Ordinary Aura

oh man. i see this size and typeface, illustration style, i'm immediately back to holding one of these with fingers in as many places as possible. i actually have used the chooseyourown series in teaching lately as an example of thinking about Database as Symbolic Form. The database is the new novel, manovich says.

these are some good images today - i'm a total sucker for the aesthetic of the list, the catalog...

i've been real interested in the rise of this aesthetic over the last few years, the way in which it's popping up everywhere. what does it mean?

i guess artists render the functional non/dis/mis-functional all the time, but I wonder what it means when a tool (database,catalog) is looked at as a beautiful thing?

there's something about fetishes going on. i don't know my freud-lacan so well though.

cheesy chain restaurants now hang old rusty hammers and saws on the wall as decoration - duchamp appropriates a bottle-rack as readymade - readymade magazine teaches you how to turn last season's gallery object trends into furniture.

i keep thinking about consumerism and our show - everything that's been said here about aura and art, found objects, also holds true on the retail floor. aaron betsky wrote about this, I'll post some later.

subscriptions to cabinet and mcsweeneys have been the only subscriptions worth the money since artissues went out of business.

my very favorite catalog-artist (and one of my favorite artists) is wa'lid raad. his work with/as the atlas group is the first time I could see someone engaging the attraction of this whole found/archivist aesthetic with a big view of the ways in which tools are instruments of power even when you mis-use them.

Sometiemes you wonder, but you never learn, whether this paradise lies in the future or the past.

What a great line. Very Borges. Also a pretty strange ending for a kid's book, I think; it's an ending with no conclusion, no wrap-up.

Bouncing off the writing time thread: I think I like this image more by itself, and the two passages as complete texts with the rest of their stories implicit, than I ever did in the original form (and I had all those books too). The thing about Choose Your Own Adventure is that it really means "choose one of these adventures we wrote for you." The less text you're faced with, the more story you're forced to derive yourself out of the implications of what's there.

yes yes yes. man with a movie camera has been big for me for a long time, and manovich explained some of the reasons why. I've always said that if I had to I could teach whole classes looking at nothing but that movie as an example.

about your observations of the chooseyourown books - your preference for making your own connections, rather than choosing between someone else's -

The less text you're faced with, the more story you're forced to derive yourself out of the implications of what's there.

this is consistent with some of your other posts on mystery.

some might read this statement as aspiring at universal - as in "ambiguity is always better than directness in art." others might read you as looking for what is better for you.

I wonder if we could choose another route - the whole objective/subjective fork seems like avoidance. Could we instead try to locate this preference in context? The same way that we might say that in one context, oil paints are more useful, and in another context, acrylics?

When and how would it be useful to read a choose your own adventure book from front to back? when it and how would it be useful to read only one possible story-route and then throw it away?....

framing preferences in this way might help us differentiate between some of the different uses and values of this word "aura."

More thinking aloud.

Your questions about content are good ones. Thinking about when it would be good or useful or evocative to choose a fragmented experience over a unified one, or a continuous experience over a unique, limited one, I go back again to the encyclopedia as a model for this kind of structure. If you absolutely need to find out about a single topic, you look up that topic, and maybe follow cross-references to related topics; if you're just cruising around for knowledge, you might flip through the book at random, or follow stream-of-consciousness associations, reading a paragraph here and there. The question you're raising is how these two experiences of a single structure become relevant when we're talking about a narrative, rather than description or information.

I suppose it depends why you're approaching the narrative. If I'm reading about the history of Moslem Spain, I'm probably going to want a more comprehensive, coherent experience -- again because, to echo what you said earlier, what interests me is the basis of the story, the thing I'm being told about.

If I'm reading out of idle curiosity (a powerful motivator), or if I'm reading a book in a genre I'm very familiar with, I may skip around from scene to scene to get the good stuff. I think reading genre is possibly a good model to think about: when I pick up a mystery or a horror book (less so with science fiction), I know what the story's about; what I'm interested in is the way it's told. Again, if I'm very familiar with the tropes of that genre, an entire story built out of those tropes may bore me, whereas a fragment that refers to those tropes, without spelling them out, may be much more evocative.

What I'm positing here is an audience with a pre-existing familiarity with the tropes or the structure that the artist/writer is using. But that suggests a kind of insularity, preaching to the choir so to speak, that isn't so appealing as a way to make art, particularly for this show. Is that familiarity necessary? Is "mystery," as I mentioned it before, built out of familiar traces in unfamiliar context? Shades of Freud there, of course.

I do think, though, that the shock of seeing familiar things made unfamiliar is a big part of what I'm talking about. I've just been making icons for my various maps this afternoon, and I'm expending a lot of attention on what's recognizable, what reads as city-map-ness. So in that sense, I am counting on the audience's familiarity, not with the language of the art world, but with particular images and symbols..

More on this later.

Your posited audience decides on a function they require of a work - I'm interested in this way of anticpating viewer engagement. Your hypothetical viewer does take the perspective of the studied and knowledgeable decision-maker. As in "based on my past experience, do I require A or B of this situation," like a painter who has used oils and acrylics and who now has to decide which to use on a new work.

But I was thinking too of an expanded view of this question, including in the picture less explicit or knowledgeable decisions. The people who've never used paint before, the people who just assume that oils are all there are, who never even heard of acrylics, the people who assume that acrylics are always better and never think twice.

For example, certainly an artist's or viewer's decision to privilege ambiguity (the "specific ambiguity" I think O'Connor preaches, not the ambiguity of Barbara's hypothetical freshmen art students) must reflect certain expectations of art and life, and even certain social, economic, or political situations.

I don't expect that we can ever fully predict audiences in order to target them, nor is that something I desire. For example, we might guess that during the siege of Sarejevo, a resident of that town might be less inclined to expect ambiguity or mystery of art, when survival is foremost on the brain. We might just as easily imagine the opposite - that mystery would be what let them escape from the threat for awhile. I've heard of both. Either way, art's role and content is contingent on context.

The point is not to anticipate every possible predisposition, but to acknowledge the context-dependency of definitions of truth, goodness, or beauty in art, at least in rhetoric, and hopefully in the work itself.

This is similar to what a good designer does too I guess - as in your last comment Seth, anticipating the user's possible expectations of function, and either facilitating them or clearly denying them, so that they move on to the next item on the shelf. (Some too would set out to change or challenge those expectations.)

An example would be the treatment of race in contemporary art. From what I've been learning from some of our grads who work more with that than I do, we could contrast the tactics of early-nineties "identity politics" artwork with more recent treatments of race. In that earlier work, audience expectations were more often targeted and predicted by artists - as in "white viewers will always be more at ease in the museum than will black viewers, so I will divide my audience and make them aware of their place."

Today, instead it's the positionality itself that artists seek to highlight when race is explicitly acknowledged in art. Instead of predicting a viewer's expectations and making them aware of them, these artists seek to make us aware of the fact that we have expectations at all, and that these are as informed by race as by a myriad of other things.

I know this is getting abstract again - I have been challenged by these last fews days' posts though to try to think of ways to address it directly in work for the show.