Source one and Source two
Source one: Cultural Resistance Reader by Stephen Duncombe
This source is relevant to the topic as one of the art works I’m going to talk about carries an idea of cultural resistance. It also could be used for better understanding of subcultures formation and it’s influence on art.
The article does not use art-criticism, but rather considers difference between two types of cultural resistance: appropriation and re-appropriation.
One is created with the purpose of political resistance and it works to that end; the other one may be used for resistance that was not originally created for that purpose. And in-between stands culture appropriated for aims for which it was not designed. ‘Culture that was not meant to be rebellious can be turned and used for those political ends and, conversely, the culture that was self-consciously fashioned with rebellion in mind can be made to serve very non-rebellious purposes.’
As NO-AD app is created by street artist, I assume that his rebellious background made a great impact into underlying theme as well as artist’s motivation. Subcultures, including street art, reject consuming culture that prevents from forming ideas or actions which will contribute to fostering a political activity or resistance; while creating culture is an action carried out by a community rather than an individual and it gives someone the power and courage of solidarity to rise against the problems of the society, what actually Jordan Seiler did. Creation of this application could be interpreted as cultural resistance, that brings with itself the power of creating own politics, so it is a crucial part of the cultural resistance.
‘But as a punk I found others who also had these problems, and since we all seemed to share them, we reasoned that they must not just be ours, but society’s problems. My personal problems became a social problem.’
‘Us punks then supported each other, helping each other face a society we didn’t like and working together to create a micro-world that functioned according to different principles.’
‘When I found my way to political activism a few years later, it was as easy step because I was already halfway there.’
‘I could develop a critique, but punk in itself did nothing to affect the root causes of the things — racism, sexism, and class inequality — I was so angry about. Punk had no strategic plan; it had no plan at all.’
‘The turn «cultural resistance» is not firmer. In the following pages I use it to describe culture that is used, consciously or unconsciously, effectively or not, to resist and/or change the dominant political, economic and/or social structure.’
‘Lets begin by considering how cultural resistance works to foster or retard radical political activity. First off, cultural resistance can provide a sort of «free space» for developing ideas and practices. Freed from the limits and constraints of the dominant culture, you can experiment with new ways of seeing and being and develop tools and resources for resistance.’
‘..cultural resistance often speaks in a more familiar and less demanding voice than political…’
‘Content and medium may carry a message, but the meaning and potential impact of that message lie dormant until interpreted by an audience.’
‘..culture that was not meant to be rebellious can be turned and used for those political ends and, conversely, culture that was self-consciously fashioned with rebellion in mind can be made to serve very non-rebellious purposes.’
‘In the middle lies the subculture, a group that has been cut off, or more likely has cut itself off, from the dominant society in order to create a shared, inclusive set of cultural values and practices.’
‘And revolution is the complete overthrow of the ruling system and a time when the culture of resistance becomes a culture.’
‘Cultural resistance creates a «free space»:
ideologically: space to create new language, meanings, and visions of the future
materially: place to build community, networks, and organizational models’
Source two: Inside the White Cube by Brian O'Doherty
In this source, the author discusses the ideology of gallery space naming it the ‘White Cube’. It’s relevant because one of the works I’ll talk about in my thesis uses a ‘classical’ gallery space for implementation, changing the context of the White Cube.
The source uses art criticism in discussing the influence of the gallery context on public’s perception and understanding the artworks. The author maintains that context of the gallery becomes an integral part of the artwork giving it a new meaning. Moreover he proposes his invented creatures which are the only thing that have left from a person after entering into the White Cube. The names of the creatures are the Eye and the Spectator; the author gives quite detailed description of each of them and helps the reader to understand (feel) the difference between their approach and perception of art and more importantly the significance of their symbiosis.
