“We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to say this (Terence having pipped him to the post back in the 2nd century BC) merely proved his point – a point which Macedonio Fernández took one step backwards when he sketched out a prequel to Genesis. God is just about to create everything. Suddenly a voice in the wilderness pipes up, interrupting the eternal silence of infinite space that so terrified Pascal: “Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done.” Rolling His eyes, the Almighty retorts (doing his best Morrissey impression) that he has heard this one before – many a time. He then presses ahead with the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the creepy-crawlies that creepeth and crawleth upon it. In the beginning was the word – and, word is, before that too.

In his most influential book, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom argued that the greatest Romantic poets misread their illustrious predecessors “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”. …

(I like the Morrissey/Smiths reference, though it gives away Andrew’s own contemporary past! see below *)

This is a variation on my argument about actuality and the contemporary past – that we overemphasize the flow of time in our notions of history, forgetting that the past lingers, mutates, haunts, and constitutes our very being. This is the archaeological, the vitality of ruin, the impulse to arrest entropy, the shock of the old, when nothing happens twice, because it has already happened before (was this one of those wonderful aphorisms from Theodor Adorno?).

See my recent comments on the new translation of Laurent Olivier’s wonderful Sombre Abîme du Temps [Link], and my own forthcoming book The Archaeological Imagination [Link].

The past is all around us.

The implications apply also to any authoring or design -

Innovation and creativity are mostly about recycling, remixing, reworking.

Dryburgh Abbey, by Scott’s tomb.

*
Cemetery Gates – Morrissey – lyrics from The Smiths – The Queen is Dead (1986)

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now?
With the loves and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair
And I want to cry

You say: “ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’ve read well, and I’ve heard them said
A hundred times, maybe less, maybe more

If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loans”
There’s always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall …

I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson.

Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past.

The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in a variety of sourrces, and it has been the subject of extensive historical research. But what remains today of the missile sites that once were a focus of world interest? What does a World Crisis in ruin look like? In order to find new ways of looking at the Crisis we conducted archaeological fieldwork, looking for memories in the ground as well as in people’s minds. The pictorial results of our efforts are presented in this book.

Related is Persistent Memories by Elin Andreasssen, Hein B. Bjerck, and Bjørnar Olsen – extraordinary and haunting archaeological fieldwork in the abandoned Soviet mining town of Pyramiden on Svalbard:

Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

To the right – garderobe (latrine), with a finely corbeled chute.

Barnard Castle, Teesdale UK, one of the great medieval fortresses of the north

Topic – archaeology, ruins and the picturesque landscape.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

Should I just give up photography? As a tainted medium?

This is too simple a response (not least, it doesn’t make sense to say that media can be wholly compromised). Though for a long while I worked with the arts company Brith Gof [Link], and we explored relationships with place through site specific performance – see my book with Mike Pearson Theatre/Archaeology [Link] and his new book Site-Specific Performance [Link].

In our conversation in that archetypical English pub in Durham, Bianca, Chris and I decided to avoid the search for a definitive solution, and adopt instead an attitude taken from design thinking -

be mindful

and embrace the contradictions – for they are at the heart of how we connect with (archaeological) landscapes

- be mindful and work with the contradictions (iteratively – for there never is a definitive solution).

How?

• acknowledge and break the rules, reveal the constraints
  (eg break the framing in a time series, collage or some other manner)
• interrupt the work performed by the aesthetic with commentary or annotation
  (eg break the illusion, Brecht-like)
• recontextualize
  (eg use the images in an incongruous setting, or as a series that supplies a critical setting)
• intervene, use the images actively as engagement with a place and re-presentation rather than treat them as simple descriptive document
  (Mike Pearson and I adopted this tactic in many “performed lectures” we presented in the mid 1990s).

This all takes me back to a paper I published (very obscurely) a long while back – Critical romanticism on a visit to the past [Link].

I included a discussion of both Turner (see the previous entry [Link]) and another archetypical romantic, Wordsworth.

Wordsworth walked. His poem on Tintern Abbey deals not with the ruin so much as the synaesthetic and constitutive imagination – how place engenders certain responses in us, particularly through memory, but is dependent upon our creative apprehension that organizes the very substance of experience. As one walks and looks. Both Turner and Wordworth dealt with the topology of time – the folding of time, how pasts and presents meet in the composition of the “figure in the landscape”. And how this encounter is ultimately incomprehensible – sublime – prompting us to restlessly experiment with our responses, representations, reflections.

