Intro to Visual Practice / Fall 2010

The classroom space acts with us. It is ontologically marked as a site of pedagogy with a strict hierarchy and a competitive impulse: teacher-student, a grading curve, a fight for the 4.0, etc. Egoism, selfishness, socially fracturing: these are the conditions of the classroom, the site of pedagogy.

But is this the best environment to learn?

We want to break down the site and start it anew. The classroom can be a space of trust. The classroom can be a space of mutual dependency and learning. The classroom can be a social space, not one of digesting pedagogical vomit, but one of conversing. But this must happen through a reinvention. We take the tea party as our site of departure from the established classroom space. The tea party conjures images of a lady’s garden luncheon, a mad hatter’s chaotic unbirthday, a place of revolution, a nihilistic hypernationalist movement. All of this history informs our party, but we create our own party. Haphazard, open, free to all who choose to come. We host this party only as suppliers. There is no obligation to join. Not joining and joining have their own markings, and we make no judgments on these decisions. In fact, these decisions create the piece. We only hope to set the stage for a new learning. Learning that takes individuals and binds them to one another through difference, through preference. There must be a grounding, but this is only a site of departure for an alternative future. An opening up and breaking down of the classroom, of the student, of the teacher, of the tea party for something to transform and transgress.

Dario Robleto’s work makes him a clear inclusion in The Record. Beyond his innovative work with the record as a physical material, Robleto practice reflects a deep interest in the practices of the musician. Moreover, he considers himself not an artist in totality but some sort of hybrid figure: something like a DJ/researcher/creator/scientist/artist. His work involves a careful precision in preparation and selection of materials (hence the old country music, e.g. Patsy Cline). I find  There’s An Old Flame Burning In Your Heart, Or, Why Honky Tonk Love Is The Saddest Kind Of Love especially noteworthy in the way he allows the research to become a social pursuit. Growing up the son of a Texas honkytonk owner, Robleto has noted that a particular kind of melancholy persists in these establishments. His creation of these matches intervenes in the interactions of melancholy in these Texas honkytonks by rearticulating the musical score to these scenes, watching in strike up and blow out, injecting this melancholic music into the air. As much as the creation of these matches is manufactured, their true research function comes in the (un)artistic social use of the objects. Through actual use, they not only reflect the atmosphere Robleto was inspired by but they become part of that atmosphere, assuming markings (quite literally on the side of the box) and new meaning through actual use. The artist opens his work to a social element, allowing his work to assume not just the meaning he has put into it but the meaning it takes on its new setting, in some ways outside of his control. In this sense, we see art assuming a social character and the artist opening his work up to becoming (re)marked by the viewer.

I think that my post which addresses general themes in Brian Dettmer’s work and a particular work by Steve Reinke, for the purposes of this blog, properly addresses their work. But

To provide a few more links, however, Brian Dettmer gives interesting insights into his process in this video. He also situates his work in the context of analog and new media and how we can reinvent so-called analog media in this new context.

Steve Reinke’s work frequently takes on critiques of writers. You can see his work on his website which takes a stab at Leo Bersani in its name (also of note are the pieces on Susan Sontag and Melanie Klein).

Finally, in my passing reference to Dario Robleto, there’s an interesting talk at MIT you can view here, but I would highly recommend his artist writings for the poetic sensibility.

During the conception of my project of destroyed books, I frequently turned to the work of Brian Dettmer. Dettmer’s work treats the material book as a sort of body which he dissects to reveal the innards and contents of the book. Yet in his dissection, the shell of the book disappears and the separated pages appear together in a layered plane. Dettmer views form and content as inextricably such that his alteration of material does not liberate either form or content from the state it is normally presented to us in but rather reconfigures content through this transmutation of material (for ideas of transmutation, I am draw to the work of Nasher favorite Dario Robleto).

In discussing his process, Dettmer notes this lack of control he deals with in carving the book. He is subject to the book and even in this transformation, he cannot escape its contents (or form). I too wanted to deal with the incapability of the content of a book’s inscription on a lineage of rational philosophy and illustrated this through these ultimately fruitless wounds to the text and form of a book.

Steve Reinke’s work “Anal Masturbation and Object Loss” seems more akin to the emotional and esthetic quality I was working with. Reinke highlights the false sexiness of psychoanalysis in this video work by gluing together the pages of a volume of psychoanalysis while explaining that this article with the same title of his work is in fact about fraternal death and constipation. What Reinke addresses is this constant fallacy in academic writing in which it presents itself to be something it is not. In my work, I sought to attack what I saw as an egregious and hegemonic trend in the history of philosophy (manifested and disseminated through books) which provides an all-too rational and humanist picture of the world and consequently limits rather than expands our place in the world. I see a similarity with Reinke in a certain focused vitriol which is directed at an object but not the source, illustrating a limit and failure of a school of thought.

A book's cover is spray painted, its pages removed.

An explanatory Hegel text is nailed shut, its covered obscured by the tools or the irrational artist after the end of art.

FIVE POINTS

INSCRIPTION: Inscription can be material and immaterial, visible and invisible. In its erasure, it loses its visual function yet maintains its presence in memory.

MACHINES: Bodies are machines, this notion is not new. It is a series of machines functioning collective and individually. Machinic function occurs cognitively and prehensively, functioning differently in different milieus, with different intentionalites (though not all machines, bodily or not, are intentional). In the realm of the intellectual, the cognitive machine produces rational discourse circulated as language – often in books.

BOOKS are machines of ideas. Books are drawings of letters. Books inscribe ideas. (Though books can function as other machines.)

THE ARTIST, in a romantic western narrative and in certain practices, is an affective machine. The artist exists before and after the intellectual discourse, gesturing toward the cosmos. The artist is rationally irrational. The artist, in a western narrative, ruptures and breaks from the intellectual discourse, seeking that which is beyond reason, seeking originality, breaking and appropriating forms, destroying to create.

DESTROYING books creates a wound on the image of the text as machine idea, yet its immaterial inscription endures. The legacy of Enlightenment thought endures in spite of these chinks in its armor. But destruction reevaluates and reformulates. What is Kant without Kant’s writing? What is political philosophy without material content? The artist as destructive machines opens itself to the guilt of destroying but enables in this destruction new textual machines, rebirths of these books, and most of all, new (re)inscriptions.