Baudrillard Research Paper

Baudrillard and Contemporary Artist

Shannon McDonell
Post Structuralism
Diane Zeeuw
December 6th, 2012

We live in the world of science fiction. With our ipods, iphones, tablets, laptops, etc. we have a vast amount of information on our finger tips. Through all of our online networks, blogs, websites, etc. we have a whole virtual world online. Baudrillard would term this as hyper reality where there is so much information exchanged that the foundation of our reality has changed. We are building off copies of copies and restructuring ideas that have already existed. Any kind of information about anything can be accessed via Internet. If people don’t stay caught up they will be left behind in our modern world. Computers need
to be repurchased or majorly upgrade every couple of years to keep up with the more demanding new software. New cell phones have advance applications where it surpasses that of the older technology. Parents can install a tracking system in their children’s phones so they can always be found online. How do we deal with this excessive amount of information we are bombarded with? Where does the contemporary artist fit into this world?
Baudrillard has stated that there will always be more reality, because it is produced and reproduced by simulation, and is itself merely a model of simulation (Baudrillard, 1996, p.17). He continues to say that reality has been driven out of reality and only perhaps technology still binds together the scattered fragments of the real (Baudrillard, 1996, p.4). In other words, he thinks that reality and origin do not exist and we cannot escape the world of stimulation and illusion. Illusion is indestructible (Baudrillard, 1996, p.19). There is nothing deeper underneath the surface and there are no hidden meanings to uncover. When something is too extreme, it no longer holds its origin or originality and becomes an illusion. For example, being more real than reality, having more art than art nullifies the origin because of its extremities.
Some of Baudrillard’s ideas may seem radical, but there is a grain of something honest that he is saying. How technology and how we communicate with each other shapes our consciousness and how we perceive the world. So much of our experience is through the television screen and Internet that we don’t need to leave our homes to live our lives. We could have our food delivered to us and we could work at home and be connected to the outside through the World Wide Web. The necessity of living outside is no longer essential and we could live our lives through the screen. In Baudrillard theories, there is a relevant connection to the progression of art in the 20th century and today’s contemporary art starting back with Marcel Duchamp’s work. As Sylvère Lotringer states in The Conspiracy of Art, “We have grown so accustomed to take art with a sense of awe that we cannot look at it anymore with dispassionate eyes, let alone question its legitimacy. This is what Baudrillard had in mind, and few people realized it at the time. First one has to nullify art in order to look at it for what it is (Lotringer, 2005, p.18).” To Baudrillard, he wasn’t attacking the art world, but seeing it for what it was: nothing. When he describes Duchamps work, it is this artist that began to dissipate meaning in art. The readymade created a paradox between what’s a real functional object and what is an art piece. Duchamp’s Fountain or Bottlerack were objects that one could purchase at any hardware store. Since he signed these objects and placed them in a gallery the function of these objects changed because the context of their use altered. The Readymade being taken out of its functional context and into the galleries, we begin questioning what constitutes as art (Baudrillard, 2005). Baudrillard describes these objects as being more real than real, more art than art, in other words, these objects became a hyperreality where there is no origin or reality. Duchamp gave art meaningless and created ambiguity between art and reality. The readymade set in motion changes that would forever alter the art world. As quoted in The Conspiracy of Art “The readymade wasn’t a point of departure, but a point of no return (Lotringer, 2005, p.20).” According to Baudrillard, Andy Warhol went the farthest to the destruction of the artist by withdrawing from the creative process. There is no avante garde; no utopia (Baudrillard, 1996, p.79). He reintroduces nothingness into the heart of the image. As Sylvère Lotringer states in The Conspiracy of Art, “what Baudrillard so readily embraced in Warhol, though, was not the great artist, but the machine he masterfully managed to turn himself into. Both in his art and in his frozen persona, Warhol embodied in an extreme form the only radical alternative still conceivable in the century: renouncing art altogether and turning commodity itself into an art form (Lotringer, 2005, p.19).” He pushes the boundary of art and reality. Warhol takes popular images from commercial advertising, newspapers, magazines, and removes them from their context. He is creating something different. Images of race riots, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy, Campbell soup, Brilla Boxes, he is removing the drama and context of these images leaving them emotionless. The bright flat colors reduce the picture to something else then it’s existence in its original context. As quoted by Warhol “Art exists (perhaps) but I don’t believe it (Baudrillard, 1996, p.83).” Warhol changed how the art world defines and perceives art, and forever changed what constitutes as art. As Baudrillard states about Andy Warhol, “What is good about Warhol is that he is stoical, agnostic, puritanical, and heretical all at the same time (Baudrillard, 1996, p.84).” Duchamp and Warhol have changed the art world and its role in our reality by detaching objects from its reality. So how do contemporary artist use these ideas and influences in their work? Artist Josiah McElheny is a glass blower using the traditional Venetian techniques. He doesn’t believe in