Unsitely AestheticsUncertain Practices in Contemporary Art

MAriA MirAndA

Unsitely AestheticsUncertain Practices in Contemporary Art

Errant Bodies Press:Surface Tension Supplement no. 6

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TABlE Of COnTEnTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

In the Beginning

Chapter 1: Unsitely Aesthetics

Chapter 2: Network Culture & Mediated Public Space

Chapter 3: Site of Unsitely

Chapter 4: Present in the Past

Epilogue

Notes

References

In Coversation with Artists: An Introduction

In Conversation:

kanarinka with Natalie Loveless

Igor tromajer with Norie Neumark

Hugh Davies with Linda Carroli

Artists from the exhibition Mixed Realities with Jo-Anne Green

and Helen Thorington

Brooke Singer with Renate Ferro

Deborah Kelly with Bec Dean

Barbara Campbell with Norie Neumark

Yao Jui-Chung with Timothy Murray

Lucas Ihlein with Teri Hoskin

Darren Tofts:

Possible Rendezvous Art as Accident in Urban Spaces

Melbourne / Rome

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PrEfACE

This book started life from within my own collaborative art practice with sound artist Norie Neumark. The questions raised here were first brought up in relation to that practice as we found ourselves moving out of a studio situation which for us meant chained to our desktop computers and into the streets with mobile media. At the time it was thrilling and liberat-ing to make work on the run, so to speak. It was exciting, too, to learn how we could work without depending on the comforts and constraints of a stu-dio. It was yet another learning curve1 although this time no manuals were involved. In a way it happened by chance as we found ourselves in a foreign city with no media facilities at our disposal and no studio to return to. We had to improvise with the materials at hand, a process we enjoyed so much that weve continued to work in this way. With this shift in our practice arose questions as well as a certain urge to articulate what was happening to us. It also appeared that our own move into public space was not unique and that similar shifts seemed to be occurring in the world around us, in particular the media landscape. This twofold shift from within and without presented questions that this book seeks to articulate, if not answer.

In 2005 I began research on a PhD thesis initiated by the question of site and its problematic position within media art practices. My own art practice guided my search for a greater understanding of what exactly was happening to media art as it became untethered from static computer workstations and mobile, in particular as it entered public space in sur-prising and diverse ways. At the same time dramatic changes were hap-pening with communication technologies, as the internet became more enmeshed in our everyday lives. It is that thesis that became the core for this book.

For the book I decided to approach these questions in two different ways, through two different foci. In the first part, I let my PhD research, as well as my own art practice, direct my attention to concentrate on larger forces operating in art and broader cultural contexts. I engage in conversations of sorts with historical art practices, network culture as well as the philo-sophical ideas of John Dewey and Jacques Rancire. In the second part of the book, I turn to other artists, who shared that same moment, and ask them to engage in conversations too, conversations of whatever sort work for them, to help understand the field Im calling unsitely aesthetics. Their generosity in conversing around an idea that was unfamiliar to them at the time nevertheless resulted in surprising and exciting understandings that stretched and deepened my own thinking and added immeasurably to the book.

Of course being an unsitely project itself, there is an accompanying website where research and discussion will continue.See: http://www.unsitelyaesthetics.com/

8ACknOwlEdgEMEnTS

Firstly, I would like to thank all the artists and writers who shared their own projects and who engaged with the ideas of the book so generously. Their contributions were always insightful and have enriched the book and its concept immeasurably.

I am particularly grateful to La Trobe University for giving me the time and space to continue my research on the unsitely through a Postdoc-toral Fellowship, and for the stimulating environment that has been created through the Centre for Creative Arts.

I would also like to thank John Potts and Kathryn Millard for their generosity and guidance at Macquarie University, and I am grateful for the support of Macquarie University through the early version of the book, which was my thesis.

I am also very grateful to the artists residencies that enabled me to make the artworks for the project, for the time and space they afforded to pursue my work, follow new directions, and engage with fellow artists: The Cit Internationale des Arts, Paris; The MacDowell Colony in New Hamp-shire; Toos Neger in Dordrecht, NL.

The greatest thank you must go to Brandon LaBelle for his generous invitation to follow my discursive desires. Without his encouragement, generosity of spirit and unsparing commitment to the project none of this would have been possible. I would also like to thank Hille Haupt for the creative design of the book.

Finally my deepest debt of gratitude is to my art collaborator, Norie Neumark, with whom I have shared so many important projects, stimulat-ing conversations and adventures; her intellectual generosity, unflagging energy and incisive intelligence have been critical and sustaining.

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in ThE BEginning

And how does artistic practice position itself in relation to notions of public space and the complexity of audience? In this sense, site might function as an operative term through which to gauge practice it is both the physical location of presentation andthe intrinsic negotiations such presentation entails. (Ehrlich & LaBelle 2003: 10)

In 2004, while on a residency at the Cit Internationale des Arts in Paris I began working on the project Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier, with my collaborator, Norie Neumark. The projects conceit was an actual search in the streets and other public and bureaucratic spaces of Paris for an imagi-nary street, as described by Georges Perec in his book Life a users manu-al (2003). The work itself is ongoing as the search is open-ended and never finished. However, this work marks the beginning of our exodus from the studio to the streets and further into public space. Ostensibly this was a movement that seemed to come from our own particular commitment to engage with the place of Paris and the desire to experience the city in all its strangeness, but also its overwhelming familiarity. Paris is a city that has been written about, filmed, photographed and imagined (in the Anglo-phone world) in one way or another for at least three hundred years. Its streets and buildings exist on multiple levels of perception, encompassing both the physical and the cultural imaginary. In this sense it is actually far from strange or exotic, rather it is already highly mediated.2

However, our leaving the studio occurred in the context of the then cur-rent movements of media artists working with Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and contemporary artists working with notions of social relations and exchange. In fact it is at the point of intersection of these two move-ments media art and contemporary art that the work and this proj-ect are located. Drawing on the idea of constraint from OuliPo the liter-ary group of which Perec was a member and conceptual and Fluxus art practices from the 1960s, we took seriously the description of this street in Perecs text, setting out to search for it and deliberately blurring the world of fiction with the world of actual events. We thought that, as a city like Paris cannot be seen or known transparently, traversed as it is by fictions, desires and other affects of the cultural imaginary, the best course of action to engage with such a place was to take its fictions seriously. Therefore the constraint we set ourselves was the seriousness of our intent to search for this street, knowing full well that it did not exist and yet by following this initial irrationality absolutely and logically mimicking the plight of for-eigners or tourists in a foreign place, we experienced intimate, intense and playful encounters with strangers.3

To meet strangers on the streets of a foreign city is not itself unusual. However, in our case we encountered people while using our low-tech me-dia. And it was the media that both enabled our ludic encounters and cre-ated the space for such encounters. In other words, the encounters became

Searching for rue Simon-Crubellier.Stills from video, 2006.

more than private encounters between strangers, but through our portable media apparatus announced a public encounter of performance. Off the streets we continued searching online on Google and through the Perec list-serv. These online searches and encounters became part of the installa-tion of the work and the installations became part of the online incarna-tion of the street: the more we searched for rue Simon-Crubellier, the more online references we found to our project and ourselves.

Out of these encounters and the ongoing exhibitions of material ac-cumulated from our searches arose questions about public space and art, questions that set this project in train.

In their book Surface tension: problematics of site (2003) Ken Eh-rlich and Brandon LaBelle work with the figure of site to rethink art in public space and what they call complexity of audience. What I am inter-ested in examing here is how the internet inflects this discussion, not just for so-called internet artists nor even new media artists, but for a range of artists who are working across media. After all, the internet is now an ev-eryday part of the world we live in, and it is changing relations between art-ists and their publics.

Uncertain Practices

For some time now I have noticed a certain disjunction between the two fields of contemporary art and media art. This disjunction has a long and complex history, which I can only allude to here. However as the condi-tions of network culture4 expand across the world many artists are forg-ing a new relationship with the internet not as a medium, but rather as an-other site of their work.

In the mid-noughties I also began to notice what seemed like a body of artworks and artists practices working across both the internet and ac-tual sites what Im calling uncertain practices. I consider these practic-es uncertain because of both their location they work across sites and exist both online and offline simultaneously and their uncertain position at the intersection of media art and contemporary art. They are works that may be thought of as media art yet unlike the previous era of new me-dia they are not concerned with technology itself or the notion of inter-

activity. Rather these artists are now leaving the studio, moving and work-ing in public spaces, in a process that is mobile, nomadic and performative. They have responded to and developed new audiences and new ways of re-lating to their audiences, who are defined by networked culture and its me-diated public spaces.

