of the country's Cultural Revolution, wanted to reclaim avant-gardism through a radical, individualized but particapatory politics of aesthetics.
Wu Shanzuan is an artist who contributed to this highly charged avant-garde movement and his practice will therefore be the focus of this essay. I would like to propose that Wu's work is a unique hybrid between realtional aestehics and institutional critique. The work patterns its content after western historical and neo-avantgarde strategies, which initially shunned but subsequently recognized the requirement of the "institutional frame." However, institutional critique has, for all its intentions, nevertheless tended to remain grounded in the model of the artist as disseminator, revealing a "hidden truth" to a passive audience, where the artwork is provided to allow contemplation and critical reevaluation. Here Wu's work parts ways with institutional critique, instead swapping out contemplation for participation and the potential for dialogue- strategies more in line with those espoused by Bourriaud.
One may question why the work of an artist from communist China should be examined through theoretical lenses coming from the post-industrial, democratic and free market logic of the west. For decades now China has held an ambiguous if sometimes very dramatic relationship with overt market economics and the flexibility of individual liberty. It is for this reason that an analysis must be done. Applying the principles seemingly inherent in the discourses of institutional critique and relational aesthetics to art practices that have operated outside of their purview will help shed new light on their implicit ideologies and limitations. I am hopeful that Wu's work can be used to foreground a growing tension today that has less to do with east/west or capitalist/socialist divisions than it does with transnational issues involving collective will and individual agency in manifesting political change. I believe his work provides a unique but also crucial context through which group dynamics and the efficacy of "relational spaces" can continue to be measured.
- - -
Synopsis:
Arkhe, we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence- physical, historical, or ontological principle- but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given- nomological principle.
-Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
Anyone who has ever watched films, videos or television within the last quarter century is familiar with the genre of moving images known as stock footage. Stock film and video, portraying simultaneous idealized and banal projections of life lived, filter out into our daily visual language. We've all seen the stuff before- in infomercials played on late-night television or in spots shown on closed-circuit monitors during a mass transit ride, we are shown the "relaxed vacationer," the "conscientious employee" and the "stable family practicing financial responsibility." These images belong to an ever-growing archive, one begun in the spirit of the Enlightenment Project's rational attempt to catalog the world and also one available for immediate utilization. Yet stock material is not necessarily recognized as belonging to the archive. More often, stock imagery is experienced as "final image," already programmed, its use part of a grander intention to reinforce meaning for a particular message by those who have an interest in doing so. But Derrida's etymology suggests that this archive, one often conjured under the auspices of neutrality, is consummated and maintained with authoritative bias. Here questions arise: how do we understand the "look of law" within the contemporary commercial stock footage archive? What social and political structures give it shape, give it its nomological principle, allow for archetypal imagery, allow for stereotypical imagery?
In the hopes of a better understanding of the possibilities of the digital video archive, this essay will examine specifically the Digital Film Library of Artbeats Software, Incorporated, an Oregon-based stock film and video house. I would like to place the company within an historical context, and then move into examining specific clips from its libraries. I aim to first critique the look of law in them initially through the lens of classic Althusserian analysis of ideology. I will then try to nuance my argument by way of using concepts of hegemony, both in the Gramscian sense of the term as well as in more contemporary articulations. The latter will finally help provide a framework within which I can speak of the particularly digital nature of the commercial video archive and then forecast a trajectory for it.
- - -