The Ubiquity of Conquest
for the exhibition The Conquest of Ubiquity
Curated by Jose Luis Brea
15 Oct 2003 - Jan 2004
http://aleph-arts.org/ubiquid/eng/
As for the worlds of sounds, noises, voices, tonalities, they are already ours. We evoke them when and where we please. Formerly we could not enjoy music at our own time, according to our own mood. We were dependent for our enjoyment on an occasion, a place, a date, and a program. How many coincidences were needed! Today, we are liberated from a servitude so contrary to pleasure and, by that same token, to the most sensitive appreciation of works of music. To be able to choose the moment of enjoyment, to savor the pleasure when not only our mind desires it, but our soul and whole being craves and as it were anticipates it, is to give fullest scope to the
composer's intention, for it permits his creatures to live again in a vibrat milieu not very different from that in which they were created. In recorded music the work of composer or performer finds the condition essential to the most perfect aesthetic returns. Paul Valery1
For Valery, writing in 1928, the ability to ubiquitously enjoy music asynchronously, according to personal choice, and privately was the promise of a utopian if not revolutionary future. What Valery did not know, or at least did not focus on, was the massive infrastructure that would grow up around first recorded and then broadcast music, determining what was recorded by whom, what else it would be packaged with, where it would be available, at what price, etc. till eventually, in a cultural feedback loop, some significant portion of the music produced is determined by the physical media (can't be longer than...) or marketing determinations (too pop, make it sound like...). Hardly the vision of the conditions essential for the "most perfect aesthetic returns." For a while, Napster in particular and peer-to-peer networks piggybacking on Internet protocols in general promised a "return" to Valery's dream of ubiquity's conquest. But as always, market forces of conquest are there to stanch the ubiquity, whether through RIAA lawsuits or "voluntary" shrinkwrap licenses or, for that matter, better interfaces and reliable service.
Following Valery, Jose Luis Brea posits that the "ubiquitous and limitlessly reproducible character" of net.art underpins what he
terms the transition of artistic practice from within the regime of a trade economy to a distribution one - always available anywhere. At the same time, he is cognizant of an "emergenc[y]" in this transformation of communication practices. Net.art is
symptomatic of both a promise and its deferral. This would oblige us now to perceive it as a kind of an inverted "deja vu", in which is taking shape a recalling of the future in the past - a past still present, in which outline we can weigh up at this precise moment of breakdown of hasty dreams, what is at stake.
In my 1998 talk Why Have There Been No Great Net Artists?, I suggested that part of what is at stake is whether
institutions, such as museums, can or will change to recognize and accommodate this "new type of communication practice." As Brea points out, the termination of the Walker Art Center's new media curatorial program in 2003 is certainly a negative indicator. Or is it? Is Valery's ubiquity of music triumphant or denied by the very market forces that make it possible - in a controlling way? Is the Walker's unwillingness to sustain a new media program an indicator of its inability to assimilate it?
Brea posits that there are two specific "qualities of resistance" of net.art: "being unattainable for the trade and merchandise economies" and "its inadequacy to submit to the settled strategies of exhibition" that make it more or less unsuitable for
conquest by the Art-Institution, which, as he puts it, "perceives very evidently the danger that the establishment of new regimes and new ways of practice mean to it."
This is seductive logic, but if this is true, why just net.art? Why not conceptual art? Performance art? Happenings? Fluxus? Meat dresses? Candy spills? Water writing? Island wraps? Biodegradable architecture? Each of these and a host of contemporary
practices are ill-suited to the white cube and its apparatus, yet they often thrive on the international Art-Institution circuit. They can have substantial market value and are"collected" assiduously.
From this point of view, the likely outcome is only a matter of time; not whether but when net.art will be part of the strategies of exhibition and partake of the trade economy. From this point of view, the subversiveness of the work in the show The
Conquest of Ubiquity flows not from its medium-specificity but from its specific content, whether it is a suicide box or a censorship platform or even a website of "corrupt" html. From this point of view, the ubiquity of conquest is inescapable but perhaps, just perhaps, this new type of communication practice will "just become everything." That is the future that this historywants to point to.
1. Paul Valery, "The Conquest of Ubiquity," first published as "La Conquete de l'ubiquite," in De La Musique avant toute chose
(Editions du Tambourinaire), 1928.
