The exhibition space and the art (object)

The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself. This gives the space a presence possessed by other space where conventions are preserved through the repetition of a closed system of values. Some of the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystic of the experimental laboratory joins with a chic design to give a unique chamber of aesthetics.

Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, University of California Press, London, 1986

The 'Doppelcharakter'

“The artwork is a commodity of a special kind. It is considered unique, and it is split between its assumed symbolic value and its market value. The peculiarity of its Doppelcharakter relies on the fact that it can have a price only because it is presumed to be priceless- which is true to a certain degree, as what is at stake in artworks cannot be reduced to a price. Collectors’ motives can’t be reduced only to speculation. They want the market value to increase, yes, but their motives are hybrid. They want the symbolic value as well.”

- Isabelle Graw, Artforum April 2008, ‘Art and Its Markets- A Round Table Discussion’

http://www.artforum.com/inprint/id=19746&pagenum=1 (login required)

Image, Medium, Body, A New Approach to Iconology by Hans Belting

Link to AAARG.org article

The idea of linking the physical images with the mental image. The old cultures of practice of consecration (religious for example) rituals that changed an object into something powerful therefore creating icons of worship.

Sigmar Polke/ Fetish definitions

fetish-

-an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit

-a course of action to which one has an excessive and irrational commitment

- a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc…

(www.encyclopedia.com)




Tables Turning Sigmar Polke (1981)
n the 1970s, in his farmhouse near Dusseldorf, Polke experimented with photographic dark-room techniques, deliberately ignoring the standard rules: ‘dropping the wrong chemicals onto the paper, turning on the light during development, brushing the developer on selectively, using exhausted fixer’.6 The ‘mistakes’ turned into inventive techniques: for example, he started to fold the paper during development because the trays were too small for larger prints, but the welcome effect was that the image became obscured by blossoming chemical stains along the folds. This fitted well with Polke’s psychedelic exuberance and interest in spatial juxtaposition (the flat, folded paper producing the other-worldly clouds), but it also harked back to the early days of photography, revisiting a time when the new technology was considered a medium in more than one sense – as a means to summon ghosts. Exposing surfaces to experimental mixtures of substances and light fed into Polke’s painting, further fuelled by his ambitious research into ancient and new pigments and paint during trips to Australia and South-east Asia; just in time for the return of painting in the ’80s.

Made on the back of all this, Tischerücken (Table Turning, 1981) has been described as a breakthrough painting, although it actually exemplifies several kinds of literal and metaphorical breakthroughs. There is the brownish-red furnishing fabric, which acts as the ‘canvas’ and slips through the lower end of the dark wooden frame it is stretched on like a fastened tablecloth (which, with its repetitive pattern of a gently curved and closed form, it could well be). The lower horizontal bar of the frame, however, is mounted in such a manner that it juts out from the wall as though it was a windowsill with a curtain stuck under it, letting the painting flip between the table and window association, between object and image. This movement is reflected by a large irregular puddle of white paint spilled on the cloth, apparently applied when the painting was horizontal, so that the oozing of the paint could be controlled by jacking its sides up or down; it is also reflected by the fact that on top of this puddle there is the black outline of a ‘flying’ table.

The tables in this work are, of course, those used for a séance, and the white spills directly reminiscent of ectoplasm.7 Yet the séance table was also Karl Marx’s oft-cited metaphor for the strange machinations of commodity fetishism: for as soon as an ordinary wooden table ‘steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than “table-turning” ever was.’8 Polke – pointedly at a time when painting resurged as a particularly sought-after commodity – seemed to juggle these different levels of meaning at once, while making sure that none of them became too securely fixed.

Frieze Issue 110 October 2007 by Jorg Heiser

Eagleton's Ideology of the Aesthetic

‘What one ought to do can no longer be deduced from what, socially and politically speaking, one actually is; a new distribution of discourses accordingly comes about, in which a positivist language of sociological description breaks loose from ethical evaluation. Ethical norms thus float free, breeding one or another form of intuitionism, decisionism or finalism. If one can return no social answer to the question of how one ought to behave, then virtuous behaviour, for some theorists at least, must become an end in itself… the work of art is now becoming ideologically modelled on a certain self-referential conception of ethical value.’

