an international call to boycot and ban brad braceand so it is with some hesitation that I have decided to tackle the phenomenon of Mr Brace. Those who have subscribed to any discussion lists that have in some way or other been related to what has been occasionally called "net.art" will be familiar with Brad Brace's postings about his 12hr-ISBN-JPEG Project. He seems determined to use such lists as promotion for his project, and those postings are usually identical to the one that was posted here.
from all lists and websites.
But what exactly is it?
I have very occasionally looked at these images and they are indeed, as he describes them, apparently pointless. It seems then that the project is an attempt at some sort of extension of Fluxus, or some kind of conceptual conceit that is carried out with pernicious determination and apparently entirely lacking the understated elegance and humour that underlies most Fluxus and conceptual works..
Brace suggests that it:
> minimizes the familiar, the known, the recognizable; it suspends identity, relations and history. This discourse, far from determining the locus in which it speaks, is avoiding the ground on which it could find support. It is trying to operate a decentering that leaves no privilege to any center.
and here we see an idealism at work which seems blissfully unaware of its own internal contradictions. Avoiding the ground, supending identity, relations and history, suggests that Brace consider the work to be free from the conditions that determine all other areas of cultural production and that he (as he clearly identifies himself as sole author of this project) is above ('avoiding the ground') rhetoric, criticism, etc... The irony of course is that far from the claim of 'decentering' Brace is indeed the centre of his own universe of image production a solipsism that recalls the worst excesses of art for its own sake high modernism. Equally the locus is clearly the internet in many of its incarnations. It is, he says 'post-rhetorical' and yet swims in its own rhetoric. It happens "on the endless present of the Net", he says, while also being "a spectral, trajective alignment for the 90`s!" which consigns it to a historical period and inscribes it with it's a built in obsolescence, a use-by date that it will soon reach! No wonder that Geert perceives it as nothing more than self-promotion by Brace when it is conceptually full of self-contradictory holes.*geesch* presumably geert feels that my manifesto-contribution is more than just a _little unworthy... perhaps it's a little more than threatening to his imaginary privileged authority... ;-}
Not unworthy so much as attempting to construct its own privileged authority by cancelling out discussion by describing it as "post-rhetorical".The net has given an opportunity to many to become the equivalent of 'self-publishers' in the old literary sense. Often cultural gatekeepers dismiss self-publication as it has not passed the tests of assessment in the marketplace of established cultural practice and the attendent divisions of labour, bypasses being given approval by the curators, editors, publishers who have that 'authority' to filter what is publically available, visible, etc. There are publishers who will publish anything if the author will pay. I believe this is called 'vanity publishing'.
So when net publishing is so accessible there is a thin dividing line between free expression, self-publishing, self-promotion and vanity. Like all communities that take the form of self-organising systems, online ones develop their own codes, protocols and etiquettes. It would seem unfortunate if anyone would want to police these, even in good faith. The Australian government's attempts to do this in the name of 'protecting the innocent' is perceived as unwelcome censorship.
We (the community of this list which has yet to find its discursive feet as it were) can decide to boycott Brace, or we can welcome him into the discussion. The discussion has been framed as being "towards" a manifesto. Does this mean, 'post-rhetorically', that manifestos are issued as fully formed conceptual bulletins such as Brace's, or can we open it up to a real discussion which entails an exchange and evolution of ideas between a number of people?
We don't really want to have to suffer 'Cyberbullies'!
Steven Ball
