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Review of Philippe Parreno expositionAnywhere, Anywhere,
Out Of The World
(with reflections on a post-relational art)
Palais de Tokyo13 avenue du Prsident Wilson Parison view through January 12th, 2014
Could my soul be dead? Is it then that you have reached such a degree oflethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness?
-Charles Baudelaire,Anywhere Out Of The World
Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of
The World
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Relational art is dead. But its waggish ghost, le grand vide, is on full flaunt.
My cognitive encounter with Philippe Parrenos vast but fey expositionAnywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World was anything but otherworldly.
Rather, I related to it by way of a psychic thump into an obtuse obstruction.
That might sound peculiar, given the blow up relational art is treated to here
(to the scale of 22,000 square metres), but it is precise.
With the officially sanctioned support and celebration of relational
dematerialization (celeb-commodified into a brand - and co-opted by the
star-state-socio-economic system that is its life blood) the relational aesthetic
(established by Nicolas Bourriaud1 now director of the cole Nationale
Suprieure des Beaux-Arts) is no longer an idealized mode of art activity
that (supposedly) accepted the full range of all human relations as art in
opposition to private objects and spaces. No, that shamanistic idea is now
exhausted and has turned cold and cynical. With relational officialdom
(other current prime examples being Pierre Huyghes retrospective at Le
Centre Pompidou, the Dia Art Foundation sponsored Gramsci Monumentby
Thomas Hirschhorn, and Tino Sehgals win of the Golden Lion for the best
artist in theInternational Exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico in the Venice
Biennale) an exploration of the full range ofall human relations is clearly
untenable - and human intimacy pays the price.2 The obscurantist artist as
1 Artists included by Bourriaud under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics include: Rirkrit Tiravanija,Philippe Parreno, Carsten Hller, Henry Bond, Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe.2 Actually I thank Parreno for sprucing up the Plais de Tokyo and lowering the ceilings.
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catalyst - by means of flighty creations of intentionally stuplime3 works that
fluctuate between sculpture, music, film clips and small Fluxus-like events -
has turned the successful relational artist into star-impresario-entrepreneur: a
very specific, limiting and quasi-domineering human relation. Coupled withlame fun-house-laboratory4 work based in an aesthetic paradigm of
aloofness that is so cool it verges on cold, the relational art star (now draped
in mystification) is placed firmly back at the center of things and torn away
from artworks that create a social environment in which people come
together to participate in a private/shared activity that is open-ended,
interactive and resistant to closure.
The inherent detachment of pretentious work-in-progress post-medium
practice, shorn of any deep commitment to medium specificity, seems to
inscribe this condition of superficiality on the artist, yet guarantying a
circular commercial success: a truly Mephistopheles-like metaphysical
situation. It is interesting to note that Claire Bishop has suggested that such
work seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory:
rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual
reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.5
Underlying this aim was once a miasmatic ideal that questioned linear and
hierarchical structures and sought to replace them with atmospheric loose
structures, keyed to a penetrable, reciprocal flow of events. This ideal
3 In her chapter on Stuplimity from Ugly Things , Sianne Ngai offers this term as a necessary reaction tonew, primarily postmodern, objects of analysis, a term that acknowledges stupidity and boredom as part ofthe sublime expression connected to the postmodern art experience.4 curators promoting this laboratory paradigm include Maria Lind, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Barbara van derLinden, Hou Hanru, and Nicolas Bourriaud5 Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" October(Fall 2004, No. 110) p. 52
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(similar in part to Bruno Latours Actornetwork theory) suggested a
consideration of the enlargement of the audience's normal participation; both
in regard to the spectators ocular aptitude to instigate variations in the
perceived optic, as well as her capability to produce kinetic and aggregateexchanges on or within the work of art itself.
Of course this was and continues to be the basis of Kinetic Art.6 Indeed
Kinetic Art ideals7 play an unacknowledged, but important, part in relational
aesthetics by pioneering the unambiguous use of movement and by
fashioning links between science, technology and art relating to the notion of
the environment. This linking set the stage for whose relational artist, like
Parreno, that blur and hybridize traditional categories and genres.
This historical link was well exemplified by Palais de Tokyos last mega-
show, that of a precursor of Kinetic Art and Op Art,8 founding member of
G.R.A.V. (Visual Art Research Group): Julio Le Parc. Le Parc incorporated
kinetic/optical research notable for its immersive attributes given its
realization on an architectural scale.
