CURSOR 9
CURSOR9: 21C Artists
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
INTRODUCTION
When I composed my NEH digital humanities proposal, I titled it “21C Artists.” I thought, “Oh yeah! Great title! Very catchy!” Then I Googled 21C and found this:
http://www.21cmuseumhotel.com/overview/default.aspx
My initial reaction was, “D*****! They beat me to it!” A collector/developer couple in Louisville, employing a highly skilled web designer or design team, and an excellent PR strategy and/or team, had imprinted their ownership on a project that in some significant aspects addressed the same issues I am taking on. Here is the overview of the 21C Museum, from the website:
21c Museum is dedicated to collecting and exhibiting the very best work of living artists from all over the world. With over 9,000 square feet of exhibition space, as well as a dedicated video lounge, the museum features dynamic group and solo exhibitions, as well as permanent, commissioned installations. The exhibitions in the reception area gallery and in the lower atrium gallery will change approximately every six months, and will feature artworks from the International Contemporary Art Foundation, from the collection of Laura Lee Brown and Steve Wilson, and from artists, museums, and other private and public collections.
In early 2008, the 21c Museum Foundation changed its name to the International Contemporary Art Foundation in order to solidify its position in the nonprofit community and to further denote its separation from the for-profit hotel. This has been a change in name only; all operating procedures will remain the same. The founders felt it was important for the foundation that operates the 21c Museum to have the distinction of being nonprofit, a fact that was unclear under the old name. With this change, we hope to become a more prominent member in the local and national community, promoting greater understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art for all audiences- and to encourage open, creative expression of all art forms.
About ten years ago, I produced a gallery project (Destination Gallery) in a downtown Nashville high-rise office building owned by TIAA CREF and managed by CB Richard Ellis. The project conceptually was very similar to the 21C “museum hotel” in Louisville. The idea was to install a dedicated art space on the ground floor of the skyscraper, and to install a permanent collection of artwork throughout the building. We would present exhibits every six weeks or so in the gallery, featuring artists from elsewhere, a niche that at that time was underserviced. Destination Gallery at First Union Tower operated for a couple of years. The owner negotiated for me to present the shows for free the first year, and promised that if I met some goals we agreed upon, we would implement the program of permanent installation. That never happened. The building was sold, First Union changed hands, and most of the original parties moved on, including me, with Destination Gallery. When I say the two concepts were similar, I am referring to the establishment of culture anchors for cities, or as painter Richard Haas (not to be confused with Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations) describes them, “urban icons.” (I don’t think Richard invented that term. We discussed it thoroughly on my Nashville art radio program though.) Perhaps a well-funded boutique hotel housing a contemporary art museum and a diverse multidisciplinary presentation agenda and a gallery/collection in an office high-rise seem dissimilar. When I suggested they aren’t, it is because they share fundamental characteristics: architecture; privately owned and/or consigned collections of quality art; a progressive social or community agenda; concept marketing to benefit an attached and not-arts-related business.
Two nights ago I posted this quote from my Thesis: “Globalist corporate ownership – of property, the means of production and the shaping of identity – is the greatest threat to art.” If that sounds extreme to you, consider this item from today’s New York Times:
“And Now, an Exhibition From Our Sponsor; For Some Museums, a Corporation Can Also Be a Curator” (By ROBIN POGREBIN, Published: August 21, 2009 )
Given the economic downturn, more small and midsize art institutions may be increasingly open to ready-made shows by corporations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/arts/design/23pogr.html?ref=arts
This is possibly the most troubling newspaper article about fine arts that I’ve read in over 25 years. If ever a need existed to not redefine art in American Democratic society, it is now. My Thesis discusses the trends that have brought us to this point, so I won’t pursue this course in detail here. However, I will suggest that the urgency for cultural reform of the sort we are exploring in this course on the Digital Humanities is absolutely essential to the survival of the nation and an art system with integrity.
