Art in the Age of the End of Days
In 1932, a year before the Nazi takeover and the ensuing global catastrophe that would be named World War II, the German critic and theoretician Rudolf Arnheim released a collection of essays he called Film als Kunst. In it, he sought to create a distinction. Film, he claimed, had the potential of being Art, if certain conditions were met. So within the medium of film, there would exist two types. On the one hand, there would be films that were simply films, mass-produced commodities perhaps, made for entertainment or information. On the other, there would be a select group that possessed a certain quality, more ambitious, authentic or somehow better, that made them deserve the designation “art”. Throughout the book, Arnheim tries to establish the criteria by which a film should be placed in one category or the other, to pinpoint the features or qualities that a work should have to be a work of art. Whatever these qualities were, the author apparently never had any doubts about where to look for them – they would reside in the work itself.
Arnheim’s book – or rather its title – insinuated itself in my thoughts while I was watching Geir Tore Holm’s film The Time Will Show on the final session of the first day of the symposium The Only Lasting Truth is Change, organised by BEK in November 2021. Although somewhat ambiguously placed, in a conference setting rather than a gallery or cinema, the film seemed to me to belong in the second of Arnheim’s categories: a film that is also a work of art. It shows a protagonist – the artist Geir Tore Holm, ostensibly the creator of the film – in various postures in nature, talking about various things. He picks berries and some flowers. He cuts a tree. There is a dog. But most of the time, there is talking. He talks about art, life, time, nature, ecology and other things. So many words, in what essentially amounts to a lecture delivered to a camera instead of a live audience. Now, why would he choose to present his message in this manner, going through the cumbersome process of making a film – couldn’t he just have given a talk from the podium? Maybe he was adapting to the Covid reality, where digital communication feels more straightforward and immediate than physical coexistence. In fact, most of the speakers this day appeared on screen and not in the space of Kulturhuset, a recently opened venue in Bergen where the conference took place, and the event as such was streamed online to make it available to those outside of these premises. Maybe he chose a medium that he as an artist felt comfortable with, thereby conforming to the myth of the artist as a non-verbal figure, who prefers artworks rather than words as means of expression. Given Geir Tore’s eloquence, this is hardly likely, but there is a case to be made about the artist speaking through a medium that is subject to his artistic choices and deliberations instead of standing in front of an audience as an individual, an expert possibly, but still commenting the art from the outside, keeping it at a distance so to speak. By creating a work of art, something to behold, engage in, with a clear rapport with the viewers, he would achieve a focus that might not be available as a speaking person.
Whatever the reasons for his choice of strategy, it remains clear that it was a choice, and indeed a strategic one. He made a film, but he could have chosen other ways. He could have presented his views in a lecture, that is, not as art, or he could have used another medium like photography or music or poetry, or even the hybrid genre of performance-lecture, which would be a bit of both. He chose film, and that is a work of art. Although his contribution is then a perfect example of Film als Kunst, it seems to me that the criteria by which it is designated as a work of art, are completely different from the ones that Arnheim envisioned in 1932. It is art because it is made by an artist. It is art because it is presented as art, in an appropriate art context. As it stands, there is a certain ambiguity about this particular context, since it was a symposium about art, about the relationship between art and society, and it was screened along with discussions, interviews, lectures, artist talks, and Q&As – that is, a context normally associated with the discourse surrounding art, not the work of art itself. The actual artworks were referred to the evening events and exhibitions in other spaces, in accordance with the genre. How should we understand this work? Art about art? A pre-recorded lecture, marginally different from the other lectures that were given, physically or digitally, at the symposium? I believe this ambiguity, that is, the unresolvedness regarding art’s limits and limitations, could be said to characterise the whole symposium, but only viewed from a certain perspective, which I shall return to. In theory, one could argue that this film is not necessarily a work of art, given the odd context. If it was shown in a gallery, it would be art, no questions asked.
The distinction between what is art and what is not, is then, despite Arnheim’s claim, not a question of the work’s quality. It has nothing to do with the medium or materials being used. Rather, something is called art if it is produced, presented, discussed, and experienced in a particular part of society, by a certain group of people linked to a certain institutional framework. We know who these people are – artists, curators, critics, theoreticians, art historians, teachers and so on, residing inside and outside the institutions – galleries, museums, art academies and universities. These people and these (formal or informal) institutions constitute the art world, and for something to be accepted as art, it must be accepted by these bodies. In Geir Tore Holm’s case it is not an issue, since he has a long career behind him after graduating from art school in the mid-nineties. Whatever he presents as art, is art. In the film, he even imagines that everyday actions by non-artists could be considered art, that an ordinary working day at the checkout of a grocery store could go “straight into art history”. Maybe so, but it would still need sanctioning from the art world.
