I have been accepted as a panalist to the above Philosophy & Art Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan. Yee Haw. Proposal is below. Conference is happening Friday, March 28 and Saturday, March 29, 2008. More info later.
Veils Proposal
Summary
Communication of content in media easily begets a representation of a false present-ness. Manipulating media for presentation as art is not a matter of flawless technique resulting in representation, but a restructuring of the layers of content to create recognition of the primacy of thought within artistic process.
As an artist, I present in this proposal extensive analysis of three of my works that I believe exhibit the desire to elevate the unveiling of thought within the arena of the appreciation of art as object. I desire to present these works at the Art and Philosophy Conference at Stony Brook Manhattan. Presentation, installation and performance specifications are included in this proposal for consideration.
Explanation
Communication is an accumulative process which functions like a veil, gossamer layers that individually are insubstantial, but sheer accumulation still creates mass that obscures the nuance and sensitivity of thinking that is needed to accrue into understanding. The accumulation obscures meaning and understanding by creating distance that simplifies viewpoint. This is representation, not art. I see the stuff of philosophy as the investigation of the function of individual layers of thought and the stuff of art as the reconfiguration of those layers. Both capture these processes in forms that can be recognized as thinking as much as a representation or a product. A solely representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to this process. As an artist using technology I struggle to lead art back to into the realms of the experience of communication rather than the appreciation of objectification.
It is within the interstices between distance and nearness or immediacy in all media that communication occurs. Given the complex nature of perception and how we understand and interpret it relative to communication, it is hardly surprising that objectifying experience has been the overwhelming concern of many humanistic disciplines for thousands of years now. In the essay “Hermeneutical Experience”, Hans-Georg Gadamer posits that:
The understanding of a text and the understanding that occurs in conversation-is that both are concerned with an object that is placed before them…. In the successful conversation they both come under the influence of the truth of the object and are thus bound to one another in a new community. To reach an understanding with one’s partner in dialogue is not merely a matter of total self-expression and the successful assertion of one’s own point of view, but a transformation into a communion, in which we do not remain what we were. (515)
The lasting artist has always pushed the boundaries of the traditional “conversation” with their viewer, and we have learned to intrinsically appreciate it as similar communion hat we experience in text. Objectification may serve as a means to an end, but is not the goal.
You would think that recording technology for audio and image would have subsumed this “objective” and definitively shifted the focus of art to thinking, content and understanding experience. Now, more than a hundred years after sound was first recorded surround sound technology is in more homes than art galleries, promising unrivaled realistic experience. It would seem we know no fear of being in the midst of recorded sound; letting it be inside our head, letting it represent all manners of loves and horrors. Likewise, the recorded image has the power to baby sit children as well as turn terror and repulsiveness into a two-dimensional backdrop. Are we just adapting ourselves, learning with the help of technology to keep the past and the future at a distance? Technology in art is scattered into forms as numerous and varied as painting or sculpture. Representational focus on perception and medium in art appreciation and criticism cannot do justice to the use of technology. The artistic struggle to lead art into the realms of the experience of communication and thinking rather than the appreciation of objectification is subtle and complex, bearing meaningful comparison to not just philosophy but other forms of cultural analysis.
Reflecting on the appreciation and understanding of the place of sound as part of a video or stand alone amplified sound in an installation environment, I think sound is an integral contemporary tool used to confront the subjective perspectives and objective stances taken in the dialogue that is forming contemporary understanding of culture. When asked about the role of sound in their art installation projects, artist Emilia Kabakov, Ilya Kabakov’s installation collaborator, thinks we find it easy to appreciate paintings because we have thousands of years of cultural experience looking at them. In order to be good art, an installation must be complex and viewers have to learn to spend time with an installation to appreciate it. Sound lends an integral dimension of complexity to any art installation, and installation art is integral to understanding culture (“Kabakov”). Given individual desire to fit into a context greater than themselves while still remaining unique and ‘whole’, innate confusion regarding the objectivity of perception is often brought to bear in all communicative pursuits as the transmission of narrative information becomes imperative no matter how disjointed the presentation.