history. He states that his work is derived from some previous source at some level, so he is reimagining something that previously existed and connecting it to the source. McElheny is creating these objects by copying them from art history; in other words, these pieces are copies of copies. Originality is not important to McElheny, but memory of the object is significant to him. McElheny views his work as making models, never going beyond the model stage (Sollins, 2005, p.86). In his piece Mirror and Reflected Infinitely he created mirrored blown glass vases and placed them in a mirrored glass case. The piece has infinite reflections of the objects only, not the viewer; in other words, he created an infinity of reflection copies that goes on forever. This relates to Baudrillard’s idea of making copies of copies and how there is no such thing as originality. Something is always derived from something else and it is a continuous cycle that can never be altered or escaped. Jenny Holzer is an American conceptual artist.
She uses advertisement aesthetic for her public art pieces using phrases or words about general issues to evoke a response from the viewer. Holzer has stopped using her own text in 2001. She says her work is not poetry, but it takes the shape of poetry with no connection to literature. It has to do with the medium and its location. Holzer likes to go to locations and get a feel of the place and then she can visualize what to put in or on the space. She doesn’t put herself in her work. Holzer utilizes sources outside of her self and doesn’t want the concern to be who the artist is, but to be attracted to the content itself. Her work is an example of communication through technology in an advertisement aesthetic with bright flashing lights and strong phrases to capture the viewers’ attention (Sollins, 2007, pp. 14-24). This is an example of Baudrillard’s idea of how we communicate through technology and how technology is what perhaps binds fragments of reality today (Baudrillard, 2005, p.4). Using this medium, Holzer is communicating social issues in a public place through a social context. She puts thought and intention of where her works will be shown and the audience who will be viewing the pieces. With care and purpose, her work has been displayed on billboards, televisions, monuments, buildings, posters, clothing, stickers, public benches, plaques, etc (“MOMA”, 2009). She has pushed boundaries of where art works can be shown and displayed, involving the community discourse into her works. She takes words and phrases from hot social topics, such as the Death Penalty and creates communication of these issues through her art
pieces. Susan Collins is an installation British artist. In her public works, she uses technology as a form of communication through various social contexts. Her recent works mostly utilizes transmission, networking, and time as key materials. She also explores the function of illusion or belief in its form and how it is communicated. In Conversation was first installed in 1997 at Brighton, United Kingdom. As stated on Collins website, this installation offered the means for people out on the street and inside on the Internet to participate in a live discussion with one another. The goal in this piece is to study the boundaries and social customs of diverse forms of public spaces, and in this case examining the street and the Internet/chat room social interactions. Each social space has its own established conduct of behavior and rules of engagement. People on the street come across an animated mouth projected onto the ground, while through loudspeakers they could hear voices created by the Internet users attempting to start up a dialogue with the passersby. When the foot-traffic replied, a hidden microphone and surveillance camera conveyed the answers to the website through a live video stream (webcast). Online visitors could view the surveillance video and listen the people on the street through the website. They could enter their messages and launch them instantaneously to the installation where they were translated into speech and announced through loudspeaker to the street. This project investigated how people communicated and interacted depending on the context and location of the social engagement. In addition, she is exploring the motivation for individuals to participate in the communication (Collins, 2001). In Baudrillards theories, this is connected to how we experience reality through another vehicle of technology. It is a reality that is just a real as when we communicate in person to each other and from even several miles apart from each other via internet. When I studied in Florence Italy, I would use Skype to communicate with my family back in California. I would be sitting comfortably in my bed in Florence with my computer on my lap that had an image of my mother sitting in her car having her lunch on her break from work in California using her iphone to skype with me. Another time I was sitting at home on a Friday night in Grand Rapids, Michigan while my family was at Costco and Target in Novato, California doing their usual Friday night shopping. I was walking around Target with my brother on his iphone looking and talking about movies as though I was there, except I was at home in my living room in Grand Rapids on my computer. I was socially interacting with him even though I was not physically there. All I was missing was experiencing the smells, tastes, and feel of where they were. I was there having the experience with them even though I was two thousand miles away. Through technology, I was experiencing a reality that was outside and different from the one I was physical placed. As Baudrillard has stated in The Perfect Crime, “We labour under the illusion that it is the real we lack the most, but actually, reality is at its height. By our technical exploits, we have reached such a degree of reality and objectivity that we might even speak of an excess of reality, which leaves us far more anxious and disconcerted than the lack of it (Baudrillard, 1996, p.65).”