These observations are neither particularly original nor profound – in fact, any art student or artist of a certain generation is expected to know these things. I still think they are worth mentioning, for three reasons. Firstly, this “do anything” attitude causes art to be understood in terms of practice rather than objects, resulting in a wide range of activities with nothing other in common than the fact that they fall under the name of art – a range perfectly illustrated by the artists presented at the symposium.1 Secondly, this openness, or lack of direction that a specific medium like painting or film would provide, puts an immense pressure on the artist with regards to the choices being made, and to the surroundings that the choices would be made in relation to. The artist is judged, not by her skills in manufacturing an object, but by the quality and relevance of these choices. Hence the need for artistic strategies, and the acute awareness of context that we see in art today, the artists at the symposium included. The artist needs to be aware of – and take care of, maybe – the environment, whether it is the work’s immediate surroundings (which could be a gallery, a studio space, or something completely different), the art community, or the wider cultural context, even expanding to wide-ranging phenomena like climate change and the global economy. If art is a practice, then art is inherently political. Not only the contents of the works, but how they are produced, disseminated, talked about and organised – all the different ways art is embedded in society – become areas of political struggle. Artistic choices involve taking sides in political conflicts – often existing ones, but sometimes also inventing new discussions, new lines of conflict and intervention. This was very much apparent at the symposium, even if the themes discussed seemed to fit into the familiar areas of ecology, digitalisation, colonialism and such. Art no longer resides in the fringes of society as some sort of isolated haven but is tackling the big and small troubles that the living beings in society have. Art has become responsive. The third reason is that the lack of materials or medium requires the work’s status as art to be guaranteed in other ways. Someone needs to say “this is art”, set the border between art and non-art, establish the context that can justify the claim. When art gets involved in political issues, it also needs to borrow from the discourses that surround them, such as the political, scientific or technological. The artistic choices must be accounted for, both in relation to the work’s status as art and to the political surroundings. Art has become discursive. Hence the appearance of conferences, artist talks, discursive side programmes, publications and other discourses, often to such an extent that the actual works seem like afterthoughts in comparison.
How do we understand artistic practice? And how does this understanding change when we start taking seriously all the current global crises? These were the main questions that the symposium sought to address, as stated by BEK’s director Maria Rusinovskaya in her introductory remarks. I believe the questions reflect the situation I’ve described, with the artist lacking predefined tasks, but with an enormous number of possibilities and choices. Artistic practice needs to be defined, again and again, because the artist needs to make these choices again and again. And then the next question arises: in relation to what? The AWNE workshop, led by Lars Holdhus, seems to have confronted these issues quite directly. It was presented at the symposium in short talks by some of its participants, a few seated on stage, but the majority on screen in the familiar Zoom layout. Taking agriculture and related questions of ecology as its starting point, the workshop tried to establish models of artistic practice in accordance with a sustainable life. Although what actually transpired during the workshop sessions was only vaguely outlined, the presentations showed the stakes involved quite clearly. On the one hand, there was the role of the artist. Many of the presenters displayed a wide range of seemingly unconnected activities, and it appears that the workshop provided a sense of unity to them. Elida Linge, for instance, works as a farmer in rural Sunnmøre in addition to making installations for the gallery space. Although her agricultural work could inspire her installations (she showed some prints with patterns derived from the crops at her farm), she would not consider farming a part of her art. Inish, who showed a video work, is also a DJ and producer, and involved in a community art project focusing on empathy and care in institutions. Cha Blasco talked about the tension between his role as a composer and working with disabled people. All of them expressed the view that the workshop had helped them understand the connections between these disparate activities. On the other hand, the workshop addressed the problem of the artist’s surroundings, in particular its relationship with nature. In many of the projects, agriculture was a component, or issues like recycling and reuse of materials: Simone Ghetti’s architectural work, Monica Seggos’ site-specific performative walks, Will Kirchner’s work with permaculture. Content-wise the workshop focused on nature. But equally important, I believe, was to create an artistic practice that was in itself sustainable, independently of the particular project the artist was involved in. So this approach to art’s relationship with its surroundings seems to follow two lines: the large scale concerned with ecology, and the small scale concerned with the identity of art. There seemed to be a certain discomfort or disillusionment with the art world, the individualism it promotes, its careerism and commercialism, its connections with dubious corporations with equally dubious agendas. Daniel Um’s idea of creating a space for (mostly young) people to create art outside of the institutions, without any pressure or professionalism, could serve as a case in point, but I believe the sentiment was shared by most, if not all of the participants. How can one create models of artistic practice outside of the established institutions and networks? Is it possible to find alternatives to the idea of the singular artist, with its focus on results and achievements?
