Open Systems, De Salvo, Review

Contemporary Art, Systems and the Aesthetics of Dispersion, 2023

https://www.routledge.com/Contemporary-Art-Systems-and-the-Aesthetics-of-Dispersion/Halsall/p/book/9781032324920 Using five case studies of contemporary art, this book uses ideas of systems and dispersion to understand identity and experience in late capitalism. This book considers five artists who exemplify contemporary art practice: Seth Price; Liam Gillick; Martin Creed; Hito Steyerl; and Theaster Gates. Given the diversity of materials used in art today, once-traditional artistic mediums and practices have become obsolete in describing what artists do today. Francis Halsall argues that, in the face of this obsolescence, the ideas of system and dispersion become very useful in understanding contemporary art. That is, practitioners now can be seen to be using whatever systems of distribution and display are available to them as their creative mediums. The two central arguments are first that any understanding of what art is will always be underwritten by a related view of what a human being is; and second that these both have a particular character in late capitalism or, as is named here, the Age of Dispersion. The book will be of interest to scholars and students working in art history, contemporary art, studio art, and theories of systems and networks.

In this paper I discuss a small but significant slice of the artistic life of a disparate collection of indi­viduals working in Australia during the early period of the development of computing and other as­pects of the electronification of our lives over the period from the 1950s through to the mid-1970s. It involves the activities of individuals within settings that required them to have ideas and make moves that were constrained by the currently possible, encouraged by the potentially feasible and inspired by the thought that something might just have an interesting consequence. The multiple, overlapping cultures in which these individuals lived, subsections of a larger culture of academic, scientific and artistic institutions, shaped these constraints. They also supplied the spaces in which individuals within these disparate sub-cultures could discover what each other was doing and perhaps interact, or at least be inspired or irritated, perhaps only in a small way, by the output of the other. Ultimately my purpose is to gather and record the history of what has occurred in Australia in the field of Art & Technology, to find the traces of the work in this field and to record what was pro­duced and, where possible, how it was produced. The focus will be on two areas of technology: one based on computers and the other based on television. As they progress they become intertwined since they have at heart a single common technology, the Cathode-Ray Tube (CRT), that forms the device upon which much of the output of these two systems was displayed. I have already said that the way to discover how the processes of Art & Technology developed is to examine the relations between those who, in their various ways, were engaged in it. We have to do this in two senses: 1: we need to look at the layers of the culture of the time and how they interacted to bring out particular kinds of manifestations in art, and 2: we need to look at the nature of the relational processes themselves as they operated both within the dynamics of a particular layer and the dynamics between individuals who occupied those layers. The layers, (1:) here, are the technological and the aesthetic cultures of the time. There is, in a sense, a third layer between these two and that is the people who are engaged. It is the layer within which the relations between people function, ie, it is the layer in which the politics occurs, and it is the layer that, through those relations, ties the technological and the aesthetic layers together in the production of works of Art & Technology.

Tate Papers, 2006

One Million Years – System und Symptom, 2014

"One Million Years—System und Symptom" addresses the aesthetic, cultural, and political implications of systems logic from the point of view of contemporary art. The project reflects projects that tackle systems and systematics in a wide variety of ways. Systems are, on the one hand, invisible; on the other, they are ubiquitous. Systems order things and regulate everyday life. They define processes and relations. Complexity is organized into functional structures in systems. Systems are patterns. Only through continual repetition are their principles recognizable. Otherwise the pattern disintegrates. Texts referring to artists such as Vito Acconci, Josef Albers, Christian Boltanski, Hanne Darboven, Thomas Demand, Andrea Fraser, Katharina Fritsch, On Kawara, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Henrik Olesen, Falke Pisano, Martha Rosler, Jan J. Schoonhoven, Andreas Slominski, Simon Starling, Octavian Trauttmansdorff, Heimo Zobernig. Kunstmuseum Basel, 2014.

Minna Henriksson: Maps 2005 - 2009, Texts, self-published, Helsinki, pp. 25-33, 2011

I argue that the question of what works of art do is inextricably bound up with an ontological question of what it is that is doing the doing. In others words, the question of what is being done by the artwork cannot be answered without answering what the agency for that action is. First, I introduce the problem of medium in art after modernism. I argue that the terms ‘end of art’, ‘postmodern’ and ‘postmedium’ are commensurate, and that all require a rethinking of concept of medium in art practice. I then argue that Niklas Luhmann’s account of medium (in his sociologically grounded systems theory) provides an answer to the question: What Work Does the Work of Art Do? My argument is that the work of art gives the medium form, configures it and thus actively constitutes it as a medium. As a concluding example, I turn to Pierre Huyghe and Phillipe Parreno’s collaborative project “No Ghost Just a Shell “ (1999–2002) and demonstrate how Luhmann’s account of medium/form can be used to explain the work.

My immediate impression upon entering Systems at the Swan Coach House Gallery (August 11 – September 23) was that the name was abstruse, and that there must be an arcane system behind the explosion of miscellany that covered the walls and spilled onto the floor of the entrance foyer. After venturing further into the collection of work by Lauren Michelle Peterson and Amie Esslinger, the relationship between these artists' practices and the title became clear: Systems presents two local artists who combine traditional media with found material to systematically explore art-making in very different ways.

Within art history, the idea of “systems” is typically coupled with experimental artistic practices that utilize electronic and telecommunication systems and make reference to cybernetic theory. As a result, the notion of systems-art is often equated with work in so-called “new media,” from contemporary digital art to its major 1960s precedents–including movements and organizations such as E.A.T., Art & Technology, and so forth. This research project builds on a panel at the SLSA Conference (2014), “Art as Open System since the 1960s,” (co-chaired by Christine Filippone and Johanna Gosse) to explore how systems aesthetics is both historically and conceptually broader and more complex than these established approaches have allowed.

Paroles gelées, 2004

Additional document, n° 2, 2014

In 2004, the exhibition The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere, organized by Nato Thompson at the MASS MoCA, demonstrated the persistence of a politically involved art beyond the 1980s. The forms on view, which remained somewhat discrete in the art world because they were aimed rather at an efficiency in the everyday social sphere, were classified on the basis of their intervention strategies: nomadism, action in the public place, annexation of intellectual discourses and education, the creation of clothing and accessories improving the autonomy of individuals, and political action. The exhibition catalogue, produced with Gregory Sholette,(1) borrowed that structure and was intended to be a "user's manual for the creative disruption of everyday life".(2) Although Nato Thompson noted therein the degree to which cultural and political contexts have changed since the 1960s, readers could subsequently-but with surprise-note the significance of certain forms of action directly inherited from that period in the works selected.(3) He pinpointed two "tactics" developed by the Situationist International, and always very present in the works on view. Appropriation (détournement) and drift (dérive).(4) But it was possible to make that observation for the whole curatorial project-from the choice of artists to the catalogue's form-which seemed overtaken by the nostalgia of the political and artistic avant-garde movements active during the 1960s and 1970s, in both France and the United States. Apart from the Situationists, Michael Rakowitz's inflatable, and the moveable structures of Lucy Orta, Dré Wapenaar and N55 might call to mind the research of the Utopie group,(5) when the bus circuit conceived by e-Xplo and Reverend Billy's sermons against the consumer society were in keeping with the experiments undertaken by the pioneers of happenings.(6) To borrow the words of Jean-Louis Violeau, it was thus this "nebula in which the far left tradition, Situationist thinking, and the imprint of H.