O'Doherty emphasizes that for some type of art we need the Eye but some of it requires the Spectator in order to get full experience from the art work. But according to the source it’s pretty hard to have the full experience and as a result there is an appeal to aim at having the Eye and the Spectator at once. In my opinion AR puts the Eye and the Spectator together directly, allowing the public to get ‘full’ picture and experience from the artwork. On the grounds of this it could be said that modern AR technique transforms the gallery space of classical White Cube described by O’Doherty in 1986 into space which unifies the Eye and the Spectator.
‘"Presence before a work of art," he writes, "means that we absent ourselves in favor of the Eye and the Spectator." By the Eye he means the disembodied faculty that relates exclusively to formal visual means. The Spectator is the attenuated and bleached-out life of the self from which the Eye goes forth and which, in the meantime, does nothing else. The Eye and the Spectator are all that is left of someone who has "died," as O'Doherty puts it, by entering into the white cube. In return for the glimpse of ersatz eternity that the white cube affords us — and as a token of our solidarity with the special interests of a group — we give up our humanness and become the cardboard Spectator with the disembodied Eye.’
‘We have now reached a point where we see not the art but the space first.’
‘The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is "art." The work is isolated from every- thing that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.’
‘So powerful are the perceptual fields of force within this chamber that, once outside it, art can lapse into secular status. Conversely, things become art in a space where powerful ideas about art focus on them. Indeed, the object frequently becomes the medium through which these ideas are manifested and proffered for discussion- a popular form of late modernist academicism ("ideas are more interesting than art").’
‘Life is horizontal..A gallery is place with a wall, which is covered with a wall of pictures. The wall itself has no intrinsic esthetic; it is simply a necessity for an upright animal. Samuel F.B. Morse's Exhibition Gallery at the
Louvre (1833) is upsetting to the modern eye: masterpieces as wallpaper, each one not yet separated out and isolated in space like a throne.’
‘The greater the illusion, the greater the invitation to the spectator's eye. The eye is abstracted from an anchored body and projected as a miniature proxy into the picture to inhabit and test the articulations of its space.’
‘The nineteenth century looked at a subject — not at its edges. Various fields were studied within their declared limits. Studying not the field but its limits, and defining these limits for the purpose of extending them, is a twentieth century habit. We have the illusion that we add to a field by extending it laterally, not by going, as the nineteenth century might say in proper perspective style, deeper into it.’
‘Now a participant in, rather than a passive support for the art, the wall became the locus of contending ideologies;..Once the wall became an es- thetic force, it modified anything shown on it. The wall, the context of the art, had become rich in a content it subtly donated to the art. It is now impossible to paint up an exhibition without surveying the space like a health inspector, taking into account the esthetics of the wall which will inevitably "artify" the work in a way that frequently diffuses its intentions.’
‘The breaking of the rectangle formally confirmed the wall's autonomy, altering for good the concept of the gallery space Some of the mystique of the shallow picture plane (one of the three major forces that altered the gallery space) had been transferred to the context of art.’
‘Modernism's classic void ends up stuffed with ideas all ready to jump on the first brushstroke.’
‘The surface of the picture is made opaque by collage. Behind it is simply a wall, or a void. In front is an open space in which the viewer's sense of his own presence becomes an increasingly palpable shadow.’
‘Both abstraction and reality, however, are implicated in that sacred twentieth century dimension, space. The exclusive division between them has blurred the fact that the first has considerable practical relevance- contrary to the modern myth that art is "use- less." If art has any cultural reference (apart from being "culture") surely it is in the definition of our space and time. The flow of energy between concepts of space articulated through the artwork and the space we occupy is one of the basic and least understood forces in modernism.’
‘Its mythologies are drained, its rhetoric collapsed. It is simply a kind of undifferentiated potency. This is not a "degeneration" of space but the sophisticated convention of an advanced culture which has canceled its values in the name of an abstraction called "freedom". Space now is not just where things happen; things make space happen.’
‘If the picture plane defined the wall, collage begins to define the entire space. ..Do we not, through an odd reversal, as we stand in the gallery space, end up inside the picture, looking out at an opaque picture plane that protects us from a void?’
