STATUS QUOTES

Notes and references on art and 4D (2017)

INTRODUCTION

The original concept for the 2-3000-word essay to be included in my application to the University of Oxford/Ruskin School of Art DPhil in Fine Art program boils down to speculative answers to some fundamental aesthetic questions:

"What is art?"
"Who is an artist?"
"What is art for?"
"What does art do?"

Added to this list, specific to my artistic focal interests, are a few others:

"What is 4D?"
"What is 4D art?"
"What is Time/dimensional time?"

The time question in particular attaches to 4D discourse, mainly because the most common answer to "What is the fourth dimension?" is "time." It is my contention that the Einsteinian definition of 4D/Time is but a partial one for the more-than-3D "world," of which art is only one facet, and there is no sufficiently compelling argument to exclude other narratives for and approaches to 4D (i.e., philosophical, art-theoretical, spiritual, mathematical, literary and so on). I would further contend that 4D "space[/-time]" is precisely "where[/-when]" the manifolds of material and immaterial can be congregated productively. "How" one "does" that is the 4D thing. The fourth dimension is a transitional, transactional/-active, interstitial zone inclusive of all those disciplines and their various assignments for theoretical and practical 4D. It is the dimension for the 4D project to happen, at the same time it is 4D, by and/or in spite of definition.

Did I mention that 4D is confusing, convoluted and complicated? Because 4D is more than a thing happening 1-3 dimensions... - But I'm getting ahead of myself, a condition peculiar to 4D experience, so let's leave off there for the time being.

Combined, the aesthetic/dimensional questions above actively span a broad range of discourses with tremendous currency at the moment. The text that follows is an effort to introduce what I consider to be the most pertinent and interesting components of ongoing, relevant, selected conversations from that set of discourses, drawn from a diversity of sources. I hope the general 4D art reader, which itself is an oxymoronic conceptual persona, will agree with my assessment, or explain to me why my ideas (or those cited below) are dumb and irrelevant, and/or point to other information that helps us crowd source a useful "image" for 4D/art today. Some of the selections will pertain to passages in the essay I am submitting with the Oxford/Ruskin application, and these will be noted as such.

1

TITLE: "Google Sets Out to Disrupt Curating With Artificial Intelligence"
AUTHOR: Ben Davis
PUBLICATION: Artnet (news)
DATE: 14 January, 2017

LINK: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/google-artificial-intelligence-812147

NOTES: Ben Davis was my editor at artinfo and is an excellent net.art analyst and art critic. His first essay of 2017 covers Google Cultural Institute projects touting very large database-rooted programs for machining the art curator. I recommend the article in its entirety. Davis provides an informed perspective on the latest intersections of art and technology, which helps deconstruct the pitch and product (technology) relative to the subject and object (art). His observations and examples directly apply to the sections 1 and 2a of "Time for the 4D Art Thing," with respect to databases/-visualization, and subtextually, the problems of time-/object-flattening inherent in computer processing of the actual. Davis touches on some robust theoretical issues affecting the future of art, as it is being designed in "Silicon Valley," and promulgated via social media, TED Talks, and other forums with significant reach and influence. One of those issues is comparative, involving the Research and Development budget of Google, compared, for example to the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts budget for R and D. The money-issue extends to the "disruption" produced by Google, potentially affecting the "job" of curating.

QUOTE(S):

C.P. Snow’s classic essay “The Two Cultures” describes how Western education has fatally divided between cultural intellectuals and scientists, separated by mutual incomprehension. Snow saw it as of the utmost importance to bring these two sides together. The promise of something like Google Cultural Institute should be to do just that for art and technology.

Yet, in reviewing its output so far, I can’t help but think of the anecdote in Snow’s essay, when a scientist is asked what kind of literature he reads, and replies “Books? I prefer to use my books as tools.” Characteristically, the cultural objects that the Google Cultural Institute has under its care are referred to simply as “assets,” an unflattering bit of jargon. “We have this database of millions of great assets, and we try to find ways to create new experiences,” the Institute’s Laurent Gaveau told Wired last year.

...

The pitch is to make art engaging to web-savvy people, which is all good, but it stalls out because it seems to have no theory of why art, in particular, might be more significant than any other body of images to play around with online. When you try and figure out what it all means, you are left with the impression of having listened to a product pitch meeting through a keyhole, where all I can hear is “art… digital… accessibility… disruption… change the world!”

I hate to be the art critic who says that the missing piece here is art criticism, but that is exactly what I think.

