A good deal is at stake in the attempt to invent linguistic structures

“Physical pain – unlike any other state of consciousness – has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language. Often, a state of consciousness other than pain will, if deprived of its object, begin to approach the neighbourhood of physical pain; conversely, when physical pain is transformed into an objectified state, it (or at least some of its aversiveness) is eliminated. A great deal, then, is at stake in the attempt to invent linguistic structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language; the human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence.”

(pages 5-6)

Scarry, E. (1985). The body in pain. Oxford: OUP.

A conflation of the real and the represented

“Although the word [hysteresis] sounds like history (it’s pronounced “his-ter-EE-sis”) and looks like hysteria, hysteresis has no etymological connection to either word. Its roots are in Greek and refer to a “shortcoming” or “to come late.” But I like to think the word, when applied to recordings, encompasses all of these concepts. We want those magnetic particles to line up exactly right because we want a part of ourselves to last forever. But we can never quite create something exactly in our image – which is to say, we never get the sound exactly perfect. The world rebels, exercising its right to hysteresis. But we never stop trying. It’s maddening, when you think about it.

And making a recording is just half the battle. A record is absolutely meaningless unless it is played. As an object, it signifies nothing. If you don’t play a CD, it’s nothing but a coaster. A record is a text that cannot be “read”. It must be decoded.

This decoding is directly related to the technologies we use to do it, from tinfoil to $90,000 turntables. The goal of the decoding is always a conflation of the real and the represented, a condition that sets recorded music apart from photography and motion pictures, two other art forms that arose to question what it meant to capture reality. The movie audiences who famously jumped out of the way of the on-screen train barreling towards them quickly wised up. Today, special effects dazzle us, but they don’t really fool us; we may not know exactly what makes the Death Star blow up, but we know there is no Death Star. Recordings, on the other hand, must trick us to work, and always ask that we suspend our disbelief. We are supposed to hear the sound of Led Zeppelin jamming together in real time. The narrative of a film might jump around in time, but a song is always linear. We’re not supposed to hear the sutures. A recording is nothing until it is decoded, and what it decodes is always an illusion.

It is their ability to maintain this illusion that makes recordings unique among cultural artifacts. No other object is such an intractable combination of the subjective and the objective, the irreducible and the economically rationalized, art and science. If recordings are considered to be primarily works of art, they can signify as such only by using the prevailing technological tools of their age. If recordings are considered primarily as products of technology, science and industry, they can be evaluated only subjectively – that is, as artworks – because what they produce is so abstract and illusory, mere pressure changes in the air. Glenn Gould said it best: ‘I can think of few areas of contemporary endeavour that better display the confusion with which technological man evaluates the implications of his own achievements than the great debate over music and its recorded future. Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is reevaluated, and they concern notions about the future that will ultimately question even the validity of evaluation.’”

(page 21-22)

Greg Milner. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. NY: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal, ILL.

Particles don’t want to move

“There’s this great word, hysteresis, that refers to the lag a system exhibits when a force acts upon it. If you bend back the tines of a fork, and then remove your hand, the tines spring back a little. The position of the tines is determined not just by where they are at the moment you let them go but also by where they were a moment before. The tines remember. That’s hysteresis.

Hysteresis is particularly useful for understanding problems in ferro-magnetic systems such as magnetic tape recording, the most popular method for recording music in the last half of the twentieth century. Magnetic recording works by passing magnetized particles on tape through a fluctuating electromagnetic field. The goal is for those particles to form a tidy analog of the waveform being recorded. The problem is that, thanks to hysteresis, those particles don’t want to move. We’re good at motivating them, and we can get them almost where we want them, but no matter what we do, the relationship between the original waveform and its analog is never quite linear. Hysteresis stands between us and our ideal copy.”

(page 21)

Greg Milner. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. NY: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal, ILL.

The sound of reality comes at you all at once

“How can a representation of music be as real and authentic as the music it represents? Every recording is an attempt to come to terms with this paradox; even if, like the aforementioned genres, it rejects the idea of recording something real, it still defines itself in relation to that tradition. How you solve that riddle represents your ideal of perfect sound. Every record is its own tone test, a challenge that proclaims: This is music.”

(page 13)

Greg Milner. Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music. NY: Faber and Faber, 2009.

Borrowed from the Bibliothèques publiques de Montréal, ILL.

All that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous and critical

“The task of articulating cultural value is now urgent in both the museum and the academy, where a tsunami of fiscal imperatives threatens to deluge all that is complicated, creative, vulnerable, intelligent, adventurous, and critical in the public sphere. Significantly, it is a question of temporality around which this struggle now takes place: authentic culture operates within a slower time frame than the accelerated abstractions of finance capital and the annual cycles of accounting (based on positivist data and requiring demonstrable impact). But it is precisely this lack of synchronicity that points to an alternative world of values in which museums – but also culture, education, and democracy – are not subject to the banalities of a spreadsheet or the statistical mystifications of an opinion poll, but enable us to access a rich and diverse history, to question the present, and to realize a different future. This future does not yet have a name, but we are standing on its brink. If the last forty years have been marked by ‘posts’ (post-war, post-colonialism, postmodernism, post-communism), then today, at last, we seem to be in a period of anticipation – an era that museums of contemporary art can help us collectively to sense and understand.”

