www.quondam.com/81/8103e.htm

Quondam's 28th Year Stephen Lauf

2024.02.04
I read this morning:
"As British artist Mark Leckey commented a decade ago, "Research has to go through a body; it has to be lived in some sense--transformed into some sort of lived experience--in order to become whatever we might call art. . . . A lot of art now just points at things. Merely the transfer of something into a gallery is enough to bracket it as art."[26] The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped into a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretive syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered."
Claire Bishop, "Information Overload" in Artforum International, April 2023, p. 130.

The above are the last sentences of Bishop's masterful essay on "the superabundance of research-based art," and it's the italicized 'metabolized' that nailed the whole essay.

While reading the essay, it becomes clear that research-based art installations most often comprise myriad amounts of data, and it is through the collection and presentation of said data that (hopefully) a process of assimilation (within both the artist and the viewer) ensues. Ultimately, however, Bishop suggests the utilization of the process of metabolism, on the part of the artist, for a better, if not best delivery of research-based art. It might be suggested that not just the artist, but that the viewers also metabolize.

The following were first posted by me at the now long defunct artforum/talkback:

2002.11.25
Re: Barnett Newman
There is also the notion [within the theory of chronosomatics] that the operations of the mind, i.e., imagination, reenact the (physiological) operations of the body. For example, there is a fertile imagination, an assimilating imagination, a metabolic (creative/destructive) imagination, an electro-magnetic imagination, etc. According to the chronosomatic gauge, humanity in our time operates mostly via a combination of an assimilating and metabolic imagination.

2003.01.18
Re: Critical Theory Clinically Dead?
According to the theory of chronosomatics (an idea/theory of mine), the modus operandi of humanity today comprises the end stages of massive assimilation (absorption of data), the beginning stages of metabolism (the dualistic creation/destruction of data), and the embryonic development of a forthcoming birth (i.e., about five months into pregnancy).
Imagine the male/female human body upstanding with outstretched arms as the continuum of time, and the present as a plane slowly rising up through the body. To read the present (or any moment in human history) is to read the cross (transverse) section of the body that the plane of the present cuts through. 2003 corresponds with the corporal cross-section where the lowest tips of the rib-cage appear.
Essentially, the era of unrestricted expansion, corresponding to the hiatus of peripheral skeleton between the hip bones and the rib-cage is now ending, and a new web-like structure is beginning.
For the most part, about 1/2 inch of corporal cross-section equals 100 years. Ever notice that (on average) the crest of the hip bones lies on the same plane as the center of the navel? That's when/where the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was published.

Alongside all of the above, another notion came to mind while reading "Information Overload," the notion is that research-based art installations may also be seen as manifesting virtual museums, which in turn brings to mind something else I first posted at artforum/talkback:

2003.02.13
Re: Larry Poons
I wish museums mixed things up more. For example, I'd like to see Poons in a French period room, or Duchamp in a Ladies Room. Brancusi next to armor, why not? Museum as future-shock, sort of. Pick your destiny.
Hold me! Thrill me! Kiss me! You're my pride and joy, etc. Now rearrange me.

26. Mark Leckey in conversation with Mark Fisher, "Art Stigmergy," Kaleidoscope Almanac of Contemporary Aesthetics, no. 11 (Summer 2011).

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