The Death of the Author

The Death of the Author is an important text from structuralist and critic Roland Barthes, published for the first time in 1967. But more imporant the Death of the Author is a concept in art theory about the giving of meaning. Barthes argued that the viewer was the one who was important for the making of meaning. The author was the one who wrote the story down (or painted it on a canvas) and afterwards his job was done. He might have put his own meaning in it, but a viewer could still extract a totally different meaning. Barthes believes that a viewer normally makes meaning by examining signs in an image. The viewer creates a interpretation of a text, he is not looking for a final definitive meaning. An interpretation starts with a viewer objectively looking at a text and describing what he literally sees in or reads from the text. This literal description of the text is what Barthes calls denotation, a descriptive and literal level of meaning shared by virtually all members of a culture. What these signs mean for a person calls Barthes the connotation; the personal associations a viewer has with the signs.
Does this mean that an author or artists leaves the work of art behind after the completion? Wouldn’t an author have any influence on the signs the viewers are going to see? Or does an artist consciously leave traces behind, a path he wants the audience to follow? Can he make certain signs more noticeable and with this steer the interpretation in a desired direction?

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is the largest web-based encyclopedia available. It was launched in 2001 and currently has around 14 million articles, written in 272 languages. The name is a combination from the Hawaiian word ‘Wiki’, which means quick, and the word ‘encyclopedia’. What makes this web-based encyclopedia special and popular is that every visitor can add and edit articles.

Although it has been stated that Wikipedia contains less errors and mistakes (through to the continuous editing) than printed encyclopedias, this editing model is also the main point of critique on Wikipedia. Every visitor can change an article to whatever he decides. There is a strong controlling apparatus with moderating users, but no guarantee whatsoever. Former editor-in-chief of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Robert McHenry called Wikipedia a ‘faith-based encyclopedia’ and even Wikipedia’s own founder, Jimmy Wales, disencourages academic use of his creation, for there is simply no possible way to prove all the information there. Trying to include false information is becoming more and more popular, an example can be seen on the facebook group If Wikipedia Says It, It Must Be True where people post screenshots of the Wikipedia articles they find (or make) to be incorrect.

Interesting is to see how the unreliability of Wikipedia is included in Popular Culture. The quote ‘Citation Needed’ appears on Wikipedia when a moderator (or visitor) questions the reliability of an article.

Official Invitation (scribble-down letters!) / Photo by Timothy Greathouse

Media-Savvy

Coined ‘The Royal Drag’ by the SOHO-news, Topo Grajeda & Jimini Hignett’s wedding performance planned to challenge Charles and Di’s monopoly of prime-time news on July 29th 1981, was a wonderful combination of art and media-savvy. Performing in New York in the early 80’s under the name ‘Christians from Outer Space’, Topo and Jimini topped their usual aim of having their name appear in the local listings each week – performing at off-off-Broadway locations on the Lower East Side and on the sidewalks midtown – with this cross-dressed version of the Royal knot-tying making onto the Channel-7 news. Unfortunately no video footage of the event was made (and channel-7 refused to allow their tape to be copied) but the late Timothy Greathouse took great publicity stills, and Jo Ann Porter made some fantastic shots on the day.

Asylum Seekers

“See Asylum Seekers” – was a planned residency project by Jimini Hignett in which a family of asylum seekers were to be given the keys to a free apartment with all amenities in the Dutch city of Delft in return for which, they would be the exhibit in the final exhibition to take place showing the work of various artists in residency there, and visitors would be invited to come in and look at them.

Hignett’s intention was to both to provide housing (albeit temporary) for people in need and to encourage discussion of the treatment of asylum seekers and artists in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, due to the credit crunch, the new housing for the original occupants of the apartments was delayed and this plan was cancelled. (For more on the plan which Hignett did carry out, see Negotiating Equity.)

The photograph shows the empty apartment in question.

Maerten in Cyberspace

In 1996 over the space of just seven days, an enormous 17th century triptych by Dutch master Maerten van Heemskerck which had been shipwrecked off the coast of Sweden is scanned and ‘returned’ in cyber-piecs to the Netherlads via internet to the Grote Laurens Kerk in Alkmaar, where a computer controlled plotter, under the eye of the public, ‘repaints’ the 6 by 8 meter triptych in the very location for which it was originally intended. The event was followed closely on the local and national media and the finsihed triptych was unveiled by Queen Beatrix.

