Thanks, and exactly; we've got to consider the ontology of the digital,
an issue which has been a problem for people for decades; it's tied to
issues of reproducibility, originality, equivalence, etc.
- Best, Alan
On Sat, 28 Oct 2017, Pall Thayer via NetBehaviour wrote:
> This is a great read. Now I want someone to explain to me how a non-material
> (non-existent) work of art maintains its immateriality (its non-existence)
> despite a record in the blockchain. Personally, I think we have to start
> admitting to ourselves that digital existence is material. Especially if its
> existence is recorded within a distributed network. It exists. We may not be
> able to cradle it in our hands but its existence is broadly verifiable.
> Doesn't that change things?
>
> On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 10:32 PM Alan Sondheim <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> The following (which may be difficult to follow in ascii?) is a
> discussion
> between Ruth and myself; Ruth asked that I send to the list.
> Oddly, given
> ascii, it's not clear that I wrote first (in response in
> response etc.) -
> the
>
> "Hi Ruth, I'll intersperse some comments, and thank you so much
> for
> writing back and so much to think about! We're still away,
> staying for an
> extra day (next Sunday) and trying to decompress..."
>
> is mine -
>
> On Mon, Oct 23, 2017 at 10:32 AM, ruth catlow
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> ? ? ?Dear Alan,
>
>
> ? ? ?Ihesitate to bring up issues here which themselves are
> problematic,
> but here goes.
>
> ? ? ?Ifor one am very appreciative of your thoughts here. I am
> preparing
> for our first DAOWO workshop on Thursday and this is very very
> helpful.
> http://www.daowo.org/#reinventing-the-art-lab-on-the-blockchain
>
>
> This is really fascinating! I do find a problem with "Does Art
> need its
> own blockchain?" - "art" needs nothing (can't get rid of the
> italics,
> apologies); perhaps people do, but then which people? and what
> arts?
>
>
> ? ? ?First, to the extent that art is a Foucauldian discursive
> formation
> (at least as I taught it at RISD in the 70s), labor, in the form
> of
> reading/ writing/conversation/declamation/discourse is involved.
>
> ? ? ?With blockchain art the financial formulation of the work - its
> price,
> its relationship to, and operation within the markets over time
> - becomes
> another element of its expressive form/ part of the discourse.
>
> I think this held with a lot of conceptual art as well, what
> artists were
> on about around the time of Piper/Siegelaub texts.
>
>
>
> ? ? ?Second, at least again at that point, there was a tendency to
> associate the value of a work in relation to the labor necessary
> to
> produce it; in other words, an artist would be paid according to
> the labor
> she put into the creation of a work, real or invisible,
> substantial or
> insubstantial.
>
> ? ? ?(I remember Adrian Piper talking with us about this, but I may be
> mistaken; this was early in her career.)
>
> ? ? ?Artistic labour is still discussed in this way by public funders,
> and
> publicly funded arts organisations in the UK
>
>
> I think there might be a difference, not sure. In the States, it
> was a
> form of identification with manual labor, that one should be
> paid for what
> one does. This attempted even then to break the inflationary
> spiral which
> is now of course out of control.
>
>
> ? ? ?Other than that I dont see how this can possibly still hold true
> (if
> it ever did). The financial value of an artwork by an art star
> hardly
> correlates to either the effort or time invested in its
> production. Unless
> we are talking about more craft-oriented work.
>
> The idea was a form of levelling in relation to art-stardom.
> Anyone who
> was on the way to success, I think, ran from the idea.
>
>
> ? ? ?Im not sure at exactly what point in history this occurred or
> whether
> it was always thus. Or whether being (barely) remunerated for
> 'labour' has
> just become a way to keep all artworkers on the bread line.
>
> In the States, artists are always statistically on the
> breadline; maybe 1%
> can support themselves by their work. Paying for labour means
> payment for
> all cultural workers. It never took hold of course. -
>
> ? ? ?And third, there was within conceptual a discourse of the
> invisible or
> non-existent work, vide for example Lucy Lippard's The
> Dematerialization
> book.
>
> ? ? ?There was of course a heavy critique from Haacke and others of
> the
> commercialization of art (also of course in music, tv (Radical
> Software)
> etc.).
>
> ? ? ?Ilove a lot of Haackes work and also of the Radical Software
> group.
> But they were successful in generating cultural capital for
> themselves -
> through their expressive disdain for the commercialization of
> art.
>
>
> For me that doesn't invalidate the work at all; I never expect
> purity of
> intent and production from anyone to be honest. I think even
> Barbara
> Kruger (who I really loved) made some money from her work. And
> with all of
> these people, there were long periods at the beginning when they
> made
> little or nothing. For that matter the Guerilla Girls aren't
> wealthy after
> all these years (I know one of them) . -
>
>
>
> ? ? ?Ikeep thinking about the hundreds of young artists and art
> students
> that I meet in London who are attempting to make meaningful work
> and to
> pull themselves up into a decent world (and artworld) by their
> bootstraps.