The book develops a notion of unsitely aesthetics as a way to speci-fy these practices both in relation to site and public space and audience but also in distinction from other practices in the same terrain of pub-lic space, including practices such as locative media5 and traditional public art.6 These latter practices focus on either site-specificity, community art or the use of GPS devices, in contrast to the uncertain practices that are discussed in this book, where work may be ranged across a number of sites and address a number of publics spread across the globe. These works play out in public spaces including the internet but are not considered public art in the traditional sense. Unlike site-specific or con-textual work, this work exists across sites, across media and is networked and connected. And in distinction from locative media, the work does not necessarily use location aware devices. What is its relationship to contem-porary art? What sort of aesthetics does it enact? How does site work in media art practices that exist across media and in different places? And is site a useful term to employ in the current era of networked publics? How is the internet a site of art practice and reception?

A major proposition of the book is the recognition that the internet changes everything, including changing relations between the artist and their audience/publics. That is, the internet is a site of production and of reception. Even though some work may also exist in other sites at the same time, for many audiences it is received only through the internet an au-dience spread across the globe in a local context of reception. This point of reception has become a significant site of work. I have approached this site not as if the real work happens elsewhere, but as a site in and of itself.

I am calling this situation unsitely. The term pivots on the tradition-al history of site from the site/nonsite of Robert Smithsons Spiral Jet-ty to the decades long history of site-specificity.7 And un is brought into play to dislodge the fixity of site and to multiply its potential, rather than discard site itself. In this way site-specificity is folded into the notion of unsitely, both acknowledging its importance and unfolding a new moment

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as network culture disrupts our common notions of place and being in one place at one time. It also suggests an expanded site, incorporating but be-yond Smithsons site/nonsite. In this expanded and unsitely work there can be glimpsed new possibilities for artists to work productively at the edges of the art world and its institutions, rather than at the centre. This move away from the centre does not mean an abandonment of art institu-tions but rather a recognition and a renegotiation that as we head down the highway, with the radical practices and aspirations of the 1960s gener-ation fixed firmly in the rear view mirror and realising there is no turn-ing back there are nevertheless new possibilities for action, movement and engagement that are not completely negative, coopted and corporate, as critics such as the artist Andrea Fraser suggest.8 Rather, there are glimpses of possible gaps and cracks in the corporatised world of art where an art-ist can work without the controls of art-on-demand biennales and art fairs, without the veiled nationalism and work-as-charity of government funding, without the pressures of demanding patrons and dealers. The new public spaces of the networked world have created new lines of flight (in a Deleu-zian sense) and in the unsitely aesthetics of some art practices one can per-ceive this movement away from the normalising pull of corporate art in-stitutions as artists devise new strategies and tactics, utilising the internet as a new possibility for public encounter and encountering multiple pub-lics.9 As the internet is a site of both public and private encounters, media artwork situated there disturbs the art / life divisions and debates. What do these spatial media art practices reveal about social space and the produc-tion of space in this time of networked, mobile media on the one hand and corporate art institutions on the other?

Media Art in network Culture and Mediated Public Space

Network culture is a term used by Kazys Varnelis to describe the current moment of internet connections and mobile media. (Varnelis)10 Network culture, for Varnelis and the contributors to his book, is the contemporary condition we find ourselves in, the simultaneous superimposition of real and virtual space, the new participatory media. In fact they go further to describe the network as the dominant cultural logic of our era and anal-

ogous to previous logics and periodisations like modernism and postmod-ernism. In this book I investigate art practices, including my own, that are working in and with networked culture, but are not simply using and test-ing the new technologies of connection. Rather they are works that reflect in some ways on the new condition created by the network; effects felt ei-ther of time, space, social relations or the social imaginary. In fact these uncertain practices often employ low-tech strategies with little use for spectacle or high-end computing power, rather, through strategies of play-ful intervention and humorous situations they test the cultural logic of ev-eryday life to peel back hidden layers of significance.

I also use the term mediated public space rather than simply net-work culture to point to the contemporary moment (that is crucial to un-derstanding the work discussed). In so doing I am drawing attention to the way that people of all ages are carrying media of all sorts everywhere and using media in public space. I consider this an aspect of network culture now so taken for granted that the complexity and significance of its effects can be overlooked. That is, what I am calling mediated public space in-volves a reconfiguring not just of public/private and social behaviour and relations, but also subjectivity more broadly. In Chapter 2, I parallel John McGraths perceptive analysis of surveillance media and surveillance space in Loving big brother (2004)11 and argue that the ubiquity and new uses of mobile media are creating a performative space of encounter in public. With the multiplication of media besides the surveillance ef-fect there are other unexpected and possibly more positive effects which are changing the relationship between people and media, and which are producing a more active subject than the more passive subject of previous technologies. Following McGraths argument for a more productive under-standing of surveillance through the notion of performativity and what he calls surveillance space, I apply his insights to mediated public space. I see this performative space, created by mobile media, as a key condition for an unsitely aesthetics.

In order to go beyond the limits of traditional approaches to both pub-lic art and new media art I foreground the situatedness of the making and reception of the work. I do this through the figure of site playing on its situatedness. I use the idea of site as a fulcrum, as Ehrlich and LaBelle (2003: 11) put it, to think through ideas of current media art practice that

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exist across sites of mediated public spaces. This contemporary art figure and concept has much to offer us in order to understand a group of me-dia art practices that in most cases have been understood through media art theories of distributed aesthetics, or other media theories of commu-nication. That is, while site has been the subject of extensive and impor-tant scholarly work in art history, (Miwon Kwon 2004 and James Meyer 2000)12 and sound studies (see Ken Ehrlich & Brandon LaBelle 2003) it has not been a significant figure for (new) media art theory.13 In this book, then, I want to rework the figure of site to investigate and present media art in public places and, in turn, to suggest that media art in public s/plac-es also opens new questions for scholarship about site and of course im-plicitly about place and our sense of place. What could place mean in a net-worked world?14 In returning to the figure of site, my aim is to look again at the significance and potentialities of site, not to re-locate media art back again into paradigms of site-specificity but, on the contrary, to understand site as it relates to and en-frames contemporary media art practice as it plays out in network culture. And in looking at media art practices in pub-lic space we will also look again at a particularly important form of public space as a site of art the internet.

In this sense site is operating much like a thaumatrope, a nine-teenth century toy that flips between two images.15 For now let us imagine site here as a sort of hinge and a way to open up and connect two seem-ingly incompatible histories and discourses those of contemporary art and media art. In these discourses site has a distinct meaning. By making the term work as if a Duchampian door, I am attempting to conjure both meanings simultaneously and at once. If you swing the door in the direc-tion of the internet and media art, its meaning is linked to the common term website. If you swing the door in the direction of contemporary art, site is situated within a rich and complex history of site-specificity, dat-ing from the 1960s and described and analysed by Kwon in One Place Af-ter Another.

In investigating media art practices that exist at the intersection of media art and contemporary art,16 I use the term media art in a similar spirit to that outlined by Darren Tofts in Interzone:

First, I have resisted using the term digital art because it is too reductive, foreground-ing the computer as the decisive factor in the art-making process Secondly, I have also resisted using the term new media art because it is the one term most closely aligned with the concept of interaction and therefore even more reductive than digital art. (Tofts 2005b: 8)

The term media art invokes contemporary art practices that engage with a range of dif-ferent media, of which the computer is the predominant mode. (Tofts 2005b: 12)

Tofts assumes media art practices to be naturally part of the landscape of contemporary art practices, and in a way of course they are. Yet, I suggest there is also a discord within contemporary art institutions, which have on the whole been slow to accept the computer as another tool or medium for art practice. This has created a separate and specific history of the elec-tronic arts; Tofts book is testament to that history in the Australian con-text. (Tofts 2005b) Instead this book takes this historical separation of me-dia art and contemporary art as a starting point and invitation to discuss work that is now ranged across this gap: work that for this very reason I am calling uncertain.

