Postproduction: Nicolas Bourriaud 2002

 

Nicolas Bouriaud (1965-)

Postproduction (2002, reprinted in 2005, 2007)

Chapter: The use of objects.

Postproduction ideology:

Transition, reception, composition, interpretation.

artists don’t just look for the meaning, they look for the ‘use’, making art function – this is what makes art original now. They edit historical and ideological narratives into alternative scenarios and offer other pathways through reality with the help of forms/objects to materialise their pathways. p45/46 They create ‘open work’ interactive, participatory, happening. Where the viewer/receiver fills in the gaps and chooses how to read the work p88.  Artists produce thoughts and meanings unique to the individual. The artwork becomes the surface for data and storage.

(At the bottom of this post is an unfinished intertextual Cento Poem i wrote in responce to this text titled: The multipurpose product.)

Modernist ideology of originality:  artists considered in the artistic field.

Postmodernism ideology: artists just wanted to mix and merge movements and era’s up. Postmodernism accepted this.

Altermodernism ideology: artists used objects to promote experience rather than shallow aesthetic value and to make a political statement against the imbalance in capitalism.

Relational Aesthetics 1998: Main feature is to consider interhuman exchange an the aesthetic object in itself.  How has this been interpreted by curators? 
It plays on the meanings of the word 'use' and 'use'. production and consumption/ take advantage/use for a purpose. The idea that a flea market/facebook are unitry structures.
The spectical is replaced by the immersive. More acknowledgement of people wanting to feel a sense of connection. there is more collaboration going on. 

Nicolas Bourriaud: constructs his ideas and theories with artists at the time as it appears around him. (p10)

Altermodern 2009 tate Britain exhibition (2005) term coined by the French theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, meaning art made now in response to a global society and as a reaction against standardisation and commercialism.  This art is characterised by artists' cross-border, cross-cultural negotiations; a new real and virtual mobility; the surfing of different disciplines; the use of fiction as an expression of autonomy; concern with sustainable development and the celebration of difference and singularity.  It marks the end of postmodernism; cultural hybridisation; travelling as a new way to produce forms; and the expanding formats of art. Tate book.

The Situationist: general principles were an attack on the capitalist exploitation and degradation of the life of people, and solution of alternative life experiences, construction of situations, unitary urbanism, psychogeography, with the union of play, freedom and critical thinking. Such general principles were applied by Jorn to painting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asger_Jorn

Postproduction art is:

A response to the rapidly growing chaotic global culture.

Artworks made and created with pre existing works/objects. Artist’s who use works by other people.

Art that is a result or response to the age of information, global culture that has been ignored up until now? (2005)

It is a start to a new aesthetic in art.

Postproduction is an analysis of today’s art in relation to social changes, technological, economic and sociological. Postproduction seeks to establish typography of contemporary practice and find commonalities.

Reproducing work of the past via different display, re-exhibiting them, rearranging them. Techno cultural environments encourage new kinds of work.

1990’s: citation, recycling, notions of interactivity, environment, and participation, classic art notions were rethought through different points of view.

2005: a break with manipulation of references and citation by re examining notions of creation, authorship, originality through the use of cultural artefacts is absolutely new. (Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Garden and Riikrit Tiravanija)

Artists now have intuitive relationships with art history and it is now going beyond ‘the art of appropriation’ (inferring an ideology of ownership) and moving towards a culture of the use of forms, sharing, to probe the contemporary world. Artists are now finding new meanings in objects on the global market that already exist. Artists are inserting their own work into other peoples work.  Postproduction artists repurpose products, recycle sounds, images and forms.  They are no longer doing performance, they are using performance as a form/medium and end product. They don’t just look for the meaning, they look for the ‘use’, making art function (this is what makes art original now) – this is what makes art original now.  Artists are visual DJ’s now. They are ‘semionauts’ agents of evolution, the specialised workers of cultural re-appropriation. Artists who produce pathways through signs and culture, their work is a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities, a moment in an infinite chain of contributions. Artist are now more aware of the market, theory and language of their work globally.
Agents of evolution. Mediums of experience.

What matters now is what we make of the elements placed at our disposal. we are micro pirates.

Postproduction means: audio visual and tv films and video montages. Creating and copying readymades and originals.  Ideas become material, building connections.

The affect of postproduction in art: traditional distinctions between production/process and consumption are being eradicated. Artists are remixing rather than transforming raw materials/elements.

Existing objects: already in circulation on the market, that are already informed by other objects are used to create new contexts.p25

Blurred notions: of originality and making something from nothing.

Micro Pirating: reappropriation- stealing on a small  scale, salvaging already used objects.

Relational aesthetics: dealt with interactive and social aspects.

Disorganised boundaries: between consumption and production.

Ex hihilo: Out of nothing, less than nothing, making art from things that already exist - new realism.

Renewed conglomeration: Flea market - new culture label.

Value: social, personal, financial

Consumption: a mode of production, it creates the need for new production.

