{"id":30472,"date":"2020-11-30T06:00:13","date_gmt":"2020-11-30T05:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/a-desk.org\/?p=30472"},"modified":"2023-07-09T14:45:31","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T12:45:31","slug":"retraccion-5-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/a-desk.org\/en\/magazine\/retraccion-5-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Retraction [5\/5]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Preface<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published against the backdrop of \u201cretracted life\u201d under the current pandemic conditions, the November issue of A*Desk presents the work of twenty contributors who interpret a general concept of \u201cretraction\u201d in and out of the artistic context from various vantage points in various mediums. The issue is thematically organized into five weekly installments, each introduced by a segment of a running text written by guest editor Peter Freund.<\/p>\n

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Retraction 5: Copy\/Right <\/strong><\/p>\n

Mireia c. Saladrigues, A close-up view of <\/em>video 360_0333 from <\/em>Virtual Tour<\/p>\n

Carlos Miguel S\u00e1nchez, CMS Foundation: \u00a1\u00a1SPAM!!<\/em><\/p>\n

Vitor Magalh\u00e3es,\u00a0La chambre dans la r\u00e9gion centrale.\u00a0<\/em>Where we incur, among other aspects, in the deferred, (sub)fragmented imaginary space.<\/p>\n

Eva S\u00f2ria,\u00a0The Law of Intellectual Property and Conceptual Art<\/em><\/p>\n

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Introduction<\/strong> (Part 5 of 5)<\/p>\n

Already there is something radically peculiar about the most banal decorative image of a flower that, rarely contemplated, hangs on the wall of an ordinary household or workplace. Its flat two-dimensional surface stands entirely at odds with its three-dimensional reference. In the famous surrealist inscription, \u201cCeci n\u2019est pas une pipe,\u201d the shifter ceci<\/em> presents not merely a clever, \u201ccontext-bound\u201d game that invokes and resolves a paradox but rather the ambiguous pointer reflects a dimensional contradiction in the image as such.[1] The problem of even the floral picture, which never causes the passerby the slightest hassle, reflects nonetheless the irreconcilable character of reality divided between its meaning<\/em> and its being<\/em>. Only out of this division, found in even the most quotidian of images, can we ultimately pose the principal political question of retraction<\/em> and the project of aretractive arts<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Before taking a step further, we should distinguish what is at issue here from two well-established lines of thought. The first: Whether analog or digital or even mental, the image has to lean on a material substrate that problematizes the purity of its message. One here argues that the image doesn\u2019t begin as a material substrate in order to subsequently carve out a sign from its materiality. Instead, it\u2019s the other way around: The image is a sign that retroactively marks itself as a material object, a secondary signification that frames or rationalizes the image.[2] The second line of thought, which concerns itself with the decay of the aura<\/em> and its resurrection, focuses on the problematic of the original<\/em> and the reproduction<\/em>. The question here addresses itself either to an original that is reproduced in copies (which simultaneously disseminate, degrade and broaden the function of the image) or to a copy that is altogether liberated from any original and that circulates in an abstract economy of semiotic exchange relations.[3] On one hand, the fake, the knock-off, the imposter, and the double all present variations of the copy, decried in order to claim or restore the originality and self-possession of the original. On the other hand, the simulacrum that these reproductions embody marks the liberation of the copy into a life of its own originality.<\/p>\n

By contrast, we are now talking about a question, overlapping with yet distinct from these two lines of inquiry. We are raising a conception in which something is already a copy of itself<\/em>. The question of copy-making or appropriation here shifts into a problematic of self-appropriation<\/em>. Therein the image embodies an asymmetrical dilemma in which it either stands for something or altogether fails to exist.[4] We encounter here not the cozy coexistence of the old couple \u201cappearance and reality\u201d but rather a situation in which the image is forced de jure<\/em> to imitate itself by presenting its identity \u2013\u00a0its being<\/em> \u2013 in a copy of itself. As a result, the image holds in its dimension as copy<\/em> a trace of its own lost being. \u00a0Such is true even when the flat-bed picture plane \u2013\u00a0from patterned decoration to formal abstraction \u2013 endeavors to pass itself off as either pure appearance or pure object.[5] Unlike the expansive character of reproduction, this self-mimicry retracts into a single inextricable form.<\/p>\n

From this vantagepoint, the copy defies the self-possession of the image \u2013 or even the object \u2013 or, let\u2019s take it one step further, even the subject. The copy thereby confronts the central question of property<\/em>, not because the copy threatens to transgress the law but because the copy exactly<\/em> embodies the law<\/em>. We must shift here from a framework of reproduction<\/em> to a framework of repetition<\/em>. The image endeavors to cover over the hole that it simultaneously creates (e.g. the holes of reference, of ornament, of illustration) while its failure to do so compels it to repeat \u2013 that is, to copy itself again.[6] This intrinsic repetition in the law of the copy shows its entanglement in the dynamics of enjoyment (in the psychoanalytic sense), the way in which the satisfying character of the image gives way to a dissatisfaction that it cannot completely overcome. Precisely at the junctures of its repetition, the image breaks from the property of a particularist vision (points of view, expressions and styles, objets d\u2019art, artistic oeuvres and movements, art markets and collections) and enters the universality of the copy\u2019s self-subversive structure. Here we can risk a legitimate question with which we might stipulate the crux of retraction<\/em>: The images and their technologies that pervade our world today, that never deliver on their promises, and that dispossess us of the stability of our longed-for identities, how could these repeating images, these \u201ccopy machines,\u201d precisely in their failed ambitions, become the basis of a collective project within an emancipatory politics? How could a politics of assembly be formed not on the image of an aggregation and inclusion of marginalized elements but on the structural lack of the all-inclusive, the central hole in the whole, the not-all<\/em> of every totality that instigates and keeps alive the movement of an emancipatory aim?<\/p>\n

