March 8-10 2002, University of California Santa Barbara
Peter Lunenfeld
Media Design Program, Art Center College of Design
(all
rights reserved)
(narrativization)
My talk this afternoon is
titled "visual intellectuals." But Iıve come to find that putting
together the visual with the word intellectual without a comma between them is
a pretty rare syntactic construction. The two are almost always divided by a
comma, and are usually to be found in a longer string.
Visual, intellectual, and
technical
Visual, intellectual, and
social
Visual, intellectual, and
emotional
Visual, intellectual, and
cultural etc.
But today, Iım going to use
the occasion of this weekendıs investigations of the digital in the context of
the arts and humanities as a way to conjoin these two usually divided realms.
Letıs face it, even when
intellectuals aren't talking about words, they express themselves through, by,
and with them to such an extent that what they generate can never be truly seen
as a discussion about anything other than them. This explains the way that no
matter how much art history, architectural criticism, or film studies claim to
deal with visual and spatial systems, these discursive modes tend to resolve
themselves finally around, well, around discourse itself. This is not to say
that this text-based intellectual work is in the end consecrated to the craft
of writing, as anyone who has valiantly pushed through reams of turgid academic
prose can attest (word processing aside, Truman Capoteıs chestnut, "that's
not writing, that's typing," still holds). But something new is brewing. I
would claim that we are about to witness the wide-scale emergence of visual
intellectuals--people simultaneously making, pondering and commenting on visual
culture, but in a way that doesnıt perforce adhere to the primacy of the word.
These are the people
creating the visual culture that surrounds us, a culture which over the course
of the past hundred years has essentially supplanted text's preeminence. It
would be easy enough to write this development off with the cliché about the
triumph of the mute image over the expressive word. But we're long past that
narrative now, willing to lift our "downcast eyes" (to cite historian
Martin Jay) to look into the lightbox.
Although the utopian promise
that will allow people to "write" with audio-visual media often
recedes with each new advance (at least on the part of dominant broad-, and
even narrowcasters), there is a growing body of work that proves that complex
argumentation, sophisticated critique, and even languages of praise are being
generated outside of purely text-based discourse.
The World Wide Web is the
obvious place to go looking for such multi-mediated ways of thinking. This is,
after all, a medium in which the object, that of which it is composed (the
source code), and any commentary on that object all exist contemporaneously and
conceptually in the same place/non-place of the network. The ability to scale
windows within windows, to create instantaneous linkages, and to comment on the
development of an art movement using an identical mode of production and
distribution--all of this has led to the particular flavor of visualized,
hyper-coded meta-commentary. The first such instantiations were admittedly
sophomoric--i.e., sites like
<suck.com> (Web pages that suck, get it?)-- but things improved as
the net.arts evolved, and it became obvious that the art and the discourse
about that art were contextually and constitutively indistinguishable. There
was also a willingness to explore meta-structuring of data as art, as with
IODıs remarkable deconstruction device Webstalker, or to use the structures of
the digital media to actively intervene into longstanding debates, as with the
pseudo-gaming model of Lev Manovich and Norman Kleinıs Freud Lizzitsky
Navigator.
Too often, though, the Web
breeds a techno-solipsism, an unwarranted confidence that computer networks are
generating something entirely without precedent. This is nonsense, of course,
as avant-garde film and video offers a long history of audiovisual essays and
meta-critical production (see, for example, Tom Tom the Piperıs Son of 1969,
Ken Jacobs's reframing at varying speeds and in different sections of an
example of early cinema, and Trouble in the Image of 1996, Pat OıNeilıs magnum
opus of optical printing, as well as videos stretching from Joan Jonasıs
structuralist intervention Vertical Roll (1972) to the hypertheorizations of
Gary Hillıs proto-interactive Site Recite: A Prologue of 1989).
