In a typical contemporary art college, the range of media in active use resembles a core sample through the history of communications technology:\u00a0 students draw, carve, and cast; they also film, project and playback images and sound.\u00a0 They have access to a chronological list of commercially obsolete print technologies, e.g. etching, lithography, silk-screen and, recently, wet process photography.\u00a0 The pedagogical \u201cether\u201d they all share is, primarily, speech.\u00a0 What I taught was called \u201chistory and theory\u201d which turns out to be more or less that which is NOT art, namely language.<\/p>\n
It was certainly McLuhan\u2019s \u201cprobes\u201d into the function and value of obsolete technology that induced me to see the art college this way at all.\u00a0 It is his appreciation of the critical potential of such technologies with respect to contemporary media that sustains an interest in this model, some suspicion that most artists, most of the time, are working with obsolete media.\u00a0 But it was Flusser who confirmed and contextualized my experience of a profound antagonism between images and writing, who explained the \u201ctacked-on\u201d feeling my part of the course seemed to have with respect to the art course as a whole. Under Flusser\u2019s influence, I began to think that the art college implicitly defines art as anything\u00a0but\u00a0<\/i>writing, anything that does\u00a0not\u00a0<\/i>demand a linear way of thinking, a chronological ordering of events, a logical flow of thought.<\/p>\n
It would be possible to grasp the art college context now as either very old or very new.\u00a0 Flusser\u2019s proposes a media history of continuous struggle between acoustic and visual ways of apprehending the world.\u00a0 A culture dominated by images, with speech serving as a critical and explanatory tool, and writing being available but not deeply embedded in consciousness, might resemble ancient or mediaeval conditions \u2013 after the invention of writing and before the explosion of print. \u00a0It also might anticipate aspects of the universe of technical images, as Flusser calls the visually-structured consciousness he sees arising around us now.<\/p>\n
Students who film or perform or paint may not be troubled by the prospect of writing losing it\u2019s position as the dominant mode of information storage and transmission. They may not mourn the loss of precision in language, the authority of archive, the sense of living in a dramatic narrative, in history. \u00a0On the other hand, more and more often, we see painters taking as their model some unloved photograph from a cheap print source, young sculptors running ancient, clanking film equipment in a gallery installation, photography students asking pointedly after the family album, artists submitting writing as their work.\u00a0 They re-invest presumably \u201cobsolete\u201d technologies with contemporary energy and significance.<\/p>\n
Flusser claimed that photographs \u201cdam up the flow of history,\u201d photographs being the first of many \u201ctechnical images\u201d that are shaping a new consciousness.\u00a0 If we take the idea seriously, it would seem to undermine the whole project of forecasting, the designation of any technology as unequivocally \u201cobsolete.\u201d It would render the prospective loss of communicative potential of any medium partial and potentially recoverable.<\/p>\n
“Art” can be a set of objects selected according to criteria, or a set of institutions (publications, galleries, schools and colleges) that sustain those criteria. \u00a0In either case, it has a history. \u00a0Images, Flusser insists, do not have a history, \u00a0although it is possible to see them that way to the extent they serve purposes defined by writing.\u00a0What if “art,” now, is a kind of anti-history, the project of reclaiming abandoned possibilities –maybe especially material and technical possibilities — from the past? Art colleges make mainly commercially obsolete media available to students (now, very recently, beginning to include writing); museums confer contemporary meaning on past objects and events.<\/p>\n
In a series of lectures called “Mapping the Mediascape,” I tried to attach various media to various ways of thinking or being or engaging with the world, all available in the present, as if on a surface. \u00a0An art college offers a helpful way of thinking about it. Contemporary art students draw, paint, model in clay or cast in bronze, perform, film, photograph and even write. \u00a0And although those possibilities emerged at very different points in a historical continuum, they have “pooled up,” and now appear as options on a menu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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