May 30th, 2010 - On the materiality of the image
My current project is a time-based project on the idea of materiality of the digital in juxtaposition with the physicality of live body. My recent practice has been largely preoccupied with the digital image and the media/platforms in which it functions and attains its meaning. I am particularly interested in the use of the Internet, the online ‘found’ image, the interactivity of the web and the outlets of the computer, the screen and the projection in space.
I am interested in the history and thory of the Mediology discource and the theoretical positions of Niklas Luhmann, Michael Ligner and other post modern thinkers, which propose interactivity and the exchange between artwork and ‘observer’ as the crucial property of progressive work and analogue to the idea of social and political antagonism, as articulated by Chantal Mouffe. The question of the materiality of the digital, its elusive nature, the difficulty in thinking of its elements and diverse functions seems to develop in parallel with sculptural and spatial practices, examining the material and the physical encounter between the artwork and the Viewer. In a way, the sculpture and the digital seem to c0-exist simultaneously, as opposite others, bound together as the two poles of the same quality, bearing canonically antithetical features. The image must be seen as an object, the sculpture stands for the consciousness of the body and the body tends to be articulated as an Image. This is one of the reasons that most live/performative work reaches us in the form of a photographic image. It is a cycle of media, which does exactly what it says: it mediates our perception, thinking and experience.
For this project, I am putting together a series of images depicting torsos, sculptural busts and other forms that allude to the flatness and frontality of the pictorial structure -as the inherited reading of Mondrian. Notions of classicism and sculpture are also relating to traditional ideas of proportion, balance, size, scale and composition, and in effect, the tradition of visual appearance and its affirmation to aestheticism as a system of values. On the event of a click, each still image is activated into a slow rotation around itself, highlighting its flatness, two-dimensionality, and braking down the effect of photographic representation, the effect that captures, absorbs and transfixes the viewer, when transporting away from real time. The piece also suggests the presence of a virtual space that doubles and reflects the physical space. This is why, we are currently thinking of Photography and Video not in relation to Painting but Sculpture and the real presence of the body. Clearly, the specificity of photography resides not in its materiality but in realism.
Susan (June 2nd, 2010 at 12:15 am)
Interesting thesis. I especially like the dense knitting together a number of different ideas and thematic sources. The fetishization of the photographic close-up of the human body-fragment parallels the fetishization at the bottom of art as a “system of values” (or, commodity-based aesthetics). But, the fetish freezes the eye and stops time, as these images seem to do.
It’s hard to understand without actually having the “clickable image” here.
I’d like to know more about the aspect of media and the interactivity between image and observer that you write about, and its political nature.
res006 (June 5th, 2010 at 1:47 pm)
Hi Susan
thanks for your feedback and interest in the project. You make a crucial point about the potential of viewing the image in temporal formats (the activated ‘machine’ or producer of speed, as known to us by Virilio. My next drafts and visual set-ups are very much in focus to your comments on interactivity
Thanks once again
Eleana
David Goldenberg (June 11th, 2010 at 1:11 pm)
Hi – I will start by making a few general remarks by way of trying to think my why into your project. I am not sure whether I understand everything you have said above but you are certainly making a lot of claims for your work so let us see whether you achieve this agenda. Similarly does the clash of theoretical constructs add up to something coherent. But I take it that you are posing a problem to see whether you can locate a solution i.e. whether there is a coherent framework for understanding whatever we understand as reality at a moment when existing frameworks are collapsing, and at a time when there is also a simultanious collapse of a framework for understanding art at the end of its life span. I presume this is mirrored by your question whether the mass of visual detritus can be pulled out of its curcuit and slowed down to give meaning, by way of constituting the real or approximating the real. And here I presume when there is chaos and an over abundance of information one remedy is to go for the seductive and the hypnotic.