Exchange: money transaction (Duchamp role of the artist). Art predates money(cave paintings).

Production:

Product of labor:

Ruses (certeau): an action intended to deceive someone or to trick them.p24

Direct market: provides direct payment to the artist for his skills and time and the cost of bringing the art to the market.

Secondary market: when art is resold by the first owner.

Provenance: list of previous owners, location, years collectors owned it, museums and exhibitions it has been in. condition, exposure and quality. Generic strutcure of the self.

Supply: you can remake your money but you cant remake the painting.

Demand: for art is voluntary and determined by means of desire

Postproduction asks:

• 1Not what we can make that’s new, but how can we make do with what we have?’ p17
• 2How can we produce something unique with meaning from this chaotic mass of objects names, references in our daily lives?
• 3What ever we make, may become a base material for someone else’s compositions to generate other interpretations.
• 4Is over production now seen as a cultural ecosystem rather than a problem now?
• 5It asks us to be mindful of overproduction in creating objects.
• what is visible, what is the performance behind the visual.
• what is the visual frautality 

Postproduction questions to ask my work:

• How does this insight into the meaning of ‘product’ influence the way I experience culture, society, and my identity? Does it make me less judgemental.
• How will my work be read differently? I will now be aware that what I produce could also be repurposed in the future.
• What does this say about the way art interacts in the world? Perhaps it makes art as valid as any other object.
• How can I explore this in my work? By looking at the thought process as a product too.
• Does this prompt me to reconsider my beliefs? It confirms that everything is linked.
• Is this one way of making sense of what is around us and why?
• Does this concept of everything being a product of human consumption link to other concepts? Junkspace, existentialism/
• How can I expand on this idea of product? By looking at philosophy, physics, cosmology etc…
• What are the implications of understanding work in this way
• Awareness that everything is a continuous process of nature and human evolution.
• Prompts me to investigate the dematerialisation of the work of art. Reconsider manifesting creativity into objects to support me financially, through financial exchange.
• Whattheoretical energy does my work have.
• How do i make do with what i already have.
• Is there such a thing as the end of an objects life ( if others in the future and now can use it and give it another context/use or meaning.

Problems:

Is this an attack on capitalism or a method to balance it out and exist within a capitalist system without the pressure to produce on the expectation of selling to survive?

The production of my creativity and creative thoughts and art means I need more space! For books/objects etc..

My work may only produce a minimum inconsequential amount of production in other people’s thoughts.

An unfinished intertextual Cento Poem by me:

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The multipurpose product:

Everything is a product of something else continuously and simultaneously transforming into another product.  The way we navigate through these elements are unique.  Experience is unique.

Ok…so, Nicolas Bourriaud suggests the product is in the visual vocabulary, in our concepts. The interaction between the maker and the remaker. The performance of the product in relation to the viewer. The product is the activity, the use, the exchange, the emotional and financial value.

The product is in what the product represents and what it will become. The product is the dialogue in the viewers’ thoughts. The labour of the product is also the product.  Everything that exists in the life of the product is part of the product. The product is infinite, infinitely available to expand, transfer, mutate. Learning is a product; we are a product of what we were, are and going to be. Social change is a product of time passing and will be read differently in the future.

But this product needs a space. The betrayal of the last person’s product is being turned into a new product by someone else who also part of that product.

My interpretation of postproduction is a product of the way I process information and may influence what I produce.

I see this as an intertextual riddle, the exchange of my own codes between Bourriaud’s Postproduction essay and my thought process. 

The value is in my expanding awareness of being in a network of internal and external connections.

Darwin connects me to every species collaborating, competing and dependent on each other. 

Buddha connects me to everything spiritually and physics connects me to the atom.

The chaos theory connects me through the butterfly theory.

Foucault connects me through the hierarchy of the space the products exists in. Foucault uses the term  'Umbilicus', the microcosm, the smallest parcel from the source.

Cixous connects everything to me via her entrails of the meaning of her new born word ‘internity’.  

Existentialism articulates to me, that my own use of overlapping existing theories assists me in creating the essence of my understanding of Bourriaud’s ‘product’. And it is totally my responsibility how I use it.

This expanding awareness is a product of my existence, not just my work.

Is Bourriaud  a remaker of previously mentioned theories? 

Uploaded on 5 Aug 2010

Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British artist living in London and New York. He is often associated with the artists included in art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud's 1996 exhibit Traffic,[1] which first introduced the term Relational Art. These artists include Rirkrit Tiravanija, as Claire Bishop states, "Bourriaud deems them both to be paradigmatic of "relational aesthetics." [2] He was also in Bourriaud's 2002 exhibition ""Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now"" at the San Francisco Art Institute.[3]. In 2009, Gillick represented Germany in the Giardini Pavilions of the Venice Biennale.[4] Together with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angela Bulloch and Henry Bond he was, "the earliest of the YBAs"[5]—the Young British Artists who dominated British art during the 1990s.