By foregrounding uncertain media art practices, I am responding to what has happened to some of the practices once defined as new media art. New media, especially during the 1990s, existed in a separate art world where the digital and new media was heralded as either the new avant-garde, or such a totally new phenomenon that it could only herald the end of art (again). Both sides share some responsibility for this estrangement of new media and contemporary art. On the one hand there was the disdain for new media art and rejection of it by art galleries and museums unwilling to engage with technology, and anchored in a phenomenological discourse of presence specifically the presence of materiality. On the other hand this attitude was up against the hubristic attitude of the new media advo-cates artists, technologists and media enthusiasts unwilling to under-stand art discourses historical concerns and terms. Ironically the position of media art was (and still is to a certain extent) just as uncertain in the field of media studies itself, as it was in the field of contemporary art. As Daniel Palmer remarks:

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In contemporary media and cultural studies obsession with popular and ordinary culture, artistic practices are increasingly rare as objects of study. Dismissed as the self-expression of a niche market for residual high-culture, their analysis is left to the spe-cialised discipline of art history. (Palmer 2004: 169)

To this end, new media was concerned to map out a terrain that separat-ed itself from traditional or contemporary art altogether, and out of this developed new media festivals, art shows and symposiums like the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) and Ars Electronica. However, as the dot.com crash damped down some of this euphoria, a different direc-tion appeared on the horizon, the so-called era of social software or Web 2.0. This social turn for the digital arts created a pause. Some (new) media artists began to reflect upon art discourses, and the connection between the two art worlds came into view, for instance, with the concern by both artists and theorists with connecting (new) media to an art historical dis-course and, in particular, conceptual art.17

In a corollary situation to the corporatisation of contemporary art that Andrea Fraser critiques in her essay A museum is not a business. It is run in a businesslike fashion, new media art in the late 1990s was called upon to give technology a human face and artists were considered content pro-viders.18 This can be a depressing scenario for an artist, and for Andrea Fraser it would seem to be a closed scenario, focused as it is on specific large museums in the United States. Contrary to Frasers argument, which elides neo-Fluxus practices like relational aesthetics with neoliberalism, I suggest that possibilities still exist for active and vital art actions that can and do exist outside this scenario. (Fraser 2005) Creating just such pos-sibilities and opening up discourse and dialogue with uncertain publics is exactly what is at stake for the uncertain practices that I am concerned with. As I mentioned previously I situate these practices at the intersection of media art and contemporary art. This is because they are practices that use media, but are not works about technology itself or concerned with the innovations of or for technology. Rather they are works that are deeply en-gaged in the current moment of networked culture, utilising different me-dia and working methods like cross media to make work that is ephemer-al, mobile, playful and significantly, given the corporate scenario outlined by Fraser, using strategies of DIY and low-tech. These strategies make

these practices uncertain as they are works that dont exist in one place, al-though as will become apparent this does not mean that they are not situat-ed. They are works that can be accessed online without the mediating func-tion of the art museum or gallery, which does make a difference for artists.

This book has two parts. The first part consists of a theoretical and historical discussion which contextualises unsitely aesthetics within the current moment. The second part consists of conversations between art-ists and writers or between artists and artists.

I begin, in chapter 1, by addressing the notion of aesthetics a very contested term and one that is associated with the beginnings of the auton-omous sphere we call art. I look to the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of John Dewey and Jacques Rancire. Both philosophers contribute impor-tant ideas that help elucidate what aesthetics could mean in general, and point to the significance of an unsitely aesthetics, in particular. I then clarify what is meant by unsitely/unsightly, introducing the amateur as a signifi-cant figure for unsitely aesthetics. In chapter 2, I elaborate upon the concept of network culture, looking in particular at the crucial role of the internet and the current moment of networked publics. One of the things I am point-ing to here is that network culture is the context for unsitely aesthetics and uncertain practices. In chapter 3, I expand on the notion of site to include the situated-ness of both artwork and audiences or publics. I look to the figure of Robert Smithson a key and emblematic artist from the 1960s whose work existed at a moment of uncertainty before practices had sepa-rated and congealed into performance art, conceptual art, process art, land art and other specific disciplines. In the present project Smithsons work acts as a significant departure point and reference as his invention of site/nonsite keeps in tension the relationship between the exhibition and the world outside the galleries and museums. Smithson not only expanded the parameters of what art could be about (history, geography, crystallography, for example) but his complex, prescient, and sometimes very funny uncer-tain practice interrogated and troubled the site of the art work. In chap-ter 4, I argue against a technological determinism and suggest that many of the attributes and features of an unsitely aesthetics were already forecast and performed in previous eras in particular Fluxus and the Situationists. I link the importance of mobility to unsitely and reconsider walking as an important aesthetic practice for mobile and unsitely artists.

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Part Two consists of conversations between artists and writers, and art-ists and artists who were invited to discuss both their own projects and to reflect upon the notion of unsitely in general. These conversations were themselves conducted in a range of dialogic forms demonstrating the rich communication landscape we presently live in. Some communicated through email, while others used Facebook and Skype, and one set of con-versationalists used moleskin notebooks sent back and forth through the regular mail (snail mail). All of these diverse ways of having a conversation enacted, in their processes, some of the concerns in the book itself. To be-gin, Boston based artist kanarinka, (a.k.a. Catherine DIgnazio) discuss-es her multi-sited projects in email conversation with natalie loveless, an artist based in Ontario, Canada. In particular they discuss kanarinkas most recent project, The Border Crossed Us (2011), a sculptural interven-tion that recreated the US-Mexico fence as a photo mural on the UMass Amherst campus. igor tromajer, an artist working out of Slovenia and Germany, discusses his net.art projects with the sound artist norie neu-mark, based in Melbourne. tromajer describes the trajectory of his net art projects beginning with the performative actions like Oppera Internet-tikka, where he sang the html code, to his more recent project of omis-sive art, called the Expunction project. HugH Davies, an artist based in Melbourne and linDa Carroli, a Brisbane-based writer, have a con-versation via Facebook. The focus of their conversation is Davies collab-orative and participatory project Analogue Art Map, which swaps social networking and digital processes for paper, cardboard, wool and pens in the physical space of the gallery. jo-anne green and Helen tHoring-ton, directors of New Radio and Performing Arts and the online website Turbulence.org, interview artists from three of the five projects that were commissioned for the exhibition, Mixed Realities. joHn Craig Freeman discusses his project Imaging Beijing, a place-based virtual reality proj-ect combining panoramic photography, digital video and virtual worlds. sCott kilDall and viCtoria sCott discuss their collaborative and par-ticipatory project No Matter, where they commissioned builders in Sec-ond Life to create 40 imaginary objects, which were later re-constructed in Real Life. miCHael takeo magruDer discusses his project The Vit-ruvian World, a project that embodied the principles of Vitruvius across three different forms or sites the Avatar (virtual), the Puppet (phys-

ical) and the Doll (network). New York-based artist Brooke singer and Ithaca-based artist renate Ferro, in conversation through email, discuss the collaborative nature of their individual practices. Singer discusses her collaborative project Counter Kitchen, where she deconstructs everyday food items to reveal their toxic contents; Ferro describes the evolution of her participatory and process oriented project Private Secrets / Public Lies where participants are invited to both leave their secret and at the same time erase their secret. DeBoraH kelly, a Sydney-based artist in con-versation with BeC Dean, a curator and writer also based in Sydney, dis-cuss Kellys multi-sited and tactical projects, in particular Tank Man Tan-go, a performative memorial where participants world wide were invited to learn a dance based on the steps of tank man, who confronted the tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. BarBara CampBell, a Sydney-based artist discusses her participatory web project 1001 nights cast, with norie neu-mark. This project literally spanned 1001 nights and included 243 writ-ers, who offered their stories, of no more than 1001 words, for Barbara to retell online, as she herself moved across the world. yao jui-CHung, a Taiwanese artist, in email conversation with tim murray, an academic and writer based in Ithaca, New York, discuss Yaos artistic practice. The conversation traverses the many projects made over several decades, in-cluding Yaos photographic interventions into Taiwanese social and polit-ical history with such projects as Territory Take Over (1994), Recover-ing Mainland China (1997) and The World is for All (1997 2000). luCas iHlein, a Sydney-based artist and teri Hoskin, a writer and artist based in Adelaide, conduct a slow meandering conversation using a moleskin notebook sent back and forth through that older distribution network, the Post Office. Their discussions are inspired by Ihleins two projects Bilater-al Kellerberrin (2005) and Bilateral Petersham (2006). Finally, Darren toFts, a Melbourne-based writer and academic, performs an experiment in unsitely aesthetics. In Possible Rendezvous: art as accident in urban spaces Tofts superimposes the map of one city onto another, so that Mel-bourne and Rome become an aleatoric interface for a virtual drive with chance discoveries.

