urinals and CD's

[Kim Cascone <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> My sense is that our microsound projects are largely too
> self-contained/self-referential to reach out into the other world and hence
> achieve the effects of droplifting. More prankster behavior is necessary. It
> seems that we missed a prime droplifting moment when we turned the McDonna
> project into our own deal rather than saw it as a way to invade the
> "official" contest.
yes, if we were considering an 'infiltration' scheme (i.e., 'droplifting')
with the McDonna project then what you suggest would have been a good
approach...

>What we did was almost more of an act of
> reverse-droplifting, for rather than taking our own work and
> re-contextualizing it INTO the Madonna contest, we took those samples and
> re-contextualized them into works hosted on our own website.
that was the plan: to take officially sanctioned samples from a contest
offered elsewhere, use them to create sound work that commented on Madonna
and frame them by posting them on the microsound site as a 'statement' or
posture on Madonna's work...so in that light we did pretty much what we set
out to do...the caveat being: the success of any one McDonna piece making 'a
comment' is highly subjective...

> Arguably,
> Duchamp makes the same mistake by bringing readymade art objects into the
> gallery; the gallery STILL fulfills its traditional, authorizing, endorsing,
> and legitimizing function. Thus, Kim, the Duchamp analogy also strikes me as
> somewhat backwards, though I do appreciate his prankster habits.
disagree...here's why: taking an unsolicited product into a CD shop and
placing it in their inventory without the approval of the establishment is
like (not exactly) bringing an 'autographed' urinal into a museum and
presenting it as 'Art'...I agree that the Duchamp analogy falls apart on
many levels: approval of the establishment (museum/gallery) and its desire
to create an aura of controversy, an active effort by the artist to devalue
'Art' by contributing a commonly found object thereby 'questioning' (read:
thumbing nose at) the generally accepted metrics used to judge 'Art', etc.
but I don't feel it's altogether 'backwards'...there are some similarities,
the prime one being
performing a subversive act of infiltration and raising political/economic
issues concerning cultural consumption...

the goal in 'droplifting' is to infiltrate/subvert the normal means by which
a commodity's value is exchanged and perceived...the CD shop is unaware of
the 'droplifted' product in its inventory but let's assume a consumer
stumbles across it and wants to buy it...the normal exchange (the value of
money for the value of the commodity) can take a few paths at the point of
purchase: the shop won't sell anything without it first existing in its
inventory and then sets aside the 'droplifted' object to investigate its
sudden appearance in its economic microcosm, or a sale is made and the
product is entered into inventory afterwards (although some fudging is
required by the shops bookkeeper since the object was not purchased by the
shop in order to sell)...in either case the 'object' introduces chaos into
the system because it arrived uninvited and hence no metric exists with
which to judge it...the object is a chimera and asks to be 'made real' so
that an economic exchange can take place and it is this act of 'making real'
that raises important issues...Duchamp's urinal is also a chimera asking to
be 'made real' in order for an accepted exchange to take place...i.e., 'in
order to accept this object as Art I need the correct type of cultural
currency with which to trade for it'...

>I think it
> would be more interesting, and more of a "droplifting" act, to put Mona Lisa
> in a public urinal than to put a urinal in a gallery.
disagree...the act of putting the Mona Lisa in a public urinal fulfills none
of the requirements of 'droplifting' as an clandestine act of infiltration
which results in the questioning of a mode of economic consumption...a
public urinal is not a place of economic exchange (except for dropping a
coin in a dish for the attendant); it is a place of utility where issues of
cultural consumption are not typically raised due to the function of the
environment...but I do agree that putting the Mona Lisa in an airport WC
would raise *other* sorts of issues...

>Freely posting pieces
> on .microsound.org is more along the lines of situationist potlatch, though
> not really THAT different from any number of people giving away their MP3s
> on the Web; rather, we need to figure out ways to take our works and
> droplift them into different contexts.
agreed...but by framing our mp3 projects as sanctioned by the microsound
list and engaged in by members of the list our projects tend to differ from
people giving away their mp3's on the web...the microsound projects have a
group status, a theme, and represents the aesthetics of microsound list,
etc...I think in this way the type of exchange involved in someone giving
away mp3's as an individual act is different from the type of exchange
involved in the microsound projects we 'publish'...

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