Here is how I summarised a critically romantic attitude:

• local self-assertion as opposed to universal systems (offering definitive solutions);
• an attention to the ordinary and the particular;
• an interest in the darker side of experience in the sense of that remainder which always escapes the claims of a rational system;
• defamiliarising what is taken as given, revealing the equivocality of things and experience;
• reality conceived, genealogically, as historical process;
• an attitude critical and suspicious of orthodoxy, because of the impossibility of any final account of things.

Norham Castle

To continue with the concern that I shared yesterday – the ideology of land, property and labor transformed into aesthetic form – landscape.

Images that disguise history?

(guilty pleasures of the sublime picturesque) [Link]

It is not difficult to identify various components of this aesthetic. (I recall dealing with a lot of this in a couple of classes I ran on landscape [Link])

Consider Turner’s Norham (1798) - [Link]

Key concepts

pastoral | bucolic | the idyll | picturesque | sublime | beauty

Psychology

Ask – What are the pleasures/gratifications of these landscapes?

Ask – How are they connected to people’s sense of identity? National, personal, ethnic?

Emplotment

Some narratives/scenarios embedded in landscape – return and retreat into repose (nostos) | adventure | the frisson of risk, looking over the precipice | escape into melancholy | the walk to eden | sporting pleasures | agricultural labor

Components of a landscape aesthetic

Techniques for mobilizing this ideological field:

• The figure in a setting – person | monument | ruin | artifact

(see my blog category – figure in a landscape [Link])

• Contrast/tension/justaposition/transition – in tone or tonal range (eg shadow and highlight) | in scale | in form (horizontal/vertical, textures/smooth, natural/cultural eg ruin, town, bridge)
• Formalization – making aesthetic through: framing (the proscenium arch) | abstraction | mannerism (especially over-stylization and in the use of color)
• Composition – framing | perspective (linear and atmospheric) | layered planes, stratigraphy, viewpoint (the viewer set back and up from the composition, as audience, never fully involved)

So Turner’s compositions are framed windows or proscenium arches with staged dramaturgies – backdrop, three side flats (two on the right), stage forming the river winding into the distance.

The tensions and contradictions

Past and present | city and country | real and ideal | celebration and regret | melancholy and comedy (the bucolic) | distance and intimacy | alienation and redemption | the everyday and the allegorical

Ask – How is the artist working with and against a set of media conventions and constraints?

Temporality

References to an indeterminate historical time | to a lost golden age | nostalgia | a celebration of the saturated present moment (the sublime moment of controlled shock, and/or of calm repose)| memory as actuality – the juxtaposition of different times in the now

The politics

An absence of any working community in landscape | the status of the observer (usually abstracted from what is being represented) | an escapism (from social reality) |  a contrast between the viewer and the anonymous (sublime) popular masses – vernacular human detail.

Watercolor from 1823 (Scotland is on the left bank)

Norham sunrise – oil 1845 (an exercise in form)

The cultural politics of this aesthetic have long fascinated me. This is not just a new elite aesthetic. Turner was very aware of the politics, manipulating the well-established theatrical scenography to organize his landscapes, staging vernacular dramaturgies of rural life and sporting pursuits, combining both with an experimental and rationalist realism. Like many in Romanticism, he was working with new conceptions of place, time, and relationships between the viewing visitor and the land and its objects, manifested in how travel is organized, where one stops to look at a view, how one looks at the land, what is brought to bear on this apprehension, how one builds landscapes.

The allure, the ideology, the challenge to avoid cliché.

How do we deal with archaeological landscapes today?

I will take up this question in another post [Link]

One of the images that is concerning me – a landscape in the central section of Hadrian’s Wall – largely the work of John Clayton’s conservation efforts in the mid nineteenth century, continued currently by the National Trust

Out running – jet lag gets me up rather early – here at about 5.30 am local time.

Lindisfarne, Northumberland – sixteenth century military architecture and a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life” commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the conversion – very tasteful).

What is left of the nineteenth-century wooden jetty. In the distance – Bamburgh – royal seat from the eighth century.

All too nice through HDR Pro on an Apple iPhone.

