3 Introductions

crafted by Walker Thisted

I. Introduction to an Excerpt from The Dis-Enclosure of Art

For the past several years the School of the Art Institute of Chicago has hosted a symposium called the Stone Summer Theory Institute that is comprised of fellows drawn from around the globe and students from the school. After attending the 2010 Institute devoted to considering the legacy of The Anti-Aesthetic, a collection of essays edited by Hal Foster, I set out to address a number of concerns that I felt went unaddressed during the week of intense debate. These concerns were largely driven by an intuition that the discourse on art remains largely bound to a line of thought that arcs from Pagan and Christian iconography to a crisis of representation under an intellectual framework defined by the philosophical musings of Kant and the historical absolute of Hegel that culminated in a critique that began in post-World War II Europe and that currently is in its final stages. In this context, the question that I felt needed to be raised was whether remaining tied to this arc and the critique of this arc limits our ability to understand the physicality and virtuality of art being made today and the ways in which this art relates to the world in which it is situated. Having rehearsed this question prior to participating in the Institute, my intuition was that indeed this line obscured how art actually is by making it difficult to understand how technological, economic, spiritual, spatial, geo-political, and human terms limit art and its existence beyond a Western discourse. Faced with an inability to make sense of the chaos that is art and that surrounds it, we can either author a new system that might help us understand the chaotic conditions that we observe or we can see such conditions in the art that became the subject of Western Art History and through this understanding discover an alternative that lies in close proximity to the discourse that has been proven problematic by schools of post-colonialism and deconstruction. As a result of these critiques, I believe the former option to be largely impossible. The latter, however, offers an intriguing possibility of investigating threads that have been abandoned over the course of centuries in order to gain an exciting and refreshing image of art and its discourse that has supported a great deal of pleasure both through its materiality and through the manner by which it traces our evolution as a planet and as a species. In selecting sections of the manuscript that resulted to present in the context of this essay, I have decided to focus on the line of thought that I believe allows art both past and present to be de-coupled from the discourse of art history and the line of thought that I believe can be drawn in order to lead us beyond critique and to a framework for understanding art and how it is situated and situates the world. The former line of thought deals with how art is supported by the technology of the wall, how art has been engaged in a subversive critique of the wall in an attempt to find freedom, and how this critique is distinct from a critique on philosophical or spiritual terms that resulted in the autonomy of art in the 20th century as a liberation from Christian metaphysics and the bourgeois society that was its echo. The latter line of thought suggests that following both the conventional critique of the spiritual and a critique of the material, we are given the option of understanding art through how we sense art and how it might sense us. In

attempting to offer access to these ideas, I have endeavored to provide various paths by which one might travel. If at any point you feel lost, please feel free to click on the essay diagram button to find your way.

II. Introduction to the Critique of the Wall

Most take it for granted that art exists as autonomous from the socio-economic and political conditions that surround it. It is separate from other disciplines in the academy and distinct from the natural world. When, however, one asks the extent to which art can exists beyond the walls of a museum, beyond a privileged location in a home, and outside of exhibition catalogues, it becomes less clear the extent to which it is autonomous. While the size of public sculptures and the activities of archivists allow objects in exceptional circumstances to be understood as autonomous art, the broader reality of the situation is that art remains deeply wed to the institutions that support it. In part because many of these institutions are the very entities that support a critique of authority as well as a critique of institutional frameworks and because they preserve an impression of art as autonomous, we must look beneath the surface if we hope to avoid calling for their outright destruction. Words of various institutions paint a picture of progress that has been proven false. We must examine the cause of this hypocrisy. The force that ensures that the museum remains a mausoleum in spite of its leaders attempts to re-imagine its purpose is a result of having dis-enclosed art spiritually and ideologically, but having failed to disenclose art spatially and materially. There is more room now than ever in which art might exist. It is no longer confined to the surfaces of the church, the chambers of the palace, or the walls of a comparatively small aristocracy. It finds a place in resurgent regional galleries and glamorous expansions to museums that have come to characterize elite cultural institutions in large cities. This expansion makes room for a diversity of voices that might not otherwise have been heard. This process has been taking place for centuries and currently is coming sharply into focus. It remains our task to understand the characteristics of this process, the risk of art being diffused and lost in the extraordinarily large material and spatial dimensions of the world, and the extent to which it risks decay as it travels over great distances. The opening of zones in museums once charged with the preservation of heritage to art that is critical of such desires to promote departments and periods defines the rich moment of creativity that characterizes a shared cultural space. Such a cultural realm is present in varying degrees in the largest and the smallest cities around the world. This culture is one of resistance. It is an emergent culture that has yet to and likely never will be grasped as a totality. It is defined by agents who attempt to find small openings that might challenge cultural hegemony and by receivers of these attempts who take time from the expected flow of their day to consider the alternative that is presented in the art. Whether this occurs unexpectedly when art is encountered on the street or in a darkened corner of a polished gallery, there is potential in the act and the possibility of a communal bond defined by shared interest in the condition against which art leans. Just as a growing number of cultural institutions come online, the possibility that these institutions will make sufficient room for art is threatened by an accelerated growth of all those entities that historically would have been taken as not-art. On one hand