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Here is the outline for my NEH proposal:
MISSION
To establish an international collective to support, document and nourish the visual arts by showing how valuable art and artists are to society.
VISION
We will build a community serving artists, using methods that maximize available arts infrastructure. These will include:
· A web nexus founded on the principles and practices of Digital Humanities, applied through dimensional methodologies in a transparent, inclusive, high-performing sequence of actions
· Exhibitions sited across the globe produced by the collective, facilitated by our web network
· An oral history archive representing artists in their own words (Talking Artist)
· A photographic artist portrait gallery (Portraits of the Artist in the 21st Century)
· A historical database to educate today’s artist about her roots
· A commercial store for distributing the collective’s artwork and services, providing artists with income
· An information clearinghouse containing data on support services for artists
· Partnerships with existing institutions, foundations, organizations, governments and businesses
o To establish protocols for best practices for artists, and for the society that cares about art
o To promote and enhance coordination among online and traditional (brick and mortar) libraries, collections and databases helpful for artist research
o To enhance access to artist resources for the purposes of research and continued education
o To encourage educational authorship by artists for artists and arts educational programs (K-12, Undergraduate, Graduate, Post-Graduate)
o To develop governmental programs promoting visual arts and artists
o To foster media (TV, Radio, Film, Literary) programs focused on visual arts and artists
o To create a worldwide network of exchange for art, artist and arts education, such as exhibitions, seminars, conferences, workshops and residencies
o To secure life-care for artists
o To promote the preservation of art and a sustainable community of artists through public policy
· A major study on the effectiveness of artist education programs that rely primarily or exclusively on critique, rather than demonstration
· A web-accessible database project to facilitate and preserve the artist-to-artist craft traditions, containing
o A digital archive of artist studio/shop demonstrations (video)
o How-to procedures (audio or text)
· A comprehensive listing of fine artist support services by region and specialty
· A sequence of surveys asking participants key questions, such as
o How has America failed its artists?
o What art is relevant to people and their communities?
o Why are no books published about bad art?
o Who is an artist?
o What is art?
· A vibrant and dynamic discourse among art professionals and the communities they serve about art’s meaning, definition, purpose and value
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Unfortunately, I won’t have time before Tuesday’s presentation to use the CURSOR text as an opportunity to bind the many threads together underpinning my assertion that the Digital Humanities can satisfy an immediate need for modeling a powerful response to environmental oppression on the arts in our society. It is my hope that we will together be able to establish a good point of origination for such a discourse during the brief. I encourage all, however, to at your convenience, scan The End of Organization Man & the Epistemological Age. It contains a treatise on the ethics of vision, some documentation of Founder views on art and culture, a revelatory argument against Management as a Liberal Art (it is a design domain), corrections of Drucker’s misperceptions (to be kind) and a systems analysis of corporate viral effects and disease, especially as they pertain to visual arts in a sustainable civilization. In the remainder of CURSOR, I will be essentially adding a postscript to that narrative, since the dimensional analysis in both cases leads to the same outcome, a further proof that the form is effective, with repeatable outcomes.
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At this point, I would like to incorporate an excerpt by contemporary French philosopher, Elie During, whose work was brought to my attention today by an Art for Humans collaborator, sculptor Anna Julien. During is wrestling with issues central to 4D production here and elsewhere, and although he isn’t explicitly describing the 4D art method, he might as well be.
What an ‘Anti-Positivist’ Epistemology Means
By contrast, the meaning of an anti-positivist epistemology appears more clearly. It is a stance that must first be evaluated according to its strategic effects on certain interpretative and constructive practices. Canguilhem writes : ‘To take as one’s object of inquiry nothing other than sources, inventions, influences, priorities, simultaneities, and successions is at bottom to fail to distinguish between science and other aspects of culture.’ (Canguilhem 1988:3). It is interesting that this indictment of positivist historiographical practices should be couched in quasi-Bergsonian terms.