In todays Guardian – an evocative “Country Diary” set in Borth, near Aberystwyth, west Wales, where we used to live. Another petrified forest on the coast and taking us back to the days of the Welsh epic sagas.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Herbert

After the long winter, with its numbing cold and sustained snowfall, few things raise the spirits as much as walking under a deep blue sky with the afternoon sun warming your back. Add to this a long stretch of empty beach and the scope for improvement becomes vanishingly small. My visit to Borth was timed to coincide with a spring tide, whose dramatic range exposes at low water much that is usually covered by a confusion of surf. Winter storms scour the beach dramatically, and a visit in early spring often yields previously hidden elements – including new areas of the ancient sunken forest for which the beach is well-known.

The especially low tide revealed a part of the forest I hadn’t seen before. A dozen feet or so below the peak high-water mark, stumps of trees and jumbled arrays of prostrate trunks stood out from the scalloped ripples of the beach. Beyond them I could see tangled shallow root systems set in a glossy, eroded matrix of clay and woody peat. Some newly exposed trees had surprisingly well-preserved bark still in place, and several were immediately recognisable as birch. Dated at around 5,000 years old, these trees appear to have lost a battle with rising sea levels after the last ice age. Welsh legend carries intriguing tales of the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod (the Lowland Hundred), a fruitful tract beyond the present shoreline whose sea defences were inundated through either poor maintenance or drunken error.

Could this be a folk memory carried by word of mouth for thousands of years, or is it a later tale devised to account for the same evidence of change visible today? Opinions appear divided, but as I watched the incoming tide gently moving the individual sand grains of the beach it was clear that change is the natural state of the coastline – whether we like it or not.

Fuel cap. Bentley B35AE, built at the Rolls Royce Derby works in 1933. Raced by Eddie Ramsden Hall in the 1930s and then again at LeMans in 1950. Now part of the Collier Collection in Naples, Florida.

My lab is working towards the launch of a new initiative at Stanford, the Revs Program, which will explore the history of car culture and design through the world’s finest collection of cars and library of automobility.

Archaeology of the contemporary past meets human centered design

Here I am up the Tyne Valley – where the Roman bridge crossed the river, carrying Hadrian’s Wall.

Hadrian’s Wall, edge of the built environment

In the North East of England for the Binchester excavations – Vinovium.org.

Dere Street, the Roman road that passes through Binchester, here runs north across what is now the English-Scottish border.

There was a medieval village – Kemblepath – up here in the wilds of Upper Coquetdale. On the site of Chew Green, the Roman fort and earthworks.

Map – UK Government M(ulti) A(gency) G(eographic) I(nformation) for the C(ountryside)

(Aerial photo – Tim Gates)

Dere Street crosses the River Coquet.

“I was seeing layers of typography, paint, colour – and combined with the texture of the crumbling and flaking materials, many of them were appealing to me as contemporary pieces of design in the vein of work by Ray Gun magazine.”

Manhattan

(see also archaeography.com)

Brussels.

Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Checking out Hadrian’s Wall for our summer tour.

Chorography – checking out the car parks!

A wonderful talk this evening from Alain Schnapp in our Archaeology Center.

It was about “ruin” as an intellectual artifact.

Through a kaleidoscope of quotes and vignettes about ruin from antiquity to modernity, Alain reflected upon broad human experiences at the heart of our sense of history, memory practices, collection, temporality.

Goethe among the ruins of humanity’s childhood

I was tempted to synthesize, from this mélange, some elements of a theory of ruin.

Vectors

Articulation Between past and present; flows and continuities, also interruptions. Actuality, as the conjunction of past/present. Temporal topology, the non-linear folding of pasts and presents. Presences, and absences, voids.

Materialization Artifacts and architectures as the metonymic and metaphoric materialization of past in the present.

Inscription Epigraphy, engraving, iconography as a particular presence of the past. Token or icon? Textual sources as ruins. The contrast between inscription and mute relics.

Categorization Catalogs of things. Attributions to date, place, to the makers in systems of order that make sense of entropic ruins and fragments.

Quantification Just how much remains? Can there be too much memory? Ruin and letting go of the past.

Collection Gatherings of ruins and fragments. The collection as microcosm.

Authentication Is the relic genuine, or a fake? What is such authenticity?