In his concluding talk, Lars Holdhus emphasised the costs of one’s activities, in particular those connected to the “careerist art-industrial complex”. There are implications to artistic practice, and these need to be taken into account. As an example, he mentioned the Serpentine Galleries, an institution that built its career on being sponsored by the Sackler family, who was involved in the famous opioid scandal – an institution that “ends up talking about ecology”. Somewhat ironically, the very first presentation at the symposium was held by Lucia Pietroiusti, a curator from the Serpentine, who was invited to talk about alternative curatorial strategies, outside the gallery space. Her work focuses on the entanglement of art, not with its economics, but into ecological thinking, under the term “more than human”. What that means exactly she couldn’t say, because it would take a lifetime to find out – a lifetime that she was prepared to spend – and definitely more than the 30 minutes or so she was assigned for her talk. She did, however, throw light on the matter by presenting works by relevant artists – British–Indian Himali Singh Soin and The Karrabing Film Collective from Australia – and the festival and research project The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish that she had curated at the Serpentine. Among other things, her talk showed that the awareness of political implications is as much an issue inside the institutions as it is in the fringes where Lars Holdhus and his community resides. Whether the financial sponsorship and the connection with big capital could or should be a part of that awareness, I do not know, and frankly, there were other matters that intrigued me more. You see, we didn’t get to hear a lot about the “more than human” projects that Lucia had prepared. “There is the talk I was going to give”, she introduced her presentation with. “And then there is this week.” What had happened in the preceding week was the deaths of two major artists, Lebanese–American poet and painter Etel Adnan and Jimmie Durham, the Cherokee activist and sculptor. They both reached old age (96 and 81, respectively), and there was nothing dramatic about their passing, but it made such an impression on Lucia that she dedicated a third of her time to pay tribute to them. Two magnificent careers came to an end, and one much shorter and presumably less significant talk was cut short, the scheduled time of the “more than human”, replaced with the description of these towering figures. She talked about the artists’ close relationship with the elements of nature, with the sun, mountains, rocks, and the fact that to these artists, the elements would have their own agency. So the descent into nature, which Lucia rather beautifully characterised as “becoming more than human” was indeed a natural step even if it came with a huge loss. She did not mention the controversy in recent years surrounding Jimmie Durham, that his authenticity as Cherokee had been questioned, that his integration with the community that he claimed to represent – on which he built his career, even – had become a problem. Now, seen from the perspective of the postmodern, eighties playfulness of his work, the question of authenticity might not be a big issue (or even a valid argument), but in the art world of today, such questions have become ever more pressing, even to the point of undermining an artist’s legitimacy. Maybe Lucia refrained from mentioning them out of respect for the recently deceased, or that she thought that the quality of his work transcends such biographical matters. In any case, it seems that the artist Jimmie Durham was already out of his time, even before his corporeal self became so. Now definitely out of our time, that is, the time of human lifespans, he and Etel Adnan had entered a much larger time, that of Nature, with its seemingly endless cycles of life and death, consecutive seasons, eras and eons, species evolving and disappearing, glaciers melting, archipelagos forming, in which the life of a single individual appears vanishingly small. Compare that to the AWNE workshop’s critique of the idea of the singular, larger-than-life artist promoted by the art-industrial complex, and it seems that these two would represent a suitable path, embedded in nature rather than observing or controlling or exploiting it from an outside position. That being said, their departure from our time also marked the entrance into another time that was not the time of nature, but of human history, more specifically, art history. In fact, they were already there, the subject of monographs and large exhibitions in reputable galleries, and well represented in overviews of 20th and 21st-century art. If any artist deserved the term singular it would be these two, and this is also why they are mentioned in the books in the first place, and their deaths noticed by Lucia and others. They were already more than human, in the banal sense that they were better, more interesting, more significant than the rest. This is of course not what Lucia meant, and I bring it up only to address the fact that there are different time scales involved, and that they don’t quite add up. There is the history of an individual, of the artist, of human history, of art history and of nature – and as much as one would like them to fit nicely into each other, this is not easily done.
I must admit I present my thoughts on the art world with a certain ambivalence. Surely the statements that art can be anything, that it is a question of context and strategy more than objects, that the definition of art is different today from what it was in the 1930s – surely they must be far too obvious and general to have any relevance to the topics we are discussing? In particular, the case of Rudolf Arnheim, which I started with, is more than a little embarrassing. Why bring up that dusty old chestnut now, in the context of a symposium on contemporary art? Even in his own words, as early as the 1955 edition of his book, his theory is outdated, mostly concerned with the maverick era of silent film. The whole modernist framework of his thinking has all but disappeared, and even the theories that were part of the development toward the current situation – say, the dematerialisation of the art object (Lippard 1973) and relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 2002) to name some random examples – are confined to history, no longer of any use. Still, Arnheim’s book kept churning in my mind during the symposium and for a long time after. I couldn’t help wondering why. Of course, there is a certain similarity between Arnheim’s situation and ours – an intellectual living on the brink of a global disaster, and indeed Sara Eliassen in her lecture invoked the 1930s as somewhat parallel to our times – but I think it had to do with something else. In fact, I think it is precisely the outdatedness and irrelevance of Arnheim’s theory that made it impossible for me to let go of it. The thing is, the question of time was explicitly named as one of three main areas of interest in the symposium (the other two were “digitalisation” and “justice”), and in particular long-term models for art