Felix, What Will Remain After All This?

The following blog post is a description on the project I have presented during the class: "Felix, what will remain after all this ?" including some notes, background ideas and initial questions that led to the current shape of the project. "Felix, what will remain after all this ?" is an installation in the tradition of discursive art or relational aesthetics; one might also bring in the term peformativity to describe a specific type of gesture of the work.

The work is a commissioned piece by an art institution in Berlin within their recent exhibition series: "Gruppenbild" (Group picture): "Gruppen bild is a five-part exhibition series with the artists Karolin., Discoteca F. S., Azin., Ming. and Shirirn H. S. in the showroom of the n b k. The participating artists work with performance and spatial installations. Over the course of a year they will be giving form to this experiment in conjuction with curators Kathrin. and Sophie. In every artistic intervention, existing installations will be altered and new elements added to them. The contributions of the individual artists will thus give rise to a collective conceptual model."

Note: Who is Felix?
Felix is my dialog partner
Felix is a collective
Felix represents himself
Felix represents a group of artist and curators
Felix could be Felix Gonzales-Torres
Felix is a fictional character

The exhibition space 'showroom' is a white cube. I am planing to do an intervention in this room through placing a pack of posters in the middle of the galley space/ the room. The posters are there to be taken away by the visitors.

The front side to the poster shows an Image of the ground, an image of the same spot on which the pack is placed. On the image there is also a hand visible. The photos will be taken while the hand is moving. The hand is moving because it is writing on the ground: "Felix, what will remain after all this ?"

The image is a reference to: interaction with time and memory. The space is reflected in it literal manner. Site specificity.

The image is taken by a handy photo camera. The size is A2, it is B/W print.

The image of the text on the ground covers its own root. The image covers the truth, the narrative, the history of its own, of that spot. The spectator can not witness whether the text does exist in real or not. You must go through the process of unveiling; each spectator will help the process of enlighten the truth of that particular spot through taking each one layer, one poster.

Question:
what remains after an action?
what remains after an event?
what remains after an artwork?
what remains after after history?
what creates memory?
what carries history?

On the back of the posters there is a second element printed. It is a letter. A hand written letter, authored by me and addressed towards the character Felix. The content of the letter will reflect the notions of memory, love, the you, the me, the us, the I and revolutions. The style of the letter is basically conversational. It will include Felix's previous letters which he wrote to me, and my responses to those letters.

Note: In fact, this letter is a collage of conversations we had among the curators and artist contributors of "Gruppenbild". During the meetings/workshops we had we mainly discussed each artist contributors work and interest within the project as well the nature and process of "Gruppenbild" itself. Each meeting was recorded on a dat. recorder which will of use specially for within my work.

I am interested in the relation between the two binary phenomena’s that can be found in the exhibition/curatorial concept: ‘the collective’ and ‘the individual’; or the distinction between ‘individuality’ and ‘individuation’. I am interested to look at the collective within the individual. The fact that we/people are influenced by several other people, outsiders, throughout our life, or that we are influenced by history (which marks ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘collective memory’) is for me interesting to observe.

How do we filter this influences?

The juxtaposition of this observations on the field of ‘artistic practice’ as such and the question of artistic ‘position’ or the originality and singularity of artistic ‘approach’ is for me a question that I want to point out within my work.

“… I think more than anything else I’m just an extension of certain practices, minimalism or conceptualism, that I am developing areas I think were not totally dealt with. … I think we are part of a historical process and I think that this attitude that you have to murder your father in order to start something new is bullshit.” From Felix Gonzales-Torres – Etre Un Espion, Interview by Robert Storr.

The installation includes also a second part which does not relate fully to this site, so I will leave it out for now.

General reference:

Photo from June 2009 during the silent march of the Iranian Green Movement in protest against the coup d'état of the Iranian regime. This march and the following other marches in that gathered 3 millions people on the streets of Tehran marks a particular point within the Iranian political history.

During the following demonstrations and riots in Tehran the image of the death of Neda Agha Soltan became the symbol of those historical days. The government forbid for those days every journalist to work and to document the events and actions on the streets of Tehran. It was the citizen journalism that emerged. People with their mobile cameras took pictures and films that was the only material for people to witness that historical moment.

--A

Virtual Relational Aesthetics

This video – a virtual re-enactment of the re-enactments of Abramovic's works in Second Life – is a follow up to my previous post on Marina's 'The Artist Is Present."



(Note you might need view the video directly on youtube because you need to sign in as above 18 years old viewer)

-Azin

Past Sculptures

My second blog post is again less a theoretical investigation on a particular matter than a question or an experiment.

I have to admit that the recent show of Marina Abramovic does less strike and entertain me because of the artworks themselves (although I have to say that I respect and appreciate her body of work very much) or because of theoretical references we tempt to force on art works; rather it interests me as a new step or understanding that she provides us on performance art. I am not sure whether this is a critical point or it is just how performance art is developing in its organic way and whether there should be less resistant against this development. We'll see.

But what I mean with a new step in performance art is that I think Abramovic denied a very specific element of performance art which is the event, the actions performed on-site and on the specificity of time. Time specificity and site specificity. So what happens if we deny this element and just concentrate on the concept or the script of the performance? A script which usually is in itself open and again based on the site and the time in which it will be performed. Even the term 'to perform' is in my opinion not the right term. But because of the lack of English I can not suggest another term at this moment. So what happens here if we just take the script and the plan of an already happened event/performance; what happens if just take the documentation of it and let it be re-enacted by other performers? Can we still talk about performance art? Or are we talking about objects? Isn't it the same as 'living sculptures' of Gilbert and George?

