GMU:Artists Lab IV/Daria Dordina/Task 5

  After the compilation review, I felt rather bewildered and puzzled. Most of the conceptual work presented seem rather meaningless personally to me. I cannot understand why all these obsessional practices were used in their pure form. They seem to hint at a high level of abstract meaning embedded in them, but I cannot read it. Unless they were the embodiment of what was happening in the artistic environment that times, seemingly the filling of museums for the sake of filling museums. Sol LeWitt wrote that art is not utilitarian - it’s written in the first manifesto in the compilation; and at the same the compilation mostly depicts production of the things done with purpose make people in the gallery look at them. All this variety of “abstractions” - does it not pretend to be non-functional just to stake out a certain niche and a certain function? In order to maintain a certain narrative? I am not sure.

  I mean that personally I can not perceive these works in any other sense, except as a plenty of exercises on the topic of performing algorithms. I don’t understand, for example, why again take ideas from the avant-garde of the 30s, deconstruct them to formal exercises and attach such things to narrative about cybernetics or computers. The difference between these cases and, for example, Malevich’s suprematism seems obvious to me - suprematism worked with cosmology, it did not investigate, but proclaimed. The Black Square was a project to replace the icon in every home, and not an art for placement in a museum context. 

  In addition, the explanations of logical systems by artists who speak of cybernetics but do not include anything other than plain enumeration in their work seem very strange to me. Not a single algorithm touches on the idea of ​​logical chains, branching conditions, they all look like host commands to a dumb servant: “repeat this (one action or a linear sequence of actions) for some amount of time”.

  I can’t call these works too simple, but I don’t understand why they were done, if we assume that they were done sincerely. I do not perceive them as intellectual exercises, perhaps rather as tasks in a math textbook to repeat a certain chapter or something like this.

From the entire selection, I liked the work “Zen for TV”, works of Yanick Fournier, Samuel Beckett’s Quadrat and the video in which John Baldessari sings Sol LeWitt. I think I like them because they don’t engage in plainly flirting with “intellectual abstractions”, but include more layers in their work.

  I also do not really understand the question about a simple algorithm from my daily life. Obviously, my daily life consists of many algorithms, both linear (a recipe for oat porridge in the morning) and individual instructions (if ... then ...). My favorite of these algorithms is probably an attempt to distance myself from my own experiences and look at the situation from the outside (while-loop: alienate from oneself until it helps).