Werkmij crew posing in front of the triptych

Photos from the website of Kees Bolten

Cargo

Cargo was an extremely controversial project executed in 1992 by the Dutch Werkmij group. In the middle of the kilometres long Afsluit-dyke which was built to enclose the former Zuyder Zee, a steel giant constructed form electrical pylons, and ‘bricked up’ with 20,000 loaves baked on-site using grain from the polders and sea water from the adjacent former Zuyder Zee formed an enormous sacrificial image entitled the ‘National Gift to the Sea. Due to be ‘sacrificed’ this project, which took place at a moment when the news was full of drought and famine, caused national uproar as children collected signatures, politicians and other dignitaries complained of blasphemy. The planned submergence of the sculpture was prohibited and following its disappearance and the discovery of loaves of bread washed up along the Belgian coast it left in its wake a new national myth and an unsolved mystery.

National Gift to the Sea - Afsluitdijk - 1992

Kees Bolten of Werkmij with loaves

Clandestine dismanteling of the sacrificial statue

All photos from website Kees Bolten

Hogerhand

The Hogerhand People’s Front is a civil defense militia set up to defend the Netherlands in the event of an invasion by the US army following the so-called ‘Hague Invasion Act’ which president Bush signed on August 2nd 2002. A group of concerned Dutch citizens operating entirely within the law and armed soley with the willpower embodied in their simple motto, trans corpus mortuum: ‘over my dead body’! this peoples militia of unarmed guards patrol Dutch beaches around the clock, forming a human shield against the absurd invasion plans of our ally on the other side of the Atlantic.

Hogerhand Civil Defense at Castricum

Hogerhand People's Militia at Scheveningen

Media / Mass Media

Ion Barladeanu, Romania, 1946 (submitted by Jimini Hignett) – Barladeanu lived in the garbage room of a block of flats where he made collages critical of the Ceausescu regime using images torn from old magazines until he was ‘discovered’ in 2008. Nowadays he lunches with Angelina Jolie in Paris.

Ion Barladeanu - Untitled

Ion Barladeanu - Realpolitik

Martha Rosler

Martha Rosler’s work has long drawn on subjective documentary material in what could be seen as a classic example of aesthetic journalism – her project ‘The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems, a series of printed photographs and texts, dealt with issues underlying Manhattan’s skid-row The Bowery. (See also H for Housing&homelessness.)

To circumvent any possible copyright infringements, the photographs of the Bowery project are re-photographs of reproductions, the next is a photograph taken during a re-enactment of the work ‘Semiotics of the Kitchen’ performed by school children during Thomas Hirschhorns ‘Bijlmer Spinoza Festival’, as is the video.

Re-photographed reproduction of print from The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems

Re-photographed reproduction of print from 'The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive systems'

Re-enactment of Martha Roslers (1974) Semiotics of the Kitchen, during Thomas Hirschhorn's Bijlmer Spinoza Festival 2009 Photograph-Jimini Hignett

Still from video of re-enactment of Martha Rosler's Semiotics of the Kitchen (1974) during Thomas Hirschhorn's Bijlmer Spinoza Festival 2009 - photo-Jimini Hignett

Kitchen Semiotics re-enactment from Jimini Hignett on Vimeo.

Click on ‘re-enactment’ above to see the video on vimeo

Housing & Homelessness

‘If You Lived Here: the city in art, theory & social activism’

- a collaborative project by Martha Rosler, brought together a great many people from many different disciplines and backgrounds, presenting a wealth of (largely) documentary information in widely diverse forms and formats to produce a landmark work on the issues of housing and homelessness, in NYC in the late eighties.

Publication: If You Lived Here, Rosler et al

Per.cep.tion

n.
1. The process, act, or faculty of perceiving.
2. The effect or product of perceiving.
3. Psychology
a. Recognition and interpretation of sensory stimuli based chiefly on memory.

b. The neurological processes by which such recognition and interpretation are effected.
4.
a. Insight, intuition, or knowledge gained by perceiving.
b. The capacity for such insight.

