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RAM-MUSEU.
The time-image and the archivistic relationship in contemporary art |
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| The following text is an excerpt from the forthcoming book by José Luis Brea, e-cK: electronic cultural capitalism. This is, specifically, part of a chapter devoted to analysing the transformations of the contemporary art museum — transformations marked by the irruption of the image-movement, the new information technologies and the accelerated circulation of information. These phenomena, which have transformed the way we engage with the exhibition, are the focus of in_to exhibition; alternatives to the exhibition, a project produced by the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica. |
JOSÉ LUIS BREA
My purpose in the lines that follow is to question the present state of what has been called the archivistic relationship of art, in the strict present defined by a profound renovation of the conditions of the general management of knowledge resulting from the appearance of new technologies of information and communications.
In particular, I would like to focus on the de-centring —as I see it, crucial to any analysis of the disappearance from the mechanisms of art of a predominantly mnemonic relationship— brought about by the irruption in its field of the time-image, to use the Deleuzian expression. This is due not so much to the appearance, with the cinema, of an image-movement in the history of culture and the practices of entertainment as, and above all, to the general spread of the uses of the time-image in the realm of artistic practices. In relation to this fact, whose fundamental moments are found first in the development of video art and subsequently in that of art film and in the current inflation of the video-screening, I would like to note three problems that seem to me to be crucial.
The first is the way that such uses of the time-image radically transform the logic of perception, causing spatialized presentation in a stopped time —the characteristic form of presentation of static images— to seem increasingly inappropriate. The logic of the museistic gaze favoured by the white box as the privileged context of perception tends as a result to prove less and less adequate, and not only on account of the need to alter the ordinary lighting conditions (that logic that tends to turn the old white boxes into new black boxes) but because of the fundamental alteration of the time of reading, of perception, that this entails. It is no longer a question of the microtimes required to read a static image, which in being apprehended in a single time, or at most the overlapping of a very few simultaneous times, calls for a scarcely more expanded time to be perceived (it is estimated that two seconds is the average length of time devoted to the contemplation of a picture in an exhibition visit); rather, it is a question of a time with a far more extended duration that calls for a different logic of viewing, a logic evidently closer to that of the cinema.
The result is that the new museums and art biennials tend to
be endless galleries of microcinemas, long tunnels lined with
an endless rosary of black boxes screening pictures: the convergence
of art and time-image is only achieved at the cost of a confluence
of its establishments: at the cost of a progressive conversion
of the museum into a miniaturized new city of a thousand cinemas,
a kind of Babel-like micro-kinepolis.
The dérive from the museum to the realm of the culture industry and entertainment finds another argument in its favour here, and not only because the dynamic of perception, of viewing, favours the ‘simultaneous and collective’ reception that is the basis of mass culture, as Benjamin saw so clearly, but also because there is in the very logic of perception of the time-image an inclination to distracted, dissipated, unreflecting perception.
This, which has to do with the phenomenology of the perception of the time-image, is also due —second feature— to the inherent structure of its ontology, which introduces difference into its itinerary by way of duration, de-centring the mnemonic process —and the possibility of reflexivity— and distributing it in contrast in the course of time as a ‘differing from difference’, as a différance, in Derrida’s term. There, representation is no longer subject to an economy of representation regulated by the continual return of the same, by the repetition of identity.
In effect, while the static image has its ontology defined by the permanent repetition in its scenario of the same —retained against all temporality, against all passing of time—in the time-image, in contrast, it is difference that takes place on the actual surface of the visual sign. That its mnemonic potential declines there is obvious: remembering (oneself) —as Rachel, the Replicant in Blade Runner well knew— and ‘being oneself’ always consists in the conservation of memory that static images retain, while the time-image speaks in contrast of the transient nature of the event. Not that it, what has occurred, returns and stays there, but precisely that it goes and ceases to be, forever. That, as the other Replicant observes, it is lost forever, like a teardrop in the rain…
My aim here is to insist on the idea that there is an intrinsic link between art (image) and memory, a firm core of mnemonic potential in the visual, but only in so far as artistic practice takes place in the realm of the static image, and not in the time-image, where area the capacity of the image to operate as memory to be read and recovered (ROM memory) is altered, and it offers itself instead as charged testimony to transience and disappearance.