2

TITLE: Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design
AUTHOR: Ellen Mueller
PUBLICATION: Textbook (Oxford University Press)
DATE: 16 January, 2016

LINK: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/elements-and-principles-of-4d-art-and-design-9780190225148

NOTES: 4D art has its first real primer! Mueller's text has much to recommend it. As an instructional manual for 4D art/design teachers and students, Elements offers its academic users many classroom exercises and technical tips. The book maps a basic familiarity with the most prevalent professional 4D applications (exclusive of painting and sculpture). It aggregates a diverse profile-sampler of 4D practitioners in art world/creative industries, either auto-identified as such by the practitioner via plentiful interviews, or framed as such by the author. The primary problem with Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design is definitional. Mueller chooses to locate her definition of 4D/art focally on the time-line. Also her conflation of art and design is problematic. It conforms with the trending/inclusive/"creative" omni-definition of the expressive that spans art, crafts, architecture, writing, teaching, performance, design, computing, camera-based activities, activism and - well, pretty much everything else one can think of. In that flex-"art" everyone is or can be an "artist" situationally, and "art" is fungible, a term that can be assigned to nearly anything (thing or not).

QUOTE(S):

The three dimensions - height, width, and depth - are augmented in 4D design by time. It is the fourth dimension. Although we all have a basic understanding of time, there are many different definitions of this term depending on the field from which one approaches it. For our purposes, we will say that *time* is the progression of events and existence from the past, through the present, and into the future. One could even simply say that time refers to change.

...

Four-dimensional art and design refers to those practices that involve time, the fourth dimension, in some way. For the purposes of this book, we will define art as those practices whose products and experiences are to be appreciated mainly for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content, while design will be defined as practices that focus on users and work within constraints established by a client. Having noted this differentiation, it is important to immediately acknowledge the border between art and design is nebulous and overlaps a great deal in certain areas. Examples of 4D practices include motion graphics, film/video, performance art, social practice, sound art, installation, Internet art, game design, animation, and so on.

...

Fast-forward to the present day, and many of the most popular art and design practices - whether online videos, animated GIFs, the opening titles of a movie, flash mobs, video games, websites, and so on - embrace the use of time. The elements and principles of 4D art and design are central to our ability to create and critique contemporary art and design.

3

TITLE: Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820
AUTHOR: Liam Gillick
PUBLICATION: Book (Columbia University Press)
DATE: March 2016

LINK: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/industry-and-intelligence/9780231170208

NOTES: Liam Gillick himself presents an object case study for a successful neo-"art world" approach to personification and contextualization as the content for answers to "What is art?" and "Who is an artist?" today. From my perspective Gillick represents in his person and various personas/roles in the "art domain" a tactical methodology to subverting standard art definitions. Simultaneously, his interventions occur within the bounds of orthodoxy for art and aesthetics, or theory. Gillick's intellectual brilliance is I think indisputable, and its expressive features complicated. Industry and Intelligence proposes a model for time relative to Contemporary Art - or rather, Gillick's narrative/characterization of/for it - that redefines time-art in terms of historicity with implications for subjective and objective notional aesthetics. The effort, from a 4D perspective, is generative of many curiosities and potential discursive threads. The quote below was included in a version of the essay as counterplay to Ellen Mueller's definition of 4D art/artist.

QUOTE:

Contemporary art endures. It survives because it is neither the product of a true academy nor an artist-critic-generated description of choice but rather a term that has for some time been a tolerable description for an increasingly wide range of art and artlike activity that cannot be completely captured by modernist or postmodernist accounts of visual art. Contemporary art is a leaky container that can accommodate many contradictory structures and desires.

4

TITLES: [a] "The Truth of Art" and [b] "Towards the New Realism"
AUTHOR: Boris Groys
PUBLICATION: e-flux Journal, [a] #71 and [b] #77
DATE: [a] March and [b] November 2016

LINK: [a] http://www.e-flux.com/journal/71/60513/the-truth-of-art/ and [b] http://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/77109/towards-the-new-realism/

NOTES: Boris Groys "Truth of Art" is tactically adherent to Walter Benjamin's inventive non-sequitur anti-art methodology, sublimating art to the Word with a technological/social media update. Upon close reading, the relevance of their applied art-metaphors collapses, even if the density and political urgency of the texts functionally blur the value of definitional integrity and other essential factors in any discourse for art on its own terms. Both Groys and Benjamin relentlessly and brilliantly redefine art in idiosyncratic, suppressive linguistic hierarchies outside art's own traditions, co-opting aesthetics for the geo-politics they advocate, using art as the context for a hybridic revolutionary/nostalgic reformation. I consider both Benjamin's and Groys' art texts to be prescriptive fictional narratives with some brutalist, concrete-seeming illustrations useful in provocation and associative de-meaning. Eventually the arguments proposed in their work dissolve into accidental comedy rooted in their patternist, disjunctive assertions, which are couched in the vernacular of tech-promotion and a version of literary art and theory with strict semantic parameters. The opening paragraph of "Truth of Art" is included here as an asymmetrical counterbalance to Mueller's conflation of design and art in Elements and Principles of 4D Art and Design. "Towards the New Realism" contains many lines pertinent to topics discussed in my essay(s). Specifically, I thought Groys' analysis of current "realism" for art and writers to be sufficiently contrary to my own to merit referential inclusion for juxtaposition purposes.