‘Who is this Spectator, also called the Viewer, sometimes called the Observer, occasionally the Perceiver? It has no face, is mostly a back. It stoops and peers, is slightly clumsy. Its attitude is inquiring, its puzzlement discreet. He — I'm sure it is more male than female — arrived with modernism, with the disappearance of perspective. ..The Spectator seems a little dumb; he is not you or me. .."The viewer feels ... "; "the observer notices ... "; "the spectator moves .... " He is sensitive to effects: "The effect on the spectator is...."’
‘They are not on such good terms with each other. The epicene Eye is far more intelligent than the Spectator, who has a touch of male obtuseness. The Eye can be trained in a way the Spectator cannot. It is a finely tuned, even noble organ, esthetically and socially superior to the Spectator. It is easy for a writer to have a Spectator around — there is something of the Eternal Footman about him. It is more difficult to have an Eye, although no writer should be without one. Not having an Eye is a stigma to be hidden, perhaps by knowing someone who has one.
The Eye can be directed but with less confidence than the Spectator, who, unlike the Eye, is rather eager to please. The Eye is an oversensitive acquaintance with whom one must stay on good terms. .. It must be waited on while it observes — observation being its perfectly specialized function: "The eye discriminates between ... The eye resolves ... The eye takes in, balances, weighs, discerns, perceives ..."’
‘The Eye is the only inhabitant of the sanitized installation shot. The Spectator is not present. Installation shots are generally of abstract works;’
‘The Eye maintains the seamless gallery space, its walls swept by flat planes of duck. Everything else- all things impure, including collage — favors the Spectator. The Spectator stands in space broken up by the consequences of collage, the second great force that altered the gallery space.’
‘Witnesses don't report on themselves in the Merzbau. They look at it, rather than experience themselves in it. The Environment was a genre nearly forty years away, and the idea of a surrounded spectator was not yet a conscious one.’
‘Kate Steinitz, the Merzbau's most perceptive visitor, noticed a cave "in which a bottle of urine was solemnly displayed so that the rays of light that fell on it turned the liquid to gold." The sacramental nature of transformation is deeply connected to Romantic idealism; in its expressionist phase it tests itself by performing rescue operations among the most degraded materials and subjects. Initially the picture plane is an idealized transforming space. The transformation of objects is contextual, a matter of relocation. Proximity to the picture plane assists this transformation. When isolated, the context of objects is the gallery. Eventually, the gallery itself becomes, like the picture plane, a transforming force. At this point, as Minimalism demonstrated, art can be literalized and detransformed; the gallery will make it art anyway. Idealism is hard to extinguish in art, because the empty gallery itself becomes art manque and so preserves it.’
‘The gallery space "quotes" the tableaux and makes them art, much as their representation became art within the illusory space of a traditional picture.
The spectator in a tableau somehow feels he shouldn't be there.’
‘The Eye and the Spectator set off in different directions from
Analytic Cubism. The Eye goes along with Synthetic Cubism as it takes up the business of redefining the picture plane. The Spectator, as we have seen, copes with the invasion of real space from Pandora's picture plane, opened by collage. These two directions — or traditions, as the critic Gene Swenson called them — vie with each other in their opprobrium. The Eye looks down on the Spectator; the Spectator thinks the Eye is out of touch with real life. The comedies of the relationship are of Wildean proportions; an Eye without a body and a body without much of an Eye usually cut each other dead. Yet they indirectly maintain a kind of dialogue no one wants to notice. And in late modernism the two come together for the purpose of refreshing their misunderstanding. After modernism's final- and American- climax, the Eye bears Pollack's picture plane off triumphantly toward Color Field; the Spectator brings it into real space where anything can happen.’
‘The Eye then stands for two opposite forces: the fragmentation of the self and the illusion of holding it together. The Spectator makes possible such experience as we are allowed to have.’
