FUNCTION OF THE AUTHOR
Celia Lury, “Contemplating a self-portrait as a pharmacist, a trade mark style of doing art and science”, Theory culture and society 2005
Celia Lury works in the department of sociology at the University of London. She regularly writes articles and has written a number of books.
“Becoming a brand name is an important part of life. It’s the world we live in.” This is the quote by Damien Hirst that introduces the essay by Celia Lury. She discusses how the, function of the author has changed today. Where is the author?
“Death of the author”, the author no longer has authority over the work. Intervention no longer matters. In other words, the creator has no control over how the work is read. This is a “response to the world we live in (94)”, says Hirst.
The author function has been replaced by the brand as in the case of Damien Hirst. A brand name now helps our understanding of art, “creativity invention and discovery” (106).
Damien Hirst is a self branding exercise.
The author now sits outside of his work. Hirst's spot paintings are made by assistants. The dots are all the same size, so are the gaps. The paint is the same. He is not concerned with originality; he is concerned with the use of his name as a brand or trademark. He is a director, a scientist, “a pharmacist” (100).
Although it could be said that nothing is new, we still strive for originality. Art seems to now be original in its placement (conceptually), not so much in its form. An artist now is creating a new way of looking at an old idea. Similarities here can be drawn with the pharmaceutical industry. When marketing a new heartburn medicine, Gaviscon, the market was saturated. The solution was by “inventing a new problem and offering a new solution (100)”.
“In physics, you know, if they can’t find the answer they want, they change the question. As long as you’re prepared to do that … there’s nothing you can’t do.’ (107)
Author function is being replaced by brand loyalty as Lury points out regarding the practice of Damien Hirst. This is an interesting point and one that we as artists should take note of. “Consumption of creative goods, like all goods, depends on ‘tastes’”1, and in the twenty first century those tastes are influenced by brand loyalty.

1. Elizabeth Currid, ‘The economics of a good party: social mechanics and the legitimization of art/culture, journal of economics and finance.vol 31.no 3 fall 2007

ART PRACTISE IN AOTEAROA
Tze Ming Mok, ‘Race You There’ Landfall 208, Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2004 (November)

Tze Ming Mok is a New Zealand political writer of Chinese decent. Her articles and blogs provide thought provoking comment on minority cultures and racial attitudes of mainstream middle New Zealand. In this article written for Landfall in 2004 she draws on personal experience of being an Asian non-Maori in Aotearoa. Mok provides personal anecdotes, relates experiences and incidents that resonated with her. Racial Marches, marriages of convince for politicians, Hikois, National Front protests are used as background. Where are you from? She’s asked time and time again.
Does the bystander effect highlight group prejudice or is it generalising the actions of a few individuals. A National Front member attacks Chi Pung in a violent race motivated attack. Bystanders ignored the Christchurch student for twenty minutes.
An anti-race march is organised as a result. Chi Pung “boycotted the very march she took the fall for (23)”. Pung believed that the root of white aggression was the failure for white s to see themselves as migrants. It seems “anti-racism is not as black and white (23)” as one might expect. “Fake visas are being sold by the leader of a Maori sovereignty group. What do they entitle? The ability to stay in New Zealand because of tribal affiliations. It’s a rip off of course, but the idea is not new. “The key for asserting migrant rights to belong in New Zealand is for all newcomers to see their presence as an entry by treaty”(23). This is why Pung boycotted the march; it seems “Pung had placed her finger on the trigger point (23)”.
New Zealand is ever changing. Whether acknowledged or not these changing elements work to inform the practice in which an artist engages, shaping their concerns in a direct or indirect manner. Mok writes with a certain biased, but she is able to expose larger under laying questions and issues. We are still working within a colonial mindset within middle New Zealand. But as Mok points out this is changing as the country responds to time and place. When something will “rise from the ashes of majorities and minorities (18)” and there will no longer be a dominant white population.

CROSS CULTURAL FANTASIES

James Meyer, “The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity”. Space, Site, Intervention: Situation Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, pp. 23-37

In his essay, James Meyer refers to what he calls the “cross-cultural fantasy of the other”(35). A supposition based on a not so solid foundation, forming mental images of other places.

