[Nettime-bold] Learning from Prada?

["Calin" <Calin@euronet.nl>]

NOTE: for those with little time at hjand, skip my intro and go to Andrew
Renton's text, fished by me on a sister list - nettime-ro. it sheds a pretty
funny light on the matter.

***************************

Learning from prada is a challenging text, as they usually come from Lev
Manovich (if we get over the irritating misspelling of all those all too
well known names). Some thoughts, though, triggered mainly by the last part
of the essay:
I do not think that all analysis of such hot potatoes like: surveillance
technologies, cultural predominance of design, brand(scaping, but not only),
dictatorship of corporate aethetics etc. should be performed only and
necessarily from a leftist, critical position. In that sense Lev Manovich
positions himself as an art historian, as far as he keeps a muzzle on
ethical commentaries. Things get a bit blurred when he comes to launch
activist questions like:
>Can cultural institutions play an active, even a leading role, acting as
laboratories where
>alternative futures are tested?
and answers implicitely that this is possible if strategies of >the
avant-garde wing of retail industry< are going to be imitated. which is
twice naive, because:

one. by getting into the shoes of the Pradas (and they already do that
handsomely - see the Guggenheim, so inocuously mentioned by LM in his text),
museums/galleries are just what they became already, second rate followers
of fashion.
two. while racing for the same type of attention as the one got by the
cool-retail-cum-cafeteria-lounge, museums/galleries can do nothing more than
comply to the ideological, financial and moral constrains that filter access
to > new technology (that) is being developed for military, business or
consumer use<.

which is fine, but then how can one expect a "leading role" to come out of
this? i know that it is not the purpose of the "prada" essay to solve this
dilemma, (the text suffers mainly from this unfortunate, wish-to-be exciting
title, that hardly covers the content),  but then maybe a cautionary
approach of the topic would have been better.

see bellow what do other people learn from Prada.

****************************

 _Looking for meaning_
by Andrew Renton

One of the criticisms that I always hear levelled at contemporary art is
that it's really just a neat bit of design in disguise. There's no "art" or
soul left in the work. It's a tough proposal to counter, so I jumped at the
chance to talk through some of these questions last week with Hal Foster,
one of the world's leading art historians, in front of a packed audience at
the ICA.

  Foster is Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton, and there can't
be a clued-in art student who hasn't grappled with one of his books.
Throughout his career he's looked at various movements central to 20th
century art, such as minimalism or surrealism, and has managed to change the
conventional wisdom on the subject. He's a founder and co-editor of
October - a journal so overwhelmingly influential in the past decade that,
in the art history corridors of the world, the word itself is almost
synonymous with art criticism.

But Foster has been a bit troubled of late. He's hungering for something new
in art, and all he seems to find is a slick product. Design, by any other
words. And he has just published a book, Design and Crime, which pinpoints
this design-as-art crisis and might just offer us an escape route into a
21st century culture.

After all, he says, we live in a world that's just so much design. From
designer faces (surgery) to designer personalities (drugs), even designer
babies through genetic manipulation, we're constantly surrounded by design.

The result is that we're inhabiting an increasingly smooth, glossy and
superficial culture. And it's a culture looking for a subject. In Foster's
words, design is the "package" that "all but replaces the product".

Weren't we warned never to judge a book by its cover? Foster cites Canadian
uber-designer Bruce Mau, whose two huge doorstop books, S, M, L, XL (in
collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas) and Life Style, aren't so much to
be read, or even placed on the coffee table - they are the coffee table. And
look at the irony of that first title - it's culture, any size you want it.

Design moves product so successfully that the product can't catch up and
design becomes the driving force. Foster called this the "political economy
of design". This is the late-Modernist equivalent of putting the cart before
the horse, doing the packaging before there's something to be wrapped up.

Design doesn't need to be the devil's work. It clarifies and clears the
cluttered space of so much of our world. The problem is, we're left wanting
something more. Something we can't quite reduce to stylistic flourishes.

We feel this most in the museum - the place where, as a last resort, we hope
art might touch us. Often we find that we're no longer engaging with the
object, but a digitally manipulated version of it, where the artist mediates
our very own view for us.

We see it most clearly in the works of two Germans, Andreas Gursky and
Thomas Struth, the world's most successful photographic artists. Their
photographs build the act of seeing into themselves.

Struth, for example, often returns to the museum to make his work,
photographing some of the world's masterpieces in situ, with crowds of
tourists also milling about in the frame of his lens. Now he finds his own
work in the museum too.

Is there anything left for us to do, when we're standing in the museum
looking at an image of some people standing in the museum looking at an
image? Will we feel the need to go to the museum when its contents are fully
digitised and accessible on-line?

The museum itself has also been looking for its subject. It used to be
cathedrals that conferred status on cities, now it's the museum that puts a
place on the map. But a grand tour of Europe's new museums will reveal great
design and an empty heart. There's nothing to put in them, or rather there's
nothing that needs to be put in them. They call it the Bilbao effect - great
for the local restaurant trade, but hardly the saviour of our culture.

To my mind the Guggenheim in Bilbao, jaw-dropping as it may be when you
glimpse the metallic sheen through the cobbled streets of the Basque
capital, has become a celebration of its own surface, rather than of its
contents. It's part of a larger Guggenheim brand, which is developing an
international resource of "reassuring" cultural consumption.

You know where you are with a Guggenheim. It's the grand tour - fuelled by
Big Macs. The problem with the art/design conundrum is that the art can
become all too strategic, too stylised. What we might be seeking now is the
old-fashioned magic that often comes when you least expect it. We need an
artist to see it and, in this digitised age, we crave the artist's touch.

Here's where I see a glimmer of hope. Towards the end of his book, Foster
speaks of a simple but touching work by the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco,
made in 1993. It's a photograph that documentsa little assemblage of stones
and wood detritus, found in the streets and propped up against a wall and a
dirty puddle. In the distance we see the Manhattan skyline. It doesn't lay
claim to any grand gesture. Although it's set up by the artist, however
humble the assemblage, it still has meaning. So where does this meaning come
from?

The temporary configuration, for all its fragility, echoes the immovable,
modernist grandeur of the cityscape. Orozco snaps the scene and moves on.

The work of art, the little gathering of materials on the street, lasts
until the next street sweeping. But it's a moment that sees beyond the
discarded qualities of the materials, holds these incongruous elements
together, and situates them in a real place. And they hold together in the
memory.

How affecting the image appears to us now, after that same skyline was
fractured last year - even though Orozco's moment happened some nine years
earlier. But somehow this work that was hardly ever there still resonates
and means something anew. That touching moment observed by the artist
couldn't have been designed - it's art."

see the online version at
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/hottx/top_review.html?in_review_id=533
216&in_review_text_id=498848



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