The uncapturable ... recaptured

Wandered into an old friend today, courtesy of Seb's Open Research, yes it does seem that, to some extend, like elephants, the Internet Never Forgets

The uncapturable

in one fell stroke of a stripe of red midst the deep blues, Barnett Newman defeated the entire reprint industry. They can copy his stripe all they wish, duplicate every non-variance of his pigment tone and brushwork, even blow their copies up just as high and mighty, but they cannot usurp his work's position as the Voice of Fire.
[...] Only this ephemerial state of being the uncapturable, the marker of a place in time and space, the now of being here, this is the only option in a digital rebroadcast future, an inevitable convergence path for all art in a digital age.
And that future is here.

via radio-weblogs.com

I was reminded of this post today in the whole Cory Doctorow vs Nina Paley discussion, which is an excellent read, true, but they still seem to miss the hard fact point how if what you can do can be copied by machines, then look out for your job because the machines will do it! That's true if you fold towels for a living too.

Tags » Barnett Newman art copyright digital rights robots

9 September 2010
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over 1 year ago garym @teledyn responded:

ah but it is explained, empirically, with this postcard! Notice anything odd about the postcard? Compare it to virtually every other artifact that is represented in print. When I bought it, I had purchased several others and had set them all out on the kitchen table when I noticed what set THIS one apart: it does not show the canvas as do ALL the other, it shows the PLACE. VoF is not a painting, it is a PLACE. The place cannot be replicated because it is a place, and in the case of this particular place marker, unlike, say, Michaelangelo's David that can be replicated and still convey some sense of its artistry, this item loses ALL meaning outside of the whole-system immediacy of its surroundings.

Other artifacts have some of this quality, but because of their complexity, because they are objects-in-themselves, they do allow for replication. Consider for example an obvious favourite of mine, Klee's Head of a Man (my profile image) which was, in my 70's youth, endlessly replicated in Athena stores in shopping malls across the continent. I thought I knew that painting ... until, by accident, I came literally face to face with it. I had become disoriented in a Bern Switzerland museum, I round a corner and there it was, on a small wall by itself: iirc it is only about the size of a sheet of printer paper! Unlike the washed out posters iconic to the malls, it was vibrantly toned and full of texture. Clearly the REAL Klee was also a place, indelibly marked in my experience, but that does not stop the poster shops from selling its movie-poster sized replicant, and does not stop people from enjoying those prints with maybe not the intensity, but nonetheless some essence of the original intended experience.

If I paint a wall in my house, or my school or factory, a deep midnight-blue and push a red stripe through it, I may still say to people that they can find me by the red stripe, but what I have conveys no sense of the original, it is instead another original. Even if I make a photographic hi-res wallpaper and coat my wall in that, I still won't have duplicated the space in time that is VoF, his copy-protection remains completely intact.

I first saw VoF at the opening, a few days after, and took my eldest son & daughter, who were about 5 and 3 at the time. As usual, after the trip I asked the kids to draw pictures of what they had seen and Linton chose to draw the VoF, only, prophetic of this postcard I'd find 10 years later, to capture the experience, he drew the PLACE, with the floor line of the wall containing the work AND he drew a picture of a person ... with a line drawn over his head.

Who's that?
"that's me"
Why the line?
"that shows how tall I am"

In the brochure we'd brought home from that exhibit, there is a blurb by the artist, an answer to the question, "Why did you paint this?" where he answered, "To show people how big they are."

over 1 year ago garym @teledyn responded:

if that is the effect, then you are absolutely correct, but IS that the effect?

The artist's comment says it was part of his intention, but that is not the effect either the photographer of the postcard or my young archivist took. And so, then, is it even a 'painting', or has it become a sculpture? Or is the room itself the sculpture, set apart from other rooms by the presence of that canvas?

My point being that VoF establishes a unique space-time event; I don't know if you've been there or not, but I would say "I have been to Voice of Fire" and everyone (at least at that time) knew where I had been, and to replicate my experience they would not dream of painting a wall, they would spontaneously travel to the National Gallery. They'd want to Be There.

If I say instead that I had been at a Pat Metheny show, many of them might head to dimeadozen and grab the bootleg and then talk with me about the artistic nuances of the musical theatrics and while they'd agree they "wished they'd been there" (assuming they like Pat) they would still feel that they got SOMETHING OF VALUE out of the bootleg, they must or dime wouldn't be such a popular site!

Having become accustomed by television to the 4th wall, they may even count themselves lucky not to have been faced by ugly bathrooms and awkward parking, sitter fees and all that ambiance of ten thousand fans. Given the 4th-wall version of theatric reality, suddenly the DVD has all the best seats, impeccable 'sound', it is pure perfection for the isolationist experiencer.

But of what value is a bootleg VoF? Yes, you might get a sense of its scale vs your own and come away with that, you may as I did stand in awe of the absolute consistency of the pigment across so wide a field (that's not easy) but you are more likely to just walk right past it as people do most works of public art ... until someone says, "Meet me at the statue of the stacked cups outside the metro station" and then you know exactly the place. And you can't take it home and hide in the headphones to 'get it'. Ya gots to Be There.

Like being at Slugs to see the 70's Sun Ra space pageant, you can play the bootleg to friends as much as you like, very very few of them will not think you have gone totally insane. But take one of them along to the roaratorical real-time whole systems Happening of it, and suddenly they see.

This is the future of the digitally reproduceable arts. It isn't the notes and tones and pattern cleverness of symphony that is the show you need to leave the couch to see, it is the anthropologic of the place and time; in Schubert's day people would go back night after night for those cadenzas never sure what they'd get, just as they did for Sun Ra at Slugs, because every night was a human reality, a dialog in an event in space in time that was, like VoF, possibly duplication friendly in concept (anyone can create A Place, every good pub owner knows that) but nonetheless completely unique it itself. They create a SPECIAL place.

The 24-track recording, on the other hand, or the digital photo or the DVD, however skillfully crafted, was DESIGNED to be duplicated.

And so it shall.

TeledyN

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