[spectre] Announcement of "Blurting In A & L online" project

[Michael Ammann]

Introduction to the Website
Blurting In A & L online

The website of Art & Language within the website of ZKM (Zentrum f=FCr
Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, http://www.zkm.de) presents the
lexicon "Blurting in A & L" (1973) in an online version
(http://blurting-in.zkm.de) because a translation into hypertext is
feasible: Michael Corris and Mel Ramsden noted connections between 408
entries/annotations/blurts by other American members of Art & Language
as well as themselves. The connections can now be presented as links
between different webpages.
The website includes articles which contextualize "Blurting in A & L"
within the activities of the group in the seventies. Present and former
members of Art & Language (Michael Baldwin, Michael Corris, Philip
Pilkington, Mel Ramsden) summarize and reflect on their activities.
Thomas Dreher embeds "Blurting in A & L" within the proceedings of the
discourse of Art & Language.
Around 1972, the group had fully recognized a need for a criticism of
their own theoretical foundations. Using the philosophy of science
(Popper, Lakatos, Feyerabend, Kuhn, among others) as methodological
signposts, the members of Art & Language inaugurated a criticism of the
art world and tools for a self- contextualization within the ensuing
problem field. The entries/annotations/blurts in "Blurting in A & L"
reflect the discussions at this particular stage.  "Blurting in A & L"
was followed by discussions focussed on sociological theories, which
helped to contextualize the problems of the institutions of art
(museums) and the art market (galleries) within the wider social field
of the postmaterial forms of bureaucratization. These debates were
accompanied in 1975/76 by efforts to embody the basics of the critique
of bureaucratization in a subsystem of slogans as a way of reaching a
wider public without loss of reflectivity.
A discussion forum starts the debate with seven questions concerning the
actuality of the discourse of Art & Language within contemporary art
activities. Former and present members of Art & Language will begin with
the discussion, and then every user is invited to participate. The
online discussion forum realizes an intention of the members of Art &
Language: it opens the internal discussions for interactions with
external users.
Each page within the website "Blurting in A & L online" allows
spontaneous entries into an accumulative forum, which adds every new
entry to older entries. The accumulative forum seeks to provoke
inscriptions regardless of thematic limits, while it is hoped that the
discussion forum will be based on themes - with the questions as
reference points - and guided by reflective reactions to the
contributions of others. The accumulative forum allows the filling in of
signs regardless of their meanings and, indeed, for the sake of
increasing the number of signs or the accumulated length of entries. The
discussion forum can lead to similar accumulations, but it will allow
restarts on a dialogical and discoursive level: this is an experiment.
The discussions concerning relations between signs and meanings helped
members of Art & Language to problematize the functions of propaganda
and sloganizing in a way which anticipated - parallel to a French
discourse (Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard, Derrida, Lyotard) =96 the
debates of the eighties on postmodernism, which re-constructed and
de-constructed authority built into the processes by which sign-meaning
correlations are conventionalized and institutionalized. The answer of
Art & Language was and is that a constant dialogical and discoursive
process of de-construction and re-construction of the wider context
(social relations) of their own activities (art) is unavoidable. The
website presents not only traces of this process between members of Art
& Language: it offers all users a forum for proceeding within a
"theoretical practice" (Althusser) based on dialogue.

Thomas Dreher (http://members.tripod.de/ThomasDreher/Homepage.html; TDreh=
er@onlinehome.de)