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sheddin the utopian moment

Submitted by sporrati on Sun, 11/12/2006 - 10:23am. VIS70 -- Taught by Wolfgang Hastert
The essay written by Martha Rosler provides an insight into the history of Art from the last Century. The influence technology has had on Art has been coherently clarified and, I feel these days, this aspect is one of the most fundamental elements to be considered if we really want to understand contemporary art practices. Art has always been connected to the time and the social reality in which it has been created. As such it behaves like a mirror; able to reflect a wide range of human emotions, thoughts and dreams as well as providing a means of expression for feelings of pleasure, anger, uncertainty, liberty and slavery. Communication is strictly connected to technology by a reciprocal necessity. Humans have always used technological devices to express their thoughts and, at the same time, technology has itself developed for the purpose of enlarging the communicational possibilities between humans. Technology was the first organized sounds that humans used to communicate, it was the alphabet, the ink and the brush we used to write words, technology is the semiotic process of reading images; it is our computer, our phone, our environment. Nowadays, it is quite evident how far this process has gone. It’s becoming increasingly apparent how deeply dependant we all are on technology; this relationship is getting complex with technology influencing the human race more than ever. In this state of play the role of Art becomes more important than ever. As technology is everywhere Art can and has to be so. Art should have control over technology so as to be free from the manacles of the “technical aspect”. Art has to deflate the institutional Art, the old boundaries of genres and languages, to keep maintaining a high level of communicability and a strict relationship with reality. This is what the avant-garde movements did in the last century and what Video Art did as a consequence. Transgressing the rules, using all kinds of tools, mixed media, founded objects, words, speech, the body, freeing the video from the corporate TV set to express a sense, they all succeed in the building of a “laboratory means of investigation” – while adding to the re-invention of a new conception of Art. The possibility to travel within a different range of mediums as well as the ability to highlight any aspect of human social environments and talk through an unsettled system of meaning is what guarantees Art its honesty and freshness. That’s why Art is so important; it is one of the best ways of making people reflect and recognize the emptiness technology is creating around us.
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Js Warfield's Rosler Response

Submitted by srlevy on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 11:11am.
Martha Rosler’s Shedding The Utopian Moment shines light upon the significance of video artist , Nam June Paik. The mythic figure Paik has done all the bad and disrespectful things to television that the art world’s collective imaginary might wish to do. ( Rosler 45) His denial of video as an informative tool for the masses like television and mass advertisment created the art video genre as we know it today. Paik’s interference with TV’s inviolability, its air of nonmateriality, overwhelmed its single-minded instrumentality with an antic “creativity.” (Rosler 45) Rosler’s interesting history of the effect of photography on the masses show how photography as a technology effected society. By the turn of the twentieth century, photography was well established as a rational and representational form, not only of private life and public spectacle of every type, but as implicated in official and unofficial technologies of social control:police photography, anthropometry, urban documentation, time and motion study for example. ( Rosler 37) This effect of mass publication created the rejection of a realistic portrayal of the world in cubist painting. The capitulation to modernity is associated with cubism, which identified rationalized sight with inhuman culture. (Rosler 36) The embrace of technology and its rigor on the public led to the futurists and the idealism of technological components. Sectors of late 19th Century art practice, then , pressed occultist, primitivist, sexist, and other irrationalist sources of knowledge and authority, spiritual insights often based not on sight per se but on interpretation and synthesis, and arejection of feminine Nature. ( Rosler 36) Futurism was a utopia for those who did not reject war machines and indutrialization. Art discourse made updated use of the dialectic of scientific experimentation on technique and magical transformation through aestheticism and primitivism, veering toward an avante-garde of technical expertise. (Rosler 40) In conlusion, Rosler provides a map of where art stops with mass media and technology and where art of the video begins.
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Rosler Response

Submitted by srlevy on Tue, 03/13/2007 - 11:04am.
Marie Mazur Response to “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment” Reading Martha Rosler’s essay struck me as an analysis of how people cope with advancing technology in relation to art. With new forms of technology subsequently came new methods of creating and re-creating art, as well as critiquing it. This obviously happens in phases: painting, photography, film, video, etc. Rosler makes it a point to show that as art “evolves” in its forms, it also becomes more mass produced. As the progression from painting to video art takes place, art in general is seen as less than “high” and more attainable to the masses through its dumbed-down forms. She writes that television is the “degraded form” of integrated radio, photography and film. MTV for example is the grossest version of video usage that I can think of. In some respects, the national broadcast channel attempts at artistic creativity through thrashing camera angles and zooming techniques- but these are simply to keep the technologically inundated kids’ attention. Rosler repeatedly mentions factions of avant-garde artists who failed at their attempts to defy the art world; Abstract Expressionists and Pop artists for example. However, aside from these groups making obvious statements about the mass cultures of their time, she doesn’t provide solid evidence that they were actually trying to thwart the art scene. If they were, why would Jackson Pollock exploit himself as an artist and appear “fetishized” on Life magazine? Art always has to be avant-garde, or it would never progress. Rosler states that cubism “allowed painting to continue to compete with photography”. Is that truly the case? Would cubism not have come about if photography was not invented? If cubism never came about, would interest in painting die out? Whether artistic movements are avant-garde or attempting to revisit the past, they are making statements to express personal change and/or cultural change. Art does not necessarily rely on culture, although it is the heaviest influence simply because it is what surrounds us constantly. What Rosler seems to be forgetting is that not all art is seen. People create it because of the cathartic effect, not just to be put in a museum.
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