these other entities that threaten to obscure the efforts of artists to create art that engages the receiver and the world are very close to art. They are the myriad images that fill a given life. The world as an image has come to be rendered with precision and the inhabitants of this world have evolved to appreciate this image in much the same way they once might have appreciated art. Seeing the Grand Canyon or skiing in the Alps is far more sensuous than contemplating nature in a landscape painting with disinterest. The high fashion that cloaks the model and the feast painted on the table pale in comparison to shopping at Prada or dining at Per Se. The world of affects and sensations where violence is always at a distance and pleasure is always at hand has come to threaten the time that one might take engaging in an experience that may not leave one feeling self-satisfied. Tempting images are not the only distraction from engaging with art. The materiality to which these images correspond presents a wide variety of options that might provide entertainment and pleasure. They define a material condition of extreme horror that gives every viewer pause as they sit in their living room or read news on a mobile device. The intersection of material and its image in photographs, news articles, and videos allows men and women from a variety of worlds to experience the clash between nature and culture, chaos and order, first hand. Many have little need to experience the situation through the lens of an artist who may be suspected in advance of having less of a perspective. The tools are increasingly present for understanding and finding pleasure in the world through concentration on local conditions and interest in improving global conditions. In such a situation where urgency is found with every image and material that comes into focus, art might be dismissed as operating in an alien language, wasting material and technological resources, and taken as a diversion from violence. The contrasting situation between a world that has increasing room for art and one that attains pleasures and understanding from other interfaces and different resources highlights two thrusts that drive the world in which art might exist. The first defines a communal experience under the auspices of various institutions or urban structures. The second defines an anti-communal experience that encourages the acquisition of images and information at discrete and isolated points such as the newspaper, the television, computer, telephone, and screen. The fear in this division is that resistance to an order that may leave many locked in a chaotic state behind the representations streaming across the media is impossible when connection between people is defined strictly through a virtual network that makes common viewing possible. The lack of face-to-face contact denies the possibility of confronting the issues that actually effect the constitution of culture and allows for many to hide behind solutions that only make sense within the logic of the media and the state apparatus. If understood in a certain light, art can resist such dissolution of the community. It will increasingly become apparent that for some time the makers of art and the culture that preserves art and its reception are aware of the potential of art to aid in the disenclosure of communities and the possible isolation and alienation that might result when an individual is thrown into a new state defined by a new enclosure. The most successful art pulls people together just as it breaks down boundaries that insure the homogeneity of a group. Such forces that may exist in close proximity to art and to creativity are not, however, in any sense given. They are constructed by the particular interaction of art

with its placement in the world. Together, they construct a ground and set-up a condition of mediation. The setting, construction, and deconstruction will be a primary focus of the critique of the wall.

III. Introduction to Sense, Sensors, and Sensation

The sensation that art can give rise to in the mind and the body of its receiver has for the most part been subordinated to the system to which the work of art belongs. The body of the receiver and its faculties has been dismissed in favor of a collective body that supports sacred or common sense. This deferral of the particular to the universal began to come under fire during the early 20th century. Through work in a variety of fields, the individual body was given primacy. This turn occurred in light of severe attacks made on the body and on collective means of organization. The critique of art as a mode of expression regulated by universal systems such as narrative, religious, or academic conventions occurred independent of a critique of the wall that might be traced by individual artists or in individual artworks. The critique of universal systems preceded on a far more general level and as addressed to various universal systems. It followed a line that attempted to create art that communicated directly with human faculties of perception and gave rise to art that probed the depths of the psyche, the phenomenology of perception, and potential of extension in the world as both lived and performed. As art began to become increasingly capable of directly engaging the receiver, a new potential opened wherein the receiver was made an equal with the work in authoring meaning and understanding the nature of authority. The individual subject confined to a locality took precedence over a universal subject operating with a global reach and knowledge. As a result, such art supported ambiguous collectivity and a multiplicity of quasi-dominant narratives. The ability of those creating and discussing art to break boundaries between art and receiver was contingent on an institutional critique of the physical wall on which art was received and virtual boundaries between disciplines. It occurred in the context of a wave of new technology that made the dematerialization of walls a possibility. Innovations in radar, infrared, sonar, digital imaging, heat sensing, and pattern recognition technology created new room in which art could operate. In addition, advances in network technology allowed for new paths by which art could be distributed and for the existence of an expanded field of linked consumers and producers working in industries that operate adjacent to art. Together, these changes created new territory on which art could exist and defined a new framework that defined how art is received. The rate at which this change occurred and the extent to which influence came from beyond the conventional boundaries of art has led to a certain degree of confusion as to how art is understood beyond its increasingly visceral relationship with the receiver and how this understanding and the object of art in generalwhether it be real or virtual, concrete or conceptualrelates to a broader history of art. In order to work past this limitation, we focus our attention in order to understand the extent to which a critique of the wall and the critique of how art is sensed operate as two parts of a similar force. The critique of the wall exists as an attempt to dismantle an entity most often experienced as a physicality while the critique of sense operates as an attempt to reframe an entity that is immaterial and invisible. In the former case, the