QUOTES:

[a]

The central question to be asked about art is this one: Is art capable of being a medium of truth? This question is central to the existence and survival of art because if art cannot be a medium of truth then art is only a matter of taste. One has to accept the truth even if one does not like it. But if art is only a matter of taste, then the art spectator becomes more important than the art producer. In this case art can be treated only sociologically or in terms of the art market—it has no independence, no power. Art becomes identical to design.

[b]

Only when writers and artists begin to feel like failures in their conflict with reality will they ask themselves what it means to conform to reality, to live a simple life like everybody else allegedly does. An inner, psychological problem is projected towards the outside. In his A Confession, Tolstoy wrote that he was curious why “simple people” do not commit suicide but instead go on living, even when they must know that life has no meaning or goal. This question led him to take an interest in the way of life of people living beyond privileged literary and intellectual circles. Here one can ask, of course, if this assumption that “simple people” are internally, psychologically in conflict with their way of life and experience their life as meaningless is not a pure fiction—Tolstoy’s projection of his own inner conflicts onto the psyches of others. However, the violent explosion of the October Revolution posthumously confirmed Tolstoy’s diagnosis. Thus, writers and artists, if they want to be realist, have to learn to live with the suspicion that their descriptions of the human psyche are pure fiction—until history confirms the realism of their work.

5

TITLE: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art
AUTHOR: Linda Dalrymple Henderson
PUBLICATION: Textbook (MIT Press)
DATE: First edition 1983/Revised edition 2013

LINK: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/fourth-dimension-and-non-euclidean-geometry-modern-art

NOTES: Linda Henderson's text is one of the few serious and extensive art historical treatments on/for 4D. It is certainly not informed by an authorial/artist's eye. However, Henderson is diligent in surveying a diverse portfolio of artists for citation. The Reintroduction section in the revised edition is a welcome addition to the original book, covering much 4D aesthetic/practical territory from the 1950s to 2000. No doubt the new edition is a response to demand from the many emergent 4D academic programs for material on the subject. I also find Henderson's selective criteria problematic.

QUOTE:

A surprise awaited me, however, in the library. When I pulled out the appropriate card catalog drawer, there was a collection of books under the heading “Fourth dimension (philosophy)” that had nothing to do with Einstein. The divider card bore an additional note: “under this heading are entered only philosophical and imaginative works. For mathematical works, see Hyperspace. See also Space and time.” The fourth dimension of these texts was not time but an extra suprasensible dimension of space, of which our three-dimensional world might be merely a section or boundary. The roots of this idea were apparent in the books on four-dimensional geometry filed under “Hyperspace.” Yet, it was the “philosophical and imaginative” implications of four-dimensional space – primarily as an invisible, higher reality – that had caught the attention of the general public by the turn of the twentieth century, as these books made clear.

6

TITLE: The Fourth Dimension
AUTHOR: Rudy Rucker
PUBLICATION: Text (Dover)
DATE: 1984

LINK: http://www.rudyrucker.com/thefourthdimension/

NOTES: Rudy Rucker is a unique figure in the 4D "world" - a qualified mathematician, writer/blogger and dimensional populist whose diverse output has proved consistently valuable over the past several decades, for all who are curious about what 4D is and might be. He is a wonder-thinker and tremendous translational visualizer, but he brings to the 4D conversation a pragmatism that grounds the imaginary in the operational. Rucker convinces one that 4D is a DIY proposition, whatever one's technical literacy, regardless of one's disciplinary affiliations. This quote is included as a counterbalance to Mueller's and others' "commonsensical" progression, geometric 1D-2D-3D/4D[= Time].

QUOTE:

Before going any further, I should stop to answer a question that some of you may be asking. If we’re going to think of time as a fourth dimension, does that mean that all the things we’ve said about the fourth dimension are really about time? The answer is no. Just as there is no one fixed direction in space that we always call “width,” there need be no one fixed higher dimension that is always called “time.” All our talk about the fourth dimension has enabled us to think of a variety of higher dimensions: a direction in which one can jump out of space, a direction in which space is curved, a direction in which one moves to reach alternate universes. We can, if we like, insist that the past/future axis of time is the fourth dimension. And then we pretty well have to say that the ana/kata axis out of space is the fifth dimension, and the sixth dimension is the direction to other curved spacetimes. But there’s no point being so rigid about it. Nobody goes around saying width is the second dimension and height is the third dimension. Instead we just say that height and width are space dimensions. Rather than saying time is the fourth dimension, it is more natural to say that time is just one of the higher dimensions.

