From: Richard Rinehart <rjr023@bucknell.edu>
Date: July 6, 2014 7:34:19 PM EDT
To: YASMIN DISCUSSIONS <yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr>
Subject: Re: [Yasmin_discussions] ART, NEW MEDIA, AND SOCIAL MEMORY
Annick, Everyone,
I could not agree more; that's why Jon and I (in the book,
'Re-Collection: Art, New Media, & Social Memory' just to dot all my
i's :) wanted to frame new media art preservation in the larger
context of social memory. That way we can bring in a host of
approaches and potential solutions that are part of the practice of
social memory, but that don't necessarily come up in narrower
discussions around new media art preservation.
Simple human memory (as you mention, Annick) and crowdsourcing memory
are definitely functions of social memory, but ones that rarely come
up in discussions around how to keep our new art alive. In a chapter
on 'Social Memory' I propose that there are two broad types of social
memory; the formal/canonical memory stewarded by institutions and the
individual/informal 'folk' memory stewarded by smaller groups of
individuals who are (oddly) either more site-based (local communities
and bioregional knowledge) or more distributed (see online fans.) Jon
talks about crowdsourcing in the chapter 'Unreliable Archivists' (as
Roger cites) and I talk about integrating memories of different scales
(individual memories such as your memory of Moorman) with
institutional memories (via, of all things; metadata, in a chapter on
'Metadata and the historic record.')
Formal and informal social memory have functioned alongside each other
since societies began to organize into civilizations, and I (and Jon)
propose that those connections could be refreshed and made to work in
new ways generally in our digital era, and more specifically toward
the goal of preserving new and non-traditional media art.
Richard Rinehart
Director
------------------------
Samek Art Gallery
Downtown Art Gallery
Museum Collection & Study Room
------------------------
Bucknell University
Lewisburg, PA, 17837
(570) 577-3213
http://galleries.blogs.bucknell.edu
On Jul 1, 2014, at 5:53 AM, Annick2 wrote:
Dear Friends,
Douglas Kahn just posted an announcement for this coming book about
Charlotte Moorman.
Totally in line with our discussion.
It seems it takes about 20 years (a generation?) before history is being built.
I had the priviledge to witness a performance she did with Paik at
CAVS during Art Transition in 1990. My memory of it is absolutely
vivid, or should I say, the memory of the emotion she and Paik
triggered, provoked in me that day.
Re-collection, social memory: we do not necessarily need objects, or
even "documents", building legend and passing it along is part of the
preservation too. And it is creating another work, or re-processing
the original work, as it is to create a story that will make its way
through the years, that is both a good literature work + a good story
teller quality. It may need other qualities than being a good scholar
with good scientific methodology ;-)
I am really looking forward to that book.
Best
Annick
Topless Cellist
The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman
By Joan Rothfuss
Foreword by Yoko Ono
http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/topless-cellist
Overview
The Juilliard-trained cellist Charlotte Moorman sat nude behind a
cello of carved ice, performed while dangling from helium-filled
balloons, and deployed an array of instruments on The Mike Douglas
Show that included her cello, a whistle, a cap gun, a gong, and a
belch. She did a striptease while playing Bach in Nam June Paik's
Sonata for Adults Only. In the 1960s, Moorman (1933–1991) became
famous for her madcap (and often unclothed) performance antics; less
famous but more significant is Moorman's transformative influence on
contemporary performance practice--and her dedication to the idea that
avant-garde art should reach the widest possible audience. In Topless
Cellist, the first book to explore Moorman's life and work, Joan
Rothfuss rediscovers, and recovers, the legacy of an extraordinary
American artist.
Moorman's arrest in 1967 for performing topless made her a
water-cooler conversation-starter, but before her tabloid fame she was
a star of the avant-garde performance circuit, with a repertoire of
pieces by, among others, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, and Paik,
her main artistic partner. Moorman invented a new mode of performance
that combined classical rigor, jazz improvisation, and avant-garde
experiment—informed by intuition, daring, and love of spectacle.
Moorman's annual festival of the avant-garde offered the public a
lively sampler of contemporary art in performance, music, dance,
poetry, film, and other media.
Rothfuss chronicles Moorman's life from her youth in Little Rock,
Arkansas (where she was "Miss City Beautiful" of 1952) through her
career in New York's avant-garde to her death from breast cancer in
1991. (Typically, she approached her treatment as if it were a
performance.) Deeply researched and profusely illustrated, Topless
Cellist offers a fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious
story of an artist whose importance was more than the sum of her
performances.
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