Re: <documenta X><blast> electronic arts
cwduff@alcor.concordia.ca
Sun, 6 Jul 1997 10:34:38 -0400 (EDT)
Viktor Mazin - some thoughts and commnets about your posting
of Fri, 4 Jul 97. re: visual "commodity."
If, what Bracha Lichtenberg - Ettinger suggests that "in a matrixial
borderspace, artist and viewer co-emerge in divers ways with artwork
and by artwork, sharing - in-difference the screen of Vision."
Sharing - what artist has spoken of sharing before? Is this not a
revolutionary concept? To share with the audience, and not to
exploit them like so many capitalists babies who consume artworks. Since
(the co-emergence and the sharing of difference[s]) this happens, (and I
believe it is one aspect of a global series of artistic alterations
and de-alienation procedures, as well as the desiring-production-creation
of pure joy) it addresses
directly
the
question of the
reification of art works, and the alienation and
reification of the artist and viewer. "Normally" these relations are
constructed in terms of an economic relation, which itself is already
alientated and drenched in the commodity-capital market relations.
Basically the purchasing and selling of art-works is what I am referring
to - everything from private purchases to the public endowment of
galleries etc and of course the auction of art-works. But since the
matrixial would seem to subvert that process on the level of its content
(I use the term in this context provisionally), and in the very terms in
which it defines its view-ability - quite literally as a collapsing of the
"borderspace," literally the border which is the frame holding the canvas
ie.the canvas as content, and the paint as further content and context,
then is it accurate to use the phrase "visual commodity?" I think it is
inaccurate to make this choice of words.(I say economic with out meaning
to reduce any Literature or Art to one context, but with a real
desire to know its contexts, its limits, its origins; and then to
heighten
its determination; there is an economy of desire, in art which is
not the same thing.)
For the matrixial sets out to stir new relations and
potentially socially liberating ones, perhaps even revolutionary in their
molecular implications; I mean the notion of molecular revolution used
by F. Guattari - that is to say, they are transversal, they cross over the
normative categories of closure and intention. In addition to which the
transverse cuts across the disciplines of art, science, technology, social
formations etc. allowing for flows to escape, creating flight patterns and
escape lines -Art as the Real and not merely the imaginary. [[F.Guattari
in French please see - Les Annees D'Hiver; Paris, 1986,pp.167-92. and:
Quinzaine litteraire 422 (du 1 au 31 aout 1984):p.4. In English see The
Guattari Reader, edited by Gary Genosko, Blackwell Publishers, 1996.This
book has a wide selection of essays by F. Guattari. And La Revolution
Moleculaire, Fontenay-sous-Bois: Editions Recherches, 1977]]
SInce both viewer and artist are then released from the commodification
relationship - one cannot speak of the visual "commodity." Because it is
precisely that which is being overturned and challenged. To reinstate the
notion of "commodity, " at this moment would be to bring back the very
thing
which is being subverted and deplored ie. the death that the commodity
seeks in its use and its consumption. The praxis of lost agency and
intention in the face of the inertia brought on by capital and commodity,
hungrily await the art-works (Visual Art Commodities it could be the name
of a
new stock), acceptance into the market. Why? Well it is
there that it becomes the static object of consumption. That would also be
to re-instate passivity, and the everyday death of the spectacle of
consumption. With that consumption comes all the unconscious reactions
which the "consumer" of art has been trained to enact and act out. But in
the works of this artist there is another sense of things which occurs:
"artist [and] viewer are not in passive/active contradiction in
relation to the screen, yet they don't amalgamate either, they are not the
same, and they are not symmetrical. " They cannot be in a symmetrical
relation, for it is the symmetrical relation which is used to maintain the
various power struggles of ego states (and ego institutions) which
surround the art work, or the poem work. "Symmetrical" relations in the
western world are the emotional counterpart of ,or rather the existential
analogue that works in tandem with the uneven and unjust mirroring
effect
of mine versus yours, and me verus you. Mirror mirror on the wall, whose
has the greatest "object d'art" of all ? What I am saying is that
symmetrical relations are based on the consumer's illusion of equality and
that illusion creates competition and reinforces the commodity status of
objects and people. Whereas, if I understand it rightly, the matrixial
suggests another domain,a process of sharing (the wealth of vision and
insight), of eliminating the
duality of artist and non-artist, of introducing another style of
subjectivity and subjectivities - the multiple. So that even the word
borderspaces,
can be a clue to the multiplication of layer and meaning, and the
escapes
this
work provides for all concerned. As in the following - there is
border as
singular noun, and borders as plural noun object, and there is the which
follows it - spaces. The borders are
plural, in other words, that which can be crossed is many [things].
To cross is
not to
contradict, but to pass through or transverse. So the borders are passed
and, then in another sense they are the passage itself crossing. Or they
are the
spaces of the border and its limits. One can cut the joined word
borderspaces in several and equally valid directions of meaning. The word
spaces (referred to above) becomes the place where the borders are rushed
to. One can ask are they black holes, or white walls? What happens to the
borders when so insinuated and moved around? One is dealing with the
multiple and its variants, or permutations. To consume an art work, to
eat a commodity, no this is inaccurate. Consumers turn away mystified and
bewildered, they go back to the other art, the easy one that does not
traverse their previous knowings; Ones which do not cross the (trans)-
verse of unconsciousnesses of reality, their reality.
And it is not all pleasant to travel in the desert and see the
"filth" and "station-cemeteries" this work
enters, evokes; which it speaks to and remembers, calls up and which it
also overcomes. (Halala-Autistwork;Ettinger, Lichtenberg,Bracha 133& 143)
SO how can one speak of commodity, even a visual one, harmless as it might
seem, harmless as the grammar which carries its innocuousness.
No, one cannot use this term and speak of the work of art. And further can
one call the relations "bilateral?" No, that is not enough because B.L.
Ettinger's work is a force which pushes outward and thrusts at us its
challenges and queries, its painful colours creating a headache across the
eyes of our thought. No, one must object to the idea of bilateral. It is
not radical enough to its subject. It is the transversality of the
relations implied in the generosity of the act of sharing, and the
sharing in "in-difference of," and a turning away of the viewer-reader,
simulataneously extending an invitation to come aboard, and see for
themselves. But not to collapse
those differences, but to heighten, and expand them, creating a
vision, a
shared one of the screen of Vision. There is no social contract here, but
a calling forth into becoming of the forces of energy. It is not
bilateral, but multilateral - as it goes off in the different directions
of its quest - and yes the matrixial (paintings, works, concepts) speaks
to the non-visual via the various narratives of its discouse.
Its vision speaks to history in the past, and perhaps its speaks and calls
to the future. One can say it speaks then to a community, one that will
come into being. BEyond the commodity absence of relationship, beyond the
absence of relationship.
**** Clifford Duffy****************
***********************
> Yes, artist and viewer are not symmetrical. They have bilateral agreement
> (a kind of social contract) in the sphere of visual commodity. And each has
> internal agrement between an artist and a viewer in one subject,
> particulary
> in the interactive space. So, 'shared-in-difference the screen of Vision'
> always becomes the screen of revision.
>
> Olessia Tourkina
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