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ChAPTEr 1: UnSiTEly AESThETiCS

The task of [pragmatist] aesthetic theory, then, is not to capture the truth of our current understanding of art, but rather to reconceive art so as to enhance its role and appreciation; the ultimate goal is not knowledge but improved experience, though truth and knowledge should, of course, be indispensable to achieving this.

(Shusterman 2000: xv)

There has long been a tension, for the historical avant-garde as well as contemporary experimental art practices, between the desire to open boundaries between art and life and the desire to maintain a particular sphere of art and art making. The uncertain practices that Im concerned with play at the borders of this dilemma, both of art and life, as well as the borders of aesthetic understandings. My aim with unsitely aesthetics is to initiate a more porous aesthetics from the point of view of the maker and the receiver or audience of the work. To do this I will turn to the work of John Dewey and Jacques Rancire. Although the definition of aesthetics for these two philosophers is quite different from each other, both, in their own times question dominant notions of aesthetics and lay the ground for just such a porous aesthetics and a rethinking of what art could be. In this chapter I introduce Deweys pragmatist aesthetics and Rancires philo-sophical writing, which reconceptualises our traditional understanding of art history and aesthetics.19 I also locate unsitely aesthetics in relation to

other current approaches, such as relational, distributed and remix fore-grounding the significance of DIY and amateur modes of practice.

The term aesthetics is derived from the Greek, aisthetikos, mean-ing things perceptible by the senses, or sensory perception. The modern use of this term began with the German philosopher Alexander Baumgar-ten in the 18th century who not only coined the term but also founded the branch of philosophy called aesthetics. This is usually considered the be-ginning of an autonomous sphere of art. According to Richard Shusterman, Baumgartens original project of aesthetics went far beyond what is com-monly considered to be the focus of aesthetics today, that is, the theory of fine art and natural beauty rather Aesthetica argues for the cognitive value of sensory perception, celebrating its rich potential not only for bet-ter thinking but for better living.20 But as Shusterman notes, the scope of post-Baumgartenian aesthetics was reduced from the vast field of sen-sory cognition to the narrow compass of beauty and fine art. (Shusterman 2000: 266) However, in the rich tradition of pragmatism, and in particular, the philosophy of John Dewey, which is currently having a resurgence, this narrow concept of aesthetics is questioned and problematised.21

John deweys aesthetic experiences

Pragmatist aesthetics, considered to have begun with Dewey, invites a broader understanding of aesthetics, and therefore art, by grounding aes-thetics in the idea of lived experience, rather than the more common meth-od of objective analysis used by analytic philosophy. Analytic philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition that dominated Anglo-American phi-losophy for most of the 20th century.22 For pragmatist philosophy in gen-eral, there is no objective truth, rather there is a plurality of truths. Prag-matism seeks to understand each situation as it is presented. Above all pragmatism asks what is the use value of any given idea or situation.

A pragmatist turns his back resolutely and once for all upon a lot of inveterate hab-its dear to professional philosophers. He turns away from abstraction and insufficien-cy, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed

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systems, and pretended absolutes and origins. He turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action, and towards power. That means the empiri-cist temper regnant, and the rationalist temper sincerely given up. It means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finali-ty in truth. At the same time it does not stand for any special results. It is a method only. (William James: 1907)

Pragmatist aesthetics, as initially developed by Dewey, has an uncanny sense of speaking to and about contemporary art, especially art that is con-cerned with situations and experiences rather than objects and beauty.

Art as experience was published in 1934 and based on the William James Lectures that Dewey gave at Harvard University in 1931. In it Dewey outlines in great detail his philosophy of art. He begins, not by addressing art objects or traditional questions of what is art and how to judge it in-stead he discusses what he calls the live creature and the idea of experi-ence. Deweys concern was to realign the idea of art away from the reified object and to reconnect art and art-making back again into its context, that is, life itself. This is in contrast to how art was (and still is in many ways) separated from ordinary life and disconnected from its original meaning. He writes:

When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in ex-perience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general signifi-cance, with which aesthetic theory deals. Art is remitted to a separate realm, where it is cut off from that association with the materials and aims of every other form of human

effort, undergoing, and achievement. (Dewey 2005: 2)

At the same time Dewey points to the importance of the social role and function of art. The values that lead to production and intelligent enjoy-ment of art have to be incorporated into the system of social relationships. (Dewey 2005: 358) In a way Dewey may be understood to prefigure the concerns of current art practice and art theories that have shifted the ter-rain of art away from the disembodied eye of the gallery-goer to the so-cial and relational, arguing for the importance of social relations in the making and enjoying of art, and emphasising the essentially social nature of art itself. His philosophy, as outlined in Art as Experience, has become

UNSITELY AESTHETICS JoHN DEwEYS AESTHETIC ExPERIENCES

an important text for many artists today, especially those working with the social and relational, but also those artists concerned with the process of making.23 And it is in these current practices that the significance of work-ing across sites is often played out, as they are fundamentally interdisci-plinary and impure art practices.24

For Dewey the function and meaning of art is always linked to human values. This is arts use value. Art is for enjoyment and its use is to height-en the lived experience of the live creature giving vitality, energy and moments of intensity. Significantly, Dewey expands the idea of aesthet-ics to include and indeed privilege the process of making, rather than the end product, the art object, Since the actual work of art is what the prod-uct does with and in experience (Dewey 2005: 1) His philosophy is con-cerned with understanding the aesthetic experience as the lived experience of the individual, defined as having an experience. Deweys having an experience, while lived and of the everyday, does not transport us from the workaday world into another realm of being. It but reveals the potenti-ality of the world in which we live. (Jackson 1998: 61)

To understand art and aesthetic experience, according to Dewey, one must return to the source of aesthetic experience itself, which for Dewey is everyday life, that of recovering the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living Following this clue we can discover how the work of art develops and accentuates what is characteristically valuable in things of everyday enjoyment. (Dewey 2005: 9) It is here in everyday life that not only the significance of art can be found, but also arts beginnings and its source.

In order to understand the esthetic in its ultimate and approved forms, one must begin with it in the raw; in the events and scenes that hold the attentive eye and ear of man, arousing his interest and affording him enjoyment as he looks and listens: the sights that hold the crowd the fire-engine rushing by; the machines excavating enormous holes in the earth; the human-fly climbing the steeple-side; the men perched high in air on girders, throwing and catching red-hot bolts. (Dewey 2005: 3)

Here Dewey is describing everyday life in the city, the noise, the colour and the feats of strength and grace. These everyday occurrences are examples of Deweys aesthetic experience as situated within the world we live in. In

26 27UNSITELY AESTHETICS

this way Dewey insists aesthetic experience exists not just in Nature or be-hind the closed doors of art museums but also, as in the dramatic and cha-otic scenes he describes above, in the life of the city. There is no separation or break rather there is a continuity of experience from distracted to what he calls an experience, his term for an aesthetic experience. This is a very specific notion, to which I will return shortly.

Dewey, like most pragmatists, rejected any sort of dualism: the dual-ism of art and life or that of aesthetic experience versus ordinary experi-ence, or popular art and culture versus Fine Art. This rejection of tradition-al dualisms fits with pragmatisms rejection of any sort of received ideas or dogma. It also speaks to todays horizontal logic and expanded practic-es of art.