In the case of Marina's 'The Artist is Present,' I think that all we perceive in her show are objects in the form of documentation material or sculpture. Nothing there is time- and site-specific anymore. Everything is ruled by a plan. Even the exhibition design was based on the plans and scripts of the performances. There is no space for process. There are guards and rules who tell you how to be in this space. Everything is an re-enactment and theater. It is nostalgia. It is past. The artist is not present. The artist is object. The artist is past. And I will be able to buy the artist.

-Azin

Smooth Hypertext

I just wanted to share a few blurbs with you which I came across recently and I thought they might be related to the concept of "smooth space" as Delezue and Guattari described it.

The first blurb is a work by Christian Hubert, which some of you might know already. This theory is in the form a hypertext and "It contains extensive paraphrases of readings, generally, but not always, clearly credited [...] Many come from readings in contemporary developments in science like chaos and complex systems studies, some theoretical biology, and some related philosophical writings, particularly the work of Deleuze and Guattari."

http://christianhubert.com/writings/index.htm

The second blurb is a background sketch on the history of the hypertext. I wanted to mention a text by Critical Art Ensemble to open up the field. It is the chapter 5: "Utopian Plagiarism, Hypertextuality, and Electronic Cultural Production" from the book The Electronic Disturbance. Here is an extract:

"Thinking about a new means for recombining information has always been on 20th-century minds, although this search has been left to a few until recently. In 1945 Vannevar Bush, a former science advisor to Franklin D. Roosevelt, proposed a new way of organizing information in an Atlantic Monthly article. At that time, computer technology was in its earliest stages of development and its full potential was not really understood. Bush, however, had the foresight to imagine a device he called the Memex. In his view it would be based around storage of information on microfilm, integrated with some means to allow the user to select and display any section at will, thus enabling one to move freely among previously unrelated increments of information.

At the time, Bush’s Memex could not be built, but as computer technology evolved, his idea eventually gained practicality. Around 1960 Theodor Nelson made this realization when he began studying computer programming in college:

'Over a period of months, I came to realize that, although programmers structured their data hierarchically, they didn’t have to. I began to see the computer as the ideal place for making interconnections among things accessible to people. I realized that writing did not have to be sequential and that not only would tomorrow’s books and magazines be on [cathode ray terminal] screens, they could all tie to one another in every direction. At once I began working on a program (written in 7090 assembler language) to carry out these ideas.'

Nelson’s idea, which he called hypertext, failed to attract any supporters at first, although by 1968 its usefulness became obvious to some in the government and in defense industries. A prototype of hypertext was developed by another computer innovator, Douglas Englebart, who is often credited with many breakthroughs in the use of computers (such as the development of the Macintosh interface, Windows). Englebart’s system, called Augment, was applied to organizing the government’s research network, ARPAnet, and was also used by McDonnell Douglas, the defense contractor, to aid technical work groups in coordinating projects such as aircraft design:

'All communications are automatically added to the Augment information base and linked, when appropriate, to other documents. An engineer could, for example, use Augment to write and deliver electronically a work plan to others in the work group. The other members could then review the document and have their comments linked to the original, eventually creating a “group memory” of the decisions made. Augment’s powerful linking features allow users to find even old information quickly, without getting lost or being overwhelmed by detail.'

Computer technology continued to be refined, and eventually— as with so many other technological breakthroughs in this country—once it had been thoroughly exploited by military and intelligence agencies, the technology was released for commercial exploitation. Of course, the development of microcomputers and consumer-grade technology for personal computers led immediately to the need for software which would help one cope with the exponential increase in information, especially textual information. Probably the first humanistic application of hypertext was in the field of education. Currently, hypertext and hypermedia (which adds graphic images to the network of features which can be interconnected) continue to be fixtures in instructional design and educational technology. An interesting experiment in this regard was instigated in 1975 by Robert Scholes and Andries Van Dam at Brown University. Scholes, a professor of English, was contacted by Van Dam, a professor of computer science, who wanted to know if there were any courses in the humanities that might benefit from using what at the time was called a text-editing system (now known as a word processor) with hypertext capabilities built in. Scholes and two teaching assistants, who formed a research group, were particularly impressed by one aspect of hypertext. Using this program would make it possible to peruse in a nonlinear fashion all the interrelated materials in a text. A hypertext is thus best seen as a web of interconnected materials. This description suggested that there is a definite parallel between the conception of culture- text and that of hypertext:

'One of the most important facets of literature (and one which also leads to difficulties in interpretation) is its reflexive nature. Individual poems constantly develop their meanings—often through such means as direct allusion or the reworking of traditional motifs and conventions, at other times through subtler means, such as genre development and expansion or biographical reference—by referring to that total body of poetic material of which the particular poems comprise a small segment.'"

I will send the PDF of Critical Art Ensemble around for those who are interested to read further. Related to the above there is also a graphic/map which I have found on the Documenta 12 website through which they tried to visualize the concept behind the 'Documenta 12 Magazines' program. The website and description: http://www.documenta12.de/magazine.html?&L=1

And the graphic:
http://www.documenta12.de/magazine_network/

-Azin