Our desire that the resulting contexture of the experience be culturally objectified is of overwhelming concern in any listening situation. William S. Burroughs’s reframing of the internalized subjective nature of hearing through the prism of language and the human propensity to invest language into noise of all sorts is a frightening visualization of one aspect of the experience of listening. Even in the ‘signature’ contextual jumble of his essay “It Belongs to the Cucumbers”, this conflict is simply and poignantly expressed in the lines: “Some time ago a young man came to see me and said he was going mad. Street signs, overheard conversations, radio broadcasts, seemed to refer to him in some way. I told him ‘Of course they refer to you. You see and hear them’” (53). In the type of complex art installation experience that is called to mind by Kabakov, both the artist and the audience create parallel, poetic space and time when sound and spoken word is used. Instead of being a harbinger of mental illness, the representation of ‘hearing things in your head’ establishes an existential proving ground, a subjective necessity for finding ones place and relationship with objective experiences of the world.
The installation Build It Up, Knock It Down (Figure 1) is a work that combines a somewhat theatrical experience with the technology of recorded sound, resulting in a surprisingly complex experience of psychological and philosophical overtones. Walking into a room with muted lighting that has had the walls painted the same color as the floor in an effort to create a horizon-less environment we see an unremarkable tableau of a pile of sand, a child’s sand pail and a single sand castle in a spotlight. The objects remind of childhood memories, the spotlight resembles a cinematic flashback and the starkness of the interlocking trapezoidal forms of the castle and bucket strongly evoke a minimalist art aesthetic.
Figure 1. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Karen Joan Topping, Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
While the very real pile of sand unassumingly references visual and literary images of sands of time and unfathomable vastness, and the child’s pail refers to play and building as well as psychological metaphors of vessels and carrying or spilling, in the end all they are is terminology that the viewer is familiar with, the ‘hook’ that they feel easy and comfortable with. Real sand, real pail, real words and the sounds of real surf, yet the sum parts add up to a complex nexus of thinking and language and hopefully communication.
Appended to this simplistic, referential sculptural installation is a roughly seventeen minute performative, vocal recitation of repeated phrases layered and alternated with the recorded sound of the lapping of ocean surf. The repeated phrases “Build it up; knock it down; go ahead; you know you want to; you’ve done it before” coupled with the babbling of the relentless waves of the ocean brings to mind an interior monologue as well as the inexorable exhortation of outside voices. The addition of this recording to this installation creates an environment that transcends the aesthetic and perceptual qualities and clearly attempts to investigate issues of control and creativity on the part of the individual. The constant repetition that is so apparent in the craft of the artist, making and remaking objects and ideas in an effort to communicate them more effectively is the real ‘text’ of the tableau.
The struggle and violence inherent in grasping to communicate our hearts desire is what is experienced in the presence of Build It Up; Knock It Down. While his focus is textual analysis, the words of Gadamer suits the experience of understanding this work of art; he describes the nature of language as “So uncannily near our thinking [that] when it functions it is so little an object that it seems to conceal its own being from us” (514). Part art and literary reference, part theatrical performance, part sandbox, Build It Up; Knock It Down uses the media of sound to shift the appreciative focus to thinking rather than technique, by displaying objects that require no ‘technique.”
Acknowledgement of the challenge of how we construe images within the techniques of film and video are an important component of using recording media in art. According to artist Bill Viola’s musings on “idea spaces and memory systems”: “We view video and film in the present tense-we ‘see’ one frame at a time passing before us in this moment. We don’t see what is before it and what is after it-we only see the narrow slit of ‘now’. Later, when the lights come on, it’s gone. The pattern does exist, of course, but only in our memory” (318-319). An attitude of a space or place for magical poetics was ascribed to shamans, religious rite and artists for millennia before our Modernist antecedents, who more recently enjoyed the analytical mantle of “self expression” which afforded a culturally appropriate place for the cognoscenti to work out their existential anxiety. Instead of becoming a powerful, accessible, mnemonic device that records and represents the present for use in the future, the ability to record and transmit sound and image to a popular audience enforces our confusion about perception and objectivity in these spaces and places. The sounds and pictures that come out of our televisions, computers, cell phones and some artists are like a medieval morality play or Victorian hymn. The modern equivalent is still selling you a now that is part of a contiguous life everlasting, achievable through obedience to an earthly church. As long as you approach it all with a healthy dose of naïve fear and don’t ask yourself too many questions the sounds and images of the media can be blithely perceived and appreciated as an active parallel reality; another now that will also pass on into the gaping past of memory.
