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Rule and Levine's analysis of "International Art English
<http://canopycanopycanopy.com/issues/16/contents/international_art_english>"
was brilliant and hilarious (AND, it should be mentioned, a project of
Triple Canopy, one of the key purveyors of contemporary art discourse,
or IAE, I suppose). It's also certainly worth doing
anthropological/cultural anthropological analyses of cultural discourses.
But roundly condemning any conceptual or technical discourse about art
is, I think, simply anti-intellectual. There are certainly bad and
obfuscating writers of art discourse but also brilliantly illuminating
ones. Of course, that's true in any field. Why should we expect (or
want) art (or humanistic) discourse to be more "jargon-free" than any
other discourse? Should we equally condemn hepatologists or quantum
physicists or epistemologists for having peculiar insider discourses?
That would be dumb, I think.
Salome remarks: "I do not think sound is necessarily political, and a
vista is not per se political either, but listening and looking are.
Sound is sound and a chair is a chair, but how I look at it or listen to
it is political." I understand what she means, of course. But I think we
need to be wary of that sort of distinction, as though the world is
inert and meaningless until we impose meaning and value on it. Again,
this sort of world/human, fact/value distinction easily slides into
idealism and a theological inflation of the human. The world is vast
array of forces, human and non-human, that impose themselves on us and
vice versa, and that, each in their own way, are selective, evaluative,
etc. It's not some dumb thing waiting for me to make (or not make)
meaning and politics out of it.
On 6/19/14, 12:06 PM, Semitransgenic wrote:
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Hi Seth,
not sure I can agree with this : ) "The fatigue with the language of
conceptual art expressed by Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to
the very difficult and neverending work of resisting the dominant
vocabularies of our times and places" and actually, the very sentence
/"//a response to the very difficult and neverending work of resisting
the dominant vocabularies of our times and places"/ is artspeak ; )
Unfortunately, like it or not, within the "art-world" IAE is a
dominant vocabulary, it really has gone beyond a joke at this point.
So:
<http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jan/27/users-guide-international-art-english>/ "//Will
the hegemony of IAE, to use a very IAE term, ever end? Rule and Levine
think it soon might. Now that competence in IAE is almost a given for
art professionals, its allure as an exclusive private language is
fading. When IAE goes out of fashion, they write, 'We probably
shouldn't expect that the globalised art world's language will become
... inclusive. More likely, the elite of that world will opt for
something like conventional highbrow English.'"/
On 19 June 2014 15:27, Seth Kim-Cohen <s...@kim-cohen.com
<mailto:s...@kim-cohen.com>> wrote:
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Hello All
Nice to be with you and thanks, Jim, for the invitation to
participate.
Art that engages sound is not a special case. The same obligations
obtain, and the same privileges too. The fetishization of audio
technology hearkens back to half-century-old discussions of the
"material support" of visual artworks. Why should we care if the
painting is on canvas or linen? Likewise, should we know or want
to know if it's Supercollider or Max or a CD? Similarly, why is
listening isolated, idealized, and idolized? Ultimately, the
interactions that sustain interest and importance are not those
between sound waves and eardrums, but between ideologies and
economies, between societies and subjects, between history and
concentrations of power.
The fatigue with the language of conceptual art expressed by
Semitransgenic strikes me as a response to the very difficult and
neverending work of resisting the dominant vocabularies of our
times and places. Such vocabularies are so pervasive as to operate
transparently and to be adopted unproblematically as natural. The
best "international art-speak" of the past fifty years has taken
it upon itself to sprinkle sand in the gears of the
cultural-industrial machinery. Of course, the machinery constantly
recoups this sand as raw material for further manufacture. This
recuperation produces both our collective fatigue and the demand
for further "innovation" (I use the term cautiously) in the
strategies and modes of alternative meaning-making.
I fear - genuinely, I do - that our collective recourse to
technology, to listening, to mute materiality, is a signal of
retreat from the ubiquity of cultural-ecnomic hegemony. Sound
schmound. Let's think about the relationships artworks create
between audiences, institutions, conventions, ideas, and
philosophies. Then we're on to something.
Kindest regards to you all
Seth
________________
www.kim-cohen.com <http://www.kim-cohen.com>
On Jun 19, 2014, at 9:09 AM, Jim Drobnick wrote:
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For today, Thursday, 19th, our focus will be on "Hearing and
Listening." While these topics may have been addressed in the past
through perceptual or phenomenological methods, the questions by
Jennifer Fisher, Eldritch Priest and Salomé Voegelin hint at the
affective, bodily and political forces implicitly at work during
this activity. Too often it is assumed that hearing or listening
merely involves a passive transfer of sensory data, as if the ear
were merely a conduit for information. But it's clear that the ear
is subject to socialization and bias, training and discipline,
personal idiosyncracies, and influence by the surrounding
environment. The 3 questions today, then, seek to reflect upon the
effects of such influences when attending to audio art:
1) Jennifer Fisher: What is the significance of spatial resonance
and affect when listening to sound art? How do hearing and
proprioception combine in formations of resonance? How might the
resonances of ambient space -- whether a museum, concert hall or
other venue -- operate contextually in curating sound art? My
sense is that resonance operates somewhat differently from
vibration: if vibration stems from the tactile sensing of a
discrete object (or its emission from a particular point in
space), might resonance afford more delocalized, contextual,
intensification of hearing and proprioception?
2) Eldritch Priest: Through tropes such as the often cited “the
ears are never closed,” artists and theorists alike routinely
posit audition as form of “exposure,” a veritable faculty that
lays us open and vulnerable to the world. But as Steven Connor
notes, the ear is not submissive; it "actively connives to make
what it takes to be sense out of what it hears.” This means that
the ear not only refuses to entertain an outside -- “noise” -- but
its operations seem to entail "a kind of deterrence of sound” such
that to hear is always to mishear. But if all hearing is
mishearing, audition can only be a fundamental hallucination that
works for the powers of the false. From this premise we might ask
whether hearing is (in both its ordinary and Peircean sense of the
term) an abduction of the “outside.” What would it mean or do,
then, for sound studies—specifically sound studies in its
humanistic phase -- that its organ of concern (l’oreille) is
steeped primarily in “guesswork”? Does studying sound mean
studying what is effectively a connivance? And if so, if audition
is always making sense up, then with what, or as Neitzsche would
say, with “whom” is it complicit?
3) Salomé Voegelin: What is the relationship between listening and
sound art?
Jennifer, Eldritch and Salomé, please feel free to further
elaborate or extend your initial thoughts!
Best,
Jim
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