> Should they work, as Annie suggested, from their sense of
> personal quest -
> perhaps it's none of my business, but I have been questioning my
> own sense
> of how we can proceed in relation to THESE QUOTES HERE
>
> ? ? ?Like Western civilisation, autonomous art? an art that is not a
> means
> to an end, not instrumental - would be a really nice idea If art
> is an
> alternative currency, its circulation also outlines an
> operational
> infrastructure. Could these structures be repossessed to work
> differently?
> - Hito Steyerl talking about Duty Free Art
> https://tankmagazine.com/issue-72/talk/hito-steyerl/
>
> ? ? ?"Noble people don't do things for the money they simply have
> money and
> that's what allows them to be noble. They sprout benevolent acts
> like they
> sprout trees" - from Hagseed by Margaret Atwood
>
> ? ? ?"It was hard to identify with the characters. They live in an
> economic
> vacuum. They make decisions cos they are in love, or they are
> angry or
> they want adventure. You don't know how they afford their
> houses, they
> never decide not to do something because it costs too much. You
> never find
> out how much these characters pay in taxes." Willing, on
> literature
> pre-financial-crash in The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by
> Lionel
> Shriver
>
>
> The artworld now is very very different from Atwood, traditional
> artschools, etc.; everything was changed of course by the
> digital
> 'revolution' which we hardly understand. What bothers me about
> the quotes
> is all of them are based in economics; where would for example
> Carolee
> Schneeman fit into this? Where is a resistance to capital? With
> blockchain
> it has to be capital resisting capital which for a lot of people
> is
> already tarnishing, a capitulation. I've been thinking about
> Kathy Acker
> recently because of the biography which came out and the video
> we did
> together; it's becoming an underground 'hit' and I think two
> interconnected reasons are that it's based on the body and the
> confrontation with the body, which isn't prettified, and also
> because it's
> fundamentally feminist thanks to Kathy (in a documentary made
> about her,
> young girls even now talk about their identification with her).
> I think
> work liked this would either have to be economically "valued" or
> locked
> out of blockchain... I may be way mistaken about all of this,
> but it seems
> to me this is why a critique of blockchain within blockchain - a
> fundamental critique - is so necessary. I think of comfortable
> Marx in the
> British Library, writing from within, muddying the capitalist
> waters,
> producing brilliant analysis at the time (although even he
> couldn't see
> the coming digital revolution of course).
>
>
> ? ? ?So the value of the non-existent work here might well be based on
> the
> discourse; one can imagine a work which is not being discussed
> to
> blockchained, which no one knows about, possessing a labor value
> close to
> the null set itself.
>
> ? ? ?Iwasnt going to tell you but I have made a trillion of these
> artworks
> ;)
>
>
> That's interesting! That's also critique right there, that
> reproducibility
> of certain kinds of works, conceptualized works, can
> self-deflate
> economically! I love this; on the other hand I also love the
> Isenheim
> Altarpiece, no matter what it's economic value is; it disturbs
> me in a way
> that invades me, maybe the difference between Godel's work and
> his
> platonism which still found substance outside the matrix of his
> analysis.
>
>
> ? ? ?For me, what's new in the work being discussed here is its
> relation to
> blockchain, and this places it within economic strata and
> habitus that
> makes me uncomfortable. Not that that matters at all, but the
> point is the
> embracing of invisibility and non-existence in relation to
> blockchain and
> (economic) value, doesn't this also relate problematically to
> neoliberalism? If one is going to work in this direction, is it
> worthwhile
> to consider breaking the chains of blockchain (in a way somewhat
> related
> to breaking the chains of the male domination of the artworld,
> vide
> Guerilla Girls etc.)?
>
> ? ? ? I think we are now in a very different moment. I am currently
> entertaining the idea that the tactics and techniques for
> breaking chains
> may need evolve to incorporate more critical finance-play and
> experimentation.
>
>
> Yes!
>
>
> ? ? ?Iparticularly like the invisibility form, less because of its
> eschewal of value associated with art objects, but more because
> it rhymes
> with the invisibility of the electromagnetic waves, currents and
> fields
> through which our digital exchanges are taking place.
>
>
> Then you have to look at Barry, who did precisely that, I think.
> But of
> course waves/current/fields are also commensurate, not only with
> particles, but also with the constituents, 'things,' of the
> universe. I've
> worked a lot with VLF radio, very low frequency radio, and those
> things
> are out there!
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
> --
> P Thayer, Artist
> http://pallthayer.dyndns.org
>
>
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