Paul Demarinis is a sound and installation artist. He has been making noises from wires, batteries and household appliances since the age of four. He is known to explore unique connections between physics, aesthetics, and social history from the media. Demarinis work conveys connections between technology and culture; in addition he highlights inconsistency between science and superstition while pointing out the pros and cons of technology usefulness. He began collecting images of missing children in 1987. These flyers would have two images, one being the picture of the child at the time of abduction. The other image would either be an age-procession created by an artist of how the child would look now or it would be the image of the abductor/parent. Demarinis is attracted to the likeness of the two images together of the child, age-procession child, and the abductor/parent. He examines the facial similarities, pairs of faces and how the images abstract and change when they begin to turn into dust. In Dust the sound and installation piece, he places a powder chemical on the images. After a couple of minutes of the exposure to the images, the chemical maintains a faded green image of the faces. The image then begins to distort then a low frequency begins to project sound. The chemical begins to flow and dance distorting and begins taking away the likeness of the faces. In the end the images turn into patterns of abstract light in motion (“Mattress Factory”, 2012). This almost seems like the artist is expressing the meaninglessness of these images. In time the pictures will turn to dust anyways and how nothing will come of it. I think it’s interesting the relation between the image of the child abducted and the age-progression image of the how the child would look like now. The reality of these images is a production of simulation where the information gained from an origin that no longer exists. The image is detached from reality. In a statement by Baudrillard, “We have, then, to propose the same hypothesis of a total, unpredictable and definitive emergence: the level of illusion could neither grow nor diminish, since it is coextensive with the world as appearance. The illusion is the world-effect itself (Baudrillard, 1996, p.60).” Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese conceptual artist. He is very interested and influenced surrealism and the Dada movement, but in particular with Marcel Duchamp’s work. He is fascinated by Duchamp’s idea that the copy is just as important as the original. His intention is to make replica of the replica. As he quoted “You know, we want to see things the way we want to- so this is the beginning of the art here, and we can shape…how we want to see.” He made a copy of Duchamp’s Large Glass. Photographing Duchamp’s piece, he sandwiched the prints he made in between two large glass panels. He feels photography is a form of saving memories and preserving time, so this piece is about memory and creating replicas (Sollins, 2005, p.110). He is reinterpreting an idea that already exists and showing how art reinvents itself to replenish itself. As quoted in The Conspiracy of Art, “The only legitimate reason art would have to exist nowadays would be to reinvent itself as art.” By reusing already explored ideas and reinitiating an established conversation, Sugimoto is bringing into the forefront already existing ideas. The repetitive cycle of a never ending loop that takes in and regurgitates that same information over and over again. Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead (also known as Thomson and Craighead) are conceptual British artists. The installation Horizon is a narrative clock comprised of images transmitting realtime from webcams located in all times zones throughout the world. The images read like a storyboard that is being constantly updated frequently acting like a global digital sundial (“Thomson & Craighead”, 2012). Baudrillard uses the term “realtime” as a reality existing out of context and living on a screen removed from its environment. As Baudrillard states “Live your life in real time- live and suffer directly on-screen. Think in real time- your thought is immediately encoded by the computer. Make your revolution in real time- not in the street, but in the recording studio. Live out your amorous passions in real time- the whole thing on video from start to finish (Baudrillard, 1996, p.28).” There are a lot of realities projecting through the screen creating an overwhelming experience of reality. All of these projected realities are compiled together composed geometrically in small squares lined up perfectly next to and on top of each other. The overwhelming encounter of experiencing these realities all at once creates an uneasiness of bombardment of too much or excessive realities making them appear as an illusion. Another project Thomson and Craighead did is called Flat Earth. It is a desktop documentary that goes on a several minute voyage over the world to stumble upon fragments of actual blogs of people. Knitted together are fragments forming narratives and stories gathered from these blogs. The visual