critique often results in the virtualization of the real and in the latter case the realization of the virtual. A complex play between these two critiques results that supports a complex equation that calculates art and its relation to various other equations that define our world. Throughout this play, sense and sensation are given primacy over the wall. In many ways, the critique of the wall makes room for a fully operative body and its sensations. This is a result of a crisis of the representation of the human body on both political and artistic terms as well as a broader condition in which the body is increasingly mobile. Further, it is tied to the increasing emphasis on individual desire and pleasure as well as the power that results from organizing collectives of bodies in order to protest systems of enclosure that remains inequitable in the eyes of the collective. A sense of direction results that aids in orienting the receiver in the context of formerly dominant systems that have fallen to the side. Such a sense of direction points from the critique of the wall to a critique of systems that limit sensation. In order to travel this line and in particular in order to leave aside a critique of the wall that in its non-dialectic nature could be endless, we have little else to do but embrace the linguistic nature of the critique. In doing so we can leave the material critique to continue operating while turning to investigate what it means for the wall to be described by textbased language. Calling an entity a wall is the first step in a transitional critique between a material critique of the wall and a virtual critique of invisible systems of authority. Immediately sense enters the stage as we feel words form and experience the resonance of the voice in our body, in ears, and in a space. The critique of the wall informs this shift as it becomes clear the extent to which language and its vocalization require a particular understanding of distance between producer and receiver as well as to various enclosures that ensure that whatever vocalization occurs is audible. Various spatial, temporal, and cultural frames are encountered as language is presented. It is sense and sensation that makes such frames intelligible. As a result, language as well as the linguistic turn and its critique can be seen as intermediaries between the critique of the wall and the critique of sense that I believe to be essential for understanding art, its economy, and its relation to other economies through equations. The ability to sense what frames language and the ability to extend this sensation into space and time in order to find broad orientation in the world is made possible by the presence of light and sound. Together they make a field of perception intelligible. The increased level of definition at which light and sound can be produced and the ability to render a space intelligible with higher resolution has allowed both to move beyond a mere instrument that supports language and in turn the authority of a political body behind a militarized wall and to become the focus of attention in their own right. The move is tied to a tendency discussed earlier that relocates meaning at the site of the body. The result of this move, however, is to ask whether privileging light, sound, and their sensation in the body and in various sensing technologies allows their power to permeate enclosures to take precedent over their need to be contained and in so doing support a radical democratization of sense and sensation as well as a final and as of yet unwritten chapter in the critique of the wall, the institution, and authority. In order to engage this question, artists working with sense, sensors, and sensation have changed the axis and surface that is of primary importance from a vertical plane to a horizontal plane and from the object of art to the subject of art. Artists perform this

transition from the authority of the vertical to the potential of the horizontal. They embrace the ground and are guided in their embrace by carefully sensing a path through an uncertain realm. Their act of sensing brings light and claims territory in which further operation can occur. As this new zone grows, the question arises as to whether language can exist without classical forms of enclosure. To some extent, a great deal of contemporary art expresses a desire for no language in a utopian effort to overcome the evil that language has wrought through its propensity to draw and account for subjects and objects out of a natural field. A few exceptional artists, however, offer an alternative wherein enclosure is not abandoned following the critique of the wall and universal systems of value and instead reflect on the enclosure of the human body, the need for shelter, and the extension of the bodys enclosure as a virtual envelope that extends into the space around them as an auratic field. This result is a radical liberation of things enclosed by conventional means and the possibility that these items might be incorporated within a new field. This is to ask whether the critique of the wall and the faculties that sense its existence bears on the object? Is alienation overcome by demolishing the frame that structures the referent? In this moment is the object no longer an object, but a trace that has become a trace through this process of critique? Moreover, must one understand or be aware of the critique for it to become a trace? Would it then be a matter of sensing the existence of this trace in order to gain access to a world that grows adjacent to its predecessor? And, does this imply the co-existence of worlds that operate via different logics with different promises for the body, the mind, representation, and subjectivity? Here a politics is defined that equates accessibility to the trace with freedom and in so doing emboldens artists to finds ways of introducing tactics of sense, sensors, and sensation to a broader public in order to promote liberation of modes of enclosure that are not only outdated, but inefficient and economically unviable.
Copyright 2011 Walker Thisted