June 23, 2006
A few new art books
Last night, at the small book party for Daniel Birnbaum's Chronology (Lukas & Sternberg), artist Paul Chan asked Birnbaum a few questions about the book's use of philosophical conceptions of time to discuss time-based contemporary art. In the question-and-answer session that followed, Chan brought up Paul Virilio, "theorist of speed" (he's even pictured with a "crotch rocket" motorcycle on his publisher's author page), and his idea that, in the ultranetworked "first world," the ubiquity and simultaneity of presence is a kind of pollution. As someone who "nervously fingers [his] BlackBerry like worry beads on trains, in airport lounges, and street corners"—to use Daniel Gross's phrase—I can appreciate this concept of mental contamination. I'm unsure which of Virilio's books contains the most concise elaboration of this concept, since ideas, endlessly tweaked, roll from one volume to the next, but this interview with Wired magazine seems to offer a good one-line prècis: "Interactivity is to real space what radioactivity is to the atmosphere." Anyway, something to consider.
Chan is featured on the cover of the summer Artforum. He is also one of the subjects of a new series of slim, paperback "conversations" published by a.r.t. press. (Some more info is here.) His conversation with Martha Rosler, which I read on a train from Philadelphia two weeks ago, is somewhat adversarial: not an argument, per se, but a long talk between two people who use the differences in thought between them to better delimit their own practices. Or, as Rosler put it, it's "an old fart talking to a young fart." I haven't read the other book so far published in the series—a conversation between Lawrence Weiner and Liam Gillick—but the format seems promising, and they are attractively designed. (One can't help but wonder, however, whether simultaneously publishing these kinds of conversations as PDFs might be more effective in extending their reach.)