But, to my mind, the trouble with existing theories is that they start from a ready-made compartmentalization, or from a conception of art that spiritualizes it out of connec-tion with the objects of concrete experience. The alternative, however, to such spiritual-ization is not a degrading and Philistinish materialization of works of fine art, but a con-ception that discloses the way in which these works idealize qualities found in common

experiences. (Dewey 2005: 10)

Dewey claims that art has been separated from everyday experience, cor-ralled into the specialised spaces of museums and art galleries, the muse-um conception of art where art has become the beauty parlor of civiliza-tion. (Dewey 2005: 357) For Dewey, the separating off of this role of art into the museums and out of reach of the majority is a crime against the greater good. Richard Shusterman describing the motivations for the need to keep art pure, compartmentalised and away from everyday life writes,

The underlying motive for such attempts to purify art from any functionality was not to denigrate it as worthlessly useless, but to place its worth apart from and above the realm of instrumental value. This strategy, a carry-over of art for arts sake, was to pro-tect the autonomy of art from unfair competition with ruthlessly dominant utilitarian

thinking, for fear that art could not adequately compete in terms of instrumental value. The hope was to protect some realm of human spirituality from the crassly calculative

means-end rationality which had not only disenchanted the world but ravaged it with the festers of functionalised industrialization. (Shusterman 2000a: 8 9)

AN ExPERIENCE

Deweys response to this was not to disregard the opposition between in-strumental and intrinsic value, rather he goes back to basics to rethink why art is valuable and useful without the necessity of giving specific objects intrinsic value. The term useful or use value for Dewey is not to be mistak-en with the instrumentalist logic of utilitarian traditions where useful of-ten refers to a means-end justification. In the latter sense art is not useful, rather it is devalued as something of no use in comparison to the achieve-ments of science and medicine. But Deweys pragmatism rethinks the idea of useful away from this narrow means-ends thinking of rational econom-ics and efficient living devoid of joy and happiness. As Thomas M. Alexan-der remarks, If we were to ask useful for what? We should be obliged to examine their actual consequences which Alexander writes our utilitari-an obsession with means apart from ends makes us ignore the widespread poverty and emptiness of human experience, what Marx calls alienation. (Alexander 1998: 4) For Dewey it is through art, in the aesthetic experi-ence, that we find meaning and value. Art is an activity that keeps alive the power to experience the common world in its fullness (Shusterman 2000a: 10) And more than momentary moments of delight. They ex-pand our horizons. They contribute meaning and value to future experi-ence. They modify our ways of perceiving the world, thus leaving us and the world itself irrevocably changed. (Jackson 1998: 33)

An Experience

Dewey develops a specific notion of experience that he calls an experi-ence to denote an aesthetic experience apart from ordinary experience. An experience, he writes has a unity, it is the sort of experience that stands out in our lives. It is that meal, that storm, that rupture of friend-ship. The existence of this unity is constituted by a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts. (Dewey 2005: 38) Importantly an experience for Dewey does not simply wind up or stop, it has an arc or what Dewey describes as a con-summation. An experience comes to a completion with a sense of fulfill-ment. Described in this way it becomes obvious that aesthetic experience

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is not only experienced in the presence of a (traditional) art object but can happen anywhere. It can be a kiss in the morning as Dick Higgins fa-mously quipped.

An angler may eat his catch without thereby losing the esthetic satisfaction he experi-enced in casting and playing. It is this degree of completeness of living in the experience of making and of perceiving that makes the difference between what is fine or esthetic in art and what is not. Whether the thing made is put to use, as are bowls, rugs, garments, weapons is, intrinsically speaking, a matter of indifference. (Dewey 2005: 27)

What Dewey is saying is that aesthetic experience need not be confined to fine art but is an experience, a moment of intensity that can be had doing even the most mundane activities, like the pleasure of fishing. The func-tional nature of the objects he describes like bowls and rugs etc does not make a difference to the aesthetic experience one has, as either a maker or admirer. Ultimately where we place these objects in our home or in a mu-seum is a matter of cultural judgement that is not intrinsic to the object itself or the nature of the thing experienced. It is simply how our culture wants to organise things.

Aesthetic experience has a specific shape and rhythm.

we have an experience when the material experienced runs its course to fulfillment. Then and then only is it integrated within and demarcated in the general stream of expe-rience from other experiences. A piece of work is finished in a way that is satisfactory; a problem receives its solution; a game is played through; a situation, whether that of eat-ing a meal, playing a game of chess, carrying on a conversation, writing a book, or tak-ing part in a political campaign, is so rounded out that its close is a consummation and not a cessation. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. (Dewey 2005: 37)

Deweys conception of an experience may appear too holistic to have any bearing on contemporary arts enormous range and infinite variety of what an art object, situation, event or experience could be. The contemporary expanded field of art brings with it discord and fragmentation which at first glance may not seem to fit Deweys somewhat wholesome ideas. Yet it is important to remember that Deweys theory concentrates on the ex-perience of art rather than the art object. Art objects are of importance

AN ExPERIENCE

to Dewey principally as they operate within experience, giving it structure and becoming carriers of meaning. (Jackson 1998: 111) He does not dic-tate the subject matter, nor the form that art could take, and this leaves room for the infinite variety of art events that emerge today.

This shifting away from the object as the focus of aesthetic definitions to the aesthetic experience itself leaves open an understanding of art that can now include the radical departures of contemporary art. These depar-tures would include the contemporary importance of the audience/pub-lic to a work, especially work that behaves relationally and /or work that is distributed across sites. It is significant that Dewey includes the expe-rience of the maker of the work of art into his notion of aesthetic experi-ence, thus recognizing that aesthetic experience can be experienced by the person creating the work, as much as by the audience/public receiving the work. This inclusion is significant to contemporary practices where the im-portance of the process has long been recognised, at least since the 1960s. It is particularly relevant for uncertain practices where participation and making and doing are often blurred, with work initiated by an artist who may invite others to participate or collaborate or simply be included in the process of making. The work may be a situation or action rather than the making of an object.

Importantly the idea of experience is not simply something that one has alone, shut up inside oneself, and that can be reported later, after the fact. This is emphatically not what Dewey meant.

Experience in the degree in which it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of sig-nifying being shut up within ones own private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events. (Dewey 2005: 18)

For Dewey an experience is an active sense of being in the moment, in the present and it includes everything that is part of that moment. The minute that one reflects on it, one is outside the experience and no longer experi-encing it. As Jackson notes Dewey invites us to think of experience differ-ently. He asks us to abandon the convention of looking upon experience as something that happens exclusively within us, that is as an essentially psy-chological concept. (Jackson 1998: 3) Instead Deweys idea of experience

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is broad and relational. It includes the person experiencing as well as what is experienced and it challenges the centrality of the personal and individ-ual, moving away from any humanist philosophical idea of experience, to an understanding of how we are embedded in and of the environment. We are not separate from our environment, and there is no outside for the per-son experiencing.

Experience, in other words, is transactional. It is not just what registers on our con-sciousness as we make our way through the world but includes the objects and events that compose that world. The objects and events are as much a part of experience as we are ourselves. (Jackson 1998: 3)

Dewey, writing in 1934, could not have imagined the unsitely and uncer-tain practices of todays art makers his own preferences in art, as refer-enced from his texts, seem quite conservative in comparison to the impli-cations that his philosophy of art holds. Yet his ideas of an experience and the importance of the contingent nature of art as part of culture and tied to experiences in the present, rather than a museum idea of art has great relevance for understanding contemporary uncertain practices.

It is in Deweys philosophy of returning art to its sources in the ev-eryday experience of the lived creature that current art practices espe-cially those engaged with the social and relational are finding inspiration. It is important to note that in expanding the potential for art in the expe-riences of the everyday, Dewey was not calling for the collapse of art into life. For Dewey, it was an expansion of art rather than a collapse or disap-pearance. Shusterman elaborates upon this idea: The pragmatist project in aesthetics is not to abolish the institution of art but to transform it. The aim, to adapt Deweys museum metaphor, is not to close or destroy arts museums but to open and enlarge them. (Shusterman 2002a: 140) As Shusterman points out:

[Dewey] in some ways anticipates Foucaults more elaborate analysis of disciplinary power and Adornos more embittered critique of the social and personal disintegration wrought by our administrative society, which dominates by dividing and then homoge-nizing under its bureaucratic forms. (Shusterman 2000a: 12)

JACqUES RANCIRES PoETICS oF AESTHETICS

The pragmatist aesthetics of Dewey is proving productive for many con-temporary artists today as it privileges the process of art rather than the products of art, the aesthetic experience of the individual rather than a hi-erarchy of codes and forms pertaining to aesthetics of taste. This is an im-portant departure from both analytic philosophys discriminations as well as the commodity art market and culture industry. Deweys philosophy has a great deal to offer artists as well as art lovers, both amateurs and con-sumers in its expansive and egalitarian approach to art and an aesthet-ic experience. In sum Deweys work is important for unsitely aesthetics in several related ways. Firstly, it makes room for DIY and the unsightly. Secondly, it foregrounds aesthetics and art as a way of life, nourishing the rapprochement of art and life for both the maker and audience of unsite-ly works. Thirdly, it focuses on the experience as the defining charac-teristic, freeing us from the demands of certainty of art practices. Fourth-ly, in repositioning the significance of the art gallery and allowing for art experiences in any setting he prefigures the unsitely work of current practices.