6 Simply stated, the term kinetic means the study of the relationship between moving bodies, hence the term
Kinetic Art is usually used to describe either three-dimensional mobiles or constructions which move ineither foreordained or unplanned ways.7 Artists increasingly aimed in this era to evoke possibilities within the imagination of their audience and toengage their active participation and to release art from its previous obligatory fidelities to the hypotheticaland material status quo.8Much of the disappearance (Popper), de-definition (Rosenberg) and de- materialisation (Lippard) of the artobject that went beyond Modernism (Burnham) in search for a total art (Henri) developed out of the visualspectator's participation called for in viewing Op Art: a hard-edge geometrical movement which flourishedin the early-1960s (largely inspired by various optical experiments of Marcel Duchamp) in the work ofJesus-Rafael Soto, Bridget Riley, the GRAV group, and others.
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The work increasingly became a co-operative production of the operation
between the object d'artand the viewpant,9 as the viewpant is enabled to
sense the various spatial possibilities the shifting work suggests.10 In terms
of artists of the 1960s working in this new expanded-field, a great exampleis G.R.A.V. (Groupe de Recherche d'Art) (Research Art Group), a group of
eleven artists who picked up on Victor Vasarly's concept that the sole artist
was outdated.11
As the blending between the artist and spectator took on greater and greater
emphasis during the period of the late-1960s new forms of aesthetic
immersion opened up. It is precisely in this blending that the question ofart
as ambiance arises.12 With both Op Art (which is kinetic in that op situations
employ optical illusion which effect an appearance of motion) and Kinetic
Art (both conceptual descendants of the shifting perceptions initiated in 20th
century painting with Impressionism, Cubism and Futurism) the artwork
9
My term for viewer participant. Joseph Nechvatal, Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances , LAP LambertAcademic Publishing (2009) p. 5610 For more on this see Frank Poppers book Art - Action and Participation, where he shows (withparticular reference to post-kinetic research) the convergence and specificity of the notions of environmentand creative participation which combined to form the principal direction of art research in the theoreticaland practical domains. In Art - Action and Participation, Popper found that mixed-media expressions thatinvolve all the senses, are conducive to the more complete involvement of the spectator and that scienceand technology can act as creative stimulants.11G.R.A.V. was active in Paris from 1960 to 1968. Their main aim was to merge the individual identities ofthe members into a collective and individually anonymous activity linked to the scientific and technologicaldisciplines based around collective events called Labyrinths. Their ideals enticed them to investigate a widespectrum of kinetic and optical effects by using various types of artificial light and mechanical movement.In their firstLabyrinth, held in 1963 at the Paris Biennale, they presented three years work based on optical
and kinetic devices. Thereafter they discovered that their effort to engage the human eye had shifted theirconcerns towards those of spectator participation; a foreshadow of interactivity. On April 19, 1966 GRAVcreated Une Journe Dans la Rue (Day in the Street) in Paris where they invited passing participants toinvolve themselves in various kinetic activities such as having them walk on uneven blocks of wood and/orexperience a distorted world by wearing elaborate distorting spectacles. Their agreed dissolution inNovember 1968 was based on their recognition that it was impossible to maintain the rigor of a jointprogram.12The term ambiance used here follows Frank Popper's definition of the artistic environment as a meetingground of physical and psychological factors which implicate the spectator's inherent participation in theart's fulfillment in a delicate, atmospheric way. (Popper, F., 1975)
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under consideration is no longer merely a categorical system but
increasingly a relational aesthetic act.
In Parrenos version of playful poetic relational art (as louche stage setdesign)13 spectators take up consecutive positions inside faux displays in
hopes of detecting emotion within the shifting time frames. That means a lot
of waiting around - as the dead time has its due. Indeed, the boredom of dead
time and empty space seem dominantly linked here, as various pauses and
visual lines of sight offer themselves up from within the vast void, lending
equal weight to contrary and incompatible angles. Particularly at Pierre
Huyghes exhibition, one at times feels like one is waiting for a bus. This is
the dominant emotion: a fearful sense of oppressive disempowering
indecision where one hesitates to leave a boring situation out of concern that
one will miss something delicately interesting that is coming along any
minute now. But when it might become interesting, is never clear. (It never
really does.)
This idea of placing the audience in loose and shifting time and points-of-
view was once envisaged as the basis of forming community,14 but when
institutional wealth and power intervene, one cannot but help but coolly
watch this detached mode of art fall feebly into a bottomless pit of hubris,
enabled by the internet and its narcissistic social technologies.
