A review is a strange and controversial genre indeed. On the one hand, it calls us to affirm that a certain qualification is at work—i.e. a reviewer is assumed to know the necessary conditions of a phenomenon that happens to be in sight. Thus a review could be understood as an assessment (census) given by someone in the know regarding these conditions. However, we might ask: what are the necessary conditions that would help us to assess a contemporary art exhibition? For example, does the latter need to reflect the most recent global trends and be arranged in a representational contemporary art institution? Quite often this is exactly what it takes for an exhibition to qualify as “contemporary” and “successful.” By refusing to accept these conditions as self-evident, I would like to share some insights and ideas that came to my mind after I had a chance to engage with “Grazed Images”—a show dedicated to post-internet art and curated by Inesa Brašiškė (Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, 18/06/2015–09/08). I will not discuss the upsides of the show nor will I promote its ideas, even though they do resonate with the themes of my own academic research.
The title of the show—“Grazed Images”—is not accidental. The curator picked Hito Steyerl’s text on the state of the post-internet art as one of the conceptual guides of the show and it is precisely in this text that we find this expression.((Steyerl, H. (2013) “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux Journal [Online] (No. 49/11) Available from: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/too-much-world-is-the-internet-dead/ [Accessed: 10 September 2015])) It might be useful to clarify that Steyerl uses the term bruised, while in the title of the show we have a synonymous grazed.
The official description of the show ascertains (or, rather, diagnoses) that our current state of globality is caused by an unprecedented upsurge of digital images (the Lithuanian version of the introduction used the term vaizdas for “image”): “An illusion prevails that we can get rid of them as soon as we switch off our computers and smartphones. However, images [vaizdai] live long after we go offline: they transgress the realm of television and computer screens and enter our everyday world, albeit slightly grazed.”((http://cac.lt/en/exhibitions/past/15/7579)) Before we start talking about the way images remain operative after going offline—i.e., in our “everyday world”—let us notice a strange dichotomy that emerges in this description, namely “image” vs “world.” It might seem that the latter could exist in its “pure” state without images, screens, or representations (unless we are talking about physiological blindness or speculative realism). Surely the problem highlighted in the show was not that our “everyday world” was lacking in images and that, lo and behold, they suddenly appeared. An image exists as long as there is a beholder, regardless of whether an image is on the screen or in beholder’s perception. On the face of it, this seemingly self-evident confrontation between “image” and “everyday world” leeds us to a misleading line of interpretation by suggesting a rather ocularcentrist approach: the world is nothing but visual givenness where “image” corresponds to “representation” that circulates in the world via technological means. Furthermore, what was lost in Lithuanian version was the solution for the ambiguity of the English term “image” which means both representation (atvaizdas) and what is present to sight (vaizdas). Image-vaizdas is a presentation/situation/event/original, while image-atvaizdas is a representation/memory/media/copy.
This is not simply a taxonomical question. What matters here is the very fact of translation of a concept. After all, this show that seeks to define post-internet art and that is assembled from the manifestations of global art discourse, has reached the Baltic region as a translation and it is important to stress the lack of care in this translation. The translated version supported this misleading dichotomy “image/world” by not using the linguistic resources that would have clarified the matter and would have allowed the audience to recognise the fact of translation.
Perhaps, the technical distinction between “image” [vaizdas] and “visual representation” [atvaizdas] would have been more successful in formulating the problem that the show sought out to tackle: a digital representation is undergoing a genesis in the technological milieu, where it is manipulated, processed, modified (“grazed”) and, after the whole set of procedures, it haunts the offline world by becoming a part of unmediated visual perception. To reiterate the points made above, image-atvaizdas is an image with its history, because it has indexical traces that point towards its origin, while image-vaizdas is what pertains to the faculty of sight in general. The lack of this distinction was not simply a sign of the lack of care, it was also indicative of a certain hastiness in joining the global (anglophonic) discourses without taking into account the complexity of localised conditions.
Traditionally in art, the likeness between representation and its source—i.e., image perceived by a subject (artist, observer, etc.)—is a criterion of “realism.” However, according to the concept of the show, post-internet condition means that it is the digital representation (picture) itself that takes over the control over image in the offline world by correcting, influencing and informing it. Today it is the image that resembles a digital picture, not the other way around. In other words, the key factor is not the transformations that digital pictures undergo, but the transformations of the offline world of images.
Of course, there is nothing new in image being dependent on the picture (here we can recall how during the 1960s NASA adjusted the lighting and positioning of the rocket launching pad so that TV broadcasts would benefit from a spectacular imagery; or the case of a film/TV-ready makeup that makes skin look “natural” on screen; or Potemkin’s villages and other scenographies supported by various dictatorships). The new thing is the scale of this dependence because image manipulation is no longer in the hands of “specialists” (architects, artists, engineers), and it belongs to the masses that are using the standardised and globally networked media. First of all, it is the representation that gets to be manipulated, and reality—i.e., the image, the origin of representation—follows. One of the numerous examples could be the case of plastic surgery when people transform their appearance and turn themselves into anime characters or “living Barbies.”
