Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 1, April 2004
_______________________________________________________________
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.