Rather than “conceal[ing] its own being from us” as in Gadamer’s hermeneutical studies, the language of lasting art strives to create and environment where the interaction of layers of thought should not be simplified. The veils of meaning must be perforated so the content that creates lasting meaning or understanding can be experienced and picked apart. Understanding complexity of viewpoint, in art, culture, and philosophy, in anything is not taken from the surface but a matter of picking apart the processes and contents.
Challenging simplistic representation or viewpoint is not a simple matter. In the video installation Apple of My Sensory Perception (Figures 2 & 3), it takes over sixty-four minutes to show the artist painting and repainting a red Delicious apple with various colors of nail polish: yellow, green, silver, red. Being over an hour in length the silent work must almost be viewed almost out of the corner of the eye to be tolerated, a direct challenge to this concept of media present-ness. Even with a low production value, this installation takes on media, still life, painting, gender, food production, time, memory, work, creativity, illusion, symbolism, religion, technology, vanity, mortality; all within a simple silent, incongruous act that begs the question “Why paint over this delicious apple with nail polish?” Taking on the media as background, as baby sitter, it’s the elephant in the room altering the real experience and communication.
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Figure 2. Still from Apple of My Sensory Perception (Yellow). Karen Joan Topping, Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
In this installation the video must be shown on a TV monitor like a late night infomercial silently furling out only to start over and over again without a noticeable beginning or end. Presented adjacent to the monitor is a similarly sized Plexiglas vitrine that holds the product of the video, the real apple deteriorating under four coats of nail enamel. The preservation and rotting of food in addition to the illusion of altering it to fit the need of art like we now genetically alter food to fit all kinds of unnatural conditions. The symbolism of the apple in religion and society and color choices that represent real apples and symbolic apples; clearly all in our own minds, not in our perception of the real. Juxtaposing rough hands and a backdrop of plywood against the decidedly feminine act of putting on nail polish, the color, bottle and brush leads to questions of identity, gender and creativity. It takes a significant amount of time to see how mutable the apples skin is in the video, yet the real apple collapsing inside its varnish is immediately apparent. Sitting in its vitrine, watching itself in its former incarnations, it is held in a present that doesn’t exist, it’s always changing going forward. The presentation of the media, the reality and the combined tools of perception with the sensuousness of the image and the object in one bundle, defy analysis as art as representation or technique, but as an investigation of thoughts and ideas.
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Figure 2. Apple of My Sensory Perception (Artifact). Karen Joan Topping, Collection of the Artist. Washington, DC.
Nowhere is the traditional artist-viewer conversation that has centered on formal and representational concerns in the modern, western idiom, torn apart more directly or effectively than in the words of artist Martha Rosler. In the appreciation and analysis of contemporary art that employs recorded media there could be no worse sin than to confuse questions of aesthetics and perception with questions of influence and philosophy. In her essay “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” artist Martha Rosler succinctly lays out that she sees a warmed-over art historical paradigm of “distinctly modernist concern with the “essentials of the medium”” applied to “video artists” (463). She concludes that this “formalized approach… portray[s] artists in the act of objectifying their element, as though tinkering could provide a way out of the power relations structured into the apparatus [of media]” (Rosler 471). Rosler, prophetically, warns against this mystical approach to video art:
Formalist rearrangements of what are uncritically called the ‘capabilities’ of the medium, as though it were God-given, a technocratic scientism that replaces considerations of human use and social reception with highly abstracted discussions of time, space, cybernetic circuitry and physiology; that is a vocabulary straight out of old-fashioned discredited formalist modernism. (472)
The argument rings true in regards to technologies of sound as much as its application to video art. The battleground of new cognoscenti looks beyond magical “idea spaces” and the scientific objectification of psychology and the senses to, in Rosler’s words, “who controls the means of communication in the modern world” (473). As technology blends more and more seamlessly with human product and principle, we can no longer afford to monopolize the discussion of art with our perception of technology.