Don Thompson: Economics of Contemporary Art

Book by the economist Don Thompson, The $12 million Stuffed Shark.

“Money itself has little meaning in the upper echelons of the art world-everyone has it. What impresses is ownership of a rare and treasured work such as Jasper Johns’ 1958 White Flag. The person who owns it ( currently Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles) is above the art crowd, untouchable. What the rich seem to want to acquire is what economists call positional goods; things that prove to the rest of the world that they really are rich."
But art distinguishes you. A large and recognizable Damien Hirst dot painting on the living room wall produces: ‘Wow isn’t that a Hirst?’

Fred Hirsch: Positional Goods

Positional goods are products and services whose value is mostly (if not exclusively) a function of their ranking in desirability, in comparison to substitutes. The extent to which a good’s value depends on such a ranking is referred to as its positionality. The term was coined by Fred Hirsch in 1976.

Hirsch, Fred. The Social Limits to Growth, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London

Other terms of note are Conspicuous consumption, a term used to describe the lavish spending on goods and services acquired mainly for the purpose of displaying income or wealth. Invidious consumption, a necessary corollary, is the term applied to consumption of goods and services for the deliberate purpose of inspiring envy in others.

Economics and Culture: David Throsby

http://books.google.ie/books?id=PKu_cyZrRgEC&printsec=frontcover&dq=economic+value+of+art

This book brings together two very disparate areas, economics and culture, considering both the economic aspects of cultural activity, and the cultural context of economics and economic behavior. The author discusses how cultural goods are valued in both economic and cultural terms, and introduces the concepts of cultural capital and sustainability.

Could be helpful in looking at the fetishistic side of the argument- what makes us want to own these objects, why are they so important to Invidious and Conspicuous consumption?

Concerning Value and Art...

1. Over the past decade, popular interest in contemporary art has soared and the market for art today has broadened and deepened, becoming global to an extraodinary degree. What are the root causes of this radical expansion?
2. Who creates the symbolic value of art?
3. One of the great attractions of contemporary art from a collectors point of view is participation in a desirable social “network”
4. When we talk about the market there is a subtle and unfortunate tendency to merge two different concepts into one: “value” and “price”

Has Modernism Failed?

Has Modernism Failed?

An Excerpt from INDIVIDUALISM: Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?

by Suzi Gablik

True art, Marxists argue, examines the social and political reality behind appearance and does not represent it abstractly, divorced from appearances and in opposition to appearances. Marxist aesthetics demands that art illuminate social relationships and help us to recognize and change social reality. For art to be a social force, it must have a wide audience, and it must pass judgment on the phenomena of life. It must have as its subject the social world. Marx constantly stressed that art has a human social reality and must be integrated in a world of meanings–it is not a separate reality.

Both these positions–art as the expression of the individual or as the fulfillment of social needs–seem equally intelligible, but their conflicting demands at this point frame a major crisis in our culture: truth to the self or truth to the values of society. The sensibility of our age is characterized by this dilemma.

Elizabeth Grosz: Chaos, Territory, Art

• On first reading this seems to me to be an argument between the value of art for society and the value of art to the individual - how are these two values separated?

My own interest in art making, which is an ongoing study into my own place in a world of individuals, is not to approach an understanding of different “types” of people, but to uncover commonalties between and across humanity in general, which relate to our role as human beings, not racial or territorial groups. Art has the specific quality in that it attaches to these commonalities by its inherent sensual and intellectual effects, regardless of its political interpretations. The production of sensation is enough to bring about change - and change that comes from a much more humane and adaptable space than any one discourse or politic. - Helen

• Elizabeth Grosz, in “Chaos, Territory, Art”, speaks of Arts role in dealing with our immersion in the excess of the world, creating sensations in an effort to apprehend Chaos. (Chaos not as disorder but as a multitude of orders). She argues that the territories Art sets up by way of the frame are not fixed at any position but continually play between chaos and order, traversing any boundaries and producing new sensations…

La Grande Jatte, Valie Export

• 
• Seurat’s masterpiece “The Grande Jatte” was purchased for 20.000 Dollars by American art collector Frederick Bartlett for the Art Institute of Chicago. Within a few months apparently, a French consortium tried to buy it back for 400, 000 Dollars, which is some contrast to the price paid for it. It has remained with the Art institute of Chicago ever since.
  
