ARS PUBLICA – Ana Buigues´ report.
What follows is the curator’s report on the
development of the Ars Publica
project http://www.arspublica.noemata.net/
based on the
theoretical context for the ¨raison d´être¨ of this net.art project.
The inception of the Ars Publica project started in the second half of 2005, when we,
the Ars Publica team, in view of the
lack of a painstaking study about the art market from the artists´ point of
view, felt the need to fill this void through the realization of a study that
would include art theory and case studies in a project that would be a
combination between an academic article and an art project. After NKR (Norsk Kulturråd - Arts Council
Norway) approved our application and granted us financial support in January
2006, via the Kunst og ny teknologi fond (Art and Technology
Fund), we were able to conduct most part of the research. Bjørn Magnhildøen as
net.artist and programmer established the ¨physical¨[1]
point of departure - the Ars Publica
web site, which includes the net art sale exhibition, the library and the
museum. Thanks to Magnhildøen´s technical implementation of the dynamics of
electronic commerce the Ars Publica
web site is completely prepared for the interaction with the public and
customers.
Until now we have focused on the general public
front, having collected records about the responses obtained from the public
who accessed Ars Publica from the
Internet, as well as from a few off line performances, as Magnhildøen explains
in his report of the project:
http://arspublica.noemata.net/blog/2007/04/rapport-ars-publica-42007.html.
In
the next months we will concentrate on the marketing of our project on the
elitist front: established art and culture institutions. We are presently working on the design of CDs
and DVDs to be distributed to world wide libraries, museums, and
universities. The contents of the CDs
and DVDs will consist of a version of the Ars
Publica project accompanied by a critical essay written by the curator, Ana
Buigues, contextualizing this art project.
The essay is still under development and what follows are excerpts from
some of its sections. The entire text
will be published in the Ars Publica web site as soon as it is completed.
Ars Publica : The Art Market and Corporate
Parody
-----------------------------------------------------------
The tradition of corporate parody in conceptual art
and literature, includes, among others, the works of General Idea, Yves Klein,
and Robert Morris with pieces about monetary value of art, or Hans Haacke's
interventions in social economy, like the series of Manhattan Real Estate
Holdings, 1971 -- as well as his
collaboration with Bourdieu, in the dialogue Libre-échange, 1994.
Ars Publica basically is a commentary
on the paradox that while art constitutes another type of production to be
commercialized, the financial situation in which most artists encounter
themselves, is due to a sub-paradox that
responds on the one hand to the irrelevant socio-economic value generally
associated with art; and on the other hand with the elitist channels of art
commercialization. Artworks have come to be considered consumer goods and, as
such, depend on the laws of offer and demand, functioning within free-market
structures based on price competition.
However, perhaps these principles cannot always be applied to the world
of culture and art, and instead of a growing 'cultural industry' closely linked
to the 'art market,' what artists might rather need is certain protection from
the State, since there are some activities which cannot be measured solely by
the economic benefit they generate. Neither can the value of a specific artist
be determined solely by the prices previously paid for her/his works, or by the
promotion art dealers and art critics attach to a certain type of art or artist
(based on both their economic self interest and personal preferences, which, in
turn, may also be linked to their connections to the art market).
The project Ars
Publica is a mélange of
interventions within social networks: what we know as situationism, urban
art/action, political protest, performance, and net.art, with an emphasis on
the economies of [artistic] loss and [economic] profit. The foundations of
Situationism, and Fluxus will present the existing analogies among the Internet
networks, urban zones, and social structures that mediate our perception of the
world, and how they can be challenged through certain actions and interventions. The Baudrillardian concepts of simulacrum and
spectacle, are also included here to deal with the distorted, and accommodated
messages transmitted by the media, and in this case through the Internet, and
how it has fulfilled the needs for the consumers of a society of spectacle and
entertainment. As it is known, the
Situationist International (SI), formed in 1957 and leaded by Guy Debord and
Asger Jorn's were a group of artists and political theorists, with a Marxist
and anarchist ideology, who rebelled against bourgeois societly values, in line
with the traditions of Dada, Surrealism, CoBrA, and Fluxus. They were strongly opposed to a growing
consummerist society and their artistic statements commented on concepts of art
production and trade. Some of their
actions included attacks to established art circles and academies.[2]
Ars Publica : Art + Technology = Public Domain
----------------------------------------------
In 1968 Barthes theorized the
elimination of the author as the ultimate creator. An effect of this theorizing has been to
assign a new, protagonist role to the spectator, that depends on the ways that
a given spectator interprets and conceptualizes a given artwork. Walter Benjamin’s famous elaboration of the
aura surrounding the sacred object and the artwork took as a positive sign its disintegration. [3] Michel Foucault also took
up these conceptions in a
particular way that interests us here, since he emphasized the operations of
power in society. Foucault conceives of the author and artist-genius as
a Romantic myth imbued with patriarchy and elitism. [4] In his revision of history, he analyses the
discourses of power, knowledge, and truth and their legitimation through social
institutions, arguing that individuals,
rather than institutions, can and do transmit certain power and knowledge to
different strata of society. He also
suggests that what we call an "author" varies from period to period
according to the social function assigned to the author.
Ars Publica : net art
------------------------
We must call to mind that while the
media has contributed to the spread of cultural stereotypes, standards of
acculturation, consumerist bombarding, and power centralization, Internet
activity continues this legacy on the one hand (when the Net acts as a mass
media tool) and tries to break from it on the other hand (when activist
networks enter the game). The use of the Internet for political contestation is
what is known as “hacktivism,” in which a hacker’s rebellious mentality and
activist commitment meet. Again, “hackers” without computers existed before,
since radical artists have been commenting on social injustice and art
institutions firstly subtly and later more openly, and made use of either
mainstream or underground transmitters for many years. The Internet
contribution to this aspect is higher bandwidth, a complimentary effect to off
line activism, omni directionality and participation. Secondly, there is the concept of simulacra
and e-commerce, advertisement and media, that also bears some attention, making
the critique to capitalism and consumer art culture more easily
'believable'. The Internet offers a whole new scope
and scale to such strategies, since it constitutes the virtual reality version
of social and economic reality
By Ana Buigues
– Ars Publica´s curator.
[1] The word _physical_ is here in quotation marks
due to the virtual nature of a web site, although nowadays the widespread use
of the Internet has almost turned the virtual spaces into physical ones.
[2] The Situationist International (SI) was formed
in 1957 as the result of the merging of the Lettrist International leaded by
Guy Debord and Asger Jorn's International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus
(IMIB). The situationists envisioned a
somehow 'ideal city' where its inhabitants would have a more playful,
meaningful and just life. They created sketches of their envisioned city which
reminds one of the Utopian Socialists such as Charles Fourier, Etienne-Louis
Boullee, etc. Psychogeography was used
to describe the study of the urban environment’s effects on the psyche. The
situationists produced psychogeographical reports based on the results of their
dérives (drifting). They saw themselves as abolishing the notion of art as a separate,
specialized activity and transforming it so was part of fabric of everyday
life.
Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood, "Art and Modern Life," in Art in Theory, 1900-1990, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992) 693-700.
Further
reference to other aspects of the situationists, such as de detournement and 'spectacle' are
provided further ahead in this chapter.
[3] German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin
(1892-40), working within the context of the
[4] Keith. Moxey, The Practice of Theory. Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 56