Viractuality and Post-Conceptual
Art
published in LINKs 1 : Le Virtuel
Post-conceptual
art is that contemporary art that builds upon the legacy of Conceptual Art,
where the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over
traditional aesthetic and material concerns. Post-conceptual art has been
traced to the work of Robert Smithson,[1]
and the intermedia concept employed in the mid-sixties by Fluxus artist Dick
Higgins,[2]
but is now more often connected to digital art production,[3]
where the computer code sets the conceptual rules for a physical production. I
have identified this post-convergent and post-conceptual trend
in 1999 as: viractuality.[4][5]
Joseph Nechvatal, 1% Owns 50% of the World (2014) 36x36Ó
computer-robotic assisted
acrylic on velours. Photo
courtesy Galerie Richard Paris/New York
British
philosopher and theorist of conceptual art Peter Osborne makes the point that Òpost-conceptual
art is not the name for a particular type of art so much as the
historical-ontological condition for the production of contemporary art in
general.Ó[6]
With the increased augmentation of the self via networked electronics, the
virtual now co-exists with the actual (thus the term viractual)[7] as the digital links up with the
organic. Consequently, the
post-conceptual art object demonstrates an interlaced sense of artistic
viractuality that couples the organic with the technological and the static
with the malleable. The post-conceptual art aspect of viractualism is
essentially a visual prosthetic then for the meeting of the machinic and the
corporal dominion. Circumstances that are not fully historically conditioned
yet. Viractual post-conceptual art strives to present in natural light this understanding
with depictions of anti-essentiality of the body. Here, human flesh is undone
by digital disturbances it cannot contain.
Essentially, the foundation of viractualism as post-conceptual art
is that computer technology has become a significant means to making (and
understanding) contemporary art. Consequently, with post-conceptual art we are
investigating art in its many forms of addressing the merging of the computed
(the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This merging in post-conceptual
art is what I call the post-conceptual
viractual. It begins with the realization that every new technology
disrupts previous rhythms of consciousness. For me, the viractual realm is now
the authentic domain of art in light of the information age.
Thus, the post-conceptual art object can be further inscribed as a
thing of viractual liminality which - according to the anthropologist Arnold
van Gennep (based on his anthropological studies of social rites of passage) - is
the condition of being on a threshold between spaces. I wish to suggest that
the terms viractual (and viractuality) may be concordant conceptions helpful in
defining the post-conceptual art object as a third fused inter-spatial place of
the arts - forged from the meeting of the virtual and the actual.
Concerning this viractual span of liminality, I am reminded here
of two very different, yet complimentary, concepts: entrainment and ŽgrŽore.
Entrainment, in electro-physics, is the coupling of two or more oscillators as
they lock into a commonly sensed interacting frequency. In alchemical terms an
ŽgrŽore (an old form of the word agrŽger)
is a third concept or phenomenon that is established from conjoining two
different elements together. I suggest that the term viractual may be a concordant
entrainment/ŽgrŽore conception helpful in defining the post-conceptual art
object as a place of third-fused inter-spatiality which is forged from the
meeting of the virtual and the actual - a concept close to what the military
call augmented reality, which is the
use of transparent displays worn as see-through glasses on which computer data
is projected and layered.
The keystone of the post-conceptualness of post-conceptual art is that virtual producing rule-based computer
technology has become a significant means for making and understanding
contemporary art and that this brings us to a place where one finds the merging
of the computed (the virtual) with the uncomputed corporeal (the actual). This
blending of computational with the object indicates a subsequent emergence of a
new topological cognitive-vision of links between the computed virtual and the
uncomputed corporeal world. Digitization is a key metaphor for post-conceptual
viractuality in the sense that it is the fundamental translating system today.
But I think that in every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest the art
tradition away from conformism that is about to overpower it.
The post-conceptual art object recognizes and uses the power of
digitization while being culturally aware of the values of monumentality and
permanency Ð qualities that can be found in some powerful analog art. This
indicates and initiates communions of the protoplasmic body to virtual spatial
conditions. Consequently, the post-conceptual aspect of art articulates a new
techno-digital sense of life.
Joseph Nechvatal, scOpOphilia
(2009) 19.7x19.7Ó digital animation screen and computer-robotic
assisted acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy Galerie
Richard Paris/New York
Gender here is viewed as an act of becoming that fails to sustain
sex oppression by ceasing to draw the boundaries of the Other. As such it is a
provocation not only to male/female constructions of heterosexuality, but also
to homosexual constructions of identity. This critique of ÔrepresentationÕ in
the aesthetic sense is part of a critique of ÔrepresentationÕ in the political
sense (and vice versa). Art here is seen as political in the sense that it is a
site of power struggles which fail to presuppose a metaphysics which is itself
a politics Ð a politics which establishes an order of values which often
maintains the dominant order of meaning and power over break-through
ideologies. The point is that within viractual creation with post-conceptual
art, all signs are subject to
boundless semiosis - which is to say that they are translatable into other
signs.