The sad irony of this is the good intentions, based on the 1960s-70s
humanist lost dream of the decline in the art object's sequestered, fetishistic13 In response to a carte blanche invitation, Parreno devised his exhibition with the notion of the exhibitionas a medium in its own right.14 See Popper, F. 1975. Art - Action and Participation. New York: New York University
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standing as object d'art. But dematerialized linked relations have now turned
de-humanist, superficial and a little clich robotic. Hello Edward Snowden.
Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out OfThe World
After the Snowden revelations, what is required in art today (particularly in
Europe, it seems to me) is a radical art of non-relationalfreeing, an art of
loosening the audience (at least symbolically) from the relational model of
databases with their relational classifications and procedures. In this new
non-relational orpost-relationalcontext, Parrenos once breezy mischievousart of ambiance has now become top-heavy official art that functions in a
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domineering relationship15 to the (rather passive) audience. The need for a
post-relational aesthetics seems evident to me, and I shall return to the idea
below, for one might ponder just where do we go after the death of relational
aesthetics. But as Charles Baudelaire says in his poemN'importe o hors dumonde : "Anywhere, anywhere, as long as it be out of this world!"
("N'importe o!n'importe o! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!")
Parreno views the exhibition as a postdisciplinary medium, an event/object
in its own right, an experience whose every possibility he seeks to explore -
and I take him at his word. In Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The Worldthere
were flicking lights (that resembled Le Corbusier lamps) that
choreographed/corralled me through the network of vast galleries on three
floors. Parrenos choice of a Jumbotron (a/k/a Jumbovision a/k/a
Jumbowank) a huge-screen digital-visual technology typically used in major
commercial intersection like New Yorks Times Square and in sports
stadiums and concert venues immediately makes my point about forms of
relational power. As does his installing an overwhelming huge wall of
blinding white light located behind the reception desk. It assaulted my
retinas as I had to passively submit to wait in line for the privilege of visiting
Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World.
15 By exposing the publics actions and external choices to authority where events are measured in terms ofobjectification (to some extent), and thus to the participation of the public in more or less advanced formsof control and reification.
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Installation photo taken by the writer of the blinding white light wall behind the reception desk
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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of
The World
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A player piano taking up a vast room playingPetrouchka by Igor Stravinsky
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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of
The World
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Installation photo taken by the writer of automaton video on the Jumbotron
For me the choice of a Jumbotron as vehicle for exhibiting a collection ofParrenos rather undemanding and almost flippant video clips, such as a fake
protesting throng of school children shouting and waving banners in support
of "No More Reality, could even be, if I wanted to be nasty, theorized as a
form of relational aggression16 (also known as covert bullying), a type of
social aggression in which harm is caused by damaging someones psychic
relationship to themselves via the other. This was almost so, as Parreno
appeared to try to intimidate me with his display of empty grandeur;
signifying luxury, mystification and wealth. As I will explain below, this ties
16 Relational aggression is defined as a type of aggression that is intended to harm others throughmanipulation of their social standing.
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into relational data mining, the data mining technique for relational
databases and the need for a post-relational art.
Such bogus grandiosity by the puppet master is encountered over and overthrough the extravagant exhibition of objects, such as human-less player
pianos, one taking up an entire room (there are a total of four player pianos,
all playingPetrouchka (1911) by Igor Stravinsky). This spurious grandiosity
is especially evident in the form of some of his video soundtracks,
soundtracks that call to mind the worst moments of sham solemnity and
kitsch romanticism found in the epic space opera franchise Star Trek. Recall
to your mind, if you dare, the most pretentious moments of such films: when
the enemy star craft is ominously lurking behind some corny dark star while
preparing its devastating attack on the good guys Enterprise. While such
bombastic relations with the visitor seem a ludicrous hypocritical
inconsistency within relational aesthetics (and laughable) I am certain that it
will not harm Parreno, for Parreno is now a celebu-artist and so peu importe
qu'il le fasse. To be fair, at times I was nodding in accord with this freedom,
and in the next moment I was aggravated, shaking my head wondering how
it all ties in together. But I like to have my prejudices exposed and
challenged and it seems that this exhibition did just that.