The meaning of information is –in contemporary thought– subjective. It can be perceived as truth, nonsense, art, and of course many other things. Yet, the power of news is that it is generally perceived as the truth. This assumption of truth might be the reason why artists practice aesthetic journalism more and more as a way to critique the perception of information.

Spoof

News satire has been a strategy to critique society for long as news exists. In the late 19^th century, when the newspapers were more widely spread, fake news became a frequently used tool. One of the most famous spoofers was Mark Twain. His hoaxes were so successful and believable, that one newspaper after another fired him. His realization that lies travel faster then the truth, comes back in his later work. As the internet provides more accessible ways to spread news, it gave a whole new dimension to the phenomenon of satire. The most recent successful example are of course the Yes men. A successful Dutch site is www.speld.nl, but the Onion might be the most widely spread one, as well as www.fakingnews.com.

EGBG

EGBG is a Dutch registration research company set up by artist Martijn Engelbrecht in 1994. The company conducts market research on several levels, for his own practice and commissioned. Engelbregt deals with information and privacy issues (his company name actually stands for ‘Once Given Remains Given’ or ‘Engelbregt Information Management Group’). He was one of the people starting to look for the borders of what people voluntarily fill in on questionnaires.

At the hight of the telephone market research hype, EGBG created a guide to counter attack telephone interviewers. The one being questioned becomes the one questioning and the other way around. He also worked for the critical Dutch TV network VPRO, where he mapped the information of all the VPRO employees.

http://www.egbg.nl/

Sois Belle Et Vote (‘Be Pretty and Vote’ ) was a sentence used for a political advertising campaign that took place in Lebanon in 2009 by the occasion of the parliamentary elections.
Together with this sentence the billboards showed an image of

a young woman, as commonly represented by fashion and beauty brands. This controversial advertisement, being accused as sexist and offensive, brought up reactions at different levels among these, new versions of this image, whose content was changed according with the protests.

What happens in this specific situation is that the adoption of an aesthetics is not only used to communicate and idea to a particular audience – the young hip Lebanese women – but mostly aims to create a public discussion based on its controversial aspects and consequently generating visibility and promotion for its own benefit. This is not something surprising when thinking about political advertising but what is interesting to note here is that the appropriation of this kind of aesthetics (even if still operating at a commodified level) serves not only the purpose of this campaign as, propaganda, visibility, public discussion, etc, but also by making the appropriation itself visible, indirectly exposes the structure which is based on.
By critically examining political advertising and the different ways it has been dealing with the existing media structures, I believe one can find an interesting place for observing advertising and mass media structures.

In 1983, the French newspaper Libération invited Sophie Calle to publish a series of 28 articles. Having recently found on the street the address book of a man called Pierre Baudry, Sophie Calle photocopied the content and afterwards
returned it to its owner (his address was written in one of the first pages of the book). Later on, she visited and interviewed some of the people who were listed in the book. Sophie Calle’s concern was to build up a portrait of the man according to what his acquaintances had to say about him. The articles were published next to some pictures that Calle took of the man’s favourite activities.

According to an interview that Sophie Calle had with Stuart Jeffries for The Guardian, the owner of the address book (a documentary film maker) threatened to sue her for invasion of privacy after he discovered the articles. However, once that the Libération newspaper agreed on publishing a nude photograph of Sophie Calle, he felt things were even. “He was trying to be very aggressive. He disliked what I did.” Sophie Calle said.

Things had a much different ending in Paul Auster’s novel Leviathan. For the book, Auster describes some of the works of Sophie Calle as carried out by a fictional character known as Maria Turner. To tell the whole story of Maria would be inappropriate for this blog (and to some extent also repetitive). However it might be enough with saying that the Address Book project eventually leads Maria into another story where she ended with her jaw being broken along with a wrist, a couple of cracked ribs and bruises all over her body.

It seems having a naked picture of yourself published in newspaper might not be that bad after all.