‘Sources’ and ‘influences’ point to the ‘retrospective illusion’; ‘simultaneities’ and ‘successions’ are reminiscent of the spatial conception of the historical timeline. Canguilhem says elsewhere that ‘A history of results can never be anything more than a chronicle. The history of science concerns an axiological activity, the search for truth. This axiological activity appears only at the level of questions, methods and concepts, and nowhere else.’ (Canguilhem 1994:30). How this bears on the question of historicity itself, and how ‘the history of the relation of intelligence to truth generates its own sense of time’ (Canguilhem 1994:31), is another question, but it is a Bergsonian question as well.
It seems that we are now in a position to formulate the general principle of anti-positivism: it consists in the belief that epistemology is not concerned with facts (neither scientific facts, nor historical facts uncovered by the history of science), but with concepts. This means that its objects are always projects, and in the case of the history of sciences, ‘the object of historical discourse is, in effect, the historicity of scientific discourse.’ (Canguilhem 1994:26).
Yet again, the real problem with positivism is not so much that it strives at some kind of immediate contact with the real : it is rather that this attitude implies a very naive idea of what a concept is, in general. Hence the problem is not so much to replace facts by concepts as the proper objects of inquiry, but to reach an adequate understanding of the formation and functioning of concepts in the first place. Whether the substitute for positivism is found in dialectics or intuition, what is being criticized is always an abstract view of concepts which considers them apart from their theoretical setting, the network or system of notions to which they belong, their vital connections in the web of thought (Canguilhem 1994:50-51).
In his study on the formation of the concept of reflex movement in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth century, Canguilhem emphasizes the necessity of studying conceptual filiations rather than the succession of theories (Canguilhem 1994:181). Bachelard develops a similar line of argument concerning Fizeau’s experiment: we do not know what we are talking about before ‘the object of knowledge is replaced in a problematic, situated in a discursive process of instruction.’ (Bachelard 1949:55). On this construal, the object becomes ‘more than a historical fact, more than a fact resulting from observation: it solves a problem.’ (Bachelard 1949:53)
Briefly stated, the kind of ‘positivism’ that is being discarded by the French epistemological tradition under consideration is essentially one which considers concepts in isolation from their variation in a problematic configuration, one which proves incapable of engaging in what Canguilhem calls the ‘working of a concept’ (‘Dialectique et philosophie du Non chez Gaston Bachelard,’ in Canguilhem 1970:206).
Anti-positivism thus reverts the ordinary direction of thought: instead of going from theories (and facts) to concepts, it goes from concepts to theories (and problems), because to define a concept is to formulate a problem. Through the succession of theories, one must realize that a problem endures, even within the solutions devised for solving it. Problems must be tracked, identified, properly recast and posed, even where scientists and thinkers themselves were not in a position to do so, or believed they could do without it by simply stating the solutions. To quote Bachelard once more: “Above all one must know how to state problems. Whatever one may say, in scientific life, problems do not arise by themselves. It is precisely this sense of problems which is the distinctive mark of a genuine scientific mind. For a scientific mind, every piece of knowledge is an answer to a question. If there is no question, there cannot be any scientific knowledge. Nothing is granted. Nothing is given. Everything is constructed” (Bachelard 1938:14).
And elsewhere: ‘Scientific research does not need the bravado of universal doubt, but the constitution of a problematic. It takes its departure in a problem, even if this problem is badly stated.’ (Bachelard 1949:51).
Needless to say, according to Bachelard, this sense of problems is a requisite for the history of sciences, and a fortiori for any rigorous philosophy of science. These considerations bring us one step further in the understanding of what an ‘anti-postivist’ epistemological stance should imply. For it seems now that the proper object of an anti-positivist epistemology is not so much facts, theories or even concepts themselves. Rigorously speaking, ‘the perpetual revision of contents by deeper investigation and by erasure’ is only a symptom of the constant recasting of a problem in various theoretical fields. So the real objects of an anti-positivist epistemology are problems, along with the conditions under which problems are formulated, posed, and sometimes solved. The positivist image of truth is overturned only when one realizes that thought does not primarily strive at knowing what reality really is, but deals with its own problems as immanent, genetic functions.
