THE ART OPERATION
Strategic intermedia art operations in the age of extremities.
I’m not going to go on at length about the specifics of my conception of Art Operations, but reserve the right to mention some generalities. The image above, called History-Design, is yet another take on a kind of painting I designed back in the summer of 2001, then called the History-Painting.
I repeat this almost every time, but I gave myself the objective at the time of painting the Concept(s) of History. My best guess was what I came to call the History-Painting. This History-Design is kind of an inside joke I am making with myself, since I start almost every post with, “In the summer of 2001…”
PART ONE: HOW DOES IT WORK EXACTLY?
Below is a quick sketch I made on my giant notebook of the basics of the Art Operation as I currently practice it. I am the Art Operator at the left with The World at the right. I observe the world, the universe, including people who also inhabit this space, and I take it all in with my senses. I also call this data collection “in-the-field”.
This goes in one direction, from The World towards me. Then you have my art productions, which flow in the other direction, from me towards The World. The world also includes publication and exhibition towards the Public. In any case, the art productions involve the transformation of raw materials, and go out into the world, as state above.
What’s left are Thoughts. Thoughts cycle onto themselves, they are their own loop. Thoughts create more thoughts, and I put down the term Documentation and Archive, to remind myself that a mature Art Operation always maintains its own documentation, the documentation of its practice, its processes of invention as well as work methodologies, including one’s research practices as well.
PART TWO: THE ROAD AHEAD
I recently wrote elsewhere about complexity in the art operation. What happens is that once you start up the Workspace and start working, researching and working on the production process, the longer you go, you build up steam, you build up tension as well, and productions, and in the end you end up becoming destabilized — at least if you’re not careful.
That’s why it’s important to remember to shut dowh the operation. Whether it’s at the end of the day, or once every week, or every two weeks, the time doesn’t really matter but you MUST remember to shut down the WHOLE OPERATION. This is for your own safety and physical and mental health.
I explain. What happens is that as you take on more and more steam as I called it, and you are multiplying manufacturing operations and building up research and documentation and so forth, as well as taking on/adding new Projects, the Complexity of the Operation sky-rockets.
This high level of complexity is non-sustainable at least in the medium-to-long term. You might not realize it yet, but you’re heading straight on towards your eventual Collapse. There’s nothing to fear about collapse, it’s just a rapid or else sometimes more drawn out process of Simplification.
The complexity has reached fever-pitch and the whole thing collapses, because to maintain the high and possibly still growing level of complexity of the workspace and operation, you need more and more energy inputs, and thermodynamically speaking, you can’t do the impossible!
So here are two types of equilibria that I encounter in my art practice and research, regularly. After that I will explain what you are seeing and explain the second part of this image which is on Modes of Expression.
The image at the top-left is of two concentric circles signifies or represents a stable equilibrium state. That’s the state you’re in when you’re at rest, before any work takes place. Imagine being a marble at the bottom of a fruit bowl: You are in a state of stable equilibrium. You are at rest, you sit still, and if you move in any direction, gravity will take you back to that central position, the stable equilibrium state.
The image on the right, of the circle with the arrow pointing outwards, that’s an image or representation of what I call a neutral or astable equilibrium state. An unstable equilibrium would be like balancing on top of a basketball, it’s unstable, and if you fall off, you go FAR AWAY from the state of equilibrium. In the stable equilibrium, small deviations self-correct. In an unstable equilibrium, small deviations cause the whole craphouse to collapse. You have failure.
This is true in art practices, this is where I got the idea for these two basic equilibrium states. In the neutral or astable equilibrium state, you are like a book sitting on a table. You can move it 3 inches to the left, it easily moves, it responds to the force applied to it, and it stays are rest after that at the new location. This is the state you are in when you are working an Art Operation a lot of the time. Except you DO have points of unstable equilibrium, I just didn’t draw that one. The neutral equilibrium state is where you want to be because you can respond adequately to pressures from inside the art practice AND pressures from the outside. You are not easily displaced, not too easily, and you stay at rest once you’ve moved. I conclude now with an explanation of the rest of the sketch I made on my giant notepad, with The Three Modes of Communication of The Art Operation of Interdisciplinary Artist-Research A.G.
PART THREE: CONCLUSION
At the bottom of the sketch on my giant notepad is a strange image, you might think. There are three tracks basically, or three modes: Image | Sound | Text. These are my Three Modes of Expression. I explain.
The top track is the image track or mode. It speaks for itself, it is composed of images-in-sequence. My painting series are exactly this, moving pictures. The drawing is meant to show a strip of film like you would see in analog cinema. The second track is for sounds. This is a signal, basically, and that’s exactly what I drew, the waveform if you will of a basic noisy signal, or else a complex waveform. Sounds are just so many superpositions of pure sine waves, and the sounds-in-sequence are my experimental sound designs as well as my Song Cycles and voice recordings and so forth. It is the Sound.
The last and final track or mode of expression is Text. Here I express myself in various forms and formats, in poetry, fiction (novels, etc.), and non-fiction, i.e. philosophy and other research. That’s how I conceptualize my art practice, called The Art Operation in The Historiotheque (the latter term is just the name of my atelier/art studio. More on this at a later date.
Concluding Note: The History-Design at the beginning of this post has three main features. It has Templates, Conduits, and Axes. When I designed the History-Painting, that is, when I tried to paint the Concept(s) of History as I said, I decided to start with polygons on a flat two-dimensional surface, the surface of the painting. I made these little floating windows that represented the history of painting, because it was similar to the catalogue-paintings at the Birth of the Gallery, also the Birth of Painting, hundreds of years ago. Those are the Templates of History. They are like land-fragments.
The Conduits are just the lines of communication connecting the Templates as though it were one massive circuit board. The Axes are self-explanatory, they are the bases, the different bases on which the basis vectors of History sit.
It was one way of visualizing History. There are others, but I wanted to graph trajectors of history-points and other things like that, and even had a function called H(x) — pronounced “h of x” — that was the production function for The History-Project, a single function from which you could derive THE ENTIRE PROJECT. Again, more of this at a later date.
A.G. © 2023. All Rights Reserved.
