Carlo Zanni - "The Possible Ties Between Illness And Success"

For my first essay I explored the relationship that exists between conceptual art and Internet art, looking specifically at how Internet artist Casey Reas appropriated Sol LeWitt's wall drawing instructions and translated them into a computational code for implementation in software. Reas' was interested in LeWitt's theory that the idea or concept behind the work should be the artists primary concern. In each manifestation of the wall drawing instructions the outcome will differ, depending upon a number of variables; the size of the wall, the paints used, the nature of the wall and the skill of the artist. Reas saw this effect also translated into his Software Structures project. The browser type, the Internet speed, the size of the screen, the power of the computer's processor and the type of software used all mediate the artwork's concept. The concept of the artwork, however, remains the same throughout every implementation. Thus, in LeWitt's terms, "the idea becomes the machine that makes art."*

It seems that Reas isn't the only net artist to be influenced by the above maxim. Italian born artist Carlo Zanni is also interested in concepts being the central and necessary mechanisms behind the production of works of art. His works attempt "...to reflect my sense of the times we are living in. These works confront themes such as real time/real life; fiction/information; social economy/special effects; isolation/public identity."* One such work is Zanni's cinematic production The Possible Ties Between Illness And Success (2006). The work is a one-minute video that plays over the Internet - in fact the nature of the Internet is a very necessary and important component that literally helps to create the work. The amount of people viewing The Possible Ties at any one time and each of those peoples IP addresses, locations, and date and time of access is turned into data to be run through a software programme which works to subtly change aspects of the film. All of the variants created in the process of accessing the work online contribute to the final appearance of the work, in a similar way experienced by Reas and LeWitt's works. So, the movie is transformed and manipulated by it's Internet audience, who become important collaborators in the realisation of the piece.

The narrative of the short film is set in a bedroom and is centered around a young man who is sick and lying in bed, and a woman who enters the room to comfort him. When the site is visited by any Internet user, their individual data is collected by Google Analytics and sent to the server that hosts the film. The data is then used as a tool to fill the body of the young sick man with dots that look like a rash. The nature and location of the rash on the body depends upon the number of visitors and the location from where they are accessing the site.

In the act of a viewer accessing and watching the movie the data provided by their computer is gathered and stored, and then used in the re-editing of the film. The new version of the film (in which the narrative remains the same, but the character's degree of sickness changes) is then uploaded so the next viewers can watch the movie, which will differ in appearance depending on the data collected by the server. The interactive nature of this work is pretty amazing and like the Radio Astronomy project (talked about in an earlier blog) distorts one's concept of space and time. That I can sit at home and look at the site, thereby changing the nature of the film in a very specific and unique way is something that can only be facilitated by the Internet, and this is a work that is completely aware of and depends on this ability - the work is characterised by this necessary co-dependency.

The movie is no longer in production - the last manipulation was made on July 2007. Up until then, two versions were stored every day, but only one was archived per week. You can still download these older versions to view for those who are interested in the history of the project.

The title of the work refers to the Zanni's manic-depressive disorder, yet his success as an artist, and is directly influenced by the book Touched With Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and The Artistic Temperament by Psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison. I am really interested in the title as a statement and the works underlying concept (not unlike a set of instructions for a wall drawing). It occurs to me now that the works' success fundamentally relies upon a viewer's choice to access and view it online; a decision which in turn impacts upon the well-being of the male character, thereby providing another 'possible tie' between success and illness. Perhaps it is not immediately obvious to the viewer that in an eerie kind of way, we are what's wrong with the male character - it is the viewers "who provide the closing element of the story: the illness itself."* In this sense, the statement and concept 'the possible ties of success and illness' is, as in Sol LeWitt's terms, "the machine that makes the art." It's complex and tricky work and I like it.

Texts used:
* LeWitt, Sol ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ in Artforum Summer 1967, Special Issue, Vol. V, No. 10, pp. 79-83, June 1967, New York
* 'Bio' : http://www.zanni.org/
* Waelder, Pau The Possible Ties Between Illness And Success [March 2007]

'Websites Are The Art Of Our Times'

I've recently been looking at the web-art projects by Miltos Manetas, an artist who I discovered earlier this year when exploring the whitneybiennial.com project [blog #1]. I am interested in his work because I like how he often uses relatively simple design aesthetics (in Flash usually) to convey clever and complex ideas. Take for example the work A Portrait of Joseph Kosuth, 2006 (above) – the artwork’s title is first of all both misleading and ironic – in the place of the subject or sitter (Kosuth) there is instead text in parentheses stating – ‘This is not a Joseph Kosuth’. Something tricky is going on here – I can sense there are multiple layers to this work and it’s going to bug me if I don’t get to the bottom of them.

First of all, A Portrait of Joseph Kosuth clearly references the appearance of Kosuth's Art as Idea as Idea series (example right is Meaning , 1967), which were also characterised by white text upon a black background. So, I suppose Manetas’ work could be seen as a sort of symbolic portrait that pays homage to the art of Kosuth - it being in the style of Kosuth while not actually being a Kosuth, as the text suggests. But there are certainly other potent references in this work too. When I first saw it, a mixture of confused thoughts swelled in my head: Joseph Kosuth' - so it’s a conceptual work? But he's referencing Rene Magritte too right, so it is also somehow a surrealist work? - Can that even exist? I suppose it does now... Huh?

The link to Rene Magritte is through his work entitled Le Traison des Images or The Treachery of Images (1928-1929) more commonly referred to as 'Ceci n’est pas une pipe' or 'This is not a pipe.' (left) Magritte's works were often witty and amusing explorations of representations of objects to get us thinking about how we perceive works of art. At first the text stating ‘this is not a pipe’ in The Treachery of Images seems to be a contradiction, seeing as there is a pipe in the picture. The point is that the pipe is not a real pipe but merely a representation or image of a pipe. The text in Manetas’ work tells us that his work of art is not a Joseph Kosuth, even though it may appear to be because it relates in every way to Kosuth’s work.

So it’s evident that Kosuth and Magritte produced quite different works in terms of style, but both similarly sought to explore the existing boundaries and nature of art, and make us question what we are looking at. Manetas' work seeks to follow on with this tradition. In his essay Websites Are The Art of Our Times, he states that websites are 'today's most radical and important art objects.' He believes that the web is not just another type of "media" but mostly a "space", wherein a website should be thought of as having physical presence - as a "web entity". Each web entity is a work of art in itself - at least I think that's what he means. I find his writing quite confusing.

So like Magritte and Kosuth, Manetas is asking us to re-examine and question what we believe constitutes art – to explore our entrenched expectations of art, and viewing habits and to critically engage with art. They all advocate for a reassessment of existing art-boundaries. Manetas would describe this exploration as the 'Telic spirit', which he describes in his essay if you are interested. The Telic Spirit describes a new way of thinking, or a new way of seeing and conceptualising and making sense of new media languages, and art for that matter; looking through their primary functionality and into their potential for expressivity. In a way, I suppose you could see Manetas' A Portrait of Joseph Kosuth as a manifestation of the “Telic spirit”.

I think Manetas thinks both Magritte and Kosuth would be proud this work and his interest in exploring the web as a new and exciting space for art and art production, as if he is carrying on a legacy for art that they both were also interested in. I don't think I've really discussed all that I really wanted to about this work and its complex associations, but right now my mind has gone blank, so I'll have to leave it there.