Jacques rancires Poetics of Aesthetics

For much of the 20th century the term aesthetics has been a despised term by avant-garde artists and radical thinkers. It was considered to be the purveyor of an elitist thinking and practice linked to classical ideas of the beautiful. The early avant-garde attacks on art were often de-voted to undoing or disrupting established aesthetics, undermining no-tions like the autonomy of art. Aesthetics came to be understood as the philosophical defence and practice of high art, opposing itself against the low arts of popular culture. A culmination of this distrust of the aesthetic was the publication of a key text of post-modernism, edited by Hal Foster and published in 1983 aptly called The anti-aesthetic.25 It is against this master narrative that Rancire proposes a rethinking of aesthetics and its relations to politics, and what he calls the politics of aesthetics.

In the philosophy of Jacques Rancire aesthetics holds a completely different place to that provided by Dewey though a useful one for my pur-poses. According to Rancire, aesthetics no longer refers to perceptible by

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the senses, or knowledge through experience. It does not refer to an indi-vidual appreciation of art at all nor any other sensual experience. Rather, it refers to a specific regime of art. In Rancires scheme aesthetics refers to:

[that] which denotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consign art to its effects on sensibility. Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying and re-flecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their cor-responding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships (which presupposes a certain idea of thoughts effectivity). (Rancire 2006a: 10)

Rancires project is to understand the relationship between art and pol-itics beyond the familiar model of Marxist analysis as well as the old de-bates on arts autonomy. This is useful and productive for unsitely aesthet-ics as he confronts these old debates with a fresh approach that shifts the ground away from an either/or situation; in fact, he describes the possi-bility for critical art today as a sort of third way between the two poli-tics of aesthetics. The two politics Rancire is referring to are, on the one hand, art as an autonomous and self contained entity, on the other hand the indiscernibility of art and life most often seen through the long pro-cession of avant-garde activities and aspirations spanning the entire 20th century. But for Rancire this seeming opposition between the two politics of aesthetics represents a paradox: for art is both singular and heteroge-neous, so that the third way for critical art practices, must be that of ne-gotiating and playing on and between the boundary between art and non-art. Political art must be some sort of collage of these opposites. Collage for Rancire is a key idea, and a major procedure of critical art. (Rancire 2009: 41)

In this schema politics itself is a constant renegotiation of the terms in which politics is staged and its subjects are determined. (Hinderliter et al 2009: 7) For Rancire the political is the framing of what will be con-sidered common objects and experiences; it is the framing of the spaces of politics and of what can be seen in other words, of what is visible and audible, of what can be said and heard, and therefore our very basic un-derstandings of our worlds. This distribution of spaces and times and feelings and experiences are what Rancire calls the distribution of the sensible. It is,

JACqUES RANCIRES PoETICS oF AESTHETICS

an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an or-der of the visible and of the sayable that sees that a particular activity is visible and an-

other is not, that this speech is understood as discourse and another as noise. Poli-tics exists when this order is disrupted by those who have no part. (Ranciere cited in Hinderliter et al 2009: 7)

It is this crucial aspect of what is possible and what can be perceived that puts aesthetics at the core of politics, because politics is now a struggle over the possibilities of political reality itself: Politics is aesthetic in principle because it reconfigures the common field of what is seeable and sayable in a particular political order. (Hinderliter et al 2009: 7)

Rancire understands the work that art does as, of necessity, constant-ly shifting and responsive to the cultural as well as political moment. In-deed, Rancires philosophy, and understanding of art history, opens up a space for understanding and engaging with work that may be slippery, mo-bile and ephemeral unsitely as his philosophy is (and here he shares ground with Dewey) unconcerned with judgements of taste. Rather Rancires concern is the possibility of art staging the political where dis-agreement can be staged in order to produce new communities of sense. (Hinderliter 2009: 19)

In Rancires philosophical world the arbitrariness of form and con-tent is understood through the grid of the current regime of art, that which he calls the aesthetic regime:

The aesthetic regime of the arts is the regime that strictly identifies art in the singular and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses

to shape itself. (Rancire 2006a: 23)

For Rancire Art in its singular and now capitalised state occurred two hundred years ago. Previous eras did not know this form of Art, rather it was a plurality of arts. He identifies three regimes of art within the West-ern tradition, thus producing a distinct genealogy for art that reconfigures

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the usual historical master narrative of modernity the familiar story of modernism and postmodernism.

regimes of Art

Rancire rewrites a genealogy of art to elucidate the different ways that art has been considered in order to reframe understanding of the relationship between politics and aesthetics. The first he calls the ethical regime of im-ages exemplified by Platos Republic where the prevailing values for the arts were the truth content and the question of their purpose. For Pla-to art was not singular; rather there were the arts each belonging to its own sphere with its own purpose and truth. There was no such thing as a singular autonomous art. The second regime he identifies as the poet-ic or representative. The guiding value here is the couplet poiis /mim-sis. Within this regime the arts were properly sorted into genres and sub-ject matters strictly controlled and organised and assessed within a specific framework as good or bad. Within this regime there is a strict hierarchy of subject matter and genres. I call it representative insofar as it is the no-tion of representation or mimesis that organizes these ways of doing, mak-ing, seeing, and judging. (Rancire 2006a: 22) The third regime is the aesthetic regime, our own regime. This regime begins with the French Rev-olution and Modernity itself at the end of the 18th century.

Aesthetics is not science or philosophy of art in general. Aesthetics is a historical regime of identification of art which was born between the end of the 18th century and the begin-ning of the 19th. The specificity of this historical regime of identification is that it iden-tifies artworks no more as specific products of definite techniques according to definite rules but as inhabitants of a specific kind of common space. (Rancire 2006b: 2)

This regime differs from the previous two regimes in that art is no longer defined by specialised skills or mediums or modes. The separate arts have be-come art. Rancire argues that the well-known modernist narrative (as-sociated with Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg among others) where art-works are isolated in a separate sphere of their own fully misses the point.He writes:

REGIMES oF ART

The notion of modernity thus seems to have been deliberately invented to prevent a

clear understanding of the transformations of art and its relationship with the other spheres of collective experience. The confusion introduced by this notion has, it seems to me, two major forms. Both of them without analysing it, rely on the contradiction constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts, which makes art into an autonomous form of life and thereby sets down, at one and the same time, the autonomy of art and its identification with a moment in lifes process of self-formation. (Rancire 2006a: 26)

Rancire identifies artworks as inhabiting a specific kind of common space. This specific sphere has no boundaries. The autonomy of art is its heteronomy as well. (Rancire 2006b: 3) Thus Rancire delineates the essential undecidability of art and its existence within the tensions of art becoming life, life becoming art and life and art exchanging qualities. Ran-cire sees this essential contradiction where the line between art and life is constantly shifting as constitutive of the aesthetic regime of the arts:

If the end of art is to become a commodity, the end of a commodity is to become art. By becoming obsolete, unavailable for everyday consumption, any commodity or fa-miliar article becomes available for art, as a body ciphering a history and an ob-ject of disinterested pleasure. It is re-aestheticized in a new way. The heterogeneous sensible is everywhere. The prose of everyday life becomes a huge, fantastic poem. Any object can cross the border and repopulate the realm of aesthetic experience.(Rancire 2002: 144)

For Rancire the question isnt are we still modern, already postmodern etc but rather, what exactly happened to the dialectical clash? What hap-pened to the formula of critical art? His answer is that the critical forms or dissensus aesthetics has split into four forms: the joke, the collection, the invitation and the mystery- forms that do not always stage a dissen-sus, but rather problematically can be forms of consensus and this is critical arts challenge. (Rancire 2009: 44)

Rancire is relevant to unsitely art practices today for several reasons. First, in shifting the idea of aesthetics away from either the traditional un-derstanding of aesthetics as concerned with form, content and style asso-ciated with high art and Modernist rhetoric, as well as the anti-aesthetics of the traditional and neo avant-garde, Rancire opens a space to re-imag-ine art practices, broadening their possibilities. This means that artwork

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that once would not have made sense this is not art is now intel-ligible. Secondly, in re-imagining aesthetics as a regime the time and space of this era he rethinks the relationship between politics and aes-thetics, understanding that politics is already aesthetic and aesthetics is always political. This is useful for unsitely artists and practices, as it fore-grounds the criticality in much unsitely artwork that might be missed or dismissed. And finally, Rancires engagement with the notion of com-munities of sense26 is useful in understanding arts new publics and audi-ences as unsitely works call forth heterogeneous publics rather than fixed communities of art audiences.

