Founded in Coventry (England) in 1968 by Michael Baldwin, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge and Harold Hurell, Art & Language brought together the work that these artists had been creating jointly since 1965. A year later, they published the first issue of the homonymous magazine Art-Language, a publication that reflected on theoretical problems of conceptual art and became a platform from which to develop the group’s projects. During 1969 and 1970, Mel Ramsden, Ian Burn, Joseph Kosuth and Charles Harrison joined the group, which eventually ended up bringing together more than thirty artists in subsequent years. Since 1977, Art & Language has consisted of the artistic collaboration between Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden, with the theoretical contribution of the historian and art critic Charles Harrison, who died in 2009.
SON[I]A
“…our inability to describe and understand technological infrastructure reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.”
James Bridle
“Again it comes back to infrastructure and how our inability to describe and understand reduces our critical reach, leaving us both disempowered and, quite often, vulnerable.
Opacity is an important word here too, as is the term ‘black box’. Most of our engineered communications infrastructure is not just extraordinarily abstract for people to come to grips with but is actively kept hidden. There are some valid reasons, of course, for keeping infrastructure hidden but the fact is it out of sight is being increasingly exploited in and out of supposedly democratic contexts, largely by surveillance initiatives we were never told about.
Engendering a healthy paranoia here, along with making work that ruptures the featureless skin of these black boxes – providing points of entry – is important to me currently. Infrastructure must not be a ghost. Nor should we have only mythic imagination at our disposal in attempts to describe it. ‘The Cloud’ is a good example of a dangerous simplification at work, akin to a children’s book. Such convenient reductions will be expensive in time as some corporations and governments continue to both engineer – and take advantage of – ignorance.”
Julian Oliver
The always excellent Bruce Schneier (who coined the term “security theater”) in a talk at Harvard’s Berkman Center (video and transcript). About the Internet and Power, and technological advances that set into motion events no could can possibly predict. In his own words:
What I’ve Been Thinking About
I have been thinking about the Internet and power: how the Internet affects power, and how power affects the Internet. Increasingly, those in power are using information technology to increase their power. This has many facets, including the following:
1. Ubiquitous surveillance for both government and corporate purposes — aided by cloud computing, social networking, and Internet-enabled everything — resulting in a world without any real privacy.
2. The rise of nationalism on the Internet and a cyberwar arms race, both of which play on our fears and which are resulting in increased military involvement in our information infrastructure.
3. Ill-conceived laws and regulations on behalf of either government or corporate power, either to prop up their business models (copyright protections), enable more surveillance (increased police access to data), or control our actions in cyberspace.
4. A feudal model of security that leaves users with little control over their data or computing platforms, forcing them to trust the companies that sell the hardware, software, and systems.
On the one hand, we need new regimes of trust in the information age. (I wrote about the extensively in my most recent book,Liars and Outliers.) On the other hand, the risks associated with increasing technology might mean that the fear of catastrophic attack will make us unable to create those new regimes.
It is clear to me that we as a society are headed down a dangerous path, and that we need to make some hard choices about what sort of world we want to live in. It’s not clear if we have the social or political will to address those choices, or even have the conversations necessary to make them. But I believe we need to try.
We looked at her work extensively today in seminar, but to recap and for further looking and reading, here’s a list of online materials. (Don’t forget there are quite a few catalogues in the KHM library; we also have a rare 1992 interview on VHS.)
The show at the Ludwig opens this Saturday. Also, on Friday 21. June, 2013, at 19h, there is a we’ll see the Europe-premiere of her new performance : “Men on the Line” (Museum Ludwig cinema.) Recommended!
2001 Little Frank and His Carp (Video, 6 minutes, on ubu.com)
2003 “Official Welcome (Hamburger Kunstverein)” (Video, 30 minutes, on ubu.com)
In part I this interview she talks about this piece and about the part where she strips naked. Quote:
“It is my body, in this underwear. And then I take the underwear off and I’m nude; I joke that, yes, I finally joined the grand old tradition of nudie performance art. And my other joke is that I’m not really nude because I’m in quotation marks. But, of course, I am.
Part of the reason I decided to do that was precisely to close that gap, to collapse the distance between myself as the artist named Andrea Fraser and these other positions that I was performing. And to make that distancing more difficult and problematic.”
In the 2nd part of the interview she talks about later works and writings, including “Men on the Line”, later to be shown here in Cologne (you can download the interview as a podcast here):
2011 Texte zur Kunst, “Speaking of the Social World” / “Über die soziale Welt sprechen” (German translation)
The Whitney website holds her contribution to the 2012 Whitney Biennial: “L’1% C’est Moi” & “There’s No Place Like Home”
You would think they don’t really need these kinds of appeals any more… NYC’s ‘Ring of Steel’ is one of the most integrated “full spectrum, military grade” surveillance networks. Cryptome.org / Natsios-Voir-Dire.pdf (local mirror)
Documentary on NYC’s Ring of Steel pt 2: Central Command
Spiegel-Online article (in German)
Am I the only one who thinks this looks like an art exhibition?
