Monday, 26 March 2012
The process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. This process is a combination of economic, technological, sociocultural and political forces.
The elimination of state enforced restrictions on exchanges across borders and the increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange that has emerged as a result.
- Fast food restaurants are beginning to dominate the world.
- 'Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned'.
- Rapidity of communication echoes the senses.
- We can experience instantly the effects of our actions on a global scale.
Global village thesis//
'As electrically contracted, the globe is no more than a village. Electric speed at bringing all social and political functions together in a sudden awareness of responsibility to an intense degree'
- Centripetal forces// bringing the world together in uniform global society.
- Centrifugal forces// tearing the world apart in tribal wars.
Three problems of Globalization//
1: Sovereignty challenges to the idea of the nation state.
2: Accountability transnational forces and organizations. Who controls them?
3: Identity who are we? Nation, group, community.
If the 'global village' is run with a certain set of values then it would not be so much an integrated community as an assimilated one.
- Rigging the 'Free market.'
- Media conglomerates operate as oligopolies.
- US media power can be thought of as a new form of imperialism.
- Local cultures destroyed in this process and new forms of cultural dependency shaped, mirroring old school colonialism.
Chomsky and Herman (1998) Propaganda model: 5 basic filters.
- anti communist ideology
'Sustainability development is the development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs'.
‘according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at’ (Berger 1972, 45, 47)
Discuss this quote with reference to one work of art and one work from the contemporary media.
Berger talks about how men look at women and how women watch themselves being looked at. By this he means that women are made to be looked at for the pleasure of men, men are allowed to look at women and women enjoy watching themselves being looked at by men. I have looked at two pieces of work where this theory has been put into practice. One is a piece of art and the other a piece of contemporary media.
(Sociology) (Philosophy) an image or simulation, or an aggregate of images and simulations, that either distorts the reality it purports to depict or does not in fact depict anything with a real existence at all, but which nonetheless comes to constitute reality.
An example of hyperreality could include the reality TV show Big Brother. Big Brother is a show that is held twice a year, one being with celebrities and the other ordinary people. A selected group of people audition to enter a house for about 6 weeks; they complete tasks inside the house to win special treats for either themselves or their housemates. Each week a house mate is evicted following voting’s made by the public.
This is an example of hyper reality as the people in the house and also the public that vote for the evictions believe that the show is a real life situation. But in actual fact it is a TV show that has been specifically designed to seem real. The house that the people live in has been built purposefully for the show and it has been designed to be almost like a perfect house, they have everything they need as if they were in the 'real' world. Another aspect of the show that is hyper real is the fact that the house mates know that they are being watched which therefore would make them act in a certain way which means the public would not see the 'real' them. They are almost part of a simulation within the house.
When people go into the house they are just ordinary people and its not until they are on the show or have been evicted that they gain a higher social status, almost like celebrities. But they have not actually changed at all, which again links to the fact that people think the Big Brother house is real when really it is a well structured and thought out show.
Friday, 23 March 2012
Read the Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'. Write a 300 word analysis of one work of Graphic Design, that you think relates to the themes of the text, and employing quotes, concepts and terminology from the text.
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
To examine the historical development of practices of institutional critique in relation to the corresponding development of the modern art gallery.
1// To demonstrate the importance of the art museum to the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the 19th century.
2// To analyse Peter Burger's theorisation of the twin development of aestheticist (formulist) art practice and critical avant-gardism in the first three decades of the 20th century.
3// To consider the postwar critique of the convention of the white cube through attention to Brian O'Doherty's Inside the White Cube and Michael Asher's 1974 Claire Copley Gallery installation.
- Modern art musems have been developed into public exhibition spaces and have been generated to gather a visible presence of a social body, gathered to appreciate the achievements of its society. By creating a sense of belonging, the museum spaces serve to mystify the role of the individual within society.
- Capitalism makes people believe that we must sell in order to live.
- Capitalism generates a single fundamental class division between the bourgeoisie (who owned the means of production and the proletariat (who sold their labour for wages).
- Social institutions such as the church, schools and the press play an important role in propagating ideologies that support existing relations of production and support dominant class interests.
- Within the rise bourgeoisie came the rise of public art museum.
- Understanding how ideology functions as a particular set of culturally shared assumption that have the appearance of being timeless and natural, but in essence are historically determined and culturally specific.
- Marx ideology is grounded in relations of production within society.
- Marx beliefs and assumptions that societies hold their collective consciousness. Directly linked to the means by which society sustains and reproduces itself physically and materially.
- A society that gains wealth by working land will possess different collective beliefs to a structure that has a very developed level of industrialisation.
- Marx 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness'.
- Following from the development of the Louvre throughout the 19th century, public exhibitions of art increased in popularity.
- The development of public museums and exhibitions in the 19th century generated spaces for the representation of cultural life and the production of public audiences.
- Institutions comprising 'the exhibitionary complex' were involved in the transfer of objects and bodies from enclosed private domains.
- Formed vehicles for inscribing and broadcasting the messages of power throughout society.
- The Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace consisted in relations between the public and the exhibits so that while everyone could see, they could also be seen, thus combining the functions of spectacle and surveillance.
- Creating an environment where people coudl witness their own inclusion within a larger social body.
- Through the progressive removal of art's representational function and enclosure within the museum spaces came a separation between art and life so that modern art came to comprise a direct and individualist address to the audience's aesthetic sensibility.
- Ideas of expressivity, tastefulness and beauty were at the heart of the aestheticists doctrine. Colour was understood to be an inherent expressivity that stood for the artist's inner sensations.
- Colour used in paintings became unnatural.
- Aesthetic Hypothesis which introduced the idea of significant form, which centred around the idea that what was of importance in visual art was the capacity of a work's formal organisation to provoke an emotional response.
