Part and parcel of a response to questions from someone else a while back, part and parcel of what it feels to be rejected, what it feels to be angry, frustrated, unwanted… but maybe, oh maybe, motivated. An all-in-one.
As far as how I frame these projects… it is, to be quite honest, a rather tricky question. When my neighbours know that I am an artist, does anything that I initiate count as “art”? Or, if they have an understanding of “art” to mean oil paintings and wealthy galleries in the 798 arts distict of Beijing, are the things that I do as artist “not really art”? This is an age-old question already, fired off long before Duchamp, before the modernists, before the anything “next”, the non-traditional, the “new”.
Hmm… pretentious? 虚伪？
Last week, her question of the week: “Does ‘alternative’ also mean ‘minority’?”
In regards to such categorization, presentation, or address, I think we can embrace and understand the need for multiplicities of thought and approach. On one hand, this is for me an artistic endeavor, and if asked to explain it theoretically, it seems natural for me to do so, in all my impracticality, from an artistic standpoint. But amidst the sharing of something with someone during the moment of exchange/creation, it also lies beside the point to think about how we should label it. While such labels are important, too, it is in actuality that these are crucial in all places outside of the work itself, e.g., in terms of its marketing, presentation, and documentation.
So where does the ART of the artwork lie? This is a question we can ask of any artist, a la art school 101, but given the current contexts it comes again that one should justify oneself against the concreteness of the “product”. Is this really the case? Amidst the artfulness of the downfall of financial capital, what materialisms must we still rely upon? You might say that domestic interactions in China are less affected by such crisis, but we cannot neglect a reconsideration of where the artfulness of the thing is. (Do we get into a question of virtuosity here?)
Can we talk about transaction anymore these days? If the very nature of the exchange itself should determine the material and form of the artwork, are we talking about economies or aesthetics? What is social work? Is human interaction a question for within a museum, within the public sphere, or within politics? In which one do we participate?
Of an art which is created of such interaction and participation, we look to it as a “third thing”, possibly a positive externality outside of you and I both, but created by you and I. This is not necessarily a clarity of approach. What is 含蓄 is outside and inside, a weaving——containing and embodied yet implicit, veiled. “We give appearance,” he says.
We start to learn and recognize things in one another that we had not noticed before. In our own neighbourhood first, but also by reflecting a global position back onto the local. By adding value to such things that where we had not before, we could consider transaction beyond the monetary, but also not merely as a nostalgia. This is a creative process. There is a social capital and a cultural capital involved here. And maybe——just maybe——we could begin here, at the level of community, to understand the possibilities of a micropolitical capital.
Michael writes to Hu Fang: “We enjoy the space between being ‘in the know’ and simply being attentive to one’s social environment where the unexpected may occur, setting up an interaction that will provide a meaningful communication, ‘loading the decks’.”
时间 posted on: 29 May 2009 | 
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May 29th, 2009 - 15:13
i read as you wrote….(emphasis mine)
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Let us, then, recapitulate our argument, in order to try to suggest what form the new civilization might take. We have two alternatives before us. First, there is the possibility that imaginal thinking [sean: eg. surface, image, screen] will not succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking [sean: eg. line, text]. This could lead to a general depoliticization, deactivation, and alienation of humankind, to the victory of the consumer society, and to the totalitarianism of the mass media. Such a development would look very much like the present mass culture, but in more exaggerated or gross form. The culture of the elite would disappear for good, thus bringing history to an end in any meaningful sense of that term. The second possibility is that imaginal thinking will succeed in incorporating conceptual thinking. This would lead to new types of communication in which man consciously assumes the structural position. Science would then be no longer merely discursive and conceptual, but would have recourse to imaginal models. Art would no longer work at things (“oeuvres”), but would propose models. Politics would no longer fight for the realization of values, but would elaborate manipulable hierarchies of models of behavior. All this would mean, in short, that a new sense of reality would articulate itself, within the existential climate of a new religiosity.
All this is utopian. But it is not fantastic. Whoever looks at the scene can find everything already there, in the form of lines and surfaces already working. It depends on each one of us which sort of posthistorical future there will be.
