Re: <nettime> Claire Bishop?s Game (kris cohen)

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Hi Kris --

While as a practitioner more than a theorist, I have not read 'Artificial 
Hells', I note your observation that the "analysis of form cannot spark" w/o the 
"sociological" pole (Jameson)...

This is a crucial observation that I intuit that Bishop's (and to a large degree 
Bourriaud's, imho) concepts fall flat. While I personally don't use a model that 
includes 'sociological' I have constructed a model of reality that transcends 
form (as I suspect that many (participatory) artists do to some degree). If 
there is any verity to the concept that "you had to be there", a statement that 
I have often used when asked to describe a particular participatory 'situation' 
that I have facilitated as 'artist', formal analysis is a deeply flawed or even 
useless tool to access the ensuing dynamics, effects, and outcome of (some) 
participatory works.

Her use of case histories, as one standing 'outside' is only for other 
historians and folks obsessed with sussing out a stance based on a 
representation of life, without ever expendig life-time and life-energy on it: 
the demon observer that kills Schrödinger's cat, or not.

This is the question of difference that you raise: What is the difference 
between the structure of a participatory occasion and the affective experience 
of that event? -- The answer, frictional life itself! The map is never the 
territory.

And you are quite perceptive in your ultimate call:

"the aesthetic case can do more than reorganize the art world around another 
collective noun. It can do analytical work in and on the present tense. Such 
attention to form would seek not only to use disciplinary standards to reassure 
ourselves of art’s critical distance—to notice when, from that distance, it 
attacks other people’s comforts—but would demand that historians of the 
aesthetic event re-invent the genres of our own participation."

Be there then; be here now.

Thanks,
John


--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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