Art & Language: Blurting in A & L online

—– Original Message —–
From: "Thomas Dreher" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, December 09, 2002 10:23 PM
Subject: RHIZOME_RAW: Art & Language: Blurting in A & L online


> Blurting In A & L online
>
> The website of Art & Language within the website of ZKM (Zentrum fur Kunst
und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, http://www.zkm.de) presents the lexicon
"Blurting in A & L" (1973) in an online version (http://blurting-in.zkm.de)
because a translation into hypertext is feasible: Michael Corris and Mel
Ramsden noted connections between 408 entries/annotations/blurts by other
American members of Art & Language as well as themselves. The connections
can now be presented as links between different webpages.
> The website includes articles which contextualize "Blurting in A & L"
within the activities of the group in the seventies. Present and former
members of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Michael Corris, Philip
Pilkington, Mel Ramsden) summarize and reflect on their activities. Thomas
Dreher embeds "Blurting in A & L" within the proceedings of the discourse of
Art & Language.
> Around 1972, the group had fully recognized a need for a criticism of
their own theoretical foundations. Using the philosophy of science (Popper,
Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn, among others) as methodological signposts, the
members of Art & Language inaugurated a criticism of the art world and tools
for a self- contextualization within the ensuing problem field. The
entries/annotations/blurts in "Blurting in A & L" reflect the discussions at
this particular stage. "Blurting in A & L" was followed by discussions
focussed on sociological theories, which helped to contextualize the
problems of the institutions of art (museums) and the art market (galleries)
within the wider social field of the postmaterial forms of
bureaucratization. These debates were accompanied in 1975/76 by efforts to
embody the basics of the critique of bureaucratization in a subsystem of
slogans as a way of reaching a wider public without loss of reflectivity.
> A discussion forum starts the debate with seven questions concerning the
actuality of the discourse of Art & Language within contemporary art
activities. Former and present members of Art & Language will begin with the
discussion, and then every user is invited to participate. The online
discussion forum realizes an intention of the members of Art & Language: it
opens the internal discussions for interactions with external users.
> Each page within the website "Blurting in A & L online" allows spontaneous
entries into an accumulative forum, which adds every new entry to older
entries. The accumulative forum seeks to provoke inscriptions regardless of
thematic limits, while it is hoped that the discussion forum will be based
on themes - with the questions as reference points - and guided by
reflective reactions to the contributions of others. The accumulative forum
allows the filling in of signs regardless of their meanings and, indeed, for
the sake of increasing the number of signs or the accumulated length of
entries. The discussion forum can lead to similar accumulations, but it will
allow restarts on a dialogical and discoursive level: this is an experiment.
> The discussions concerning relations between signs and meanings helped
members of Art & Language to problematize the functions of propaganda and
sloganizing in a way which anticipated - parallel to a French discourse
(Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard) - the debates of the
eighties on postmodernism, which re-constructed and de-constructed authority
built into the processes by which sign-meaning correlations are
conventionalized and institutionalized. The answer of Art & Language was and
is that a constant dialogical and discoursive process of de-construction and
re-construction of the wider context (social relations) of their own
activities (art) is unavoidable. The website presents not only traces of
this process between members of Art & Language: it offers all users a forum
for proceeding within a "theoretical practice" (Althusser) based on dialogue
(http://blurting-in.zkm.de/openmind/ ;
http://blurting-in.zkm.de/e/questions/ ).
>
> Thomas Dreher
> http://mitglied.lycos.de/ThomasDreher/Homepage.html
> http://iasl.uni-muenchen.de/links/lektion0.htm
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