August 15, 2004
Curt Cloninger on Artspeak
by Liza Sabater
Setting Up the Punch Line:
Some Thoughts on Para-Art Media
Originally posted at Rhizome
I've been thinking a lot lately about media that accompanies an artwork, and the kind of artwork that relies on such accompanying media. Accompanying media can include the artist statement, but it can also include instructions on how to use the work, as well as an explanation of what the work is actually doing.
Let's deal with each type of accompanying media in turn, citing specific examples.
1. Artist Statement:
Think of Sherry Levine's "After Walker Evans," where she takes pictures of Walker Evans' pictures. Without the explanatory artist statement, we think we're looking at pictures of Alabama sharecroppers taken by Walker Evans. We wonder what these pictures from the turn of the century are doing in a contemporary art gallery. It's only after we read the artist statement that we understand we are looking at pictures of pictures, and we get it.
I've dissed conceptual work like this before, and it's not my intention to kick that dead horse again. I just want to point out that, although the "art" of this piece is in its concept, the punch line of that concept is revealed in the actual accompanying media of the artist statement. The artist statement is like the "Da-dum-bum!" that cues us to the joke. So although Levine's meta-media conceptual artplay is supposed to be heady and subtle, the gag is actually revealed with all the subtlety of a vaudeville clown. Understated, Steven Wright-type humor this ain't. When Steven Wright pauses for a very long time, then mumbles "I stole all the erasers to all the miniature golf pencils in the world," the joke is as much in the subtlety of his delivery as it is in the content of his punch line. We get no such subtlety from artwork that relies entirely on accompanying media to convey its concept.
2. Instructions on How To Use the Work:
This is just one example of many, but check "Free Radio Linux":
http://gallery9.walkerart.org/bookmark.html?id=10672&type=object&bookmark=1
There is an introductory text blurb at the gallery9 site itself. Then after you link to the URL of the actual piece, there is even more accompanying media before you get to the piece itself, telling you how to get to the piece, what software you need for the piece, etc.
These instructions are necessary for the use of the piece. To his credit, the artists tries to tie-in the tone of the instructions with the overall concept of the piece. The piece deals with sourcecode, and the instructions are written in a "readme" type of voice. Still, all of these how-to interruptions place barriers between the user and the piece itself. If this were Amazon and the piece itself was a book being sold, few people would ever get around to clicking on the "buy now" button. Which may be just as well in this case, since the piece is just an audio stream of translated software code with little aesthetic appeal. The instructions of how to access the piece may be as interesting as the actual piece itself.
To return to our stand-up comedy analogy, this piece is like a comedian who spends his entire routine testing the sound system and the acoustics of the room, and then he tells a fart joke and walks off stage. My critique is that the accompanying explanatory media distracts from the impact of the art. It's not setting the user up in any intentional way to experience the art. It's not leading her into the art. It doesn't help contextualize the art. If anything, it decontextualizes the art. Just like labeling every tree in the wilderness with a placard describing its uses and phylum and genus detracts from my hiking experience rather than adding to it. (This critique admittedly presumes that art is meant to have some sort of overall experience on a person besides just explaining something to her intellect.)
3. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can already tell):
A lot of times, these explanations of what a piece of work is actually doing are gratuitous, because it's quite obvious what the work is doing. Yoshi Sodeoka recently had a piece at Turbulence where he was asked to come up with some sort of introductory statement as part of the commission [ http://turbulence.org/Works/sodeoka/ ]. The piece doesn't need an introductory statement, and Sodeoka solved this problem by giving a sort of non-introductory statement in the form of a FAQ --
Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining?
A: This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself.
Sodeoka's evasiveness was pegged (derided?) by Eduardo Navas as enforcing a kind of structuralism. And in a sense, he's right. Sodeoka, as a graphic designer, is used to being able in maintaining contextual control of the user's experience of his work. His work is meant to be visceral and somewhat disorienting. So accompanying textual media that orients his users actually runs counter to the experience he is trying to create. But I don't think it's any kind of intentional structuralism as much as it is a desire to sneak up on the punch line, to keep the audience guessing. It's mostly an issue of timing.
Back to the stand-up comedy analogy -- Sodeoka is a Gallagher-like comedian who likes to run out on stage and begin throwing rubber chickens into the unexpecting audience. In this instance, he's hired to play a comedy club (Turbulence) where the house rules dictate that every comedian must have a proper biographical introduction. This requirement undermines his comedic surprise attack, so as he's being introduced, Sodeoka sits in the wings and throws rubber chickens at the MC.
3b. Explanations of What the Work is Actually Doing (when you can't tell otherwise):
Now here is a problem I'm encountering in my own work. One of the fun things about the web is that you're not obliged to contextualize your art as art. You needn't have any accompanying explanatory media whatsoever, and you can simply throw your user straight into your piece. You can even create faux accompanying explanatory media that actually sets-up your user for your punch-line (cf: http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/rebranding/ ). Mouchette is the classic example.
But there is a problem with new media that foregoes an accompanying explanation -- if your technology is not *apparently* doing what it's *actually* doing, nobody will know what it's doing.
A case in point is this piece:
http://www.computerfinearts.com/collection/cloninger/bubblegum/
There are user instructions, but they are cryptic ("wait for a magic transformation"). The underlying technology is calling in discrete images and autogeneratively collaging them according to a semi-random code. You can watch each card and see sometimes thousands of different combinations. But you may have to keep watching before you realize that these collages are being generated in real-time. Otherwise, you might watch 4 or 5 different collages, and think that each one is a static, pre-fab single image. In which case, it seems like you are watching a slide show of a few discrete collages, when in actuality you are watching a collage-generating machine.
My honest questions are:
1. Would adding an accompanying explanation of the underlying technology make this piece more enjoyable and meaningful? Would it increase the value of the user's experience?
2. Would adding such an explanation detract from the whimsical, disorienting context of the piece in a way that hurts the piece?
3. If a new media piece needs accompanying text to explain how it works, if its underlying workings are conceptually important but not experientially apparent, then does that piece fail as an autogenerative/reactive piece? If I'm looking at one of Lev Manovich's autogenerative database cinema pieces, and it just looks like a linear movie to me, then has he achieved his artistic purpose?
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Personally, I suspect that the most successful pieces evince their underlying workings and concepts without the need for a bunch of accompanying explanatory text. Without the accompanying text, the artist is allowed to hijack more of the user's context. This gives the artist the ability to dialogue with a more holistic/gritty area of the user's mindspace; it makes the work less antiseptic and quarantined. Granted, the artist who is comfortable relying on accompanying explanatory text may object, "But what if the user doesn't get it?" My knee-jerk response is, "Then it's probably not that good." But things are probably more complicated than that. I'm coming to believe that a piece of work may well be enhanced by accompanying explanatory text, *provided that*:
1. it's absolutely necessary
2. the tenor of its copy is in dialogue with the approach of the piece.
3. it serves to contextualize the piece rather than de-contextualize it. [cf: http://www.memexengine.com ]
4. it isn't full of a bunch of blah blah Adorno-quoting art school bullshit [cf: http://www.playdamage.org/market-o-matic ]. Oftentimes the accompanying explanatory text is used like overabundant A1 sauce to mask the rank taste of an underlying cut of bad beef. If your piece sucks, alluding to John Cage isn't going to make it any less sucky.
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Posted by Liza Sabater in Art, Guest Writer, Language, Rhetoric
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