Locative Media & The City

I enjoyed Erwin Redl’s talk. I liked the way he spelled out the connection between his music background, his computer art and his current practice. He made the transitions sound conceptually elegant, smooth, and yet not obvious or easy. As for his current work, I’m not quite sure I entirely know what to make of it. For one thing, as I may have had a chance to mention to some people, it seems to me that in terms of scale and production value the work belongs to an altogether different tier from the one I look at as a reference for my own practice. It’s Matthew Barney’s and Bob Wilson’s tier, and although I sometimes enjoy that kind of stuff, there’s a way in which I don’t really engage with it as a maker. It’s a bit like going to the opera: I may enjoy it, I may even be inspired by it on some level, but ultimately I feel that it has nothing to do with what I do. Maybe I should also say that the entertainment value of this kind of work is a bit too high for my taste. To say that (post)minimalism is ‘entertaining’ may sound preposterous; ‘entertaining’ is not the word I want, perhaps. But this insistence on the experiential – on how it ‘feels’ to look at and move through the work – always makes me a bit impatient. Thinking about it within the context of our locative media class, moreover, I found the work rather perplexing. Maybe I entirely missed the point, but I thought that the relation of the work to its environments lacked criticality (and I think I really want to say ‘relation’ in the singular, as it doesn’t look like there’s a whole variety of ways in which this work relates to its surroundings). From what I can tell (but I have never seen any of these works live), the indoors pieces create powerful environments to the price of almost entirely overwhelming the spaces they inhabit. Although Redl has suggested that the initial concept comes always from the actual space where the piece is supposed to exist, the outcome seems invariably to erase all trace of the original space. Redl’s interventions, in other words, rather than interacting with a certain space, seem to have a tendency to replace it altogether. I mean, if the pieces (inspired as they may be by specific spaces) were to be installed in a white cube somewhere else, would the ‘experience’ change at all? In the case of Matrix II and Matrix XII I honestly doubt it. Of course, to say that a piece replaces (rather than interacting with) its environment doesn’t mean per se that the piece lacks criticality. In Redl’s case, however, the replacement seems to operate on a purely sensory and aesthetic level. This is especially evident, it seems to me, in his large-scale outdoors pieces (the building in Tampa, the church in Lille, the Whitney). Here the subversion of our perception of a certain building/space is achieved by actually making that building/space look different. The reason why the building in Tampa may look different when observed through Redl’s LED wall, is not that the piece makes us look at it in a different way, but quite literally that it makes IT look different. The works we’ve looked at, in other words, (but let me repeat that I have never experienced them live) don’t seem to question or alter our relations to certain environments by calling into question the terms of these relations, but merely by making the environments themselves look different. In this respect, I feel that the subversive effect of this work (even when ‘subversive’ is used in a merely aesthetic sense, thinking of the work’s capacity to make its environment look different) would last no longer than the work itself. So in a way Redl’s elegant, sobering restraint in discussing the social impact of the Tampa project seems justified more by the very nature of his work, than by general considerations regarding the social import of public art.