Rancires critical theory and continental philosophy may seem in-compatible with a pragmatist aesthetics like that of Dewey, as pragmatism suggests the practical and the empirical. In the case of Dewey one could be forgiven in thinking that an experience points to an essentialism of the body through experience, which in turn suggests a form of anti-intellectu-alism and a repetition of the old mind / body dualism. However, this would be to misunderstand Deweys ideas. In fact Dewey, and the American prag-matists in general, rejected Cartesian dualism in favour of what they called concreteness and the practical consequences of a given idea. As Wil-liam James observed in his lecture on pragmatism in 1907, for the prag-matist there is no single Truth, only multiple possible truths The prag-matic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. (James 1907) Pragmatists opposed dogma of any kind.

As James announced in 1907, pragmatism is a method. It is not a closed theory of the world. For pragmatism theory and practice are insep-arable; thus Shusterman writes:

In seeking to bring theory closer to the experience of art so as to deepen and enhance them both, a pragmatist aesthetics should not restrict itself to the abstract arguments and generalizing style of traditional philosophical discourse. It needs to work from and through concrete works of art. (Shusterman online)

It seems to me that the two philosophical positions are not so much in-compatible but rather that they operate at different levels and speak from a different place and time to each other. Rancires genealogy of the re-

REGIMES oF ART

gimes of art offers an analysis that reconfigures art history itself, redefin-ing the conditions of possibility much like Foucaults use of discourse. He shifts our understanding of both the past and the present and of poli-tics and art and redefines aesthetics as a particular regime of art rather than a theory of the senses. Dewey, too, is not interested in a narrow theo-ry of the senses; on the contrary, as discussed above, Dewey is not at all in-terested in categorising art objects. Dewey shifts our understanding of the aesthetic away from the object to our experience of art, be that an object, situation or event. Deweys project has a much broader sweep than tradi-tional art criticism and, like Rancire, is concerned with a philosophy of democratic civilization, with ethics and political thinking. Dewey, like Ran-cire, reconceived what aesthetics could mean. For Dewey this meant mak-ing aesthetics an essential part of what ethics and politics could mean, thus refocusing both away from the narrow definitions of politics as a matter for political theory and ethics a matter for moral conduct and rules of mor-al judgment. (Alexander 1998: 16) He stretched the meaning of aesthetics and in particular aesthetic experience to encompass the whole of life. This has far reaching implications for both art and politics.

But democracy is not primarily a political theory in Deweys way of speaking. It is the culture of a whole society in which experience is engaged in its power of fulfillment of life through cooperation and communication. But if democracy is to have a future, it must embrace an understanding of the deepest needs of human beings and the means of fulfilling them. Dewey has argued that our deepest need is for the experience of mean-ing and value in our lies. (Alexander 1998: 17)

And this is precisely why the role of art and the aesthetic experience is so important for Dewey. It is to an [aesthetic] experience that Dewey finds the qualities that he considers most productive for a meaningful and con-scious life. In this, the two philosophies /philosophers intersect and over-lap and in particular in their focus on the importance of everyday life as the site of value and meaning. For Dewey everyday life experience is the basis for our experience of meaning and value in the world. (Alexander 1998: 11)

Dewey speaks to the creative moment of both creation and reception, the moment of experience. Rancire, on the other hand, speaks to how that

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moment reverberates out into the world and its significance in the larger context of political life. On different levels both philosophies understand the impossibility of pinning down exactly what is meant by art and both philosophies unsettle the idea of the avant-garde or any notion that art has a single mission or single ideology. Such an idealistic and heroic position is anathema to both Deweys pragmatism and Rancires sense of the shifting, performative and heterogeneous sensible. For these reasons I think that both philosophical positions are important for understanding uncertain practices; and both philosophies are productive for valuing and understanding the mobile, ephemeral and porous nature of the unsitely aesthetics of these practices.

Unsitely

It was in the midst of a dinner party conversation, sometime in 2004, dis-cussing internet art and the demise of net.art that I first became aware that something had seriously shifted with artists practices and their rela-tionship to the internet. What prompted this rethinking was the work of two German artists calling themselves Empfangshalle (reception hall). The two artists had made a work in 2001 while in New York City, called Please Let Us Hear From You.27 This simple but powerful work entailed literally inserting themselves into private souvenir photographs that other people were taking while visiting the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City a popu-lar tourist site. This is how it was explained on their website:

Empfangshalle requested a photo of one partner taken by the other. And with the cou-ples own camera. The developed photo was to be sent to Empfangshalle later. Please let us hear from you The infrastructure that Empfangshalle utilizes lies between intimacy and public space. A pair of lovers place themselves in the public space of a touristy sou-

venir photo. Actually this would remain a private matter in spite of the public setting if Empfangshalle had not joined in. (Empfangshalle n. p.)28

The website for this work is simple and minimal, showing photos depicting the two artists standing astride a tourist, (in both cases a young woman). The images have captions saying sent from Tokyo and sent from Ve-

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rona, so it would seem that their collaborators (the tourists) did send their photo back to the two artists in Germany. It is this almost casual use of the internet and the snapshot together that alerted me to this shift in the relationship between artists and the internet. In many ways this work is ex-emplary of the shift that I argue has occurred between artists and the in-ternet in the recent past, where the internet is now acting as one site of the work as well as another form of public space. And it is this play between the online and offline presence of the work that is most significant. That is, rather than the previous era where net.art or Flash animation played only online, artists are now leaving the studio, moving and working in public spaces, in a process that is both mobile and nomadic. The internet is now part of the everyday rather than being a separate and removed place to which one can escape. This sitting side by side of the virtual and the physi-cal world is the hallmark of the new relationship that artists, and especially the uncertain practices that this book is concerned with, are now utilising.

The form that this type of work exhibits and enacts on the internet can be described as, above all, simple (although not simplistic). Second-ly, it displays a low-tech preference rather than high-level computer pro-gramming or specialised technical skills on the one hand and, on the other, costly forms of fabrication. This sort of working method is often associat-ed with DIY and has a certain anti-professional bent to it, both of which create a distinct sense of intimacy. Intimacy is a quality strongly associat-ed with both DIY modes of production and the internet itself.29 Significant-ly, the work exists across multiple sites both actual and metaphorical, but it is also situated. That is, like the Brooklyn Bridge in the above work, the site is an actual place and one of several sites of the work. The German art-ists are also situated in terms of their own place in the world; and the work exists online and therefore can be accessed globally at any time; and in this case it was accessed by me in Sydney.

In part it is this paradoxical multi-sitedness and situatedness of the work and its reception that has prompted the term unsitely, thus calling attention to its lack of presence in the traditional sense and to the hori-zontal logic that it shares.30 The un in unsitely resonates with Freuds notion of the uncanny or the unheimlich. The uncomfortableness and the not at home feeling, which some work evokes and that can provoke the question of where is the work as well as what is the work? This sense of

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the unheimlich can produce both unease as well as an attendant laughter.But unsitely is also a pun, referring to the unsightly or unspectacular na-ture of the work. Following Dewey, unsitely/unsightly suggests both the ir-relevance of the beautiful as well as a shift away from a focus on the vi-sual altogether, to work that invites participation or engagement through media. As Arthur Danto notes in his essay on art and beauty, Kallipho-bia, If everything is possible as art, everything is possible as aesthetics as well. (Danto 2005: 324) In Empfangshalles work, the photo is a snapshot rather than a crafted photograph. The importance of the work does not lie with any particular harmonious nature of the snapshot, rather it is, firstly, the concept that prompts a response and, secondly, knowing that the peo-ple in the image are strangers31 to each other, it is the absurdity of the sit-uation of the two artists standing calmly astride the tourists and the ridic-ulousness of inserting themselves into a private, yet very public ritual of snapping a photo of an iconic place, that solicits a response. Put simply it is very funny; and with laughter there is a release, which is liberating and cathartic. This is the power of the work. In discussing the laughter of Fluxus, David T. Doris quotes Conrad Hyers (himself discussing the laugh-ter that is prevalent in Zen): The resulting laughter is an expression of cognitive shock in the face of a rupture of the expected, the dissolution of the frames authority an explosive decentring of the self. (Friedman 1998: 121)

