In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?: Rescension
July 16, 2002 12:51 AM
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?
Steve Dietz
for Anthology of Art
Jochen Gerz
July 16, 2002
http://www.anthology-of-art.net/inside/index.html
In the context of contemporary art, what is your vision of a yet unknown art?
The future has already arrived; it's just unevenly distributed. William Gibson
Within months - virtually simultaneously on certain time scales - Raqs Media Collective, Delhi, coins the term "rescension" and the New York Times writes about "mash-ups" - songs that "typically match the rhythm, melody and underlying spirit of the instrumentals of one song with the a cappella vocals of another."
RESCENSION
"A re-telling, a word taken to signify the simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within oral, and from now onwards, digital cultures. Thus one can speak of a 'southern' or a 'northern' rescension of a myth, or of a 'female' or 'male' rescension of a story, or the possibility (to begin with) of Delhi/Berlin/Tehran 'rescensions' of a digital work. The concept of rescension is contraindicative to the notion of hierarchy. A rescension cannot be an improvement, nor can it connote a diminishing of value. A rescension is that version which does not act as a replacement for any other configuration of its constitutive materials. The existence of multiple rescensions is a guarantor of an idea or a work's ubiquity. This ensures that the constellation of narrative, signs and images that a work embodies is present, and waiting for iteration at more than one site at any given time. Rescensions are portable and are carried within orbiting kernels within a space. Rescensions, taken together constitute ensembles that may form an interconnected web of ideas, images and signs." http://www.sarai.net/compositions/texts/works/lexicon.htm
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, W.B. Yeats, "The Second Coming" http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1369
For the Yeats - that is for modernist, Euro-American high culture -, when the centre cannot hold, things fall apart. "Mere" anarchy results. It's as "simple" as that.
For the culture of rescension - of sampling and recycling, of mash-ups - the widening gyre is precisely contraindicative of the notion of hierarchy. Yes! The centre cannot hold.
But the cultures of privatization and security are tenacious. They appropriate rescension - sample the samplers - and invert the widening gyre so that it becomes vertigo, a downward spiral of containment, lock down, down the drain, cleansed.
Within months of Raqs Media Collective coining the term "rescension", the New York Times writes an article about "mash-ups" in which the question at stake is not just whether they constitute a new art form, but whether they cannibalize sales, whether they can be sold.
In All Tomorrow's Parties, Gibson writes about this velocity - the speed with which an idea at the fringe, in the margins, is mainstreamed, brought into the centre. Order is restored.
What is known is that in the present future every good idea will only have 15 minutes of privacy. What is unknown is whether in the future present the copy, the sample, the mash-up can loose upon the world a rescension or whether it will become derivative, a hedge, an option, merely a value.
