Much of Certeau’s work in The Practice of Everyday Life concerns boundaries and spatial organization: like his defining of strategies and tactics, for example. Strategies are the manipulation of power relationships from an institutionalized and delimited place, while tactics are calculated actions that have no boundaries or center: one is centered (strategies), the other (tactics) is not. It’s almost as if one can imagine lines drawn on the ground for many of his concepts. This focus on the demarcation or stepping across of boundaries carries over into his discussion on spatial stories, which is where fas is brought forward.
The fas is part of stories creating a theater of actions, of building a foundation and opening up a space for action through a story. The Roman priests referred to in the text appeared to function as ambassadors that went to a neighboring country’s border and gave a deadline to when war would start if conditions didn’t change. If the time ran out, the fetiales would apparently hurl a spear with blood on it over the border, which would be an official declaration of war.
For my own work, specifically the OutRun project, I don’t see it as creating a story to lay a foundation for future actions. Building a device/artwork can be viewed as a story that lays out actions in the future, but I think it’s more accurate to think of this project as a style of backward action – not a future narrative. It’s all a tangled network of recycled stories, objects, fantasies, realities, and actions, though. Although I think he articulates a lot of foundational concepts that are relevant to DIY practices and tactical media, I haven’t gravitated toward Certeau in my work. I find that The Practice of Everyday Life leans toward text-based and subtle practices, like moving between spaces, creating narratives, or constructing stories.
Recently, I’ve also been rethinking the “avant garde” metaphor within art: of artists being on the front line of change, and of forging a path into the future. Certeau’s concept of fas, fetiales, and creating a theater for future actions has an avant garde resonance to it. Many exceptional pieces of artwork successfully function as antennae into the future and lay a foundation of things to come, but this isn’t the sole role of art. There is also a reflective recycling of the past, of picking up the discarded memories and artifacts of culture – and this backwardness tends to sometimes be underdeveloped in the media arts. Media art doesn’t need to be more cutting-edge: it needs to be more emotional, historical and thoughtful.
And not that driving around in an arcade cabinet is so thoughtful, but it tries to look into the past and short-circuit it with the present. My recent thoughts are in line with what some term as a media archaeological perspective: to look backward and forward at the same time, and pursue them simultaneously. It’s more interesting than trailblazing a path into the future: I think many that seek the leading edge eventually find out that they were just redoing something that had been done before.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Microphones, 2008; courtesy the artist; © Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Continuing on from your points about collaboration and co-authorship, Ellen, I’d like to extend these points to an institutional framework. I was recently reading an interview on the SFMOMA’s website, about their recent exhibition, The Art of Participation. In the interview, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts says:
One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.
What I think is interesting about this exhibition, and this quote in particular is that Frieling (speaking from within the institution), acknowledges the importance of the institutional critique that artists can bring, and talks of blurring distinctions, when by definintion, the museum can’t take the blurring of distinctions to its limit. It would undo the raison d’etre of museums to really let go of its power to categorise and legitimise. However, parallel things grow up around these forces and become part of a cultural conversation that musueums must engage in. There is an obvious parallel in publishing, in that web-powered print on demand as well as blogs and wikis force a conversation about access to audiences and freedom of expression. This very experiment we are taking part in acknowledges the impact the web has had, and will feed back into print, which will extend the power of what we say here, but still encapsulate it in the context of an online conversation.
I wonder if these small measures, such as blurring distinctions between exhibition space and education space in a museum, or blurring distinctions between what is blogged and what is printed, add up to something more? What is the art of participation, and are there particular things media art can demonstrate about participation that aren’t demonstrated elsewhere?