7

TITLE: Multiple Sources, notably After Art, American Art Since 1945, Painting Beside Itself, plus more
AUTHOR: David Joselit
PUBLICATION: Texts, interviews, curator statements, etc.
DATE: N/A

LINK: http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/06/art_books/david-joselit-with-greg-lindquist

NOTES: I recoil at David Joselit's characterization of painting as an "outmoded medium," and would attribute the generally held notions of 4D art to emerge from this sort of outmoded thinking affiliated with the art theoreticians affiliated with October/Artforum and the default textbook Art Since 1900. The thread is exemplified in the contentious discussion of painting between Benjamin Buchloh and Gerhard Richter reprinted in that book. Nonetheless Joselit is a prevalent force in the current dimensional play for art's identity and the complicated web of cross-disciplinary analysis sited in "the art world," usually "creatively" configured in fictions that juggle itemized concepts variously applicable to network/computer/media/communications technology + aesthetics/theory/philosophy/psychology/etc. + art craft + pedagogy + curatorial practice ++++... Whether those concepts make sense in a cohesive way is something else, and whether they make sense for art is something else again.

QUOTES:

I think that in many ways what I’m trying to do is to understand the form of networks as they are aggregated or concentrated in objects. Objects and networks are not separable, they’re linked in a variety of ways, and I wanted to think about how they intersect, very materially, in various kinds of contemporary art practices. In “Painting Beside Itself,” I write about the most traditional sort of art object, and some would say the most market-corrupted, which is painting. In terms of how conceptual art’s notion of the circulation of propositions, the dematerialization of work, and the understanding of how meaning migrates could be folded back into that object status. So, in a way, After Art is a kind of expansion of a set of themes within painting to a broader economy of art practice.

...

What I’m interested in asking is, what is the form? What are the forms that a network can assume? And that may or may not be addressed when one is actually using such networks. Sometimes it might be better to use an outmoded medium, like painting, to think about multitudes of images or populations of images in some way.

8

TITLE: "Tino Sehgal Dances Across the Line Between Art and Life"
AUTHOR: Dorian Batycka
PUBLICATION: Hyperallergic
DATE: 17 October, 2016

LINK: http://hyperallergic.com/329809/tino-sehgal-dances-across-line-art-life/

NOTES: I include this quote as prototypical of the accomplished "cultural producer" profile. Batycka's essay is remarkable on many levels. Certainly, the portion of the passage celebrating object-less art below is relevant to "Time for the 4D Art Thing." The idea of destroying a social-construct to save it (which extends to the Raivo Puusemp citation below) as "art" is peculiar, and Batycka touches on that notion's geo-political, neo-liberal association. The subjects raised in the essay and by Sehgal's performance are not superficial, whatever impression the event might have had on a participant/performer (or one excluded from being present), and whatever impression Batycka's review might have on the reader, now that it has actualized as an object in the art-database/archive. For instance, is conceptual art art if it results in the "death" (or death) of the artist, and/or the dissolution of the concept of art itself? Would that circumstance be mitigated by a good review and lots of documentation, enshrined on a server who-knows-where? Developments in the virtual and/or actual digital/analog hybrid "art world" complicate matters. Consider for instance indicative exhibits "Profile" by Artie Vierkant and "Rare Earth" by Mark Tribe for amplification, or the efforts to "machine" the field of curating by the Google Cultural Institute, as described by Ben Davis in his artnet essay "Google Sets Out to Disrupt Curating With 'Machine Learning.'" Is "All of It" the sign of an emergent neo-colonial form?

QUOTE:

Sehgal is an artist whose work eviscerates any boundary between dance, choreography, human social relations, sculpture, and political economy, in the process forging new ground as one of the world’s most relevant, provocative, and puzzling cultural producers of our time. He has helped breathe new life into contemporary art by deascensioning it away from material-object-oriented culture, creating famously objectless works — what curator Jens Hoffmann famously called a “museum of dance.” His tailor-made projects investigate how myriad social relations can form the substance of an artwork beyond any static or strictly material essence. It’s a type of socially engaged practice that I have come to really appreciate in recent years, but one that Sehgal did not invent. Since the 1950s, well-known groups such as Fluxus and the Situationists, as well as more underground collectives like “Museum,” began to change how artworks could be seen as per the formatively gestural. An interesting and little-known example is the work of Raivo Puusemp, whose radical experiments with group dynamics and sociopolitical processes as a conceptual artist in 1970s eventually led him to become mayor of Rosendale, NY, whereby a lifelong project saw art fully dissolve into politics so as to become indefinable from one another. Sehgal, however, is much more subtle. He is neither strictly an artist, dancer, choreographer, or theatre-maker, and his work is increasingly difficult for curators and critics to define. This is really what I like most about his work. It’s what curator Mouna Mekouar describes as Sehgal’s ability to encompass numerous “hybrid” characteristics.