(Current Studies, by blog description (2015-16)) - Click on each label to see corresponding posts!

Monday 15 December 2014

Contemporary art practice in context lecture by Spencer Roberts Caroline Christoph Bakkargiev, continued.

This lecture continues with the discussion of that Carolyn Christoph Bacardi of and her positioning in the actor network theory.  In last week's lecture we discussed that in truth there still seems to be a process philosophy going on, despite the new metaphors of contemporary Art critique.

In a way, this question of does she position herself in actor network theory, or is it just process philosophy going on, doesn't really matter.-If anything it just reinforces the process philosophy way of thinking through the whole history of intellectual thinking in itself.

We are simply testing allegiances between advanced forms of science and ancient forms of knowledge.  In actor network theory we are going beyond the state of mind of the human beings; we need to understand that human knowledge is only a small part of the full spectrum of interacting knowledges as a whole.

We are made up of billions of small things (the elements if you like) that each have their own intrinsic intelligence.  We are therefore "meta-stable" consistencies.  This is in fact a Giles Deleuze idea of the dissolution of substances.

In the exhibition documenta 13 it was a set of experiments of human fields of study, researching how perception is transferred and transformed into knowledge.

It was Martin Heidegger who talked about how, when we do repetitive "tool" based activity, but we seem to transfer our minds into a lost state of self.-It is thus this getting lost in our work, that starts the dissolution of the self and the disconnection to time and the world around us.  This is the essence of what is "research through practice".  The process becomes self referential-to explore colour with colour-representation with representation; in other words use the think that you are exploring as a means of exploring what you are interested in; by doing so the state of mind goes into the thing that you are exploring.

"There is no difference between nature and culture-anything that is in the world is coming from somewhere else"… Caroline Christoph Bakkargiev, 2014.

We are all multiplicity is that viable elements, those elements all coming together into a vibrant and wondrous world.  Consider the work by Jane Bennett "vibrant matter" (2010) this work shifts the human experience away from things into the things themselves.

Consider also "the million-dollar blocks".  This is an example of art having an influence of research through practice in a practical way.  It was noticed that the populations of many of the American prison systems and institutions seem to mainly come from a small set of tower blocks located in United States cities and furthermore in particular, in certain areas.  By redesigning and reconfiguring sets of ecological resources within those areas, together with graphic design and remodelling, through appropriate process flows and intensities… By focusing on those things themselves, and not the dialogue put forward by politicians or individuals or "correction", as has been the traditional method to deal with such situations (that were not working anyway) genuine improvement and a reduction in repeat offending by that same prison population was evidenced by the results.

If we take a step outside our discussion and remember that "contemporary art" was actually a movement of the 20th-century, which was based on an 18th century autonomy of art and the phenomenology of "the here and now", contemporary art truly emerged after World War II.

The formation of contemporary art, with its separate societies of makers, producers and thinkers has had a significant impact on how we think about contemporary art as a whole.  The exploration of a "pass time" which leads to the need of the non-useful activity (the autonomy of art), is at the heart of this enquiry.  "All art is quite useless" was a statement made by Oscar Wilde in his book Dorian Gray (1891), seems to encapsulate the investigation by Caroline Christoph Bakkargiev some 120 years later.

Henry Bergson talks of "white light", being the image of singularity, of one etc.  However, when analysed, white light is in fact the combination of all the colours of light; there is in fact a multiplicity of light.

As a practitioner, we can focus our own thoughts on research into colour with colour.  By thinking in this way, it is no different to the thoughts of social interactivity is as pockets of thought; in the same notion as radicalism; civil and rest; and the same notion of each, all through a starting of rhizomic birth of multiplicity.

Caroline Christoph Bakkargiev criticises art as a pointless activity to just create an aesthetic pleasure.  But art can be used to bridge facilitation of rethinking, or all intellectual institutions, physics, science, philosophy, art et cetera can all be brought together into one unified virtuality.

Indeed, in the age of the "digital virtual world" art has become a symbol of stability, (which is disembodied in the virtual).  The sense of the "here and now" dominated modern and contemporary art for the next 60 years after World War II.

Caroline Christoph Bakkargiev is against multidisciplinary art, as she says that by bringing together two or three separate experts, their output remains separate; it results in either bad science or bad art, in either case bad work.

To summarise, the art world has changed significantly over the last 20 to 30 years.  There is very much more a material attitude of affectation of objects.  Equally there is a numbing down of culture as we become disembodied through our own need for information.  This can be exemplified through the notion of cognitive labourers.  These are the software and systems designers of our modern age versus the artists and designers, who are in effect "advanced cognitive labourers".  Ultimately what this leads to is in fact the same process philosophy conducted by the Greeks in 450 BC, the difference now is that we have used different metaphors to describe the same thing.

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