One last feature of this irruption of the time-image in the space of artistic practice has to do with the great autonomy with which, given its inherently non-site-specific and reproducible nature, it is possible to organize the scenarios of its taking place in public, of its producing an audience.
It is, to put it another way, the great facility for distributing itself with no other mediation than that of its own autonomous and de-localized scenario —the screen— which definitely allows it to achieve that conquest of ubiquity announced by Valéry, with which it enacts the definitive superfluity of the museistic establishment —as a spatialized mechanism located in some precise here and now, which the work no longer has any need of— for the housing and publicising of the latest productions.
I would like to continue this reflection by suggesting now
that the contemporary scenario of the new telematic technologies —that
is to say, the scenario produced by the evolution and convergence
of the technologies of data processing, information storage
and treatment, making possible its present instantaneous and
interactive long-distance transmission— point toward
a new horizon that definitively displaces and resituates the
functions of the museum in relation to what are also necessarily
the new functions of artistic practices and symbolic production
in present-day societies.
That new scenario of the circulation
of information in fact makes the effect of cosmopolitan encounter
in a scenario of anthropological recognition of cultural difference
possible, hindering enormously the partisan maintenance of
homologated and unifying forms of representation — the
critique of which has in no sense ceased to be indispensable,
all the more so when than the appropriation of these mechanismsy
hegemonic formations is, in contrast, continually extending
its power.
At the same time —second de-centring— they favour even more the potency of the absorption of the content of knowledge by the technologies of reproduction. The carousel of slides with which the historicised knowledge of art was transmitted all through the 20th century is now being replaced by new and vastly more powerful electronic tools (from Google to the blog) that no longer even refer to any specific, physically located archive but are permanently online in the interconnected network of the users themselves, in this way contribute precisely to rendering the recoverable file and the hard disc increasingly unnecessary, while at the same time relegating the tour of the museum —which has lost its function in relation to the value of knowledge linked to the experience of art and placed all its hopes in the management of its exhibitive value— to the purest realms of the ‘live’, which in performance and in the forms of relational and neo-Situationist aesthetics now effect the translation into the space of the visual of the uncontrolled mesmeric force of the concert, of what takes place in the real, as a ‘politics of the event’.
Finally, there is the de-centring that the time-image introduces in order to de-inscribe from the logic of the visual its power of mnemonic retention, against the force of the passing of time. Now subjected to passing time, the given of the image is invested with other powers, but at the cost of losing that power of eternal retention of the identical in order to ensure a ritornello that could offer the human subject the guarantees and the certainty that would make for an imaginary dwelling in repetition, in the already known.
I would go so far as to suggest that what is at stake behind all these shifts and processes of transformation is something that has to do with all this, and as such is something very profound and deeply disturbing: perhaps a shift in the role and the function of culture, less and less an argument about the reproduction of the settled forms of life —let us say that part of the species’ DNA that is not written biologically— and more and more a potent argument about the constellation and general meshing of interpretations in all their great and irreducible diversity.
It is possible that in the world to come culture will operate less and less as a machine that smothers us in echoes of the past and more as an effective operator of reflexivitythat potentiates our capacities for processing data (the staggering quantity of data we have to deal with at every turn in our daily lives), so that understanding our position in the midst of its irreducible expression we may learn to tolerate the differences, to plot operative relations between the distant and the distant. Culture would then be not so much a tool of memory, under the aegis of Mnemosyne, as a machine for multiplying interpretations, in the order of a knowing that will of necessity now have to be produced as an open mesh, as a public matrix, in the intersection and connectivity of interpretations.
If I am right in what I suggest, perhaps the most relevant question as regards the relationship of the contemporary museum to the new technologies is not how these might help it to survive or keep a hold on in its traditional and probably already obsolete functions.
Instead, the question is about how, by exploiting the potential for the management of knowledge that these technologies attract, the new museums can become efficient nodes for introducing into our perceptual experience reflexivity, interaction, information-processing capacity and interconnection, fostering a sense of community and citizenship among their users; it is about how they might be increasingly able to constitute themselves as RAM operators, operators of connectivity, extending and
making more complex the networks that favour qualified access under enhanced forms for reflecting on and contrasting ever greater quantities of information, and an ever greater number of more critically empowered users… |
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