Historicity The power to preserve, to commit to memory, to narrative; active processes of recovery, conservation and destruction or elimination. Historicity as our sense of place in historical narrative. The role of hindsight. Agency – the ability to articulate past and present, to (re)construct, to repair the ruin.

Reflection Self consciousness of time and entropy. The ruin as memento mori.

Theatre/archaeology – the re-articulation of fragments of the past as real-time event – from Brith Gof Theatre – Tri Bywyd (Three Lives) 1995 – [Link]

[Link] - The Bibliotheca Universalis Antiquaria – my project with Alain and colleagues.

Standish vinyard – tasting room in an old apple barn.

Testimony to the dying orchards of the valley, the fast-growing shift to wine production.

Standish – the old connection with the Pilgrim Fathers. One of the Pinot Noirs is named “Mayflower”.

Gallery – Link

The annual celebration of a great industry and labor movement, once a living force, now a memory, nostalgically inspiring at best, after Thatcher’s neo-liberal ideology and political spite closed all the coal mines and devastated the pit villages.

Gallery – Link

Life Squared – web link and gallery link.

More links – Linden Lab/Second Life and Wired magazine

The exhibition, curated by Rudolf Frieling, is a bold and inspiring collection of works of conceptual, performance and media arts. It tracks the theme of participation in contemporary art.

(Conventional artwork – on a wall in a gallery, to be contemplated. Interactive art – the museum visitor presses a button and something happens to the artwork. Participatory art – the involvement of the visitor/viewer/audience/witness is a key component of the work of the artist).

There is a catalogue from Thames and Hudson to accompany the show – good essays from Rudolf and Lev Manovich – [Link to Amazon]

Interview with Rudolf – [Link]

John Cage’s notorious 4’33″ – the pianist sits for four minutes and 33 seconds and plays no notes. This is not about silence, but about musical interval and ambient noise that actually constitutes music – the gaps between the notes and the environmental noise against which a conventional musical composition stands out. 4’33″ directed the audience’s attention to the figure-ground relationships at the heart of music. (See my evolving notes on “figure and ground” – [Link])

Other notable works for me in the exhibition include Janet Cardiff’s “Telephone Call” – an immersive itinerary through the museum taken by a visitor with a camcorder prepared by Cardiff – literally a soundtrack, together with screened imagery, on the viewfinder. The visitor experiences the mismatch between what is before them and what is represented to them in the staging of Janet Cardiff’s absence from the walk she makes with them round SFMOMA.

Ant Farm – a series of related works from 1971 – “Media Van” 1971 – nomadic truckitecture as Ant Farm made their way across the US in a Chevy van, staging lectures and events along the way; “Citizens Time Capsule” 1975-2000 – burying a 1968 Oldsmobile Vistacruiser with a collection of community-donated artifacts in up-state New York; culminating now in “Ant Farm Media Van v.08″ – a 1972 Chevy C10 van converted again into a time capsule, this time containing analog and digital media, some from the original 1971 roadtrip, others, in the form of digital photos and music, donated by museum visitors to SFMOMA.

Rejecting a naturalistic aesthetic – extruding 3D from 2D (old photographs)

“Life Squared”, our work with Lynn Hershman Leeson, a major contemporary artist working in the Bay Area, is an installation in the online world Second Life. We have regenerated a work of hers in the Dante Hotel, San Francisco, 1972 on the basis of the records of the work, what remains of it and its locale. This is a project in what Henry Lowood and I call “Archive 3.0 – animating the archive”. Henry is a curator in Stanford Libraries and one of the world’s leading experts on new gaming technologies.

For me, it had started back in 2004 with the Presence Project. Lynn Hershman is one of the artists working with the project to explore and research liveness and mediation, presence and absence in new media and the arts. Lynn’s work, as part of a distinctive current in contemporary art, has been a consistent address to questions of how our identities and senses of self are so dispersed in our prosthetic world through all sorts of material forms and mediations: clothes, lifestyles, financial and legal information, imagery, medical history, personal memory …

From Henry I found out that Stanford had acquired 90 odd boxes of her archive: papers, photos, videos, reviews. Lynn didn’t want it all to sit in the Special Collections in the library and molder. She did indeed want to animate her archive.

This was music to my ears. And so began the project Life Squared, an archaeology of a work of Lynn’s — the installation made with Eleanor Coppola in a room in the Dante Hotel. In 2006 our team from Stanford Humanities Lab reworked the fragmentary remains of this event, experience, and performance as a facility and encounter in the online world Second Life.

