Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004

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Saper, Craig J., Networked Art, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 216, ASIN  0816637067, price: HC $106.47, PB $21.96.

Reviewed by

Robert  Chumbley

Craig Saper's Networked Art is a service to people of all disciplines which touch upon the arts.Despite the sometimes stacatto quality of the numerous descriptions, as the reading progresses,  some fascinating interplay emerges between the center and margins of art. Networked art, though it has been around since the postal service, finds one of its immediate sources in the work of John Cage and the group which came after him called Fluxus. This group believed in  'making network situations into artworks'(Saper xv). These works were on a small scale of distribution, often not bound, but 'assembled'. The goal was not only to avoid galery and regular publication systems, but to develop other ways of distributing 'artwork' all the while making of the distribution system a source of aesthetics. Saper calls such creations 'receivable texts'  following Roland Barthes' concept of a text which escapes the dyadic text of pleasure vs.text of jouissance, later readerly and writerly texts  respectively. These 'receivable' texts are indeed unreaderly which  does not necessarily make them writerly! (See Roland Barthes). Saper calls these creations or assemblings  'intimate bureaucracies' which he describes as follows:

These art works used virtual poetry and typographic experiments or instructions and scores for performances and poetic situations. Of course, all art and literature intends to move its audiences, but in intimate bureaucracies, the work is about the interaction among distribution
systems, a community of participants, and the poetic artisanal works. ( 151)

Issue 6 of The Collective Farm is an example of this collective activity. The editors asked a number of  diverse Russians to take a 'Stalin test'. An envelope with Stalin's picture and the name and profession of the addressee printed above it contained the person's effort to draw Stalin.For Saper, ' The actual responses have less impact on the meaning than the concept of the variations and 'imperfection' of all the representations.'(145) While these assemblings of intimate bureaucracies remain rather poorly known in themselves if, for no other reason than their consciously limited distribution, their true role becomes evident when suddenly Saper's discourse evokes similarities between these marginal creations and better known musical experiments of Boulez or Warhol's collaboration in the Dec. 1966 issue of Aspen , showing a cross fertilization of Pop Art and intimate bureaucracy art. There is even a nod to a 'central' predecessor , Mallarmé, whose 'Un Coup de Dés' offers the play of different fonts and positions of text on the page. Derrida more recently has done the same thing in  Glas. In both of these written texts there is play upon an aesthetic transformation of the printing network. Saper also sees similarities between intimate bureaucracies and  the Constructivist publication of the 1920`s. Indeed the list continues, as we suggested at the outset, of exchange between margin and center. 

While Saper considers Derrida  in the domain of exchange (p.100), he might well  consider 'Essai sur le Don' by Marcel Mauss which includes the concept of potlatch which Saper uses. Derrida on the other hand,  might well be addressed for intimate bureaucracy purposes in the 'Parergon' chapter of The Truth in Painting which deals with framing, or margins and centers. Yet another helpful text for analysis of this type of art might well be René Thom`s 'Itinerary for a Science of the Detail' (Criticism, summer, 1990)

I suggest these theoretical texts in the spirit of mail art by adding my contribution to the circulation of the book`s image. Finally, the negative valuing of this art by a former practitioner, Robert Cummings, (55) reminds us that the question  of value remains to be decided for this fascinating production.