POST PRODUCTION

Nicolas Bourriaud’s Post Production book (the follow-up to Relational Aesthetics), is online as PDF. Excerpt from intro:

These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.

It’s fascinating to hear an art guy thinking through DJ culture, although, like so many of these texts, Duchamp presides over it all as if the blurry emergent (post-postmodern?) cultural mush of recent years needs a stately father figure. It doesn’t. We don’t.

Elsewhere, Claire Bishop offers a rich critique of Bourriaud: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (PDF). On a basic level, her PDF is better because it contains pictures. And a nuanced support of Mexico-based Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, whose works make me think:

[Santiago Sierra – Line Tattooed on Six Paid People]

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in NYC post-Postopolis news:

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is speaking this evening at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, 6pm, free. Which dovetails nicely with the opening reception of a new exhibit at Storefront for Art & Architecture @ 7:30pm.

Geoff talks fast – noticeably faster than most West Coasters – because he’s got volumes of impressive information and speculation to convey. He says:

The title of the lecture is a bit heavy-handed, but it’s called “Designing the Post-Terrestrial.” Expect everything from Native American mound builders to applied geosynthetics to the architecture of Vicente Guallart, by way of weather control during the Beijing Olympics, muon detectors in the rain forest, and Viking archaeology.