Guidebooks can help create these fantasies as they direct visitors or tourists to places of interest. They are a compilation of information in printed form and tourists find them invaluable. As they guide of strangers or visitors through a district giving them a description of the places or scenery of interest they tend to point out certain things and not others. In other words, guidebooks can give a somewhat biased view.

One of the initiators of what was to become tourism was Thomas West in his guide to the lakes for landscape lovers of landscape studies. This and books like it helped change the British mind and enabled it to view the landscape for visual pleasure. With the guidebook and Claude glass in hand the British of the 18th century ventured into the countryside. With the Claude glass one could view the land as scenery and compose the landscape. Throughout his essay Park refers to the landscape as theatre and us as the audience. In his essay the Claude glass is used as a metaphor to turn nature into scenery.

The idea of an illusion of a foreign place is highlighted by artist Jan Muller. In the exhibition, “ Inter-pellations” Muller looks at European -American cultural relations by using guidebooks to direct visitors around fashionable areas of SOHO in New York. They position the tourist within the space and swiftly guide them through upmarket restaurants, fancy boutiques, and swanky art galleries quenching a thirst for the fresh and new. A few years earlier Muller explored this idea in reverse with a work titled bookcase which explored the American thirst for European history.

The landscape in New Zealand was to become a commodity. “... its’ landscape had been constantly, the most beautiful scenery in the world”1. Colonial immigrants had a mental picture of New Zealand thanks to idealised images presented by writers and artists. This image was a cross-cultural fantasy

1. Geoff Park “Theatre Country”, Theatre Country: Essays on Landscape and whenua, Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2006, pp.113-127.

THE POST MODERN CONDITION

Jean-Francis Lyotard, “Answering the Question; What is Postmodernism?”, trans. Regis Durand. “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1984, pp. 71-82.

What is postmodernism? Surely postmodernism is part of the modern and a work can only become postmodern if it is first modern.

‘Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the “lack of reality”, and the invention of other realities’(77). New rules have to be made to replace those that have been broken. This is what Lyotard refers to as a Grand narrative or Meta narrative.

Modernism lessened illusionism in painting and created new objects and ways of seeing them. Take Picassos Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painted in 1907. It shows a refusal to comply with historical methods of representation. Perspective has been abandoned as can be seen in the face of the figure on the bottom right which is seen from two views. That and the face above it are influenced by African masks, shattering the illusion of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘primitive’.

In the post modern condition the grand narrative has lost its credibility as culture takes on a flatness. The level of inquiry becomes cynical, what use is this? Parallel knowledge’s, takes over, in what Lyotard refers to as a ‘paralogy’.
Knowledge – science, technology and the arts, has undergone a change of status in the modern era. Lyotard pointed the figure at science. Science has become a knowledge commodity, involved with language. We believe in the truth of science. Science has freed the people. But, how, he argues do we know what’s true?
Therefore science based enlighted rationalism, reason truth and falsehood gave way to postmodern scepticism. This was to happen alongside capitalism, prosperity and widespread development in the visual arts. In the postmodern condition within science you cannot find truth. Humanity and beliefs of faith are questioned by postmodernism.

Postmodernist art embraces all manner of styles, asking questions about essence. Robert Rauschenberg began to explore this as he bought the real world into painting in his combines.”Rauschenberg paved the way for new possibilities, creating a space between painting and sculpture and between performance and object. In the wake of this artistic breakthrough, pop art, Happenings, performance art, and installation emerged.”1. These movements deconstruct and calls meaning into question.

Lyotard is in fact a modernist at heart. To state the end of the Meta narrative is a Meta narrative in itself. He goes on to concede that within the modern is the postmodern. “Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its ends but in the nascent state, and this state is constant”(79).

1. Jeremy Strick, ‘Robert Rauschenberg, combines’, ed. Jane Hyun, Germany: The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles,2005.

CONTEMPORARY ART NEEDS A FIELD WITHIN WHICH ONES PRACTICE CAN BE DEFINED.