Nayruz Holdings

A fictitious holdings company, created by Jordanian artist, Oraib Toukan. The company proposes to auction off the Middle East in the year 2012,

based on a 100-year leasehold, factoring in inflation and perceptions of political and economic risk now and in the future. Toukan assesses each county’s risk, by consulting various game theorists, image consultants and diplomatic representatives, in order to gain a plausible picture of the sellability of the the various Middle Eastern countries. Her corporate intervention was presented in 2009 at the Istanbul Biennial, under the name, “The Equity is in the Circle” (2007-2009) where she included video interviews, email correspondence, and her very own branding campaign for Nayruz- with the slogan being: “Own this view, and everything in it.”

www.oraibtoukan.com

WTO

Generally WTO is the abbreviation for the World Trade Organisation. However, culture jamming activists called “The Yes Men” placed a fake WTO website, at the domain www.gatt.org, posing as the WTO, in order to bring “corrected” information about the activities of the real organisation. Subsequently, they we invited by several organisations and conferences in order to give lectures to an audience, such as at the International Payments Conference on April 28, 2005, where they proposed to the audience that they should purchase a golden suit, they claimed would allow productivity to increase, as managers would not have to oversee workers in person but could keep track of them via images on an attached screen as well as implanted sensors.

www.yesmen.org

De Volkskrant, Wednesday 3th of February 2010
Port au Prince Haïti, 25th of January 2010, photo Tomas Bravo/Reuters

De Volkskrant, Wednesday 10th of February 2010
A Friday afternoon in North Brabant, Holland photo Erik Haverhals/ANP

De Aarsman Collectie/The Aarsman Collection
Every week on Wednesday Hans Aarsman (photographer/writer) writes about photo(s) in a spread in the Volkskrant, one of the biggest newspapers in The Netherlands, that caught his eye in the ‘news feed’. He discusses all kind of photos but mainly news photos that are not ‘digestible/interesting’ enough for the norms of a daily newspaper. He is a kind of mediator between the ‘feed’ of the newspaper and its readers.

He ‘zooms in’ on these photos, grasping every element that is visible and could lead to a new interpretation of what we are seeing. Little details can be the starting point of new interpretations and a better understanding of what is happening.

“There is not one truth. At least there are seven”. (Quote from Hans Aarsman, De Aarsman Collectie, 2005 Nai Publishers, Rotterdam)

Hans Aarsman is on twitter: twitter.com/Hansaarsman

Angels FM 98.0

Moniek Toebosch

Located on the Houtrib dyke between Enkhuizen en Lelystad in The Netherlands drivers could tune in to a radiofrequency and listen the whole length of the dyke (29 km) to the singing of angels. It was located there between 1994-1999.

• Why use and explore media platforms as an artist or curator?

• What is the relationship between (mass) media and art in the past and present, and what are the possible future scenarios?

• Can media platforms renegotiate a relationship between art and the locality in a Biennale model?

Through operating as a roving biennial Manifesta must each time address and negotiate a different context with specific geographical, historical and political structures. In this way, Manifesta offers its curators the opportunity, and the challenge, to engage with local, global and networked communities using a variety of platforms and approaches.

CPS’s approach to curation encompasses (mass) media platforms such as television, radio and newspapers, alongside more traditional exhibition formats. In the context of Manifesta 8 we ask what is the media’s relationship to the construction of a local reality, how does it relate to ideas of truth, fact and history, and what are its possibilities for engaging with new audiences and existing local/global structures?

One of the theoretical bases that informs CPS’s approach to art and the media is the notion of ‘aesthetic journalism’: LINK. This is a huge body of research undertaken between 2004 and 2009. We (Alfredo as writer/curator and Fay as artist) have recently collaborated to ‘unpack’ this concept using a practical approach; Fay developed an ‘ABC of aesthetic journalism’ which is published as a blog: LINK. We would like to involve DAI students in this process of progression from a (theoretical) notion of aesthetic journalism to a practical implementation of this concept (as could manifest itself in biennial models such as M8).

We invite you to engage in the ABC blog by responding to a post/s or by creating your own. You can add to, comment on, critique, extend, oppose or digress from the current content. Responses can take the form of text, image, video, audio or web link. Directly or indirectly consider our opening bullet points in relation to this invitation. Your approach can be academic, artistic, communicative, reflexive, objective or personal. The only rules are that you cannot delete existing content and that responses are indexed in their respective alphabetical category. You will be given the username and password to the blog for the duration of the project.