This final installment of Retraction presents four works. The first investigates the reality of the virtual presentation of the art exhibition using 360-degree video technology and considers the differences, losses, and gains advanced by the virtual on the real. The project traces the inside-out connective tissue between the virtual and the real as a surface, in which, like the m\u00f6bius strip or the Klein bottle, one cannot simply orient oneself from the standpoint of orthodox spectator behavior. The second entry introduces a full-scale art foundation in a net art project that retracts and develops the fundamental pretenses of art exhibitions in internet platforms. The third entry presents an epigrammatic text inspired by two canonical works of experimental film in which the recording apparatus significantly expands the frame of view only then, paradoxically, to retract the vision of reality into a view that transcends cinematic viewership. The last entry, written by an attorney and art historian, surveys the history, complexity and contradictions of current copyright law and intellectual property rights in relation to art, suggesting the ways in which the legal system lags behind not only contemporary art practices but also the expressed intent of intellectual property law.<\/p>\n

Peter Freund<\/p>\n

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Notes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] The grammatical shifter<\/em>, classically described by linguist Roman Jakobsen, raises the problem of the split between utterance<\/em> and enunciation<\/em>, between what is said and the act of saying it. The typically-invoked example of the shifter \u201cI\u201d structurally confuses the grammatical and the speaking subjects, wherein the reference of the former both invokes and occludes the presence of the latter. Common interpretations notwithstanding, the \u201cceci\u201d in Ren\u00e9 Magritte\u2019s 1929 painting The Treachery of Images<\/em> doesn\u2019t resolve the conflict it raises but exposes it by impossibly referring to both the surface and the reference of the image at the same time. The problem here refers us back to the second installment of the current project, Retraction 2: Halting Problem<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[2] Some familiar 20th-century references: Marshall McLuhan\u2019s maxim, \u201cThe medium is the message\u201d from Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man<\/em> (Toronto: McGraw Hill), 1964. Dziga Vertov\u2019s concept of \u201ckino-eye\u201d that extends the human sensorium; Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov<\/em> (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), 1984. One also recalls the well-known reversal of denotation as the \u201calibi\u201d for connotation in the work of Roland Barthes; e.g. \u201cRhetoric of the Image,\u201d Image Music Text<\/em> (London: Harper Collins Publishers), 1977.<\/p>\n

[3] Some familiar 20th-century references: Walter Benjamin, \u201cThe Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,\u201d Illuminations<\/em> (New York: Harcourt Brace & Jovanovitch), 1968. \u00a0Jean Baudrillard, Simulations<\/em> (New York: Semiotext(e)), 1983<\/em>.<\/em> Within the artworld, examples abound from Andy Warhol to Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince.<\/p>\n

[4] One is reminded of the anthropological mythology of a remote aboriginal who allegedly when handed a photograph of himself immediately turned the paper on its side curiously to examine the scrap, without registering the representation it captured. The equivalent is presented in a parody given by the Inuit Nanook (a.k.a. Allakariallak, who is nicely memorialized online as an \u201cactor\u201d) in Roberty Flaherty\u2019s 1922 ur-documentary, \u201cNanook of the North.\u201d In the film, the Inuit \u201ceskimo,\u201d when presented with music played on a phonograph, appears perplexed and bites the record disk that stores the music. Video retrievable from YouTube: https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=UqEIJM5TghY. For a polemical critique of Flaherty\u2019s film (and the documentary form), see Jill Godmilow, \u201cKill the Documentary as We Know It,\u201d Journal of Film and Video<\/em> (University of Illinois Press), Vol. 54, No. 2\/3 (Summer\/Fall 2002). The point here is to expose the mythology of an object that precedes the sign.<\/p>\n

[5] These maneuvers of course belong, for better or worse, to a version of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, at least at the hands of art critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. Op Art of course plays with the dimensional contradiction between the flat surface and the referential depth.<\/p>\n

[6] Narcissus repeatedly looks into the water as the retroactive empty leftover of his reflection. One is of course reminded of the Lacanian \u201cmirror\u201d in which a jubiliatory misrecognition (m\u00e9connaissance<\/em>) institutes the principle of identity through a copy.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(Featured Image: Mireia c. Saladrigues, A close-up view of <\/em>video 360_0333 from <\/em>Virtual Tour)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Mireia c. Saladrigues<\/strong><\/p>\n

Close-up view of video 360_0333 from Virtual Tour<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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