For close to three hours I explored. There was a mammoth room full of his
blinking marquee light sculptures, his marquees electric tiaras, based onlandmark cinemas and theatres. These light sculptures are particularly
unimpressive yet still suggestive of relational aggression, as they call to
mind a tender opposite: the melancholy light sculpture Untitled, (North) by
Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1993).
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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Untitled, (North), 1993, 12 light strings 22 lightbulbs each, extension cords,
porcelain, as installed at Milwaukee Art Museum.
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Installation photo taken by the writer during the Philippe Parreno exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of
The World
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Again it must be recalled that Parreno rose to prominence in the 1990s by
taking the exhibition as an art medium in itself,17 thus gaining the attention
of curatorial practice, so I think that my critical observations of theinstallation as relational aggression are pertinent. He conceived this show as
a scripted space where a series of events unfold.18 That is why relational art
as a medium is dead (to me). It has unfolded. By taking up where Kinetic
Art left off concerning the element of scripted areas where limited physical
motion is expected of me within a controlled public (seemingly) space. This
meant a desired decline in the art object's sequestered (some would say
fetishistic) standing as an object d'art. But thanks to Mr. Snowden, I have
realized that I do not want that anymore. I want a psychic escape from
cybernetic-like19 circularity and causality that surveys me and links and
groups me together with masses of others. I want contemporary art that
sequesters - one that encourages and honors my private feelings and
thoughts.
I believe what that means for art is a post-relational, post-de-materialized
personalized art object that can be lived with over extended time. Such a
17 Parreno has supposedly radically redefined the exhibition experience by exploring its possibilities as acoherent object rather than as a collection of individual works.18 From the PR: Philippe Parreno orchestrates his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo along the lines of adramatic composition where the spectral presence of objects, music, lights, and films guide and manipulate
the visitors experience, offering a journey through his works, both old and new, transforming thismonologue into a polyphony. Philippe Parreno plays with symbols, words, and sounds, to alter the visitorsperception of the space. His meticulously mastered script metamorphoses the building itself into a quasi-living, perpetually evolving organism, into an automaton.19 As pointed out by John Johnston in his The Allure of Machinic Life: Cybernetics, Artificial Life, and theNew AI, a special feature of cybernetic theories (theories of feedback systems primarily based on the ideasof Norbert Wiener, 1894-1964) is that they explain processes in terms of the organization of the systemmanifesting it (e.g.,the circular causality of feedback-loops which enables cybernetics to elucidate complexrelationships from withinuseful in formulating a creative epistemology concerned with the self-communication within a psyche and between the psyche and the surrounding environment).
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post-de-materialized art seems timely,20 as now, due to offline computer
processing, a new flexible and malleable aspect has been brought to art
production. This has been exemplified recently by curator Ronald Labaco,
with his show of computer assistance art Out of Hand: Materializing thePostdigitalat the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.21 That kind of
computer assistance malleability results in the post-relational art object that
still places an emphasis on contemporary artistic and curatorial practices as
being temporary effects of processes of negotiation between subjects,
contexts and their relations.
So for me, post-relational art is that contemporary art that builds upon the
legacy of relational aesthetics, but where off-line non-relational digital
processes take precedence over traditional relational aesthetic concerns. So
this is art now, more often than not, connected to digital art production
where the computer code sets the conceptual rules for a physical production.
I have identified this post-convergent and post-relational trend in 1999 as
one ofviractuality.2223
20However, as historical precedent, in 1954 Yaacov Agam began to undertake research into what he calledtransformable structures (the equivalent of paintings and reliefs) and transformable objects (the equivalentof sculpture) where the spectator was obliged to take up successive positions in front of the reliefs in orderto discover the sequence of changing lines, forms, colors and structures which offered themselves fromdifferent exclusive angles. Agam himself pointed out that all his works are in fact transformable, but hereserves the term in particular for those in which the basis of the transformation lies in being able to modify
the pictorial structure; for example in the 1953 piece, Nuit. He extended this premise immersively with hisTotal Picture Environment Salon at l'Eyse in Paris.21 Out of Handis mainly a design show with an aesthetic point to make. It defines the postdigital style asalgorithmic baroque. But that is only one option.22 Joseph Nechvatal, 1999 PhD thesis Immersive Ideals / Critical Distances . Published in book form withLAP Lambert Academic Publishing, in 2009, p. 5623 Christiane Paul, in her seminal book Digital Art, discusses my concept of viractualism on page 58. Oneof the images she chooses to illustrate that section of the book is my painting entitled the birth Of theviractual (2001). Joe Lewis, in the March 2003 issue ofArt in America (pp.123-124), discusses theviractual in his review Joseph Nechvatal at Universal Concepts Unlimited.