production. Now, what does that mean, long term, in the context of artistic practice? In her lecture on the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing said that the effects of global warming could last for millions of years before the earth system can stabilise from the carbon dioxide that humans let into the atmosphere. The Anthropocene itself, defined as the time of human-caused catastrophe, would be the era of the last 500, 400, 200 or 75 years, depending on perspective. As we know, the duration of a particular trend or movement in the art world is much shorter – 5–10 years, maybe – before it is succeeded by new generations with other interests and agendas. Compared to the age of the Earth, the ninety years that have passed since Arnheim’s publication is a flashing instant, but in the art world it is an eternity. This strikes me as somewhat paradoxical. For one, does speaking of long-term strategies in light of climate change imply that the art world should slow down its cycle of successive trends, its constant invention and urge to redefine itself? That the models we develop also should hold for future generations of artists? If not, they could hardly be expected to have any impact on the global situation, with its millennial time frame. If they do, the thinking resembles that of the revolutionary avant-garde movements of the 20th century, Kandinsky perhaps, or Dada, who claimed they were part of some universal project – but of course quickly replaced by other movements with similar attitude (but other projects).2 In fact, it is the driving force behind modernism, and the foundation of the characteristic relationship with time that modernism displayed, which can be described as follows: art is relevant in so far as it is up to date. Every new work is a response to the present state, its entry creating a new present, pushing the existing artworks into the past. Being an artist in the modernist sense requires a sensibility towards the historicity of forms, materials and tools, towards what is current and what is not. Now – and here is the paradox – it is this particular sensibility that renders Arnheim and so many others irrelevant and obsolete. But at the same time this sensibility is inextricably linked to the modernism that he represents. If his thinking is obsolete, so is the sensibility that dooms his thinking to obsolescence. In the context of this symposium, he feels very, very old. The symposium, in contrast, was strikingly contemporary. Anyone with some knowledge of the art world in the last ten years or so will have noticed the abundance of projects dealing with the issues that were so central to the symposium: environment, ethnicity, gender, decolonisation, power structures, artificial intelligence, neoliberalism and so on. And they will be familiar with the names and concepts that kept popping up at the event: Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, Octavia Butler (whose Earthseed manifesto provided the symposium’s title), Deleuze & Guattari, Graeber & Wengrow, Julia Kristeva, Gregory Bateson. The Anthropocene, obviously. Post truth. Hyperobjects. In other words, in its choice of themes and the way they were discussed, its theoretical framework, its relationship with society and the world, the symposium was highly relevant, on top of the blindingly fast development that the art world is known to have. I am curious how this agrees with the ambitions of long-term thinking about artistic practice – not to say the vast timespans of climate change – but I will leave that to the future. In a few years the art world may or may not have moved on to other areas and interests, irrespective of the big and small crises in the world. Time will show. What I would like to stress is that modernism creates (or relies on) a linear sense of time, with contemporary art on the one hand, and art history on the other, where the old works represent stages on the path to the present, a series of canonical works, styles, movements or “isms”. Even though the symposium’s alignment with current trends might suggest this way of thinking, there were also signs of a desire to act otherwise. In this regard, Anna Tsing gave some interesting perspectives. The Anthropocene, she said, should be not understood as a new period, conveniently replacing some previous period – the way we think of geological time, for instance, with its neat chronology of eons, eras and periods. The Anthropocene is patchy. There are different kinds of time, and the Anthropocene is best understood if one considers the diverse phenomena it is made of, their various timelines and intersections. The Anthropocene is clearly planetary in scope, but there is no unified timeline that can describe it. It consists of social and ecological patches that can be extremely local, like factories and parking lots – or the Black Sea, one of Anna’s examples, where invasive comb jellies replaced all the fish in the 1980s. Even though this ecological disaster elapsed rather quickly, it came about as a result of events with longer time frames – decades of overfishing and pollution from agriculture and industry causing the growth of algae, the particular pattern of streams in the Black Sea – but also shorter, such as the release of ballast water containing jellyfish into an environment where they would have no natural enemies. To understand a phenomenon like this means identifying the various constituent factors and their individual timelines, and accounting for how and why they intersect. Now, this conception of time is clearly at odds with the modernist ideology of the new and relevant, and I believe one could see traces of a more “patchy” approach in the symposium, with a more open-ended structure than one would expect. For one, it was dubbed a “durational” event – which could mean the 21-hour-long marathon the two days in November comprised, or the whole series of connected processes, coming together at the symposium but covering a much longer stretch of time. I’ve already mentioned the AWNE workshop’s quest for sustainable models of artistic practice, removed from the careerism of the institutions. The workshop itself consisted of a series of online discussions over several months, patiently exploring its themes – indeed quite related to Anna Tsing’s analysis – without any pressure to produce something “important” or marketable. Mark Fell, Robin Mackay and Rian Treanor also held workshops, some of which continued into 2022. There was the Circumference – a large linen cloth that was also a hydrophone, designed by artist Signe Lidén and placed in the BEK storage space for a period of a few months, available for artists to use, thereby creating a library of sounds. And the symposium’s sole exhibition, Jackie Karuti’s site-specific installation How Clouds are Formed, was created through a long conversation between Jackie and local artist Emilie Wright, who assembled the work according to Jackie’s sketches and instructions. All of these had in common that the end results would be vaguely defined, left to unpredictable, largely collaborative processes. Although presented at the symposium, they would have their individual trajectories and goals, defined by their own dynamics.
