Michael Szpakowski
Since the beginning
Works in Harlow United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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DISCUSSION

A Non-Manifesto for the Summer of 2008


Sorry. The above should read:

Hi Pall
I'm not sure there's an 'it' to say in anything that's worth a second look
Actually decent work always has lots of "its" ( and hopefully they'll involve lots of contradictions, in the conventional, not the Marxist, sense) but that the artist is the last person who should be attempting to say them...

Grant Applications

I have to hold my nose quite a lot to write these - what I really want to say is - "Give me some money & I will try my best to make something mysterious, rich and interesting. I don't really know what it will be - I have some technical ideas, which I can share with you, but once I start working on those they'll probably change completely. The truth is chance plays an enormous part in me making stuff. Here's some stuff I did before -anything I make in the future might be a bit like that, but then again it might not. Oh..and it might fail completely."
I'm worldly enough not to do this of course, which makes me sad.
I've now read 300+ of the Rhizome commission proposals & every time someone tells me what their work will be "about", or will "address", or will "investigate" I feel the urge to sob helplessly coming over me.

michael

DISCUSSION

A Non-Manifesto for the Summer of 2008


Hi Pall
I'm not sure there's an 'it' to say in anything that's worth a second look
Actually decent work always has lots of "its" ( and hopefully they'll involve lots of contradictions, in the conventional, not the Marxist, sense) but that the artist is the last person who should be attempting to say them...
<grant applications>
I have to hold my nose quite a lot to write these - what I really want to say is - "Give me some money & I will try my best to make something mysterious, rich and interesting. I don't really know what it will be - I have some technical ideas, which I can share with you, but once I start working on those they'll probably change completely. The truth is chance plays an enormous part in me making stuff. Here's some stuff I did before -anything I make in the future might be a bit like that, but then again it might not. Oh..and it might fail completely."
I'm worldly enough not to do this of course, which makes me sad.
I've now read 300+ of the Rhizome commission proposals & every time someone tells me what their work will be "about", or will "address", or will "investigate" I feel the urge to sob helplessly coming over me.

michael

DISCUSSION

LESSON NINE


I think MANIK have been responsible for two absolutely remarkable sequences on this list, the first being the mutated images series of a long time ago & the second being this ”lessons” sequence.
There was a discussion (isn't there often) here a couple of years ago about what constitutes networked art.
It seems to me that with extreme economy of means ( including a remarkable control & devastating use of what on the face of it appears to be a fairly fractured English, although I'm not sure how much I should accept ''the face of it" where MANIK are concerned - I think they have developed more of an, admittedly idiosyncratic, control over register than many native speakers ) they've created something -a piece of genuinely networked art - which says a good deal about the winners and losers in today’s Europe in particular but has a kind of elegance to it also which makes it of artistic as well as polemical interest ( in that it talks of language, of popular culture, of cliché, of misunderstanding,of the nature and difficulty of communication, of geography, in addition to its more obvious preoccupations; plus it is often very very funny)
Far be it from me to accuse them of balance but there's a certain hesitancy, almost a delicacy, here, compared to the more straightforward rants-to-list, which on occasion we've had words about, which far from disarming the thing politically actually makes it more resonant, more generally applicable -ie the piece feels as much about alienation, being left out, left behind *in general* as it does about the particular situation of the Serbs -it could equally speak to the areas & inhabitants of UK inner cities which have effectively been both abandoned & simultaneously criminalised by government.
The work's modesty of means shouldn't blind us to its virtue - indeed I find myself admiring the fact that simple ( in one sense -of course the performative/conceptual nature of this is anything but simple) words posted to a discussion board can be much more resonant than so much higher tech, more boastfully conceived & more grandiosely trumpeted work.
It's modest in a second sense in that MANIK are confident enough in what they are doing that they don't have to continually explain to us what this is (in fact to their credit they don't really do that at all).
In particular I cherish the exhilarating derangement of lesson nine to which I’ve appended this comment. I’m guessing there’s a certain a good deal of cut and paste happening here -there’s also a linguistic knowingness about SMOWWWKE, DREEEENK, ACTIVITEEEE & CONTROWWWL which bolsters my suspicions about MANIK’s actual command of English idiom.
Rhizome would be the poorer without this singular, spiky & profoundly moral presence.
michael

DISCUSSION

A Non-Manifesto for the Summer of 2008


Curt - maybe I've mellowed but I don't actually mind any of those things that much (although my list of potentially BP rasing topics would be similar if not identical to yours). I don't think any topic should be ruled out. There's always the chance (admittedly slim) someone will doing something breathtaking with one of them.
What irritates me way more is being told in advance & in mind numbing detail what a work ( or *worse*, a *proposed* work ) is about, then being instructed as to how I will react to it, which seems pretty much SOP...
michael