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Michael Taussig - The Langauge of Flowers.

How is what we produce read into political modes of thinking and what power do these productions hold? In his essay ‘The Langauge of Flowers’ Michael Taussig presents us with a series of examples in which people have been linked politically and socially to several species of flora and the long-lasting effects of said relationship.
While Taussig presents his essay in the context of the relationship concerning ‘Art in Nature and the art of nature,’ I found something else very interesting, which was the modes of association that man had with seemingly magically imbued objects from nature and the relationship one can have with these objects. Many of these relationships seem to be formed on the grounds of need for explanations and a search for answers to questions that science or philosophy is yet to answer. For instance the relationship to the Mandrake was a very interesting passage, how can an inanimate object that holds so much power and social/political leverage in its relationship to the world. Taussig goes onto explain its personification and hallucinogenic traits which caused these conceptions of it being much more than a sum of its parts.

This idea has many modern equivalents in the art world in particular, and also with things much less tangible than Mandrake roots. For instance the formation of commodity culture, and the inherent underlying power that is formed in the acknowledgement and subservience to a given notion. This can be related clearly through relating the personal to the spectacle or the massive lexicon of twitter or facebook.

This unknown power of communication and unwritten rules of acknowledgement of understanding and of communication are what form effective creative endeavours. Practices that research and represent dark areas of understanding is where the politics can happen. I seem to think that politics is not necessarily exclusively grassroots, but it holds potency while firmly on the ground.  

Michael Taussig, "The Langauge of Flowers", Walter Benjamins Grave, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006, pp. 189 - 218

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are we magic? and did my mother teach me to be withholding?

Isabelle Graw - High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture. Beyond the Dualistic Art/ Market Model

In her essay ‘High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture’ Isabelle Graw presents a reality (tv?) of how the commercial artworld functions and the relationship that has with the world of art theory and with what she deems artists artists, those who believe in the idea more than the patron.

Is this a fair assumption to use as assult upon the integrity of any given artist? No it very much isn’t.
‘Everybody knows the useful is useful, but nobody knows that the useless is useful too.’ Chuang-Tse.

What interests me in the world of art as super commodity and the magic imbued in the fingertips of artstars which transforms commodity into hyper commodity. In his essay “The Baptism of Money and the Secrets of Capital” Michael Taussig begins with a case study of interest in the Southern Cauca Valley in Southern Columbia, of which he frequented anthropologically. The case study involved the Godparent of a given child about to be baptised, concealing a peso in his or her hand and transferring the power of the baptism from the child to the peso. Through this process imbuing the peso bill with power and condemning the child to eternal limbo.
This begins an essay in which Taussig explains and muses on use value vs. exchange value of money and commodity. In particular explaining a barren method of value vs. a fertile method. This ceremonious action of baptising money, turning money into the means of exchange itself has much to do with inflation of art prices etc.
Though this can be a rather loose metaphor on the economical side, it has a much stronger relationship from the systematic blessing and attention shown to cultural commodities, such as Pantone’s colour palette or mop buckets in the Ultility Closet of the New Gallery.

“A community can in many ways be affected and controlled by the wider capitalist world, but this in itself does not necessarily make such a community a replica of the larger society and the global economy. Attempts to interpret precapitalist social formations by means of what Polyani called our obsolete market mentality are misguided exercises in an ingenuous ethnocentrism, which in fact is not even applicable to the market society itself, but is merely a replication of its appearance.”

Where does the artists artist sit in all this?

Isabelle Graw, High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2009, pp. 81-94 and 112 - 116.
Michael T. Taussig. "The Baptism of Money and Secrets of Capital." Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. University of South Carolina Press. 1980. pp. 126-139

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kino or bust 

Art and Objecthood 

- Michael Fried  

Art and Objecthood is an essay presented by Michael Fried in the summer of 1967 in Artforum. He presents his case for the invalidity of the rising minimalist movement. Of Fried’s many arguments the one I found to be most interesting was under his third section of the text, the relationship that minimalist artworks have to theatricality and the intricate care that is placed on the presentation of these works in accordance to the space of which they inhabit.