In his book All of a sudden, Jrg Heiser (2008) describes a strong vein of humour and laughter that runs through 20th century avant-garde art practices from Marcel Duchamp and Alfred Jarry to the joke group of Fluxus. He re-thinks the work of artists like Bas Jan Ader and invents a new term to describe more closely their oeuvre romantic conceptu-alists. This conflation of two terms normally considered to be opposites manages to bring together the tragic and the comic two elements that slapstick comedians understand well. Heiser in fact suggests a close link between the birth of slapstick and modern art. He argues that slapstick is significant for contemporary art, not as theme or subject but as a method:

Slapstick as a technique, attitude, or approach: as something that gets to the heart (or is it the dark, empty core?) of making and looking at art itself. Slapstick is a central trig-gering mechanism, both a premeditated trick and a spontaneous idea. (Heiser 2008: 17)

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To call something unsightly is to suggest disapproval if not outright disgust it cannot be looked at, it is something in poor taste, it is some-thing beyond the pale. In calling work unsitely/unsightly I want to pro-voke laughter and hold in tension the idea of work that cant be looked at because it is a work in motion (whose visual components are not the focus), against the possibility that the work is outside or beyond current taste or judgements. It is unsitely because it may be too small and unspectacular or, like Empfangshalles work above, it may call upon the laughter of surprise and recognition, the sudden explosive laughter reminiscent of slapstick.

The aesthetics that emerge from such practices are by no means a dominant aesthetics, yet they are a significant and widespread aesthet-ics. In fact the unsiteliness of some media art is so widespread that at first glance it might seem not to bear talking about let alone having attention drawn to it. It is as pervasive as the networks themselves and for some crit-ics this is enough for it to be irrelevant and relegated to the impure, the un-gainly, the unsightly, and stuck with the label, This is not art.32 Yet this pervasiveness is exactly why it is important to notice and understand such work. In many ways this could be considered a 21st century unfolding of the art and life debate. What is at stake for these practices and this aesthet-ics is important not only for the artists concerned but for artists interested in keeping passageways open for work that is small and ephemeral rather than spectacular; low budget or zero budget and therefore outside the con-trol and discipline of the major art institutions and funding bodies, both government and commercial galleries; and most importantly concerned with process rather than finished product. These works often display a de-cidedly and suddenly humorous approach rather than the minimalist high style of current gallery work. Unsitely, then, is a term that works on multiple levels; it is a double entendre and a pun (site/sight). In a literal sense it means work that is unsited, in the sense that Miwon Kwon (2004) discusses in her chapter, The (un)sitings of community where she ar-gues for the impossibility of community.33 Kwons analysis helps shape ideas around publics as explored in the next chapter, which further prob-lematises participation and collaboration.

In sketching an outline for a particular (unsitely) aesthetics I want to first insist that what I am calling an unsitely aesthetics is not a separate theory of art, neither is it even a formalist analysis dissecting specific fea-

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tures or properties,34 nor is it nominating a new movement, ism or style. Rather, it is more like a field of practices where network culture is acting as the context or the backdrop as works emerge willy-nilly. Or per-haps it could be compared to Deweys notion of significant tendencies. (Dewey 2005: 225) For now it is important to note that I see unsitely aes-thetics as in conversation with both relational and distributed aesthetics, even if these two discourses are not in agreement, and would perhaps not even agree to being in the same conversation. Nicolas Bourriauds relation-al aesthetics attempted to describe a certain moment, specifically a group of artists and artworks in the 1990s, as critical art practices began moving away from tired forms of oppositional politics. Distributed aesthetics, on the other hand, emerged from the online collaborative journal and group called Fibreculture35 in particular through the collaborative text, Theses on distributed aesthetics.36 (Lovink 2008) In nominating another aes-thetics, or tendency, I am hoping to open out a space for art practices that may play in the gaps and crevices of current discourse. My aim therefore in pointing to these practices is to highlight their specific aesthetic and to extend observations, raised initially by Bourriaud and later in distributed aesthetics, of current practices and their relationship to traditional art the-ory and history. In short, it is a strategic move to throw light on the signif-icance of these ways of working and making art, as the very everyday and unspectacular nature of some of these works can make them less notice-able to critical evaluation.

In the essay Theses on distributed aesthetics, Munster and Lovink describe distributed aesthetics as a rethinking of aesthetics beyond the twinned concepts of form and medium that continue to shape analysis of the social and the aesthetic. (Lovink 2008: 227) This could also be ap-plied to unsitely aesthetics which shares with distributed aesthetics an un-derstanding of aesthetics as a philosophical praxis investigating the very conditions of contemporary life. (Lovink 2008: 231) As the essay goes on to describe the conditions that distributed aesthetics must work with, it outlines, in fact, exactly where distributed and unsitely overlap each other:

Distributed aesthetics must deal simultaneously with the dispersed and the situat-ed, with asynchronous production and multi-user access to artefacts (both material and immaterial) on the one hand, and the highly individuated and dispensed allot-

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ment of information /media on the other. The aesthetics of distributed media, prac-tices, and experience cannot be located in the formal principles of their dispersal. (Lovink 2008: 227 8)

Theses on distributed aesthetics opens the enquiry into the aesthesia of networked events, an inquiry that surfaced after the demise of net.art and the rise of Web 2.0. How do we experience the current wave of blogs, podcasts, and mobile phone games? What network theory is used and is it adequate to the task of engaging networks on their own terms? (Lovink 2008: 226)

The emphasis for Munster and Lovink is on the networks and the social formations that are now multiplying around us with expanded mo-bile technologies. The focus for unsitely aesthetics is on the paradoxical situatedness and multi-sitedness of artwork as well as the restored signifi-cance of place in general.37 The emphasis for unsitely is also the use that all sorts of artists are making of the internet as a site for practice. For instance in projects like Let Us Hear From You the artists employ an elegant sim-plicity that utilises the internet in a very modest yet powerful way.

Bourriauds Relational Aesthetics, on the other hand, first published in 1998, (in English in 2002) was a text that had a powerful effect on art practices around the globe.38 It was either supremely uninterested in the internet and digital technology or highly reactive to the perceived threat of network culture:

These days communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that di-vide the social bond up into quite different products. The much vaunted communica-tion superhighways, with their toll plazas and picnic areas, threaten to become the only possible thoroughfare from a point to another in the human world. (Bourriaud 2002: 8)

However, in articulating an aesthetics of relation Bourriauds text unwit-tingly described salient features of emerging network culture and its social sites, an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human inter-actions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space. (Bourriaud 2002: 14).

In short, by developing a new term to describe the aesthetics that un-certain media art practices are manifesting, I am attempting to open out a

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space that I suggest already exists between Bourriauds relational and Fi-brecultures distributed aesthetics; and it is such a space that unsitely aes-thetics speaks to. I am also following Lovinks suggestion that it would be better to come up with descriptions for what we actually witness. (Lovink 2008: 227) In this sense, unsitely certainly describes an aesthetics that current practices are performing; it is an aesthetics that is occurring all around us and is a concept that is grounded in my own observation of this shift in artists practices.

diy and the Amateur

DIY and the figure of the amateur are two significant forms of production operating within network culture. As such they are significant modes of production and reception for uncertain practices and unsitely aesthetics and, further, they form the context from which unsitely aesthetics unfolds. Both are good examples of the horizontal mode a mode referred to by Bertrand Clavez in relation to Fluxus.39 DIY, the salient mode of network culture, positions itself against a tradition of professionalism and profes-sional values. In many ways this DIY tradition is a return to cultural prac-tices that existed prior to the 20th century, before the mechanical inven-tions for recording sound and image, as Lawrence Lessig argues in Remix:

Never before in the history of human culture had the production of culture been as pro-

fessionalised. Never before had its production become as concentrated. Never before

had the vocal cords of ordinary citizens been as effectively displaced, and displaced, as Sousa feared, by these infernal machines. The twentieth century was the first time in the history of human culture when popular culture had become professionalised, and when the people were taught to defer to t