>
Related Matters
‘The nineties saw the emergence of collective forms of
intelligence and the “network” mode in the handling of
artistic work. The popularisation of the Internet web, as well as
the collectivist practices going on in the techno music scene, and
more generally the increasing collectivization of cultural leisure,
have all produced a relational approach to the exhibition. Artists
look for interlocutors. Because the public is always a somewhat unreal
entity, artists will include this interlocutor in the production process
itself.’ (Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics [RA]
p.81)
In accepting Katie Holten’s invitation to continue an engagement
with her work which began some time ago it occurred to me that I might
invite along a third party, as it were, whom I mentioned briefly in
passing on a previous occasion. In an influential series of essays
published in the early to mid-1990s the French critic and curator
Nicholas Bourriaud outlined just what he thought makes today’s
art so different, so appealing. These essays were collected and published
in book form by Les presses du reel in 1998 as Esthétique
Relationelle and have just recently been published in English
translation. As Bourriaud’s words and Holten’s works seemed,
to me at least, to have quite a lot in common, despite the fact that
they had not previously met, it seemed appropriate to see how they
might get on together. Besides, a basic working principle in Holten’s
practice has always been that, if two is company, then three is probably
enough to constitute an artwork. Or, at the very least, the beginnings
of one.
‘It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work
as a space to be walked through… It is henceforth presented
as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited
discussion.’ (RA, p. 15)
‘The artwork is…no longer presented to be consumed
within a “monumental” time frame and open for a universal
public; rather, it elapses within a factual time, for an audience
summoned by the artist.’ (RA, p. 29)
Katie Holten can be very persuasive, and her apparently boundless
energy and enthusiasm can be quite infectious. These qualities are
not just ancillary personal characteristics but the indispensable
attributes of an artist whose practice is founded on the necessity
for collaboration and the desire for sociability. This is every bit
as evident, for instance, in her successful enlisting, in the summer
of 1999, of a Northern Italian winemaker to produce her Bog Grappa
from local bog plants, as it is in her careful planning, one year
later, of a Bog Garden (2000) for the Women’s Centre
in Derry as part of their Women Transforming Spaces project. These
qualities inform equally her decision to commission DJ Dave the Rave
from Cardiff to remix the First Movement of the Shithole Symphony
(1999), a work Holten originally composed and presented in Berlin,
and her involvement in Neighbourhood Watch (2002), a communal
clean-up of graffiti-laden walls undertaken with the residents of
Torreviega in Alicante, Spain. Superficially, the two projects in
both of these pairings would appear to be worlds apart. While the
former, in both instances, smacks more than a little of frivolous
self-indulgence, the latter carries with it an unmistakable hint of
earnest environmentalism and social rectitude. Yet what unites all
of these works within the larger context of Holten’s oeuvre
is their modeling of a way of being in the world which stresses the
collaborative and communal aspects of everyday life. It is in this,
more than in the apparently specific focus or inevitably temporary
effect of each individual project, that their principal and collective
significance lies.
‘[Contemporary] art models more than it represents, and
fits into the social fabric more than it draws inspiration therefrom.’
(RA, p.18)
These works are no longer paintings, sculptures or installations,
all terms corresponding with categories of mastery and types of products,
but simple surfaces, volumes and devices which are dovetailed within
strategies of existence.’ (RA, p.100)
‘These days, utopia is being lived on a subjective, everyday
basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary
experiments. The artwork is presented as a social interstice within
which these experiments and these new “life possibilities”
appear to be possible. It seems more pressing to invent possible relations
with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows.’
(RA, p. 45)
In its ongoing modeling of a way of negotiating the world based
on neighbourliness and sociability – that is to say, a mode
of living that is flexible, fluid and fragmentary, rather than one
locked into rigid social hierarchies - Holten’s art can happily
digress into abstraction and absurdism without, in any sense, losing
its way. Such digressions are particularly evident in her drawings,
which have a tendency toward febrile proliferation in the manner of
reproductively hyperactive organisms. These enigmatic doodles have,
on different occasions, spread across the pages of her numerous hand-made
artist’s books and have colonised the walls and floors of various
public art spaces and private galleries alike. Whether they resemble
quasi-scientific schemata, amateur botanical illustration, rudimentary
architectural sketches or the rough notes of an environmental planner
on the move, they stiffly resist translation in terms of any precisely
meaningful sign system. These individually unique emblems of industriousness
and invention combine to suggest that everything in life is both fragmentary
and ultimately interconnected.
‘The contemporary artwork’s form is spreading out
from its material form; it is a linking element, a principle of dynamic
agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line.’ (RA, p.
21)
‘[We] know that attitudes produce forms, and we should
know that forms prompt models of sociability’. (RA, p.58)
‘At an exhibition [as opposed, for example, to the cinema
or theatre]…even when inert forms are involved, there is the
possibility of immediate discussion…I see and perceive, I comment,
and I evolve in a unique space and time. Art is the place that produces
a specific sociability. (RA, p. 16)
In June 2001 Holten collaborated with the painter Helen O’Leary
in producing a batch of one hundred and forty seven home-baked cookies
which were distributed free of charge during a highly sociable art
event organised in the basement of Dublin’s Liberty Hall by
the 147 Initiative. As it happened, this group had been initially
formed in angry response to the dismissal of the then Visual Arts
programmer of the long-established Project Arts Centre, and had taken
its name from the number of signatories to a petition protesting against
the dismissal. The previous year, however, Holten and O’Leary
had also baked a batch of cookies, which were then sold at auction
at the Water Street Flea Market in Pennsylvania, USA. These formally
similar ‘art objects’ thus functioned quite differently
within these separate contexts. In the first instance they functioned
as an element in a communal protest against a perceived injustice,
whereas, in the second, they were treated as a tradable commodity.