So the symposium could be seen as one of those “patches” that Anna described: an event where different timelines come together in a particularly dense form, and causes a whole system to change. That would probably be stretching it a bit, since the symposium was neither as disastrous as the examples Anna provided, nor as game-changing, nor as unpredictable, but I think the perspective is interesting all the same. Especially since it happened in a context that was indeed disastrous and game-changing, that of the global pandemic. November 2021 was a period of cautious relaxation of the Covid regulations in Norway (as in many other countries), resulting in a sudden rush in cultural events. Public events had not been possible during lockdown, but artists and institutions kept working on their projects anyway, creating a build-up of projects waiting to be realised. Incidentally, one of those projects was BEK’s 20th anniversary, most of which had to be postponed from 2020, notably the publication of a book called around which dissonant satellites cluster. This book, containing among other things a short history of BEK written by Dušan Barok, was almost coincidental with the symposium, released a few months later. I find this coincidence, taking place in the temporal vacuum of Covid, rather fascinating. The discourse surrounding BEK has been pretty hands-on and technical, suiting the organisation's day-to-day activities. Solving technical problems, delivering practical solutions, making equipment and space available for artists, exchanging know-how. What you will hear when you enter the space is mostly conversations about cables, power supplies, frame rates, loudspeakers and such, with names like Arduino, Genelec, Reaper, Adobe, Max and ambisonics floating in the air. A broader discourse about art in context has been relatively rare. So when two discursive events appear almost simultaneously in a field known for its practical approach, it seems worth thinking about. In his essay, Dušan delivers a summary of BEK’s relatively short history, going back to its roots, naming the tendencies, strategies and alliances that BEK was a part of, probably more felt than articulated at the time by the people involved. It gives an account of what many consider a bit of a mystery, that is BEK’s peculiar identity and modus operandi. So here we have one discourse on artistic practice providing a backdrop for this other discourse on artistic practice that was the symposium. What I find interesting is that the symposium can be seen as the first major manifestation of a transformation of the identity that Dušan so elegantly put into words. It had been in the works for some years but was delayed due to Covid. There had been a complete renovation of the office, studio and project spaces in 2019, followed by a new model of organising, new ways of interaction with the art community and new ways of talking about technology in art. The process was well on its way, only to be interrupted by the pandemic. This, together with director Lars Ove Toft’s tenure coming to an end and his replacement by Maria Rusinovskaya in early 2021, created the anticipation – for me, anyway – that this would be the first time we would see the “new” BEK in action. So here we had two discourses, one turned to the past, the other representing the present while addressing the future, and I couldn’t resist juxtaposing them a bit.
There are some interesting differences between the BEK of the past and the BEK that revealed itself at the symposium – and this I believe is the third reason why Rudolf Arnheim’s name kept grinding in my head for so long. To repeat, for Arnheim, what distinguishes a work of art from something that is not art is a quality in the work itself. Some films would be art, others not, and the distinguishing mark would be whether the work was true to the peculiarities of the specific medium, its essence, so to speak. So a film could be art if it expressed something that could only be expressed in the medium of film. Other media – painting, literature, music, dance, theatre, photography – would have their own “truths” to adhere to. This way of thinking is well known, and these art forms would all have their own proponents who would state how that particular medium could be true to its own essence, from Artaud to Mallarmé to Greenberg. It is known as modernism. Now, we all know that modernism isn’t a thing anymore, and that even the critique of modernism has gone out of style. There are still a couple of reasons to dwell a little on that concept. First, there is the notion of the medium. As Dušan points out in his essay, the emergence of something called media art in the nineties – with the Intermedia department at the art academy in Trondheim as a Norwegian cornerstone – was a major factor in the foundation of BEK in 2000. BEK was modelled on the media labs that had been appearing in Europe for some years, and its mission was to facilitate artists working in “new media” – digital processing of sound and video (real-time processing in particular), audiovisual installations, the internet, various forms of interactivity. These are obviously not directly comparable to the modernist definition of the medium, which attached itself to the centuries-long artistic traditions of painting, music and sculpture etc. – it was perhaps more inspired by the better-known concept of mass media like radio and television – but it did have something in common with the modernist sensibility. In the search for their medium’s true essence, modernist artists would experiment with its potentials and limits, constantly pushing the boundary of what is possible within that medium. So when these new media appeared on the scene, it was only natural that artists would pick them up and examine what their artistic potentials were. In this sense, media art was a continuation of the modernist tradition, establishing the new media as art forms in much the same way as photography and film had done in the 19th and 20th centuries Indeed, new media art, or electronic art, was seen as its own thing in the early years of BEK. Although somewhat diluted, the notion still lingers on, and the symposium showed a few examples, most notably Stephanie Dinkins’ project on love, data and care. Introduced as a “transmedia artist” she showed some of her work based on AI systems, which sometimes would materialise as a website (https://binarycalculationsareinadequate.org/), sometimes as an app, an interactive sculpture, or photography. In a way, Stephanie could be said to represent both the old figure of the media artist, since these media were her tools of artistic expression, and something else, since she arrived at them through a critical examination of digital culture, in particular the problems connected to artificial intelligence. In that sense, she would be more related to, say, some of the AWNE participants, whose artistic practice covered a diverse range of activities, and the medium would be one of many choices that the artist needed to make. On the whole it seems that the sentiment in the BEK of today is that all of society is infused with the digital, the artistic field being one, not particularly