Allen, Jamie
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Interviews with the Swamp Thing, the Poacher and the Healer
Interactions with and within institutions have characteristic qualities, styles, personalities, and tone. These aspects of institutional life are difficult to capture through formal description or professional obligation. Institutions comprise performed characters, each activating infrastructural scenography in their way, infusing physical, procedural architectures with particular tonalities. How might we trace these performers? What are these performances, and for whom are they enacted? Transcribed here are conversations with essential practitioners. These are the characters of art institutions, tracing outlines of who they are and what they do, and how they perform it. Necessarily veiled and anonymized, these personnel profiles have monikers following their ways of life within the institution: Swamp Thing, Poacher, and Healer. They recount and refract dimensions of the critically indivisible person-professional-practitioner entities that people in arts and cultural institutions find themselves impelled or compelled to become. Such exchanges about practices in institutions reveal how these contexts demand that we enact reactionary and curative roles, composed within the constraints and affordances of the scenographic infrastructure of buildings and publications, policies and procedures, presumption, and tradition.
'Counter-conscious’ Ways of Life
In his opening address to the symposium Art Creating Society at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford in 1990, Stephen Willats compelled participants and the audience to contribute their viewpoints on the development of a new vision for art, one that extends its social meaning beyond the institutional territory to which it has traditionally been confined. This statement is an example of his pronounced intention to have his artworks intervene into the functioning of society at large, developing models that provide both critical outlooks and promising perspectives. Willats’ approach is connected to the «interactive communication networks» he creates in contemporary art. He also creates a network between artists and others through the magazine Control he has been publishing since 1969. The magazine’s title should be read in the sense of «agency» and «interaction» and not in the authoritarian sense beloved of the critics of cybernetics, as historians like Andrew Pickering pointed out.
Message Send Failure
Message Send Failure is collaborative writing, messaging and texting on the topic of the iterative misfires, cyclical catastrophes and the perilous, treacherous pathways, breakdowns and breakthroughs of meaning we embark on every day. With Bernhard Garnicnig, it begins with a sense we have all had of how miraculous it is that anyone succeeds in communicating anything, ever. Our modern-day incantations of digital communication, these necessary methods, are the magical cornerstones of an edifice of economies, social systems, personal relations, friendships, societies, beliefs and philosophies. We are tested and fail before Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as we demand proof of one another’s faith, belief and trust, falling short with every badly penned email or miss-sent misread or misunderstood iMessage. We strive toward the integrity of intention, but don’t always hit the mark. As goes the relativizing liberation of “not crying over spilt milk”, so goes the invocation of cali-fornicative technologies to fail early, fail often and profit from these failure. “Progress” these days means to project projects, cantilever life, unreservedly and constantly risk to fail. And with the crash and burn comes a freeing clearing, a conjoined with an imperative to “emerge from the ashes”, together, to revel in misunderstanding one another.
The Art of Instituting
The authors examine a digital dynamic within a networked sense of collectivity, and how this has influenced and enabled institutional experimental sites of thinking and production. They locate a tendency to organize oneself in collective groups as particularly evident in the Nordic context, reflecting a cultural history of ‘instituting’ (i.e. the formation of associations and unions) and today forming sites of hacker spaces, DIY technology groups, and artist-run project studios that hover between science, art and technology. These sites are necessary, the authors argue, as institutional forms to diversify responsibility across collectives, while simultaneously helping to equalize agencies, energies and temporal resilience, and exert post-capitalist influence.