• Mei Moses Art Index:

“Why Collect- Art Three Beauties”: The first beauty of art is the emotional appeal obtained from the visual image of the object. The second beauty of art is the enjoyment most individuals obtain from the process of its acquisition, including, but not limited to, knowledge acquisition, socialisation with like minded collectors and experts, excitement of the chase …etc. The third being its longevity and financial performance.

• Linked to fetishism of the object, in an essay by David Morley titled “Television: More a Visible Object” (from the book “Visual Culture” edited by Chris Jenks)

Reference is made to the TV as being a “trophy of consumerism.” “inside the hollow TV, the ultimate box, is a personal reliquary for fetish objects, or sacra, at the crossroads of everyday life, the commodity world and our common culture. “(p.181) Muria Fishermen in Sri Lanka, where it reports that the richer villagers often bought TV sets which were displayed as the centrepieces of their personal collections of “wealthy signifiers”, despite the fact that the lack of electricity supply in the area made their sets inoperable.

• Video piece we found featuring Ulay and the paring the nails into the bowl of milk shenanigans. Fascinating to speculate on how value is assigned to pieces like that or the Abramovic/Llama piece. I wonder how much of it has to do with the “Value” or to be more accurate, “Standing” of the artist.

• You can’t disassociate the “value” of status (or today what’s known as celebrity status) from the object produced. If someone already well-known produces an object (song/book/painting), it gets lots of publicity, is analysed rather than ignored, so its value is tied up with their status.
  

Helen

I certainly agree with the idea that advertising is the smoke and mirrors of capitalist consumer culture, all the razamatazz, wonder what Marx would make of the world today. Back projections sound great, must discuss on Thurs what kind of atmospherics we can come up with. Was looking at the Nam June Paik séance and unfortunately there's nothing online showing the actual event just the promotional material, but the idea was that invited video artists would show work channeling him, and they were making the interesting point that these artists were having to get past his considerable energy to make their own work. Also, the event was held on the anniversary of his death - ours is also on a significant date!
Just wanted to post up the link Yvonne emailed,
http://adcguides.com/representativeseancewma.htm
What to make of it all? I remember coming across an old Theosophy society building in Mumbai (apparently it was Madame Blavatsky's base for a while before moving to Madras), and it is curious the links with the Irish cultural scene, obviously still to this day with our little event.
Here is Madame herself, I hope she approves.
Milada

Phantasmagoria

Just looking at Weimar Surfaces by Janet Ward. There is a mention of Phantasmagoria:

In the hope of deconstructing the aestheticized field of vision, Marx applied the metaphor of phantasmagoria — a term invoking both feverish, fantas­
tic, associative dreams as well as the magic-lantern sequences of the begin­
ning of the nineteenth century, which hid the technique of their art using
back projection—to represent consumerism's hold over us in our cavelike

“mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. ”

And another explanation of commodity fetishism:

Marx's analysis of the “fetishism of commodities” in Capital (1867)
refers to how, under capitalism, commodities are made mysterious and
their use value, or origins of production, are obscured by their exchange
value. This act of phantasmagorical veiling-over constitutes for Marx an act of fraud: the surface cult of commodities thus distorts the way people understand social relations and the working conditions behind the production of objects. In fetishizing (masking) the commodity by means of advertising and display, capitalism gives the individual the impression that existing social conditions are unchangeable"

We could maybe look at using back-projection! As a nod to phantasmagoria!