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The post-relational art object shows us that a lacunae world of incessant
transmutation has emerged in art that correspond to how we now live: in an
open area of vast connecting links we want out of. The keystone of the post-
relational art is that virtual producing rule-based computer technology hasbecome a significant means for making and understanding contemporary art
and that this brings us to a place where one finds the merging of the
computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This
blending of computational with the object indicates a subsequent emergence
of a new topological cognitive-vision of links between the computed virtual
and the uncomputed corporeal world. Thus this is not a simple return to hand
made art but a technological art that respects human individual imagination.
So we must consider now that, in contrast to our frenzied data market
surveillance culture,24 that which trains us to fear the atrocious eyes of outer
perception, a protracted gazing at a post-relational art object could
encourage the development of noisy exchanges25 based on the individual
intuitive eye in conjunctive contact with an abundant optical-mnemonic
commons (not cloud)26 that shares a sensibility for building personal
freedom assemblages; new modes of organization of the individual-
24 For example take the fact that now under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, is theblandly named Utah Data Center, being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immensesecrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept,decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the worlds communications as they zap down from satellitesand zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms ofcommunication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches,
as well as all sorts of personal data trails - parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, andother digital transactions. It is, in some measure, the realization of the total information awarenessprogram created during the first term of the Bush administration, an effort that was killed by Congress in2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans privacy. For more on this trend seeJames Bamfords book The Shadow Factory: the Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping onAmerica. Anchor (2009)25 My interest here is in post-relational art objects that challenge and sometimes exchange the hierarchy offigure and ground (figure and abstraction) through struggles with noise.26 The term cloud is often generally used to describe a data centers functions. More specifically, it refersto a service for leasing computing capacity.
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collective from which all could benefit. Of course the post-relational aspect
is what allows art to construct unstable distinctions between subjects and
objects that embraces the entire spectrum of imaginary spaces; from the
infinitude of actual forms to formless voids of virtuality. The question is:how do artists and dealers and critics prevent the market from eliminated
that quality from art?27
Certainly globalization is all about world space, so noisy post-relational
aesthetics must be thought of in terms of spatialization: dimensions, areas,
and territories. What space does post-relational art clear and what space does
it clog? How does the post-relational art object function as an attractor for a
gazing-commons and as a repellent in the monstrous era of global data
mining and the digital surveillance state? How can post-relational aesthetic
thought help us to think and live differently within our smooth and surveyed
spaces through art? How can we live more intently and intensely in our
imaginary cosmos of pleasure rooted in the non-closure of a post-relational
aesthetic? Perhaps by not ignoring the differences between the intimate andthe political, but on the contrary, by showing how these differences resonate
together in unpredictable and contingent ways to form, in the words of Gilles
Deleuze:planes of consistency from which new art concepts can be formed.
We must address the palpable question of what is arts responsibility of
resistance in a post-Snowden world? Perhaps surprisingly, for me the answer
is to be found within the challenge of a noise style based in the cultivation of
27 One artist putting considerable effort into redefining the post-relational aesthetic market, for me, is HalMcGee. He proposes a personal form of communication in his audio art, seeking two-way reciprocalpersonal correspondence that bypasses an essential flaw of the internet forum system of communication,and it's inherent detachment.
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invisibility.28 So I want to argue here for a style of post-relational art of logo
invisibility - and the importance that should be given noise aesthetics for the
post-relational art object.
The principle of constructing patterns of infinite becomings through noise is
perhaps inherent in avant-garde artistic tradition values. But a post-relational
art, I think, should be considered in terms of noisy invisibility not ontology.
This is so as deviating from the regularities of visible normality of relational
art provides new sources for artistic production. Certainly, the values of
relational art have always been interfering with the channels of artistic
production and reception - and these values are responsible for expanding
the forms and definitions of art itself. But like in nature, noise as post-
relational art object plays a productive role in the invisible life of a system
when it stresses becoming-imperceptible.
Joseph Nechvatal
Paris 10/26/2013
28 Perhaps this should not be surprising given the hidden complexity of a basic internet transaction is amystery to most users: Sending a message with photographs to a neighbor could involve a trip throughhundreds or thousands of miles of Internet conduits and multiple data centers before the e-mail arrivesacross the street.