That's something that they're supposed to have learned early in their BFA and/or MFA degrees, if they went that route. Otherwise, they have to learn it anyway.
I reckon one learns it better in real life, not all schools are enough good to teach you that. :)
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. And far too many artists lack the training to engage with the real media of their work and instead hire technicians to realize it for them.
@ Derek: Agree with you, this is perhaps the focal point here. However, I would suggest to observe the same miscommunication not only from a pragmatical point of view (the artist might not know how to properly code something) but also from a conceptual perspective.
Maybe the artist does not always need to perfectly know how to code something, but the conceptual relevance of a work can be unveiled and successfully diffused even if somehow a work lacks of technical consistence, or does not fulfil requirements of a scientific paper.
Fortunately today's strands of "art" are manifold. Programmers are artists, artists are programmers, cinema directors become artists, sound artists become programmers, and so on... Art itself is mutating, increasingly faster since the New Media global wave. But this is probably OT already :P
Hi Marco,
On 12/23/10 10:26 AM, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Maybe the artist does not always need to perfectly know how to code something, but the conceptual relevance of a work can be unveiled and successfully diffused even if somehow a work lacks of technical consistence, or does not fulfil requirements of a scientific paper.
here I would agree 100%, as it follows directly from what I wrote already. Ii think, rather than dealing with the fallout of the Romantic era as Mathieu suggested, we are dealing with the fallout of the 1980's--and its intesification of spectacle and commodity.
Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and etc taught us that art must be BIG and to go beyond the scale of what artists can make by themselves in the studio by hiring craftspeople and technicians to realize massive, expensive works as the desirable aim of this art market economy. Although driven by a different kind of economics--mainly grants and subsidies with academic, social and political concerns involved--art/sci work still strives for the spectacle in a similar way.
I am personally not interested in what kind of work someone fund-raise and be a middle-manager to create. I want to see what someone is capable of doing with their own two hands, as flawed as that may be. For any art to be experimental, the possibility of failure must be present at all times.
At the other extreme of the spectrum, and closer to my own heart, are artists like David Tudor. After becoming the premier avant-garde concert pianists, he locked himself in the studio for two years and taught himself analog electronics. His electronic creations represented his own personal musical vision--with all the idiosyncrasies included--and have always been a huge inspiration. And I would happily categorize your work more along these lines as well.
In case this sounds like part of a paper--it is. I will be curating an edition of the Canadian online journal Vague Terrain in March 2011 under the theme "Schematic as Score" and I intend to address a lot of this material there.
Happily veering OT, Derek
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Derek Holzer wrote:
here I would agree 100%, as it follows directly from what I wrote already. Ii think, rather than dealing with the fallout of the Romantic era as Mathieu suggested, we are dealing with the fallout of the 1980's--and its intesification of spectacle and commodity.
Why would it have to be one or the other, but not both ?
Lots of things are happening concurrently in the world, but it seems like arguments often avoid acknowledging that complexity. It's not you in particular.
Although driven by a different kind of economics--mainly grants and subsidies with academic, social and political concerns involved--art/sci work still strives for the spectacle in a similar way.
In the end, what ever artist ever wanted is to show off. After that, you can make a distinction between showing off the budget, vs showing off the skills (of techniques and imagination...), and whether one kind of showing off is hindering another kind of showing off.
For any art to be experimental, the possibility of failure must be present at all times.
For any art to be really experimental, failure has to be an undefined concept. But seriously : how do you evaluate whether something « has failed » in art ?
avant-garde concert pianists [...] idiosyncrasies [...] Canadian
Btw, have you come across l'Infonie yet ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
I reckon one learns it better in real life, not all schools are enough good to teach you that. :)
Well, in the end, a student has to teach oneself, and is ultimately responsible for one's own learning ; though some are lucky to find people who make this easier. I didn't study in an artistic department, so those are all second-hand impressions (outsiders are very rarely present during crit sessions).
@ Derek: Agree with you, this is perhaps the focal point here. However, I would suggest to observe the same miscommunication not only from a pragmatical point of view (the artist might not know how to properly code something) but also from a conceptual perspective.
There are a few more layers between the coding and the artistic concepts : there are the math concepts layer, the programming concepts layer, etc. Those are all different levels at which something can « break » or be otherwise unsatisfying.
Maybe the artist does not always need to perfectly know how to code something,
What is that perfection that you refer to ? I have no idea.
And it's one thing to know how to « perfectly » code something, but it's another, to know « perfectly » what you want to code.
If one sticks to the existing vocabulary of artist statements, there is quite a gap to bridge between the concept in art history's terminology (usually called just « the concept »), and the art object itself, because once one has stated what is usually called « the concept », the art object is hardly described at all, and almost everything is left to decide, and I mean almost everything that matters to the experience of the audience.
but the conceptual relevance of a work can be unveiled and successfully diffused even if somehow a work lacks of technical consistence,
That sounds like the artist statement is being successfully diffused, more than the work in itself. Or otherwise, it can sound like the artist statement and the work in itself lead two separate lives...
or does not fulfil requirements of a scientific paper.
(Do I have to restate what I said about scientific papers and art ? It's not like I expect art to fulfill those requirements, but that's the caricature that I read twice already this week.)
But this is probably OT already :P
pd-list would be quite dry without a healthy dose of OT.
(and the sexism thread of 2007 is not what I have in mind here.)
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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Marco Donnarumma -
Mathieu Bouchard