Key members, other than Lynn and the SHL leadership, were Jeff Aldrich, Henrik Bennetsen, and Henry Segerman.

I said Lynn’s aspiration to animate her archive was music to my ears. Precisely because I am an archaeologist, fascinated by what’s left of the past, its presence with us now, and what we do with it. An aside: many think that archaeologists discover the past. They don’t. They work on what remains. Archaeology is another kind of memory practice, where past is turned into present. We are all archaeologists now – [Link].

One site where such work happens is the museum or archive. With Henry, I see us moving into a new archival era. Because we live in Silicon Valley, we thought this should be called Archive 3.0 – [Link].

Archive 3.0 — new prosthetic architectures for the production and sharing of archival resources – the animated archive.

What is involved in bringing archives alive? What are signs of this shift?

Remix, rich engagement, co-creative regeneration

These signs are there in in the reterritorialization of information resources associated with a variety of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 initiatives like Wikipedia and Flickr, with new institutional efforts of libraries and museums to diversify and reach out to users with vast information resources and intelligent customizable search facilities like Google Books. Clear in the vast and growing heritage industry of museums and sites for us to visit is a reemphasis on personal affective engagement with cultural memory. There is a recognition of the importance of developing rich modes of engagement with archival, historical and cultural resources. New interfaces involve processes of recollection, regeneration, reworking, remixing in sophisticated visualizations and customized interactive and participatory experiences. We visit Colonial Williamsburg or Jorvik Viking Center in the UK and the past speaks to us.

The Life Squared project, to animate part of the Hershman archive in the online world Second Life, is an address to the question of the future of the library and museum in the context associated with Archive 3.0 — when collections are no longer primarily of books on shelves, paintings on walls, objects in vitrines, but include immaterial forms, intangible experiences, mixed analog and digital forms. When collections are dynamically sensitive to the interests of audience, viewers, those engage with art works, and when curation becomes co-creation of new works through remixing of the components of collections and archives as they are given over to much more open access.

Avatar radars – tracking their movements and interactions

Life Squared has been a very rewarding experience, working with Lynn, truly collaborative, participatory – have a look at the documentation in our wiki and blog – [link].

See also various talks and links – [menu]

SFMOMA is changing its agenda, or rather augmenting the primary focus upon its collections Accompanying the exhibition is the inauguration of “D-Space” – a new facility in the museum and a program to reach out to the community. Dominic Willsdon has joined from Tate Modern, London, where he pioneered outreach through institutional alliances, between museums and cognate institutions, to share art-work, the work of cultural production associated with the world of the artist, art collector and museum. Dominic has precipitated an experiment involving SFMOMA, Stanford University and California College of the Arts (CCA) — developing a hybrid learning experience in the arts. It started with the idea of a kind of “summer school” for a diverse and permeable student and community group working with artists in and beyond the space of the museum. This term, Fall 2008, Peggy Phelan of Stanford and Brian Conley of CCA have been sharing a class between their institutions and devoted to the ways artists have treated their work as an educational or pedagogical project (think of Joseph Beuys’s political agenda).

With Jeffrey Schnapp , my co-director of Stanford Humanities Lab, I have outlined how such initiatives can be part of a radically new practice-oriented curriculum for arts and humanities education in the North American university. We started with our experience of practice/project/performance based research and teaching in Stanford Humanities Lab and my own Metamedia Lab in Stanford Archaeology Center.

Link – Artereality – rethinking art as craft in a knowledge economy

In the broadest way I see all this as a shift from a primarily custodial model for the art museum to a coproductive or cocreative model of designing and making culture. Conventionally, artworks are to be cherished and curated, their qualities and achievement to be broadcast in art museums, colleges and universities.

But we are also increasingly witnessing the vitality and power of popular participation and cultural creation, enabled by information technology, its ubiquity and low cost. All those videos on YouTube, all the blogs worldwide, all the self-publishing on the web.

Participation and co-creation, user-generated content – and a deep recognition of the creative energies inherent in even the most mundane of everyday experiences.

BUT …

You will have perhaps guessed that something like this was coming …

There is a colossal irony and contradiction at the heart of this exhibition devoted to participation in contemporary art.

Above all else, the exhibition celebrates the names of the artists that are attached to the works on show.