However, this change has another consequence that is crucial for art—it is a radical shift in the relation between original and copy. As Bruno Latour shows in his text that accompanies the exhibition, thanks to the progressive methods of digitalisation, digitally reproduced copies of paintings turn out to be more “faithful” to the originals then the originals themselves.((Latour, B. and Lowe, A. (2010) “The Migration of the Aura or How to Explore the Original through Its Facsimiles” [Online] Available from: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/108-ADAM-FACSIMILES-GB.pdf [Accessed: 10 September 2015])) Various parameters of an original—colour, texture, shape—can be digitally reproduced and 3D-scanned, and later analysed, corrected and retouched such that the signs of wear and tear would be removed or “healed.” It has now become a rather common practice. It is much like restoration, only here it is not an original that gets to be transformed, but its data—it is later materialised, for example, through 3D printing that allows us to recreate all the necessary nuances (e.g., texture of canvas).
This is how the original qualities that have faded and disappeared due to ageing are recreated in a copy. In his text Latour criticises Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura which is still pretty much operative in art theory today. According to Latour, aura—if it still makes sense to consider such a phenomenon—no longer belongs to the original, it migrates together with its original qualities to its facsimiles. Thanks to technologies, copy is no longer a mechanical and deficient process of reproduction of an original. On the contrary—during this process information that has been lost is now retrieved/recreated/compensated. In light of these undeniably effective developments Latour asks: why are we thinking about original images as if they still were shrines that encapsulate the entire value of culture?
Indeed, value is no longer defined by the qualities of an original, but by an experience that is evoked and transmitted by an artwork—be it an original or its copy. Therefore the process of copying should be regarded more like stage performance—it is valuable as long as audience is given a unique experience. As Latour notes, we do not regard the staging of a play to be “a mere copy” because it is the very essence of theatre—performing and reinterpreting an original, over and over again. Accordingly, the value of artwork would correspond to this ability to evoke/transmit the experience.
We might speculate about the repercussions of such an idea. Was Lithuanian audience surprised by it? We might suspect that museum staff, gallerists, artists and other art professionals still would be on the side of an original because a copy is “just a copy,” no matter how faithful to the original it were. It would not be unexpected because when original becomes separated from originality, localisation of value (including the added value) becomes impossible. The whole collections of originals in the museums would become worthless! Therefore this idea already compromises the very working principles of galleries and museums as co-owners of the original value.
However all these reflections on the political implications of the show is only a safe speculation that maintains the distance with the realities of Lithuania. “Grazed Images” was not polemical in this sense and its political dimension was safely abstracted to the “global” (i.e., Western) concerns. It was hard not to conclude that on the one hand, the show on the fascinating global tendencies simply brings progressive ideas along with it, while on the other hand, this gesture can also be seen as a tourism in reverse—i.e., when instead of embarking on a journey in order to encounter the spectacles and bring back our own ideas and impressions, we are expected to observe how these spectacles and ideas (along with theoretical conclusions) arrive themselves. These were the reasons I was inevitably accompanied by the motives of gap, distance, anonymity, abstraction. We might conclude here that “progressive” ideas, global tendencies and trends are homeless: they always belong to “some other place” and their subjects are somewhat absent, residing in a “post-” mode—which is, perhaps, an insight for a separate reflection and research on its own right.
One of the ways to reflect on this question could have been an attempt to articulate the reception of this post internet condition. However, the chance to establish a link with a non-global, non-anglophone, “non-progressive” and “underdeveloped” consciousness was lost, because Gintaras Didžiapetris—the only Lithuanian among the “non-East” artists of the show—presented a huge stencil of a teapot made of A4 paper sheets hung loosely on the wall. The sheets were actually colour prints representing a homogeneous pattern of a Photoshop transparency layer. In its entirety the “Teapot” installation was suggesting the presence of an overblown materialisation of digital emptiness that signified a non-existent but predictable object.
Was this image of non-presence a sign of concern over the offline world, or, perhaps, a warning about the transformations that (after we will have caught up with the developed world and will have successfully established a unified system of significations and values) we are about to experience here, in the “global province”? It seems that we are still unable to reflect on this because there is simply not enough time for reflection and thinking. We need to assimilate the newest conceptual upgrades of our global reality and accept the new status quo in advance as fast as we can.
Gintaras Didžiapetris, Teapot, 2015, paper mural, dimensions variable. Image courtesy CAC Vilnius and Andrej Vasilenko.
For full photo documentation see here. Translated and edited Lithuanian version of the essay: Čiučelis, T. (2015) „Parodinis turizmas, arba iš kur kilę „nubrozdinti vaizdai“”.artnews.lt [Online] Available from: http://www.artnews.lt/parodinis-turizmas-arba-is-kur-kile-nubrozdinti-vaizdai-30334 [Accessed: 10 September 2015]
