Newer Notes 1

Video With the Sound and Image of Its Own Making
Video projection

Transcription:

This vide
This video is
This is a video with the sound and image
Of its own making.
It is a response to
The piece "Box With the Sound of its Own Making" from
1961 by Robert Morris.
Robert Morris had Duchamp
Had Marcel Duchamp's urinal in mind
When he was creating
While he fabricated the box.
Marcel Duchamp had the Venus of Willendorf
And its uncertain status as an art ob
And its uncertain status in an art context in mind
When he boug
When he found the urinal and
Renamed it "fountain" in 1917.
Robert Morris was interested in recording the
Performance involved in the process of making objects.
Marcel Duchamp was interested in
Redefining what could be considered "process".






This object should be understood as a momentary pause on the synthesis of an individual after four years of specialization/individuation within the trajectory of art history. For the most part, this process of individuation consists of a conscious contextualization of the Self-as-Producer (and one's productions) in the Art-Historical* realm through the re-collection of canonized information, and of training in the use of this learned knowledge as a referential basis for the production of work. This strategy of validation through reference is indivisible from the production of (non-)objects after the existence and subsequent fetishization of the 1960s avant-garde, as well as logical result of their exemplary efforts to demystify the production of Art and the Artist-Hero.
These references are integral and explicit in the case of the object presented, not solely by the models named by the text on the screen, but by the (now common/dated) (un)critical strategy of self-reference employed in the fabrication of the piece; there is also the (perhaps newer) component of lying about this self-reference, of rendering it illusionary through the falsification of documentation linked to the event. This is an important aspect of contemporary art production to note re: the model art historical context mentioned earlier; there exists now a disinterest in factuality, even an embracing of "in-accurate" representation.
This is an un-working or re-working of the 1960s avant-garde methodology still used as a model in modern art instruction, the interest in displaying the reality of production and the conceptual importance of accuracy/factuality as far as the critical result of the work is concerned, for example in the case of endurance pieces, and diaristic or documentary installations. Often this "virtual" existence of contemporary work is aided by available technology that bridges the gap between work produced "in the flesh" so to speak, and the "simulacra" of work existing solely as representation. It is often unnecessary now for the work to exist "materially".

This essay I am writing on the video piece documented above is a continuation of this mentality (critical distance from an event or object necessary in dynamic art practice).

This is the first angle (or radius of understanding) from which to consider the piece, and the one that most "directly" explores the work's relationship to the assignment: "Delineate the boundaries of an existing genre or methodology of cultural production."

These boundary structures are (to summarize):

1) The collection of referential information from (and the internalization of) the art-historical canon; the subsequent implementation of this pool of knowledge to create work.

2) The use of explicit self-reference as a critical exposure of the modes of production of cultural artifacts.

3) The manipulation/falsification of these self-referential documentary strategies.

**4) The dissemination and presentation of the private cultural production (and of this acquired referential knowledge).

More concretely, a culmination of what I learned in Art School.
(The re-presentation and consumption of the self.)***

4 Year Individuated Subject (2007, 2003)
Polaroid document

→ un-represented event in process (Morris switching tape recorder from "record" to "play" before sealing the box.)



*Art-historical here is meant in the widest and most inclusive manner possible, more akin to the realm of cultural production)
** 4) The insularity and self-sufficiency afforded by "new technologies", both in the sense of the material tools themselves (the personal computer) and socially as a medium with which to produce and consume information (on the one hand socially expansive as a broad network of subjectivities exchanging information but also promoting compactness and isolation of production). ← (one of the general forms in which the use of this technology and the (re)production of this canonical information manifests and disseminates itself, the video post or video blog on Internet sites such as YouTube, etc.
***(In a Lacanian sense, the constitution of the Self-as-Producer through the mirror image (the Self-as-Production).)