In spite of their essential presence to this exhibition, the other “participants” in this art are quite absent. They are at best the supplement to the artists. Let me explain.

There are no names, other than “artists”. Well, perhaps half a dozen.

There are not even any demographic categories. Who are the “participants”? Are they working class, African-American, middle-class, minority? At best we have “the public”, “people”, “audience”. Yet again, and it wearies me to point it out, we are presented with the crowd, the mass, as material for the artist to manipulate. Robert Atkins, in his essay in the catalog, comes across as an elitist critic sneering at popular “mass” culture, while telling us about participation in the arts (try page 63).

Felix Gonzalez-Torres has us picking up rather unexceptional monochrome posters, beautifully stacked, as our act of participation in his work. Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Mike Bennett, in an award winning artwork, have us bumped off an email list because we are one too many – [Link].

Who does all this enlighten? The catalogue does its utmost to connect Gonzales-Torres to reciprocity (the power of giving – Marcel Mauss’s great idea, though not cited here) and to trauma (Aids). Brucker-Cohen and Bennett are, we are told, reflecting on the dot com crash a few years back.

Do we really have to have this pointed out? Is it convincing? Who benefits from these associations?

We can easily and appropriately appreciate an artist’s critique of the anonymity of contemporary anomie. It might be called consciousness raising. Artists can be good at this kind of thing. Making us look critically at the way we live.

But this exhibition, for me, is so much more for the benefit of “the artists”, or rather their collecting patrons. Why? Because the kudos for dreaming up so-called participatory artwork is awarded entirely to the genius of the artists. They are the ones who dreamed all this up, we are told. There are no other names here, no real people.

The exhibition has the gall to claim that contemporary participatory culture has been anticipated by such a bunch of artists (main website – [Link]).

I am not a geek, but count many among my friends, living, as my family does, in Silicon Valley. It was their gorgeous engineering that brought about the participatory and cocreative web, Web 2.0 — and tied most often to utopian hope and vision.

Such vital hope and vision is NOT present in most of these works. They are much more gestural, incidental, even parasitic upon the work of others. Like Fred Turner, we can indeed trace the fascinating connections between the arts, new technology and libertarian political ideologies. Fred precisely tracks the subtle networks of association. We can indeed connect art and popular creativity and politics. But the connection is not one of inspired artistic geniuses precipitating cultural and political change (see Fred’s superbly nuanced research and beautifully written work on counter-culture and cyber-culture – [Link]).

And just stand back a couple of steps and consider where participation started. Participatory art, Web 2.0 and all the rest we hear so much of today are current manifestations of a long genealogy of participatory creative production stretching back millennia. Palaeolithic cave art and the medieval cathedrals of Europe were all about participation. No, more than this, I hold that it is the everyday actions of ordinary people that reproduce society as we know it, its highest achievements included. Innovation is far more than thinking up new ideas. New ideas are commonplace.

This exhibition seems to say that we need an elite to show and tell us what is actually at the heart of our everyday experience. At the heart of politics. Actually, most of us, who haven’t invested in this hype, don’t need this self-appointed elite.

Just ask – who does it benefit to hold that these are prescient singular individuals, these artists?

I am actually not really criticizing many of the artists, but rather the art world, the discourse, the business, the market, those who buy art for their collections. Have a look at the new edition of Howard Becker’s classic book “Art Worlds” – [Link].

I am a great supporter of contemporary art. I believe that creativity needs to be at the heart of our schools and colleges. Shared, and yes, participatory. I actually have a place in this exhibition. But I am feeling alienated and excluded. I do wonder then about the reaction of those who have no investment in this kind of work.

The art market needs “artists” because they are the supposed source of value — individual genius and creativity manifested in a distinctive body of work that is given significance by the way art historians and critics write the work into the history of art.

So what about those other than the moneyed collectors wishing to enhance the status of the artist in whose individual genius they have invested? I suggest the exhibition is as much a betrayal of the radical libertarian intention of some of the works on show, as it is a celebration of participation in the arts.

The great moneyed and institutional interests of the Italian renaissance reinvented the Graeco-Roman figure of the vates — the inspired artistic genius — the creative individual. The institutionalization of modern art has pursued this elitist individualism with fervor, because it fuels the investment prices of an art market.

Just what has changed since the days of the banking Medicis and the Borgias?