Any perceived discrepancy between these two functions may be explained
in terms of the exemplary flexibility of the contemporary artwork.
‘The fact is that an artwork has no a priori useful function
– not that it is socially useless, but because it is available
and flexible, and has an “infinite tendency”. In other
words, it is devoted, right away, to the world of exchange and communication,
the world of “commerce”, in both meanings of the term.’
(RA, p. 42)
‘(The) work of art represents a social interstice…
The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less
harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other
trading possibilities than those in effect within this system.’
(RA, p.16)
Katie Holten is one of the most tirelessly nomadic artists around.
In the last few months alone one was equally likely to find her in
Southern Spain, downtown New York, or the West of Ireland. Yet a persistent
point of reference in her work for a number of years has been the
boglands of her native Ardee. In Perishable TONIC (2001)
she put on a slide-show at the Dublin office of the Sculptors’
Society of Ireland where she projected images of Ardee Bog onto a
wall, while a selection of potted bog plants hung horizontally from
an adjacent wall. When she exhibited some of her Wetland Drawings
at a group show at Galerie Paul Andriesse in 2000 they were likewise
accompanied by a horizontally wall-hung pot containing a Dutch bog
plant. In light of the disparaging expression once common among urban
Irish pseudo-sophisticates, ‘You can take the man out of the
bog, but you can’t take the bog out of the man’, we might
view these works as functioning partly as a timely rejoinder to the
self-regarding metropolitanism of the Celtic Tiger from a rooted but
genuinely cosmopolitan traveler.
The notions of uprootedness and transplantation recur regularly
in Holten’s work. The principal component of her 2001 solo exhibition
at the Context Gallery in Derry, entitled The garden, the kids,
the tiramisú and other failed projects, for example, was
a floor installation of compost and transplanted weeds. In fact, this
process of gathering weeds from an urban environment and placing them
within a gallery context where these otherwise hardy plants will inevitably
wither and die during the course of an exhibition has become something
of a signature strategy in Holten’s work. This forceful collapsing
of distinctions between nature and culture, between ‘high’
art and lowly plant life, between aesthetic beauty and the botanically
unbeautiful, between the timeless art object and the transient weed,
between the elevated and the everyday, is as salutary as it is momentarily
disconcerting.
‘The subversive and critical function of contemporary
art is now achieved in the invention of individual and collective
vanishing lines, in those temporary and nomadic constructions whereby
the artist models and disseminates disconcerting situations.’
(RA, p. 31)
‘Every artist whose work stems from relational aesthetics
has a world of forms, a set of problems and a trajectory which are
all his own. They are not connected together by any style, theme or
iconography… They all root their artistic practice within a
proximity which relativizes the place of visuality in the exhibition
protocol, without belittling it. (RA, p. 43)
In stark contrast to the delirious technophilia, the stultifying
information overload, and the relentless pursuit of novelty and innovation
for its own sake, which many perceive as the hallmarks of the Internet
generation, Katie Holten’s responses to technological advances
are both judicious and slyly subversive. While the invention of e-mail
has been a boon to inveterate travelers, there is little fear that
Holten is ever likely to fall into the trap of high-tech fetishism,
as we can see from a work such as Subject: none (2001-2).
This sculpture is based on a randomly selected e-mail message, which
has been refashioned in plasticene letters that are then displayed
higgledy-piggledy on a wall-mounted shelf. Streamlined mass technology
is thus reduced to domestic disarray.
‘Henceforth the group is pitted against the mass, neighbourliness
against propaganda, low tech against high tech, and the tactile against
the visual. And above all, the everyday now turns out to be a much
more fertile terrain than “pop culture” – a form
that only exists in contrast to “high culture”, through
it and for it.’ (RA, p. 47)
‘(The) emergence of new technologies, like the Internet
and multimedia systems, points to a collective desire to create new
areas of conviviality and introduce new types of transaction with
regard to the cultural object.’ (RA, p. 26)
‘(The) main effects of the computer revolution are visible today
among artists who do not use computers.’ (RA, p.67)
This brief meander through some of Katie Holten’s works to
date is intended less as a comprehensive summation of achievements
to date than as a modest attempt to locate her work within the particular
context of one notable tendency in the art of the past decade, as
characterised by one of that tendency’s most persuasive advocates.
How relevant this context will prove to be in the long run remains
to be seen. But then again, as much contemporary art suggests, most
things remain to be seen.
‘(The) work of art is no longer presented as the mark
of a past action, but as an announcement of a forthcoming event (the
“trailer effect”), or the proposal of a virtual action.
In any case, it is presented as a material time span which every exhibition
event has to update and revive.’ (RA, p.76)
Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, July 2002.