Strictly for those who are REALLY interested
Video footage of the first seminar. You never know, somebody might find it interesting….
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Video footage of the first seminar. You never know, somebody might find it interesting….
A great, albeit not entirely un-biased, film largely filmed in the Musee de L’homme in Paris in the 1950s. The opening lines;
“When men die, they enter into history. When statues die, they enter into art”
Today was the first session of the mash up the archive seminar. We started talking a bit about the ideas behind the Mashupthearchive project. Basically connecting the archive at the Iwalewa Haus, with artists working in Africa, with empty industrial and commercial spaces in Bayreuth. The archive is fairly extensive, consisting of contemporary artworks, traditional artefacts, music and video and one of the main ideas behind the project is to make this a bit more visible and accessible. Visible; for people that live in and around Bayreuth and who might not just happen to wander into the archives. Accessible; for artists working in Africa who, unless they are passing through south Germany, would not have the chance to see what is here. Hence the idea to structure the project around residencies, inviting artists to come to Bayreuth to work with the material. Whilst this does not solve a certain fossilized set of power and cultural relations that sees African cultural production often mediated through the old metropoli of Europe, it is our small gesture towards changing this.
After discussing these broad ideas lurking behind the project we then turned to the more specific issue of how it is possible to work with the material in the Iwalewa archive. What are the strategies that could be used by the artists? From appropriation, to collage, to performance, what could be ways in which the resident artists could begin to connect, to interface, to interfere and to interrupt the archive. We started reading the introduction to Postproduction by Nicholas Bourriaud, and although we did not get very far (1 page) it was pretty exciting. Or maybe, it was the discussion that was exciting. What seemed to be useful is looking at this whole idea of ‘mashing up’ the archive through the prism of music. In another group we’d recently been reading More Brilliant than the Sun by Kodwo Eshun and had come up with the idea of hiphopping the archive. If deejays in the 70s used disco, funk and soul as the source material to make something entirely new (hiphop) with a ‘hacked’ record player (turntables) how could we do something similar with our archive?
disco, soul, funk (music archive) + record player (hacked instrument) = hiphop (something new)
art, artefact, music and video (iwalewa archive) + ? (hacked instrument) = ? (something new)
I like this idea of using techniques and strategies from other artforms as metaphors to re-examine a separate art form. Today I was listening to deejay screw, famous for slowing down hiphop tracks to make this kind of soporophic, narcosis sound. A simple gesture, just changing the speed, and the texture, tone, feel of the track makes it something entirely new. Could this be a strategy for the archive? Bourriaud talks a lot about the artist as deejay, but I think he’s referring more to the idea that its the choice, and context that an artist places something in that somehow give it meaning (I guess one of the core tenets of conceptual practice). But then, the problem with artist working like this is that it can all be a bit too referential, a bit too “it’s clever if you know what I’m referring to, but if you don’t then this is going to be a bit boring for you”. Sure, references can enrich a work, but if the work relies entirely on those references then it seems a bit hermetic, and of course exclusive. The thing about a deejay is that if you don’t know the name of the track he’s playing, you can still dance….
Ok, that’s it for now. The hyperlinks contain links to the texts by Bourriaud and Eshun, plus some slowed down entertainment from the late deejayscrew.
Good question. MASHUP can mean lots of things, but essentially it seems to indicate combining 2 components in a new form. Often used to describe web applications (mashing up 2 previously existing applications to create a newer one) or music (the Grey Album by danger mouse might be a good example) in the context of the archive and this project, MASHUP is a metaphor, or perhaps a process that we want to borrow. For me the conceptual value of a MASHUP is that it is new. Whilst maybe the ingredients are familiar, the combined form is, I think the expression is, greater than the sum of it’s parts. I guess this is not so new to much of the 20th century cultural processes, ranging from collage to Hip Hop to appropriation, but maybe what is different about MASHUP is its distilled nature. MASHUP is minimal mixing.
Incidentally, MASHUP is also a synonym for getting off your face, blind drunk, mind-bendingly wasted.
LINKS:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mash+up
http://www.ushahidi.com/about-us/press-kit
MASH UP THE ARCHIVE 