Niamh

other uses of seances

Was looking at what other creative types have done with the Seance format - there was a series of musical events in the format of Seances see-
http://www.otherminds.org/shtml/Seance
and for a review which is interesting in how they describe the use of seance elements (lighthearted but still a little serious) see-
http://www.sfcv.org/arts_revs/otherminds

Also, this curator called Raimundas Malasauskas had a seance type session in 2002 where he "interviewed" the late George Maciunas (founder of Fluxus) with the help of a medium - he got questions from people like Yoko Ono to ask him - doesn't seem to be a website but there is a book "Looking for Mr. Fluxus".

Also, a recent event called Seance for Nam June Paik see picture above and see-
http://www.physicsroom.org.nz/events/2008/seance/

So we're very contemporary with our format I think.

See you all tomorrow,
Milada

By the way how do you include a working link? I have used the link icon but it's just not working for me - sigh, I am just jinked with these blogs.

Value

If Art Could Save Your Life
25th Februrary - 20th March
Seamus Nolan

In collaboration with the Droichead Arts Centre Seamus Nolan created a new body of work which looks at our ideas of value, production and judgement. The work explores how we manage to relate to our immediate environment and at the structures which dictate this relationship. It looks at the organisation of unwanted objects; objects which are no longer of value, exploring how this experience might inform our cultural and social value system. In order to consider these ideas the artiest will temporarily re-home two dogs from the local dog pound in the Droichead Arts Centre. The Arts Centre has taken responsibility for and effectively fostered the dogs for the duration of the exhibition. These dogs which have been either handed in or abandoned by their owners, have become ward of the state, considered here as public property, and will be returned again to the dog pound following the exhibiton.

viv

The Doppelcharakter of the Art Object

“The artwork is a commodity of a special kind. It is considered unique, and it is split between its assumed symbolic value and its market value. The peculiarity of its Doppelcharakter relies on the fact that it can have a price only because it is presumed to be priceless- which is true to a certain degree, as what is at stake in artworks cannot be reduced to a price. Collectors’ motives can’t be reduced only to speculation. They want the market value to increase, yes, but their motives are hybrid. They want the symbolic value as well.”

- Isabelle Graw, Artforum April 2008, ‘Art and Its Markets- A Round Table Discussion’

I thought it would be useful to remind ourselves where it all originated!

Emer

Susan MacWilliam

Susan MacWilliam

'Contemporary art is overstocked with spooks. The well-scried realm of photography and the occult (to take only the most obvious example) is conjured too readily in works that evoke the spiritualist sessions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century'. 'It takes an artist of rare insight and stamina - not to say a more expansive understanding of what 'the occult' might signify - to stick with this stuff and draw more from it than a simply unsettling glimpse of the intimacy of science and superstition, art and pure quackery.'

S MacW 'has both the insight and the stamina: also, a more rigorous sense than most of the history of the field on which she enters patiently, delicately and with a keen eye for the absurdities of her subject. For several years, the Belfast-based artist has been making videos and installations that reanimate certain key episodes in the history of seances and mediumship. In The Last Person (1998) (see below right), the artist posed as a medium, summoning the shade of Helen Duncan, the last person to be tried (in 1944) under the Witchcraft Act. In Kuda Bux (2003)(see below left), she restages demonstrations by a New York mystic, in the 1930s and 1940s, of 'eyeless sight'. In her three -creen DVD installation Eileen (2008)(see above center), the aged daughter of the celebrated Irish medium Eileen J. Garrett recalls key episodes from her mother's life. Representing Northern Ireland at the Venice Biennale this year, MacW will show Flammarion, a film examining the manifestation of an ectoplasmic text ont he wall of a seance cabinet in Winnipeg in 1931. The word that appeared was 'Flammarion':the name of one time President of the Society for Psychical Research in London. MacW comes at this unconvincing episode via encounters with parapsychologists and descendants of those present, tracking the printed and photographic evidence for the event through archives and interviews. One of the uncanny effects of her approach is that she has at this atage insinuated herself quite some way into the occult community, become a trusted collaborator of its delusional members. She has begun to speak their language, and at the time of writing was busy constructing a seance cabinet in her studio.'
- Brian Dillon, Future Greats, Art Review, Issue 30, page 88.

Yvonne