— Vilém Flusser, “Line and Surface” (1973)
June 1st, 2009 - 22:47
http://www.iwishicoulddescribeittoyoubetter.net/?p=2026
could this be a response? do you know what i’m talking about?
thinking about surplus value too, in relation to the ‘third thing’ that you mention, and wondering what it might mean when the surplus value of a transaction is the transaction itself, when the ‘positive externality outside of you and i both, but created by you and i’ is exactly this you and i, is the we that forms itself at the moment of exchange.
June 2nd, 2009 - 03:27
is it necessary to frame this discussion using the language of capital itself?
if “you” and “i” create something or co-emerge in an artistic and/or micropolitical sense, does it not do damage to that very act or moment in trying to define it in terms of classical economics and the “positive externality” (or “surplus value” for that matter)?
i am very leery about this. “large-c” capital would want very much to understand how such a positive externality could become a surplus value that can be exploited at a very capillarized level, would it not? is this not empire?
i think this is why the ideas revolving around gift have been so important for me lately: they are quite irrational in the face of symmetrical exchange and what might become the exploitation of a positive externality. it seems to me to be art that wants nothing in return but its own coming into being…
in this sense — and drawing from flusser’s discussion of the artist proposing models — art is very much like entrepreneurism, except an entrepreneurism that does not seek the creation of quantifiable surplus value. perhaps instead call it an art-entrepreneurism that creates perception differential for both the “you” and “i” in co-creation?
unfortunately, this can mean in a practical sense that the artist will struggle to find resources, grants, etc. to continue her work. and so it becomes but one form of transaction/exchange/we.need.different.words among others…
June 2nd, 2009 - 04:10
ha i’ve googled this today already. and yes wondering about it too.. while at times it might be productive to borrow these terms, or use them metaphorically, it’s easy to get caught up inside the same thing you want to get away from.. hmmm..
can we use words like transaction or exchange without evoking economics?
(have you read marcel mauss on the gift and reciprocity?)
June 2nd, 2009 - 23:37
exchange: the notion of reciprocity seems to be strong here
transaction: i like this better, as it seems to imply the idea of communication a little more
reciprocal: seems to connote a symmetry(?), which i think is the problem we want to avoid as a necessity
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i have not read the mauss book (it has been on the radar for a while), but from what i quickly glean from wikipedia, once again the notion of reciprocity is strong.
so how does one revision the gift such that not only is there an “obligation” of backward reciprocity, but perhaps sometimes a pay-it-forward reciprocity? i see this as a fundamental form of “transaction” growing on the network with immaterial labour.
bruce sterling: maneki neko
i think he is perhaps a bit too optimistic about the power of the internet to pull this sort of gift economy off….after all, why can’t some of the same principles be scaled down to human-level interaction?
“We start to learn and recognize things in one another that we had not noticed before. In our own neighbourhood first, but also by reflecting a global position back onto the local.”
but i think the premise is a powerful one: gift economy as a blend of payback and payforward with the “obligation” one of participation in an individualized and contingent sense.
(thinking out loud right now, so probably a fair bit of bullshit here…)
June 4th, 2009 - 02:22
i hesitate at the proposition towards models, which is something very different from potentiality. models somehow revert back to constant cycles of structure-conflict-revolution-structure, whereas potentiality is much more in its own becoming: “lines and surfaces already working” is something akin to Maya Deren, on woman: “knowing not what it is at any moment, but seeing always the person that it will become. Her whole life from her very beginning, it’s built into her, it’s the sense of becoming.”
we talked a lot about potentialities in various veins in the last comments, and i suppose what makes them interesting for me as concept is something similar to the ‘quasi-object’ as its being moves in relationality, in becoming. perhaps this is what you insinuate with gifting, though i am hesitant to go there just yet, either too selfish or just not informed enough yet, there is a large discourse already about it. it is a natural evolution, that goes again towards opening up property, opening up rights, the commons. but can it work? i tried to ask mr. lash that day, but it’s really just too big a question just yet.
but i found serres’ description of participation quite good… got me to thinking about participation to parasites to pirates to activists to to to… hmmm, let’s keep going with this one…