Graduate Art Seminar Week 6

Graduate Art Seminar Week 6

Bourriaud notes that Marcel Duchamp heralds a kind of nonlinear modernity that is closer in form to that now taking shape than the twentieth-century modernity, that postmodernism claims to surpass. He says Duchamp sensed the danger of "progress" in art, and,asserted that art was "a game between all people of all times" rather than a relationship with the present.
This implies a consideration of what came before and what came after the production of a work art, be it a physical object or an event that is rooted in the present,and can only be perpetuated through memory, or the use of replique,(replication) which takes on its own form of physicality such as a theater production or recording device. "The art of post production is a product of this notion of replique...the work of art is an event that constitutes the replication of and reply to another work or preexisting object; distant in time from the original to which it is linked,this work none the less belongs to the same chain of events."
Bourriaud implies this diminution ("diluting it in time"), is ridding the work of its character as a historical fetish. He mentions Bertrand Laver, Bruno Peinado, and Sam Durant as artists who are using a" form of replique to place work in the "cultural chain" of events.
Music would seem to provide a model for this type of contemporary art where work "is no longer defined as the end point of the creative process but rather as an interface, a generator of activities." Bourriaud uses the evolution of the dematerialization of the global economy as a model for this process of devaluation of property and shift to "short-term access between servers and clients operating in a network relationship"(Jeremy Rilkin).
I do not yet understand how galleries and artists profit from these relationship networks.Perhaps they all keep their day jobs in a time when acquisition is be replaced by a "generalized practice of access to experience." This sounds a bit like theater, where the shift from tangible ownership to temporal experience evolved eons ago as a form of communal storytelling.
Bourriaud quotes Peter Sloterdijk as saying "all things must be reevaluated in terms of their transportability" and cites the Exodus as an event where God was transcoded from stone to parchment , monument to document,a diaspora of forms, that require a translation among people that will give rise to a "new common intelligibility".