The relationship that is forged between the viewer and the artwork according to Fried includes a variety of variables in relationship to a works theatricality, ‘the largeness of the piece, in conjunction with it’s non-relational, unitary character, distances the beholder - not just physically but psychically.’
A work that I think holds a very interesting response to the theatricality and the relationship to the nature of strict presentation and seemingly perverse notions of antibacterial cleanliness exhuming the basis of art criticism from its unmanageable characteristics of expression and unconscious exploration of the human condition through the brush strokes of cluttered romantic souls. This work is Kino.

‘KINO’ (1997) is a work by Austrian artist Peter Friedl and was presented at Documenta X in 1997 and involves a large red block lettering of the word ‘KINO’. Kino which is the German for Movie Theatre is a great acknowledgement to the theatre of contemporary art itself, a cynical self aware gesture to the frivolity and issues around authorship and entrapranuership of the latter half of the past century.  

To end I will quote Roger M. Buergal in conversation with Peter Friedl: ‘...where poetic meaning of the world as langauge becomes visible but is not in the world. The four illuminated letters celebrate the autonomy of one institution being superimposed by another.’

Peter Friedl. “A Conversation with Roger M. Buergal - 2001.” Secret Modernity. pg 148-159.
Michael Fried “Art and Objecthood” Artforum, vol. V. no.10. June 1967, pp 12-23

 

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de duve


When Form has become Attitude - and Beyond
- Thierry de Duve

In his text: “ When Form has Become Attitude and Beyond” Thierry de Duve presents his argument on the relationship between competing ideologies in art schools and a comprehensive overview of this competition delicately alluded to through his headings for each section; ‘Talent vs. Creativity’, ‘Metier vs. Medium’, ‘Imitation vs. Invention’ etc.

Published in 1994, De Duve strives to create a feeling of combat with which have been now differentiated as very different subject areas; the smashing together of these ideologies which may now present an argument feeling like the planting of dogs in a cattery. These things can be attributed to as ‘Contemporary Art’ and ‘Whatever the hell everyone else is doing.’

In his essay he heads a section “Talent and Creativity vs. Attitude,” this refers to the rise of Attitude as “- what had started as an ideological alternative to both talent and creativity, called ‘critical attitude’, became just that, an attitude, a stance, a pose, a contrivance.” Harsh. This statement cuts deep, not just with it’s contriving sense of adjective. It shows us something important that is inherent to modern ‘current art’ (everybody else?), a term raised by Liam Gillick, who himself heralds the personification of counter argument of a great many of de Duve’s assumptions of dismay and disbelief in the future of art institutions. I am not discounting de Duve entirely, I found his reading interesting and informative, though I believe it to be somewhat cranky.

Gillick was born in 1964 and graduated Goldsmith’s in 1987, the same Goldsmiths that along with Cal Arts and Nova Scotia College of Art and Design formed the idea of ‘Critical Attitude’ sometime in the late 70s to 80s.(pg27). Liam Gillick’s essay ‘Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place.’ (eflux journal:21, 2010) presents a much more cohesive and current version of the understanding of the movement and time of which we inhabit. “Duchamp is the grandfather—the ultimate contemporary artist, forefronting questions of how much to produce and when rather than what to produce, while secretly producing what could easily have been made public. This has led to an endlessly produced white noise of semi-newness linked to a general withholding of work, which is seen as an affirmative neurotic leisure.”

This open relationship with information and production that current art school students have with the outside world of influence and theory is in my mind the strongest and more stringent attitude that one could take in any attempt to make sense of Contemporary Art in any sort of progressive means. The opportunity of open learning and consistent abstract competition is perfect for creating exactly the type of neurotic vessels of contemporary/current culture that the world so needs.


Thierry de Duve “When Form Has Become Attitude-And Beyond”(1994), Theory in contemporary art since 1945, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, pp.19-31.
Gillick, Liam. “Contemporary art does not account for that which is taking place” E-Flux Journal Number 21. December 2010.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/192