(pages 62)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

A space to reflect and debate our values

“Others will say that the museum itself is a conservative institution and that it is more urgent to focus efforts on social change. But it is not a choice of either/or. Museums are a collective expression of what we consider important in culture, and offer a space to reflect and debate our values; without reflection, there can be no considered movement forwards.

[…]

“Two systems of value hereby come into conflict: the museum as a space of cultural and historical reflection, and the museum as a repository of philanthropic narcissism. In the face of this impasse, the ability of the public museum to adequately represent the interests of the ninety-nine percent might seem ever bleaker. It is therefore crucial to consider the alternatives that do exist, working below the radar to devise energizing new missions for the museum of contemporary art.”

(pages 61)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The contemporary becomes a method or practice

“It is of course banal and predictable to invoke Benjamin at the end of an essay in 2013, but it is striking that his theories have been so influential on visual art yet have had so little impact upon the institutions in which it is shown and the histories they narrate. In his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), Benjamin draws a distinction between a history spoken in the name of power, which records the triumphs of the victors, and a history that names and identifies the problems of the present day, by scouring the past for the origins of this present historical moment; this, in turn, is the determining motivation for our interest in the past. Can a museum be anti-hegemonic? The three museums discussed in this book seem to answer the question in the affirmative. They work to connect current artistic practice to a broader field of visual experience, much as Benjamin’s own Arcades Project sought to reflect on Paris, capital of the nineteenth century, by juxtaposing texts, cartoons, prints, photographs, works of art, artifacts, and architecture in poetic constellations. This present-minded approach to history produces an understanding of today which sightlines on the future, and reimagines the museum as an active, historical agent that speaks in the name not of national pride or hegemony but of creative questioning and dissent. It suggests a spectator no longer focused on the auratic contemplation of individual works, but one who is aware of being presented with arguments and positions to read or contest. Finally, it defetishizes objects by continually juxtaposing works of art with documentary materials, copies, and reconstructions. The contemporary becomes less a question of periodization or discourse than a method or practice, potentially applicable to all historical periods.”

(pages 56-57)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

Disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties

“These museums create multi-temporal remappings of history and artistic production outside of national and disciplinary frameworks, rather than opting for a global inclusivity that pulls everything into the same narrative. An apt term to describe the results of these activities is the constellation, a word used by Walter Benjamin to describe a Marxist project of bringing events together in new ways, disrupting established taxonomies, disciplines, mediums, and proprieties. This approach is, I think, highly suggestive for museums, since the constellation as a politicized rewriting of history is fundamentally curatorial. For Benjamin, the collector is a scavenger or bricoleur, quoting out of context in order to break the spell of calcified traditions, mobilizing the past by bringing it blazing into the present, and keeping history mobile in order to allow its objects to be historical agents once again. Replace ‘collector’ here with ‘curator’, and the task of the contemporary museum opens up to a dynamic rereading of history that pulls into the foreground that which has been sidelined, repressed, and discarded in the eyes of the dominant classes. Culture becomes a primary means for visualizing alternatives; rather than thinking of the museum collection as a storehouse of treasures, it can be reimagined as an archive of the commons.”

(page 56)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The appropriateness of repetition

“The first point [of the Ljubljana Moderna Galerija’s manifesto] states the fiscal reality: due to budget cuts, no new display or catalog are possible, so recycling is necessary. Four further points argue for the appropriateness of repetition: rather than succumbing to the pressure to give consumers the new, the museum advocates the value of rereading; repetition is one of the fundamental features of contemporary art (video loops, re-enactment, etc.), so it is appropriate to repeat an entire collection display; repetition constructs history – through publications, research, the art market – so a repeated display retroactively helps to construct responses that produce history; finally, repetition is driven by trauma, and in Ljubljana this is twofold – the traumatic absence of a contemporary art system and the unrealized emancipatory ideals of communism.”

(pages 50-51)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.

 

The Time of the Absent Museum

“In Ljubljana, the first display encountered by the viewer is titled “War Time”: it includes a small anonymous documentary photograph of the occupation of Metelkova in 1993, alongside Jenny Holzer’s Lustmord (1993-1994), a photo series of text on skin, alluding to the rape of Bosnian women. Thereafter, the museum’s entire display is organized around thematic categories relating to overlapping temporalities: “Ideological Time” (the socialist past), “Future Time” (unrealized modernist utopias), “The Time of the Absent Museum” (approximately the 1980s-1990s, when artists compensated for the absence of a developed art system by self-organizing and self-criticizing), “Retro Time” (the late 1990s, when artists began to self-historicize), “Lived Time” (body and performance art), “Time of Transition” (from socialism into capitalism) and “Dominant Time” (present-day global neoliberalism). Contemporary art is therefore staked as a question of timeliness, rather than as a stage on the conveyor belt of history; the necessary condition of relevance is the presentation of multiple, overlapping temporalities, geared towards the imagination of a future in which social equality prevails.”

(pages 48-49)

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology: Or What’s Contemporary in Museums of Contemporary Art? London: Koenig Books, 2013.