Post-conceptualness is a new sensibility in art respecting the
integration of certain aspects of science, technology, myth, consciousness and
curiousity that captures the prevailing art spirit of our age. This viractual zeitgeist is precisely an autopoietic
desiring machine in which everything, everywhere, all at once is connected in a
rhizomatic web of communication. Therefore, the post-conceptual art object is
no longer content with the regurgitation of a standardized analog repertoire of
image-tropes. Rather I detect in post-conceptual
art a fertile attraction towards the abstractions of advanced scientific
discovery - discovery now stripped of its fundamentally reductive logical
methodology.
Personally, my guiding avatar into post-conceptual viractualism
has been Janus - the two-faced Roman God who faces both directions
simultaneously. Janus is similar to the ancient Egyptian God Aker, a two
human-headed deity who surveys the western and eastern gates of duat (the
underworld). As Janus has eyes on both sides of his head, a Janus-like
viractual model would be able to see on every side. Hence he is the symbol for
viractual dehabituation, open-mindedness, and for taking an even-handed view, as
Janus was able to look backward into the past as well as forward into the
future. Moreover he represents a question that has two sides to it.
Joseph Nechvatal, Orgiastic abattOir
flawless ignudiO (2004) 88x66Ó dyptich, computer-robotic assisted
acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy Galerie Richard
Paris/New York
This appreciation of valid antithetical simultaneities is very
useful in reaching nonreductive synthetic conclusions concerning the whirr of
information processing which takes place within the aesthetic viractual body.
Viractual constructs integrate opposites and antitheses and in this respect
differ greatly from typical dualistic thinking; the tendency to formulate
concepts in terms of two exhaustive categories (in viractualityÕs case the
actual and the virtual). Dualistic causality, bolstered by the seductive powers
of linear narration (hence appearing clearer in terms of its authoritative
explanatory closure) appears unsophisticated to me in the realm of
post-conceptual viractuality. Indeed, particularly in the realm of
post-conceptual art, the post hoc ergo
proper hoc (after this, therefore because of this) logical error of assumed
causality is ticklish.
Joseph Nechvatal, madOnna cOl bambinO
(2011) 66x44Ó computer-robotic assisted acrylic on velvet, photo courtesy Galerie Richard Paris/New York
Thus in order to author an explanatory yet non-reified
investigation (free from the deceptive certainties of conjectural cause and
effect) and instrumentally place the emphasis on viractual capacity with
post-conceptual art, I find it necessary to examine the post-conceptual art
object from two directions at once: one direction starting with an inquiry into
the larger philosophical and technical concepts of viractualism (what might be
referred to as the metaphysics and technological ideology surrounding the
details); and also from the other direction, through the examination of
specific artistic events and details. This dual method is a post-conceptual
searching for a dynamic equilibrium of equivalents, not a disanalogous
mechanical cause and effect historicism, which often thwarts the radical
newness of artistic enterprise in an effort to historicize and make what is
radically new familiar and comfortable by placing post-conceptual art into a
smooth, evolutionary continuum where vanguard art is made to seem to have
evolved out of the past, thereby mitigating its newness by homogenizing
differences into a false perception of sameness.
So, viractual post-conceptual art is an important topic because of
what has happened to our visual tendencies with digital immersion. Within
post-conceptual art, the horizon-line and vanishing-point are unmistakably
exhausted tropes that are no longer needed. Indeed the horizon-line and
vanishing-point within virtual space in general appear to me more and more only
as an inappropriate habitual holdover from the Cartesian mentality which has
nothing to do with the specificity of virtuality. The space of post-conceptual
art is an emergent space of vast all-overness and spread-outness quite remote
from the customary Western pinched perspectivist mentality. This entails the
question of visuality, but it also entails questions of peripheral cognition.
And this field of peripheral cognitive-viractuality, a field of artistic endeavor
laced with the juicy strands of imaginative and visionary optics, I believe, is
a field that is now open wide to artists with the advent of viractuality: the
meeting place between virtuality and actuality.
Joseph Nechvatal.
Artiste multimédia, théoricien et essayiste. Ph.D. in « Philosophy of art and new technology ».