Perhaps better understood by
thinking netizens is the debt to graphic design. Although some ardent
youngsters (and not-so-youngsters, unfortunately) protest that something as
commercially "tainted" as the professional practice of design has
nothing to say to artists like themselves, the impact of contemporary graphics
is indisputable. While modernist masters like Paul Rand promoted the ideal of
the designer as refining reagent, the substrate through which someone else's
message could be filtered, contemporary designers no longer feel obliged to
make a show of such modesty. Randıs
model was already being dismantled when desktop publishing exploded, radically
dropping the price of sophisticated visualization tools (programs like
Photoshop, Typesmith and Pagemaker) and fostering an efflorescence of style for styleıs sake. More self-conscious
designers also woke up to the complex challenges to "clarity"
accumulating under the rubric of postmodern theory, and began to conceptualize
how digital technologies could allow them to develop their own signature
styles.
The best architectural
publications have long been examples of visual intellectuality, and the 1344
page collaboration between architect Rem
Koolhaas and designer Bruce
Mau that is S,M,L,XL (1995) was rightly
lauded. In S,M,L,XL, the point is neither to illustrate words nor to caption
pictures, but rather to create a synergistic matrix of images and texts.
No one has ever accused
Peter Halley of an inability to read the zeitgeist, so itıs instructive to see
how he has reacted to the emergence of visual intellectuality. Back in 1988,
Galerie Bruno Bischofberger published Peter Halley: Collected Essays 1981-87 (designed
by Anthony McCall Associates) which, like the Semiotext(e) books so popular at
the same time, was an elegant, understated, monochromatic text that announced
its seriousness and modesty to the point of having a brown paper cover.
Contrast that approach to the overwhelming seduction of the recently
released Peter Halley: Maintain
Speed (Distributed Arts Publishers,
2000). Edited by Halleyıs studio director Corey Reynolds and designed by COMA
(Cornelia Blatter and
Marcel Hermans, who also
design Halley's magazine Index), Maintain Speed is a Peter Halley production
from exploding pink cover to incredibly detailed colophon. Like S,M,L,XL, it
offers a new (if incredibly expensive) model for the visual intellectual.
One of the things that
distinguishes this volume from other catalogues is that the reproductions of
paintings, the installation shots, and the incidental photography of the artist
and his milieu are all subtended by a delirious grid of parenthetical and
relational databases. Many of the paintings are, of course, grids, so there is
an immediate relationship between the content and the form. Continuing this is
a motif is what the editorial and design team refered to informally as the
"information bar": a row of ten, postage stamp-sized boxes, delineated
by pink, perforated lines, running along the bottom of the page. These "stamps" are filled only
occasionally, sometimes in blocks of two or three, and can be images, diagrams,
captions, or quotes. This allows not for a single parallel, but a multiplicity
of argumentations and contextualizations of the work under discussion.
This strategy is taken to
its utmost when the rows of stamps becomes pages of them, with a ten by ten
grid of the pink, perforated lines defining the field for a postal-sized Halley
retrospective. The first double page spread is devoted to the year 1981, and
features just five painting on one page and two on the other. By the time you get four spreads deeper,
those original seven paintings have been augmented by 42 more, and their
spatial relationships have remained consistent, though theyıve been compacted
together towards the y axis. Turn the page, however, and the planar development
of chronological sequencing is challenged abruptly. A series of blue,
curvilinear arrow are overprinted on the exact same grid from the previous
spread, but this time creating a flow chart that indicates the conceptual and
stylistic linkages both forward and backwards in time. Along with the
subsequent spreads, this offers as beautiful a double mapping of the diachronic
and synchronic (to appropriate the theoryspeak of which
Halley was so enamored in
the 80s) as you are likely to see anywhere.
By discussing S,M,L,XL and Peter Halley: Maintain Speed, Iıve obviously stacked the decks, as these projects were masterminded respectively by an architect and an artist. How might historians of music, political scientists, demographers, or feminist legal scholars spin their tales, fabricate their theories, or illuminate their causes in commensurately dynamic ways? Could the turn towards the visual extricate us from the mire of formulaic structures of knowledge with which we are all familiar to the point of sheer apathy? Perhaps first we need to let go of the notion that language is the sober way to truth, and put the visual's intoxicating powers to use doing something other than simply selling sex, stuff, or (as with so much of today's art) simply itself.