In the performance 21st Century Crumb Trail the artist again dons the mantel of infomercial or a how-to show, costumed in beige apron and black slacks. Like a cultural retail warrior she tears open a package of clear packing tape, arms herself with them like Amazonian wristbands and loads a familiar commercial tape gun. Setting the first piece of tape on the ground she proceeds to dispense the tape by walking this self-imposed line of destiny like a tightrope. The result is an unnatural choreography that shifts from plodding, to militant goose-stepping to completely falling off the line all accompanied by the excruciating sound of releasing adhesive, breaking tape and the unavoidable jamming of the gun.
The missteps are patched over as the artist improvises in her continued mission to an unseen and unknowable space. In no time it becomes clear that this ‘gun’ is leaving a silvery trail like a slithery wake of snail slime, and as an instrument of escape and forwardness it is also a remnant of what has passed by in both time and space. Like the “apple artifact” the tape remains as evidence that must be figured out by the viewer who might witness the performance as escape form convention or may happen upon it later in time when it is unclear if its context is a trail to be followed or a boundary not to be crossed. The end of the performance is unknown in time and space, but not unclear. It must end when the artist can no longer be seen, can no longer go forward or runs out of tape.
As in the other two works, the fragility and difficulties of the artistic process is played out in the course of the manipulation of everyday actions the media that records it while the materials that are used carry a host of other contextual symbols. The connotation of powerless retail minimum wage workers tape gun tool becomes a weapon. The unnaturalness of the petroleum based tape and adhesive whose sound and iridescence clarity furls out over an excruciating long journey becomes and unavoidable player in this narrative. The direction the tape-rope walker must take to continue the escape is hampered by the thought of what will be done what to eventually clean up the resulting incongruous path of tape.
To be edifying on a greater cultural level, the artistic process must make everyone question his or her action. Rosler thinks that artists must do better than the museums, better than the media; saying that “surely [artists] can offer an array of more socially invested, socially productive counterpractices [sic], ones making a virtue of their person-centeredness, originations with persons-rather than from industries or institutions” (473). In Bill Viola’s even simpler terms, the tool of technology cannot be allowed to infringe on “development of self” (325). This investigation and investiture of oneself in communication, context and culture is a far more urgent rallying cry than perception and appreciation for artists working in all mediums and making objects.
Presentation
The three works I am submitting for presentation, Build It Up; Knock It Down, Apple of My Sensory Perception, and 21st Century Crumb Trail were outlined conceptually in the “Explanation” section of this proposal. As I am interested in physically installing/performing one or all of these works at this conference, specific considerations of the “Installation” of one or both of these pieces follow this section on presentation.
Upon installation of one or both of the works I am willing to participate in a scheduled artists talk adjacent to the work(s) outlining the layering of perceptory experience in my work and its correspondence to complexity of thought and attempting to engage the art audiences in freely analyzing the ways in which content is woven into art.
Along with my own experience and exhibition history I would see fit to draw on art historical references to ancient religious and indigenous art (mosaics, painted ceilings and walls, storytelling) to modern artist’s Kurt Schwitters, Merz, and contemporary artist Bill Viola’s concentration on time, awareness and the “infinite resolution” human emotions that is magnified in recording media (“Viola on Video”). The ancient cultural necessity to invest present-ness with meaning informed by the past is being lost in a race to an unimaginable future. At the risk of being didactic, the strongest corruption started more than half a century ago by the nuclear age brought on by the axis and the allies can be salvaged; reality is not a re-windable, back-trackable, present. The choice to think must come first; it’s the ultimate survival tool.
In my experience, gallery talks of this nature require about ten to fifteen minutes to do introductions and talk about each work, with extra time for questions; so this gallery talk would be expected to last on the order of 20 to 40 minutes depending on the number of works exhibited.
Installation
Presentation of Build It Up; Knock It Down can be presented as either a projected video installation or in its entirety with sand, pail and audio. Both presentations require access to a reasonably quiet space that can be darkened. The spoken narrative is repetitive, and the level of sound modulates, as it is a live recitation. In either presentation the work is not appropriate for a temporary screening environment, but should happened upon and entered into like a conversation.