imagery in obtained from the satellite that stream into the web then made available for viewing (“Thomson & Craighead”, 2012). Here is another example of experiencing life through technology, or more specifically through the screen. Like Baudrillard said, technology perhaps still binds together the scattered fragments of the real (Baudrillard, 1996, p.4). Through the satellite and imagery streamed on the Internet, we are experiencing many realities to the extreme that it transgresses into an illusion. It is so much reality at once that a hyper reality occurs and nullifies any depth or meaning. The scenes are detached from their actual real time reality and produced in fragments and compiled together. In another piece called Weather Gauge, from over 150 countries there are readings of numerical weather data reading live in a gallery showing a visual display of this animated numerical, global, live information. Each work with data weather information moves between local-time, city of origin, centigrade, and Fahrenheit showing the viewers a unique experience in a context reaching beyond the actual site of the work (“Thomson & Craighead”, 2012). These work all have in common with bringing the “real time” into an art gallery context changing the work from it’s origins. The source of these works no longer matters and has fallen into a visual representation of illusion. Paul Pfeiffer is an installation artist that has been based out of New York since 1990. He was born in Honolulu in 1966, and moved to the Philippines when he was ten. His parents were both classically trained musicians who taught and studied sacred music. In the Philippines, where he lived until the age of fifteen, he didn’t have a television, but he says he didn’t need one to register the country’s sweeping fascination with American popular culture. He got to know America “through a certain lens of otherness (“Art21”, 2012).” Pfeiffer uses recent computer technologies to dissect the role that the mass media plays in shaping consciousness. He is interested in the relationship between objects and people, and how removing objects from their context and putting into another changes the meaning and function of that object. He is fascinated in objects of admiration and how people become consumers. Objects of admiration include celebrities, trophies, sports equipment, etc. he then likes to isolate these images from its context (“Art21”, 2012). For example he’ll take photos of a basketball during games and isolate them and compile these images onto one screen. So not only are you viewing just the basketball, but several images of the basketball creating a repetition and a sense of being overwhelmed by this object. Coming out of the context of the game basketball it changes meaning. It is no longer an instrument of play, but an artifact of admiration. The viewer is experiencing life through the screen and feels strongly with what happens on the screen as though it could be in real life. The role of the contemporary artist has changed and has been invented and reinvented repetitively over the course of history. Duchamp and Warhol are the fathers of modern art and changed how we define art and how it fits into our culture. Duchamp sets in motion the changes of the art world creating the ambiguity between art and reality. Warhol annihilated the role of the artist and how we identify with art. He pushes the boundary of art and reality by renouncing art and turning commodity into an art form. Baudrillard states that these artists create meaningless in art where origin or originality has no significance in artwork. There is a needless repetition of ideas that generate copies of copies. The contemporary artwork of Josiah McElheny and Hiroshi Sugimoto demonstrates the idea of replicating the same idea where there is no originality. Bauddrillard states, “The reality has been driven out of reality. Only technology perhaps still binds together the scattered fragments of the real (Baudrillard, 1996, p.4).” We experience reality through communication of technology. Jenny Holzer with her public arts exhibits these ideas through strong social messages. Susan Collins installations explore communication and social interaction in virtual public place and actual public locations. They both explore how communication happens through technology. Paul Demarinis’s work explores technology and culture with the contradictions of science and superstition. Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead with their installation projections explore real time by compiling several images together of different time zones, satellite blogs, and data readings taking these things out of their context. Paul Pfeiffer is interested in how the media shapes consciousness in his videos and installations. As radical or extreme as Baudrillard’s theories appear, there is aspects of it that read well into our contemporary culture with communication and technology. All of the above artist have an aspect of Baudrillard’s theories that are relative to our world of excessive information and science fiction.

Biblography
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