For that reason I must admit I find the work very intriguing but at the same time puzzling. I think the hypnotic quality that you have imbued the work with very seductive and takes the work into very strange areas [via its eroticism and rich b&w fine art qualities, combined with its wish for a critique of the flat image through its rotation.] Does the dislocation of a flat image or surface image to reveal its flatness and surfaceness constitute a critique or invite the spectator into engaging with the work to set up a form of interactivity? Does the rotation of the image mimic the body? Are we to take it for granted that representation of activities the only form of experiencing that event?
David Goldenberg (June 14th, 2010 at 9:27 am)
Hello Eleana – I very enjoyed reading and looking at your work, I am trying to think my way into your work, so is it possible to carry out a sort of interview with you? Can we start this process off, if you are ok with this suggestion, by looking at the question whether it is useful to think about Luhmann and Lingner as Post Modern thinkers. How is it possible to more accurately determine the position of these thinkers in relationship to Post Modernism? And how is it possible to evaluate now in retorspect a usuable definition of Post Modernism? Can you also let me know why Post Modernism is a useful territory for your work? – That is all for now, hope to hear back soon. david
David Goldenberg (June 14th, 2010 at 10:21 am)
Hi again – now that I know how the page work I want to add a few more observations. First by asking you to excuse the above typos -
I would like to start by saying how very beautiful your new work is, and that it is somehow able to embody many complex issues and sentiments together in a very sophisticated presentation, and I look forward to seeing more examples in future.
My worry about what you have said above, and my worry in general, is that we are sliding more and more into religious thinking, which includes the religious cult of art, without realising that we have done so. But at the same time it is not so obvious where we look to in order to rediscover a thinking and art practice that is capable of both haulting this slide and proposing an alternative materialist reading, by which I mean a continuation of the enlightenment project by other means. So it is from this position of crisis that I now want to look at your project.
There is mixed in amongst your brief an allusion to chaos, the lack of meaning, the capacity to aquire meaning and realism.[ However as I said above I dont think it is useful by pointing to such important realms of thinking and categories of art and examining the world through naming different methodologies. Can you pin down your thinking more] I take it by presenting the image in juxtaposition to the sculptural – the over abundance of images with the image of hypnotic body parts – there is a desire to bring into the sphere of your work, or into the sphere of thinking, elements to begin to address this complexity. Maybe there is an inadvertant allusion to both Nietzsche and Deleuze suggestion to reinvent thinking as art, through evoking the notion of the thinking body and the event?
I want to look at your suggestions about your work as an encounter.
There is at the moment a great deal of literature being written about interactivity and participatory practices, much of this literature is either very lazy or misinformed. But since it appears key to your project it is necessary to delve deeper into what you want to do.
It is common now, in the current climate that wants to establish a normalised understanding of art, to say that any viewers role in observing a work constitutes an interactive and even a participatory work – or to use Duchamps suggestion – that the viewer completes the work – in that case are all works of art throughout the history of art interactive and participatory? I have never believed this implication for one minute, although that is not to suggest that we dont get something valuable out of looking at and understanding a work of art, but by pointing to interactive and participatory works as Luhmanna and Lingner do then there is another suggestion taking place, which amounts to poniting to a solution to chaos and religious thinking.
How does interactivity point to a progressive work?
You appear to suggest that the encounter between the viewer and the work simulates something equivalent to an encounter in the life world – that is equivalent to the democratic process of antagonism that Chantel Mouffe alludes to. That maybe the case, but why through art? Which inadvertantly points back to the process of concensus making and the lack of politics, democracy and decision making in the life world. These are some of the issues Rancier rehearses in his books, which a number of observers have suggested are reactionary although very fashionable in art circles.
So what I am interested in looking at here in more detail is what happens when a work of art simulates a problem in everyday life.
Why isnt it possible to address the problems in everyday life in everyday life?
This brings us to your suggestion that the only encounter between a performative work or a live work are the representations of that event rather than the experience of the event itself. Are you saying here that to experience and understand a work of art – whether a performance or a live art event – it is only possible by translating that experience into representations of that event? i.e. works of art and objects of thinking?
That is all for now.