- Modern art became independant from the natural world, art became about evoking an emotion rather than staying true to natures characteristics.
- Artists tried to create an emotional encounter within their subject, generating a unique visual language through which those feelings were conveyed.
- Art became autonomous.
- Abstract art no longer reflected upon social reality and came to focus the production and reception of art towards disinterest and tastefulness.
- Burger emphasises on the institutionalisation of a particular set of values, practices and modes of encounter in which individuals might discover aesthetic emotions that are independant from practical life.
- Marcel DuChamp submitted a urinal for an exhibition was denied, this intervention then provided the object with art status, by virtue of its standing in for, or as material documentation of, the act of submission or nomination as art.
- The act of refusal was an acknowledgement of the object, which later paved the way for its acceptance as a form of art, or rather anti-art.
- DuChamp highlighted theseparation that had been drawn between art and life.
- What differentiates works of art from other objects in the world. What makes them different is what we do with them and what we say about them.
- The physical manipulation of the gallery environments changed the ways that architectural divisions of interior and exterior space and subdivisions of interior space functioned, changing the relations between viewer and gallery and the viewers attitude towards the objects/ scenarios presented within galleries.
- Underlying acts of contemplation before exhibits in art galleries is a set of social agreements, generated throughout the history of public art exhibitions that orient the actions of individuals within these space.
- To examine how Deleuze and Guattari draw emphasis to the constructed and contingent nature of social reality.
1. To contrast models of creative, 'rhizomatic' thought with traditional 'tree-like' models of thought based in sequential argumentation.
2. To examine Delueze and Guattaris interpretations of processes of social change and development.
3. Consider how they propose individual people might transform themselves.
4. To contextualise these theories of change and development in relation to the concepts 'the virtual' and 'the actual..'
- Deleuze and Guattari were a philosopher and psychiatrist who worked together in France in the 1970s and 1980s, and who have been hugely influential in numerous fields, including (but not restricted to) art practice, theories of music, geography and sociology.
- Against this dominant tradition Deleuze and Guattari conceived of an alternate structure for thought that privileges difference, play and creativity.
- They called this rhizomatic thought.
- We're going to look at A Thousand Plateaus, and the concepts developed within it: the rhizome, assemblage, subjectivation, schizo-analysis, the body without organs, and the virtual and the actual.
- Each chapter (or, as they put it, plateau, meaning a particular set of circumstances brought together in an intensive relationship) resists reduction to a goal-oriented argument. Instead multi-disciplinary practices are brought into a state of play, and concepts are re-contextualised and reverberate together.
- A rhizome is an underground stem that grows horizontally and pushes up lateral shoots- like a ginger plant.
- Delueze and Guattari form alternative model of thought to the tree-like structure that they associate with traditional philosophy.
- Delueze and Guattari emphasise that concepts 'are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies.. They must be invented, fabricated or rather created.'
- Rhizome builds relationships between objects, places, people and ideas, generating unanticipated commonalities between seemingly disparate entities. Rhizomes are inherently creative and may be produced intentionally or unintentionally.
- Isa Genzken's sculptures as rhizomatic artworks. Her works reflect the chaos of the urban landscape, yet often read as small scale skyscrapers. In these works, objects, images and poured paint collide, creating formations that suggest future architectural production shaped in relation to the city's own detritus. Materials, images and ideas drawn from diverse sources collide, suggesting possibilities for the transformation of urban space.
- Their usage derives from the French agencement, the meaning of which emphasises processes of arranging, organising and fitting together. Assemblages emphasise the convergence of heterogeneous elements such as food, furniture, and people in recognisable structures, such as a dinner party.
- An example of an assemblage with which we are all familiar is the place we make our home.A home is a way in which we make a space express comfort to us. Deleuze and Guattari describe a child, alone and afraid in the dark. The child hums or sings a tune as a way of bringing familiarity to the place.
- So, assemblages of all kinds operate, and they operate within a territory. And territory is not simply a place, it's also a process.
- Hoodies create an assemblage in a supermarket, people feel threatened by them. They turn the space from a supermarket car park to a social space. They re-territorialise the space.
- De-territorialisations and re-territorialisations occur within assemblages in accordance with the flows in which their component parts move at different speeds. Different social constructions change at different rates. The status of teenagers in society, for instance, can change very quickly, while the
status of the military is very embedded and static and slow to change. This effects how assemblages form and shift.
- Deleuze and Guattari go further, though. As individual bodies are buffeted around these social assemblages - from school, to home life, to church, and to work, and in a continual immersion in social activity - reading other people's approval or disapproval, being gendered, by selecting interests and passions or having them prescribed by others - a subject is produced.
- Consider the working day. One is shocked out of dream fantasies by the alarm clock, jostled into the role of commuter, thrust into the tasks of wage labour, and then, back at home, required to perform as a parent, and finally show the sensitivity of a lover. All this in one day. Each different situation makes a series of unique demands upon the individual, to which they must conform, at the risk of castigation.
- Real object is ascertained. James Williams notes 'A mountain exists as real with all the ways it has been painted, sensed, written about and walked over.' This traditional notion of 'the real', where something is real as opposed to something imaginary, or copied, no longer holds. Every object we understand in relation to its brute materiality is only ever known from a given perspective.
- The actual refers to states of affairs, bodies and individuals, whilst the virtual refers to what these entities imply and what in fact brings them into existence.
- The virtual is the unsaid of the statement, the unthought of the thought.
- Between creative rhizomatic constructions, social assemblages, individual re-programming, and questioning accepted notions of thought, Deleuze and Guattari developed a series of tools for strategic thought and action. These provide a set of tools for those who wish to challenge order that exists for its own sake, and a way of understanding how we today exist in relation to an ever changing, and ever more complicated modern world.