(From During’s “’A History of Problems’: Bergson and the French Epistemological Tradition” - Article publié dans le Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol.35, n°1, janvier 2004, posted 2005 on the Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine website at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id_article=65)
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Let’s for a moment reboot our comparison of old versus new media.
To begin the discussion, one can frame the comparison with a timeline and a frequency/ratio analysis. Such an analytic configuration of type yields much more information about cultural exchange that is art-centric than information about the nature of the conveyance. Yet, there is value - even if latent - for inter-linked transduction, contained in an artwork, whether digitally fabricated or manually crafted with preset materials. To put it more simply, art represents, and representation is an exchange of sentience. Choice saturates the action, and as of the mid-20th Century, so does the freed outcome. Jackson Pollack is the Hinge. Art by definition recognizably exists in the parameters the society agrees upon. Art is reflexive dimensionally, perceptually animating for the artist or the person experiencing the art, a sensory phenomenon.
The more interesting conjecture involves studying the space that separates the two forms, or considering how each succeeds, or what each is best for, and optimizing environments in which they might appear and positioning them in relation to one another effectively.
COMPARISON
Oil painting for instance has for centuries been proven as an artist’s medium. Western Civilization has produced thousands of examples of excellent verifications of oil paint, as a medium for expression that works and works well for representation of human experience. Many books have been produced categorizing the classes or types of painters and paintings made with oil-based pigments. Many books have been published documenting the processes by which the paint is made and canvas prepared and so on. Many studies of artist lives and motivations have been presented. In studios and lecture halls, experts have instructed new practitioners on methods and applications for oil painting, and elaborated on the conceptual underpinnings and strategies employed by artists and their cultural interpreters. Still, the medium, in spite of periodic claims to the contrary, is vital and continues to yield remarkable artworks by artists working across a diverse spectrum of idioms and schematics, exploring an expanding range of subject matter and culturally relevant material. Oil has longevity in both the technical and aesthetic sense. However, the number of people who can prepare and execute an oil painting and present it properly - maximizing the medium in terms of the ancient craft tradition that has relied on oil for expressive cultural conveyance for centuries - constitutes a tiny fraction of the population…
On the other hand, the digital medium is in a nascent stage (less than a century old), and compared to oil painting, is very young in its trajectory as an artist’s tool. Many of the attendant cultural apparatuses and social topology attached to oil paint, described in the paragraph above, barely attach to digital art. The number of art historians who have undertaken to focus on computer-based art is fairly small, for example. Also on this other hand, the computer and software programs like Photoshop are being used to make and manipulate images by millions of people…
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Perhaps comparison isn’t the best way to gauge the value of digital art. In my own practice, I have found it very helpful to try to come to grips with how computer-based creative processes and organic or traditional processes push each other. Art media are constantly staking out territory in competition for the artist’s imagination. Of course, personifying an artist medium with a statement like that is a bit awkward, but bear with me. I’m moving into a discussion of sentience that may prove helpful for understanding how a computer, a tool for computations, became a significant artist tool, at least for the moment, eclipsing the others in social currency (if not real, monetary currency)…
Let’s take a preliminary look at how oil painting and digital art are similar. Both as descriptive terms are identically generic. Oil paintings by Rembrandt bear little resemblance to Albers’. Computers can be used to generate still images, movies, sculptures, and many other forms of expression that don’t even exist as 3D objects in the spatial world. Until very recently, art historians had hardly managed to generate even a moderately useful organizational structure for the archiving of computer art. This task is made more problematic because of problems like the lack of common protocols among platforms and durability of the component materials…
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Or, as During’s text suggests, it might just be better to place the object next to the projection and thereby activate the idea that binds the two together. This is what we’ll do on Tuesday.
