m y q u e s t i o n s/ "p o s t-p r o d u c t i o n" by nicolas bourriaud

24 Hour Psycho clip: Dougla Gordon first shown in Gallway and Berlin in 1996

1. What if you are a 88 year-old artist and you continue to make modernist abstract paintings even in 2010 and beyond…how is your “production” focused art and your artistic paradigm perceived; archaic, unnecessary or not socially relevant, as there are enough ready-made images? Is your work considered useful as possible “pre-production” material to be stored for a later montage?

Example of Situationist Art: key dates 1957-1972

2. Is the advent of the powerful medium of Cinema so shaping our consciousness that it is provoking both collaborative thinking and performance in the visual arts?

“Art takes on a script-like value; screenplays become form.” Bourriaud

This comment makes me think that when artists are incorporating other artists’ work these other works become actors or characters making (guest) appearances. There is a celebration of mis-en-Scene in many of the installations inviting the viewers to be part of the movie.

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Pierre Joseph

"Tool Table" by Thomas Hirschorn

Pierre Huyghe "Big Kingdom"

Rirkrit Tiravanija "Untitled, 2002 (the raw and the cooked)"

Philip Parreno

3. Isn’t Post-Production, by Bourriaud, in a way fitting very much into Western Art’s insistence on defining what “new” is happening “now?” Isn’t that idea contributing to a linear concept of a movement or trend? He mentions “…. artists re-examine notions of creation, authorship, and originality through use of cultural artifacts; which is new.”

Liam Gillick (right)

4. An abundance of images bombard us in ways not experienced until the late 20^th century. How much are these fleeting, sometimes unwelcome images are like sounds we don’t want to hear? How much has the loss of control over what and how much we see affected this “new re-mixing” of cultural objects in contemporary art and to the art/music metaphor?

Art today seems to be focusing on the details of this barrage of cultural artifacts and saying “whoa, slowdown…let’s look at that more closely.”

5.doc re-mixing previously recorded music as analogous to what is going on in visual arts today. Could he not have mentioned Jazz, which has been crossing cultural lines, borrowing and incorporating, layering and mixing and challenging Western tradition since its inception?

Giant Steps by John Coltrane (1959)