privileged area. There is therefore no need to single out a specific area that would be “electronic.” Instead, BEK’s role is to reflect upon (and support artists who reflect upon) the various ways technology and society are ingrained in each other. One, slightly quaint sign of this was the occurrence of technical glitches at the symposium. Those who have been around BEK for a while will remember that their public events, whether performances or presentations, often came with technical problems. This would be quite natural, since they often involved demonstrations of new technology, often developed by the artist. So an artist talk, for instance, would regularly include some waiting. It was part of the charm. This symposium had its share of technical problems, but in a different way. Firstly, the seemingly demanding technical apparatus, with several sources of online material streamed in several directions, was handled in the background by efficient and silent technicians – in the same way as any conference is executed these days, and very different from the tangible presence of technology in the past BEK events. The only piece of technology shown at the symposium was Signe Lidén’s hydrophone. This device – big and clumsy to handle, tactile, visually striking, with a distinct aural characteristic – could have been a perfect example of an old-style BEK demonstration. Unfortunately, the hydrophone wasn’t connected so it couldn’t be experienced directly, although we did get to hear recordings from the sessions. Secondly, the places where the glitches did occur were not in this hi-tech setup but in the mundane difficulties in getting the Zoom conversations to work – troubles that most of the middle-class population on the planet have encountered in the Covid era. Enabling screen sharing. Microphone and background noise. Sound routing problems. This indeed demonstrates that the digital is embedded in our everyday lives, but also that the technology now has fallen outside of the artistic domain. The glitches were nothing but disturbances to be overcome. In the setting of “old school” media art, they would be part of the creative process. In fact, it was so common that the glitch aesthetic became a genre of its own. 3
So we find a trace of modernism in the occurrence of the term “media”. But there is another link, more profound I believe, that had less to do with the word than the way art is being understood. For Arnheim and his contemporaries, an artist works in a specific medium. A painter with pigment on a surface, a composer with sounds in time, a dancer with body in space and a filmmaker with film. This is very different from the projects presented at the symposium, where the artist could do basically anything and the medium would be a matter of choice. Now, if you look at the artistic practice at BEK in the early years, it appears closer to the modernist conception. There would be people creating music, theatre, sound installations, dance and video, whose common denominator would be that they used electronics as a tool, an extension of the medium they expressed themselves in. They would still retain their identities as musicians, composers, theatre directors or whatever (the occasional “media artist” would drop by as well) without having to invoke the general figure of the artist. The category of art would certainly come into play – to gain access to BEK one would need to maintain a certain level of artistic quality, as distinct from amateur or commercial activities, quite closely following the modernist distinction. The “do anything” way of thinking was not yet established at BEK in the early 2000s. It arrived later. Yet BEK was a place for highly diverse activities – in fact, it forcefully asserted its profile as cross-disciplinary. So, in some strange fashion, there seems to have been a simultaneous expansion and narrowing of the range of activities that BEK accommodates. On the one hand, the freedom of the artist of today is almost boundless – basically anything can be accepted, it doesn’t even have to use digital technology. It could, for instance, be sustainable agriculture. On the other hand, this range in no way represents the whole cultural field – not even if one excludes the parts that aren’t considered artistically acceptable, such as amateur marching bands or horticulture or TV commercials. If one sticks to the modernist list of art forms, it becomes apparent that the “do whatever” art belongs to one of those, that of the visual arts, which at some point during the 20th century liberated itself from the object and the gallery space and turned into the general category of “art”. The other forms, like music and theatre and literature, had different trajectories. If we look at the participants at the symposium, they are indeed overwhelmingly people from the art world, educated at art academies and working in the context of galleries – or rather, “art practice”. In contrast, the people who established BEK mostly had backgrounds in music.
This difference, while probably significant, should not be exaggerated. It should not be understood as a frictionless transition from one state to another, and it should not be understood as if the first generation of BEK artists were crypto-modernists oblivious to context or discourse – or that the artist of today selects a medium at a whim. Still, there is a divide, and the symposium revealed some interesting examples of the nuances involved. For instance, I was struck by a remark by Jackie Karuti, describing her situation as an artist living in Kenya. With an education from Àsìko, the roaming Pan African art school that was designed to “redress the outdated or non-existent artistic and curatorial curricula at tertiary institutions across Africa”, she encountered similar challenges in her practice. How to establish a viable environment for artistic practice – colleagues, audience, discourse – without simply importing it from Europe? Her response would be various forms of collaboration and hospitality; the project under discussion being a fine example. What I found strange was that the problem existed at all. It would be completely absurd, for instance, to claim that Africa lacks infrastructure or education in music and that it is difficult to establish an environment for musical practice. The “problem” in that area is quite the opposite – music is so embedded in everyday life that it can be difficult, in many African cultures, to separate the “professional” from the “amateur” or the musician from the non-musician. While we immediately recognise music in Africa as belonging to the same category as music in our part of the world4, this doesn’t hold for art – even if it is easy to recognise the artistic qualities in the vast heritage of African visual culture, including painting and sculpture. The category of “art” doesn’t quite cover that. In fact, it doesn’t really exist outside of the art world, which, although increasingly globalised, still has its centres of power in Europe and North America. Hence the problems and dilemmas in connection with creating institutions and practices that would be similar while retaining the agency and identity of the local community.
