Claire Bishop, Collective and Spectacle

 

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In her recent book Artificial Hells (2012) the British art historian Claire Bishop argues that the idea of the ‘collective’ has become “one of the most pertinent themes of advanced art and exhibition-making of the last decade” (:12).  There is an increasing tendency among artists who want to engage with the public sphere either to form their own collectives in order to practically and conceptually negate the tendency to self-interest and individualization that dominates the workings of capitalist society or work with collectives (or ‘communities’) so as to empower or possibly politicize their doings. In any case according to Bishop collaborative practices are “perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance” since they are all interested in rehearsing a being-together distinct from market imperatives or, in her words, in engaging in “an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps to repair the social bond” (2012:13). 

William Foote Whyte on the 'Sacco and Vanzetti' case

                                                      

[...]
     

    I knew that Lowell had been involved in the Sacco and Vanzetti case and I had looked forward to hearing his account of the case. In the 1920's, in response to widespread claims that Sacco and Vanzetti had not received a fair trial, the governor of Massachusetts had appointed a three-man committee that had included Lowell and the president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology to review the evidence of the trial. The committee had found no solid grounds for overturning the guilty verdict. Along with million others, I had believed that Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty of murder and had been convinced because of their views and activities as anarchists.
     Harry Levin had told me that Lowell would not be reluctant to discuss the case, and an opportunity came on a Monday evening. As several of us gathered around, Lowel went thought the evidence, step by step. As his story unfolded, I found my confidence in my interpretation being shaken. My knowledge was drawn from newspaper accounts and family discussions, whereas Lowell seemed to weigh all the evidence dispassionately. Furthermore, he had no axe to grind and had been reluctant to get involved. He had agreed to serve on the committee only at the urging of some of his Harvard colleagues.
    I raised all the questions I could think of, without finding any holes in Lowell's story. When I was stuck, Harry Levin pointed out that Sacco and Vanzetti had testified that they were elsewhere when the murder took place, and other individuals had testified in their defense. Lowell replied that there was always question of weighing conflicting evidence, and added, ''You know, Italians always have an alibi.''
     Fifty years after the execution, when all records of the Sacco and Vanzetti case were opened for public scrutiny, Harvard magazine ran an article suggesting that the records did not provide solid grounds for reversing the conviction. After checking with Harry Levin on my memory of our evening with Lowell, I wrote a letter to Harvard recounting our conversation. They did not print letter nor did I ever get an answer.
    I learned another bit of evidence later on from P.A. Santosuosso, editor and publisher of the weekly Italian News. At the time of the murder, he was a reporter on the Boston Globe. When the news had come in, he had gone to Braintree, where the murder took place, to investigate. The murder had occured in a payroll office on the ground floor of a factory. The factory workers were on the second floor. When they heard shots, some of them rushed to the windows and saw two men running by. When Santosuosso asked them to describe the two men, they replied that it was twilight so  that they could not see well enough to provide useful information. Nevertheless, during the trial, workers had testified that these two men looked like Sacco and Vanzetti. After the trial Santosuosso asked his editor if he should make public what he had been told by the workers on the scene. His editor ordered him not to get involved.

[...] 

William Foote Whyte (1994) Participant Observer: An Autobiography,  58-59

Counter-appropriations

"An examplary image...is the so-called 'Brookes image', a shipbuilder's diagram demonstrating the optimal design of a ship for the purpose of "tight-packing" a vessel with slaves. As recounted by Marcus Rediker, this diagram, originally desinged for functional and promotional purposes within the slaving industry, was appropriated, reinscribed, and rearticulated by abolitionists as evidence of the profit-driven brutality of the slavers. Through a close reading of the image and its social life across time and space, Rediker shows how the image became an important node of conflict and advocacy in the eventual abolition of slavery in Britain in 1807 and subsequently in the United States."  

Sensible Politics : The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee (2012)pages 18-19

Machines of meaning and values: An art machine

 

Machines magnify, augment, accelerate, complexify. Machines are not simply interfaces of human interaction or facilitators of preexisting communicational flows. Apart from making communication possible, they enable flows, desires, investments. Machines automate production. From industrial capitalism to informational capitalism the overwhelming proliferation of machines facilitated economic development and provided the lifeblood of a system that depends on magnification, augmentation, acceleration and complexification. More so, if one thinks of the machine as the objectification of general social knowledge as Marx did, then the machine in its pre-actualized form exists as a social possibility, as a machine-to-be. One can speak then of a social machine which is a desiring machine, a potential machinic figuration of the thing-to-be. The social machine is a machine of values and meaning.     

The metaphor of the machine as an apparatus of production that modifies and augments perceived reality is used in order to refer to a particular type of a social machine of meaning, the ‘contemporary art machine’. Within social machines objects and subjects make themselves visible, designate through their physicality and communicability trajectories to potential directions. 

“Labour, Work and Play: Action In Fine Art Practice" Brief Review

I briefly wish to discuss here the notes "Labour, Work and Play: Action In Fine Art Practice"  written by Neil Maycroft. Maycroft  deals with some familiar issues from Richard Sennett's 'The Craftsman', a book which is definitely an interesting read. There, Sennett claims among other things that the pattern of the old craftsman, the ‘homo faber’,  who was doing the job for job's own sake, should expand its scope to contemporary professions like software programmers,  doctors etc.  

Event and Counter-Event: The Political Economy of the Istanbul Biennial and Its Excesses

This is an militant and polemic article. As any other critical analysis on the political economy of spectacular events, such as the Istanbul Biennial, it should be welcomed for its effort to de-fetishize their contradictory unfolding, disclosing how their phantasmagoria rationales interweave with broader capitalist formulations. By exposing how the 'radical emancipatory' rhetoric of the 11th Istanbul Biennial contrasts with the neutralizing tendencies of creative industries, that insist on summoning radicality in terms of the value logic of the commodity, the authors foreground the 'reflexive' element of recent accumulation paradigms.

Biennialogy

 

The recently published 'Biennial Reader' is the first anthology devoted exclusively to the study of the 'biennial phenomenon' that came to dominate the  field of contemporary art the past two decades. The book itself was the outcome of  a 2009 conference on biennials  that took place in Bergen, Norway from 17 - 20 September.

The editors, Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal and Solveig Øvstebø, suggest that a systematic study on biennials appears  today as urgent as never before. To that end, they somewhat provocatively propose that a new field called biennialogy should appear, in order to  inaugurate a study on the biennial phenomenon in a more rigorous way (as there is 'museology' for instance). 'Biennialogy', as I understand it, will not only aim to 'generate a body of knowledge' about the biennial, but it will also deal with the particular specificities of the  study of the 'biennial'; say with all the peculiarities that a multi-sited ethnographic research on biennials might have, given their enormous spatial distribution and qualitative variations. The  formation of this new 'field', is for the authors particularly crucial for the discourse of contemporary art today, as it is also crucial for more 'traditional' cultural studies, in order - as they say- “to understand something crucial about our culture today”. That is because, the biennial seems to be gradually complementing the museum as an institutional site for promoting  and producing knowledge about contemporary art: