Thanks Will for your detailed resonse its much appreciated.. just a couple of
initial points.
> Bishop's narrative sticks to the most concrete manipulations of sensory
> experience - representation, sculpture, and performance.
There is an important exception (and a brief departure from Bishop's stragic
zones of exclusion) and that is the Argentinian movement (not that well known
when compared to Brazil) particularly the artist/theorist and his circle of
collaborators, Oscar Masotta, who gave their own spin to the American term the
Happening. Masotta aparently coined the term “dematerialisation" (later and
more famously developed Lucy Lipard). The most famous and interesting work
Bishop alights upon here is the Antihappening called (among other things) Total
Participation. This was developed by the collective known as Group of Mass
Media Art. And it is a clear progenitor of Tactical Media. It was initially
designed as a polemical response to the media hype surrounding the American
paradoxical concept of the Happening as a media hype around an unmediated
experience. The artists, involved set about releasing a series of caarefully
constructed press releases with photographs of the Happening with reports
appearing in major national news journals. But the event was a complete
fiction. It never took place: the photographs were staged entirely for media
consumption- Total Participation existed only as information circulating in the
semiotic landscape of the media… a dematerialised circulation of facts.. There
then followed a second press release revealing in detail the construction of
the non-event designed to expose the way the mass media operates.. this in turn
created even more press coverage. This approach was entirely unlike the
Happenings in North America and Europe which above all sought existential
thrill of unmediated presence! For these artists there was no original event
thus the media itself became the medium of the work and its primary content.
> Bishop argues under a suppressed premise for Art proper as a dialogue
> necessarily mediated by institutions, precisely the ones circumnavigated or
> prodded by interventionist politics.
I agree and that is why "Art proper” is a necessary but not suficient dimension
when discussing the -participatory aesthetic- in a broader way than Bishop,
allows because of the constraints of her strategic exclusions, allows for. I am
arguing that the institutions (academic as well as in the arts) can be
invaluable spaces for certain modalities of research and reflection. They are
particularly valuable during, what Brian Holmes has described, as periods of
latency in the cycle between uprisings. The Tactical Media zones (research,
transmedia, intervention) that Bishop chooses to circumvent frequently occupy
art’s (and academia’s) institutional spaces and other affordences. However,
(and here I take issue with Bishop) they do not (unlike Bishop) look for the
Art world’s institutional endorcement. Their eyes are fixed firmly on an
external horizon.
-----------------------------------------------
David Garcia
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