Another example is Sara Eliassen, who described herself as a “filmmaker of sorts”, the qualifier “of sorts” pointing to the fact that she was doing more than just making films. Among the projects she presented was The Feedback Loop, a multichannel screen installation in a public space, the central train station in Oslo. It showed material from the German–Norwegian documentary Symphonie des Nordens (1938), mixed with live footage from the space, on screens originally designed for advertising. Placed outside of the normal context for presenting film, the installation received virtually no attention from the passersby, the documentation revealed. I assume there was an opening event, with art professionals, politicians and bureaucrats present (the work was commissioned by the Munch Museum in Oslo during its nomadic time waiting for its new building to materialise) who would be a more perceptive audience – and at the symposium it was at the centre of attention, of course. The re-framing of the film into a hostile or indifferent environment enabled the project to manifest some traits – for instance, asking the question whether these screens really want to be seen – that would be harder to address in a cinema. The “viewers” of the work, then, would not be the people walking past the screens, but the community of people discussing it, viewing documentations, listening to presentations and perhaps reading about it. So, besides making films, Sara also, in what she called a paracinematic practice, reflects upon the usage of film, its role in society, making that society a part of her toolbox, so to speak. This ambiguous relationship with the medium puts her practice in the general category of art rather than filmmaking. Tellingly, her project is part of her research fellowship at the art academy in Oslo, and not in the film school, where an “ordinary” filmmaker presumably would be based.
Mark Fell’s double role as musician and artist demonstrates the divide perhaps even more clearly. In his conversation with Robin Mackay, centred around his new book Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice (published by Robin’s own Urbanomic press), he discussed the relationship between the artist and his tools, in particular the musician using technology such as drum machines and computers. With a phrase borrowed from DJ Pierre, “just turning knobs”, he described his approach in manual terms, that he would use equipment he didn’t know so that the performance would be a form of exploration, establishing a reciprocal relationship between the musician and the tool. Making music and exploring the technology is one and the same process, it is never a question of simply controlling the technology to achieve one’s aims. There is no real difference between musician and tool – or the work, for that matter. They all belong to the same environment. This is in sharp contrast with the image of the artist as being separate from the materials and tools. In particular he criticised the tendency to base artistic work on ideas, that is, make a theoretical framework, define the artistic goals, and then select the tools and media. This makes much less interesting work, he said. Technology should rather be used to disrupt this kind of linear process. Now, artistic practice based on ideas seems to be a trend these days, especially in the universities and the funding bodies who require that projects are framed in a certain language. I can imagine that for an artist coming from the music scene, with its more practical approach, the verbosity of the art world must be a source of constant irritation. For one, discourse is not really necessary in the artist-tool-work-relationship that Mark described, and especially not the verbal expression of goals or ideas. In addition, the attitude is somewhat condescending, implying that the wordless knob-twiddling doesn’t involve thinking or theory. Quite the opposite is true, but it is a non-discursive form of thinking. Every practice is its own best theory, as Mark elegantly put it. Here I think there is a difference between the art world and the other parts of the cultural field, such as music. In art, discourse is an integral part of the environment, whereas in music it is not. For someone – Mark Fell, for instance – belonging to both worlds, this would probably cause some tension.
One trait these artists seem to have in common is a reluctance to impose themselves – their ideas, their subjectivity – on others. This is somewhat at odds with a traditional notion of artistic expression, where the work speaks to an audience, conveying some message. Indeed, what Arnheim tried to defend in his book was the agency of the artist, dealing with a technical machinery believed by some to be limited to mechanical reproduction. Now, what I see in these three (and others at the symposium) is the attempt to protect the agency of all the other parties engaged in the work, both the audience and collaborators, sometimes extending to non-human agents. In Mark Fell’s case, it applies to the tools. For the AWNE participants and the artists Lucia Pietroiusti discussed, it includes nature. Not surprisingly, one of the recurring themes at the symposium was collaboration. Maybe a bit paradoxically, the only actual collective mentioned was the Karrabing Film Collective (in Lucia’s talk), the other examples were presented from the perspective of a single artist organising – or praising – communities and collaborations. The explanation might be that the majority of the participants were from the art field, where the figure of the (singular, isolated) artist persists – even though the activities have changed. Art is still very much an individual practice. So when the artists start reaching out to their surroundings, it is an act of transcending the boundaries of the individual. Whatever the reasons, there seems to be a need, not just to address the surroundings, but also to become part of them. So what Mark would say explicitly – that the Cartesian split between the subject and the world is a dead end, that there is no principal difference between the artist, the environment and the tools – was being felt, and attempted to put into practice, by the participants. The AWNE workshop is a nice example: there were online discussions about models of artistic practice. These conversations created a common platform, a sense of shared understanding among the participants. It did not result in a common artistic programme or aesthetic – the artistic practices that the participants brought with them were retained, even though their thinking and attitudes towards them might have changed. It did, however, create a group with a certain permanence. Indeed, some of the participants had attended versions of the workshop in the past and had decided to continue the conversation. So the workshop created a community and a context for artistic practice in addition to being a discourse about it. Signe Lidén’s Circumference project had a similar approach in that she created a loose community, but centred on an object rather than a conversation. Placing this object at the BEK storage space (which she insisted on calling its library, thereby emphasising the social more than the practical function of the space) it would be at the artists’ disposal for a given period. What was special about this object, was its refusal to be “objectified”. It was a microphone, but it didn’t just pick up sound. Its huge size – one by five metres, I think – made it impossible to control with one’s hands, it refused to be treated as a tool. One would have to negotiate one’s own body in relation to it. When placed in nature it became part of the landscape. Instead of accurately reproducing the sounds from the surroundings, it would add its own characteristic sound, generated by the large linen cloth and the inevitable mechanical noise caused by its size – quite the opposite of how a microphone is supposed to behave. So on every level it would provide resistance to an “instrumental” usage in the Cartesian sense, confronting its own materiality with the material presence of the artists, the landscape and the sounds. And of course its placement in the BEK space created a point of attention for the community to gather around, with the common purpose of exploring the possibilities in the object. At the symposium Signe played excerpts of recordings from various locations by the artists who had borrowed it: Julie Silset, Rudi Valdersnes, Sissel Hartvigsen, Enara Barnes and Jennifer D’Amore – recordings I believe became the artists’ shared property, to be used in other projects. So it also held a promise, an invitation to future collaborations.