As a projected video installation the room should be darkened and empty except for the projection. A smart room with access to a DVD player and projector with external audio equipment could possibly suffice for this presentation.
As a dimensional, experiential installation I can provide simple, inexpensive audio equipment to play the sound, for which there must be a power outlet in the room. The room must also be darkened to create a horizon-less setting, excepting the ability to use one or two track lights to spotlight the sand in the middle of the room. The floor must be non-porous and resilient enough to withstand scratching by the sand. Even if protective material is put between the 100 pounds of sand and the floor, foot traffic and removal of the installation generates the possibility of scratching or damage to damage to janitorial coatings used in commercial buildings. Per volume, one hundred pounds of sand is just four small commercially available bags of construction or playground sand. The resulting ‘island’ of sand in the room is about 2 feet by 4 feet, which I can provide if the right environment for presentation is available. The presentation space should probably be a minimum of 10’ x 10’ to allow circumambulation.
Apple of My Sensory Perception is a silent installation that must be presented on a TV monitor. This piece is also not appropriate for screening, but seeing as it is silent the space it is presented in can have a reasonable amount of attendant pedestrian foot traffic. Being on a TV monitor it can be presented in both a lighted or semi-darkened space. There must to be access to electrical power to run a TV/DVD player. Use of institutional equipment would be appreciated, but I can provide equipment for this piece, if necessary.
The presentation of the monitor and the “Apple” artifact in vitrine can either be presented on adjacent typical sculpture pedestals, (white painted plywood rectilinear columns about 1’ x 1’ x 4’) or both presented on the surface of the plywood sawhorse table on which the piece was constructed. To be frank, the loaded cultural content presenting this pieces on either sculptural pedestals or a workbench is a curatorial decision that I feel needs to be reserved until I know more about the space and specific conference content, in order that the piece have the most potent gender or institutional critique it can achieve. In either case, I can provide these surfaces and in either presentation a space of 8’ x 8’ should be sufficient.
There is a documentary copy of a performance of 21st Century Crumb Trail that is appropriate for screening and has been excerpted in this package. The piece in its entirety is seven minutes long and can be presented in a DVD format as a projection.
As a performance 21st Century Crumb Trail, is easily transported to any site, involving the simple costume, package of tape and tape gun and an appropriate location to start (a table.) It is important the path of escape go from interior to exterior and as an escape it is important that I have knowledge of my possible routes and their distances so I arrive with an appropriate distance of tape. As the performance generally has to cut through multiple public or semi-public spaces to make its point, coordination with the conference, institution and hosting facility in a pre-vetting of some sort would be appreciated. It is also important as engaging in explanation or conversation with others while performing is not appropriate to this piece. The tape is ordinary packing tape and cannot be guaranteed to not damage interior surfaces. All of these inconveniences will require scouting visits and assignments at some measure of advance with appropriate commitment to dialogue and compromise on both the part of the institution and the artist.
Works Cited
Burroughs, William S. The Adding Machine: Selected Essays. New York: First Arcade.
1993.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. “Hermeneutical Experience.” Philosophy Looks at the Arts:
Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics. 3rd ed. Ed. Joseph Margolis. Philadelphia:
Temple UP, 1987. 499-517.
Kabakov, Emilia. “Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Conversations with Artists 2007-2008,
Artistic Partnerships.” The Phillips Collection, Washington. 14, Nov 2007.
Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat: A History Of Sound In The Arts. Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1999.
Rosler, Martha. “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment”. Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz, eds. Berkley: University of
California Press. 1996. 461-473.
Topping, Karen Joan. Build It Up; Knock It Down. Collection of the Artist.
Washington, DC.
Viola, Bill. “Will There Be Condominiums In Data Space?” Multimedia: From Wagner
to Virtual Reality. Packer, Randall and Ken Jordan, eds. New York: Norton. 2001.
316-326.
Viola, Bill. “Viola and Ross on notions of time.” June 26, 1999. Viola on Video. 12
Jan. 2008. http://www.sfmoma.org/espace/viola/dhtml/content/fr_interviews.html.
