[spectre] (fwd) ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

[John Hopkins]

some meandering thoughts on institution (pardon if the quoting is nto oworking right!):

>>A pattern that reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and media art?”
>>Possibly, and if so, to whose benefit? What were institutions hoping to gain from this >>expansion in the first place, and did they?  Might they have become unwilfully blinkered, >>self-perpetuating autarkies?  Would it be blasphemous to imagine that institutions run >>by and for humans are endowed with life-spans, and that one generation of institutions/ >>organisations for e.g. media art might quite inevitably and fortunately be succeeded by >>another? And if that were so, what kernels of art and culture and the critical reflection >>that is an integral part of art and culture might one hope to see passed on from one >>generation of institutions to the next?

These closings mirror the whole closings of organizations that dealt (primarily) with photography during the onset of digital tools.  Despite years of pumping up the medium of photography as something unique and special in the art-making process, suddenly it became clear that photography was simply another way to put a 2-dimensional mark on paper and hang it on a wall.   

The same coming-and-going happened in the US with the advent of the video portapak -- many community video collectives, labs, and festivals, the majority of which are now long-forgotten.  

I think the 'trauma' in this arises when people focus narrowly on the physical substrate of medium -- a retro concept to be sure, but materialism is still the dominant worldview, so, understandable.

You suggestion of instutional life-cycle is right on -- bringing back some vestige of life to a social structure that seeks immortality at the cost of reification...

>>At the risk of sounding like a Philistine (not a good idea given today's politics! – is >>humour still allowed on this list??), my questions are what, where, why, for whom is >>art?  How and why do pilgrimages to media art institutions differ from those to >>“traditional” art institutions (the Louvre still tops the charts)?  Are there links and >>should there be? 

Institution is institution.  The object of institution is not the material product, but rather the arrangement of humans in a social system.  Radical praxis occurs outside of (ahead of!) the construction/evolution of these social systems.  That evolution is guaranteed to occur as the majority of people cannot abide the un-framable/unknown territory of creative action outside of some recognized and comfortable framework.

Look at many the practioners from media art in the 90's -- most have been adsorbed by academic (or the short-term media art) institutions.  It's easier and takes less energy to survive (and as one gets older that survival/energy issue gets more important)

Ones relationship with all aspects of the dominant social system will define ones overall praxis.

>>Is there any connection between these currently decried down-scalings and restructurings >>and closures of media culture and media art institutions, and massive interests being >>mobilised around a powerful new breed of cultural archives to store and access the >>cadavers of ephemeral art commissioned and/ or show-cased by the places being >>threatened? (this question bounces back to the previous one
).  When does an art >>archive, a cultural memory engine, become a morgue, a DNA repository for bygone >>human expression?

There is always a relation between those who are moving into unknown spaces and those who follow that lead, feeling safe enough to tread there because an Other has made the space known -- by de-scribing it, or circumscribing it -- through re-presentation...  The institution takes the role as the curator of re-presentation, and most often has little understanding of or even awareness of the impulses that give energetic rise to the re-presentation.  Institution has little knowledge of the locus of creative action as that territory is not mapped yet in a sense that social order can understand...

>>Why is it that lists like these buzz with permanent noise of cultural and artistic activity, >>more frequently stemming from ad hoc groups than larger institutions which don’t (have >>to) employ the same advertising circuits? I’m not saying it isn’t sometimes annoying. >>But it occasionally grates with something unexpected, with a lurch into unforeseen ways >>of thinking that is perhaps not so obvious in closed discussions where everybody knows >>everybody. Like those who make the same annual pilgrimages.

why is it nice to go to the same festivals every year ?-- because it's easier than going to different places all the time.  New things can be seen in a familiar context.  It seems to take less energy and less need to be aware and with 'eyes wide open' as one must do when in a totally strange environment.  Seeing an old friend has a totally different energy than meeting a stranger.  Different people have different capacities for new-ness...  I personally like a bit of both.

>>Gibson in Count Zero: “How could anyone have arranged these bits, this garbage, in >>such a way that it caught at the heart, snagged in the soul like a fishhook?”
>>I’m lucky enough to encounter work that fishhooks my snaggable soul. Yet I take the >>bait in increasingly non-territorial waters. Weird eddies on the net or in strange physical >>spaces – like Lascaux. That’s an e

snip...

>>through it in one form or another – I’m interested in looking at where we go from here. >>What we need to carry over from past institutions and why. Because that question >>determines what it is we’re trying to preserve and foster. Rightly or wrongly (and that >>question is one we don’t have the answer to – but one that probably doesn’t have an >>answer so I shouldn’t have asked it in the first place). 

I would suggest that one place of great creative profit to go is into the unknown, the strange, the wierd ...

>>Blind faith. The need to act. To ex-press. To risk the hook.

jep!

Cheers
John
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tech-no-mad::hypnostatic:: with a shattered spine on a slow mend
domain: http://neoscenes.net
travelog: http://neoscenes.net/travelog/weblog.php
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