The last example I will mention is Jackie Karuti’s installation How Clouds Are Formed, which in a way incorporates both these elements – the conversation and the unobjectifiable object. Developed with Emilie Wright over several months, the object in question was an instrument made to register a particular wind that could be felt only on a specific piece of land outside Jackie’s studio. From an engineering point of view this shouldn’t be too hard, since equipment for measuring wind already exists, but this process wasn’t aiming at exactness – or at measuring in the conventional sense. Well, in one way, measuring was exactly what it did, but without stating precisely what was being measured. A natural phenomenon obviously, a force of nature, the wind. Weather instruments are usually made to control nature, to extract energy or knowledge, to predict the future. They turn nature into a resource – exploitable, profitable, representable – by translating one type of data (impressions onto a sensor) into another (numbers). The “sensor” in this case was Jackie, taking her weekend walks in the hills by her studio, who discovered this particular flow of air that didn’t exist anywhere else. A private experience of a singular phenomenon, that is, from a scientific point of view, untranslatable. So the instrument would need to be of another kind. Which kind? What should it measure? How? The project would reveal the complex set of relations involved in the workings of an instrument, between nature, property, the individual and the collective, and quietly subvert them. First there was the wind. Jackie walking in the hills, moving across the land without demanding anything from it, doing something useless in the breaks between the stretches of work. Air and soil, two potential objects of exploitation and use, but here simply things to be experienced. She would eventually purchase the site, thereby turning it into private property. In Kenya, with its colonial heritage and power structures not quite emancipated from this history, with its population still largely dispossessed, this act was in itself a political statement. In addition, Jackie did so without using the land for what would be considered acceptable: farming, starting a business, raising a family. The site remained the same, open to the public as a playground and area of leisure, not demanding any specific behaviour from visitors. So here was a property, a proprietary bond between Jackie and her land, potentially giving her power over passersby, but one that did not translate into the exercise of power. A relationship one could argue was not unlike the one that exists between the artist and the objects she is making, the works of art. In her conversation with Maria Rusinovskaya at the symposium, Jackie mentioned that she had also opened up her studio, making it available as a library where people could borrow books. Two spaces then, fluctuating between ownership and freedom, gathering people around a shared experience. And then there was the third space, in Bergen, where the final work would be created and displayed. These spaces would somehow communicate, connected over vast distances. The artwork itself, the weather instrument, was itself an object designed for making connections. Jackie described it as a mechanical object, or rather a mechanical action, transcending its objecthood, so to speak. A motor attached to other things, it moves big and small things, and becomes a mechanical action. Or a force. Like capitalism is a force, or, as Jackie remarked, feminism, or queerness. The actual assembly was done in Bergen by Emilie, an Australian artist who Jackie had never met before, in a process that could be read as a form of outsourcing, where the task of manufacturing the work was given to someone lower in the hierarchy. In fact, like with the other two spaces, this division didn’t develop into the actual exercise of power. Instead, what took place was the sharing of responsibility for the work. There were instructions, but they were not very precise, and many decisions were left to Emilie. There were long discussions over long distances in time and space, “in the air”, trying to figure out what the instrument should do. The search for technical solutions would often cause failures, generating new questions requiring different solutions, giving a result that no one could have anticipated. So what did it measure, in the end? It did measure the weather, but also all these processes and experiences that were put into it. As Jackie put it, “it measures the distance across time that is covered by strangers.”
1 One interesting example of the borderline between art and non-art was the Playful Meal by the Oslo-based art collective Tenthaus, sandwiched between the discursive and the performative part of the symposium. Basically a meal and social gathering, it was very lightly coordinated with a few party games. An art project, sure, but also conveniently providing food and relaxation for the weary participants and guests after the demanding lectures and discussions.
2 One could argue that Duchamp found a way around the endless cycle of "this time it is for real" by basing his ersatz ‘ism’, eroticism, not in a claimed universality, but in an experience that happens to be shared by most people. If so, the ‘ismism’ was surpassed a century ago.
3 This is not to say that the glitch aesthetic and the hands-on approach to technology has disappeared from BEK’s view. In fact, Mark Fell made a convincing case for his methodology of "just turning knobs" in his discussion with Robin Mackay, and on the evening event at Østre we got a demonstration of his software for collective real-time sound processing that he and Rian Treanor had developed. There was nothing glitchy about the conversation however, which was involuntarily but smoothly executed on Zoom with Robin in Kulturhuset and Mark speaking from Covid-induced isolation.
4 Obviously, the “we” in question is a dubious category at best, assuming a common perception of certain cultural phenomena – especially in this context, where the divide between “us” and “them” has had (and still has) tremendous political and cultural importance – precisely the problems that Jackie is dealing with in her project.