This field was provided by post modernist art, especially postmodernist sculpture.
Modernism is art about art. The journey towards making a work of art was as important as the work itself. This was the theory of influential art critic Clement Greenberg, ‘the essence of modernism lies in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but to entrench it more fully in its area of competence,’ 1.

By the 1950’s modernism was a flagging art movement. Rosiland Crause described sculpture as collapsing in on itself as a result of modern art disrupting it from its traditional function.

Sculpture Crause describes pre modernist sculpture as site specific and monumental, a ‘historically bounded category and not a universal one’, p33. Sculpture according to Crause was representation, symbols and marking, normally figurative and vertical. Their pedestals mediating, ‘between actual site and representational sign’, p33. Modernism saw sculptures being multiplied and moved from site. It was no longer monument it was homeless and nomadic.

Postmodernism saw a new approach to sculpture. A discipline that revisited materials, technique and explored sculptural ideas and technology. Crause formulates or structures the possibilities of Post-Modern sculpture using concise mathematical diagrams.

She states ‘that the expanded field of postmodernism happens at a specific moment in the recent history of art’, p44. This was the late 1960’s; artists were looking to be diverse and open. Many artists looked to reject the gallery and curator as a frame. ‘For one after another Robert Morris , Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Irwin, Sol Le Witt, Bruce Nauman....had entered a situation the logical conditions of which can no longer be described as modernist’, p41. ‘Some artists moved the earth to create great colossal primal symbols while others punctuated the horizon with man-made signposts,’ 2. ‘Although primarily sculptural, this tendency also encompasses performance and conceptualism. In all cases, mapping, photographic documentation and or text-based accounts are an intrinsic part of the work,’3.

Sculpture had become the practice most artists, could slip in and out of and define their art by.

1. Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’, Arts Yearbook IV, New York, 1961; reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, op. Cit. P. 70
2. Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffery Kastner, Phadion Press Ltd, 1998, reprinted 2001, 2
3. Brian Wallis, Land and Environmental Art, ed. Jeffery Kastner, Phadion Press Ltd, 1998, reprinted 2001, 2

IMAGE AND WORD

‘...to an ever greater extent our experience is governed by pictures, pictures in newspapers and magazines, on television and in the cinema’ 1. A quote from Douglas Crimp, who believed that our experience of reality is organised by the images we make of it. What Crimp fails to acknowledge is the importance of word.

I believe that image and word are inseparable and coexist side by side.
Are poetry and painting independent arts? W.J.T Mitchell asks in the first chapters of his book, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Or are the image and word one because beneath word is image which is an impression of outward experience.

Mitchell questions what sense we can make of icons. He looks at whether there is a hierarchy between image and word.

Mitchell starts by quoting Mark Twain who believed that painting needed a title for explanation. That without one the art could be open to any number of interpretations. Twain refers to Guido Reni’s painting of Beatrice Cenci which he felt could just as easily be seen as ‘girl with hay fever; or young girl with her head in a bag’40. What, Twain fails to acknowledge is that the people of the time would have known the story and instantly recognised the figure? In the Renaissance symbols were used to tell stories in art they helped to tell the viewer what to think.

The problem is that painting cannot stand outside pictorial and verbal traditions. People want to see through the brain using words, symbols, or narrative. In other words brainwork is structured by language; we need words to structure our thinking. Therefore often the subtleties of art are overlooked. Francis Bacon said, “The task of painting is to render visible forces that are not themselves visible”2. Mitchell called it the ‘painting of the invisible’40. We can think of it as subtle levels of understanding, emotional experiences, and conveying ideas through the imagination.
The word and image are different modes of representation but they are two sides of the same coin. One is culture and the other is nature. The alienation between them is a modernist concern. A time of industrialization when those involved in all forms of art, felt traditional methods of expression were outdated. Modernist artists such as Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse wanted to move beyond Realism and focus on more subtle forms of narrative.

The struggle is not to heal the split between words and image but to allow them to work together to enable our understanding.

1. Colin Trodd, Postmodernism and Art, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim, London, Routledge, 1999. 91
2.