An analysis of selected artistic works addresses the new form of image-based conceptualization of history and the self, thus demonstrating that the performance of a work of art defines both the specific location and the structure of the action space. Historicity is communicated in the directly experienced position / image position; in its existence, the performance of the art work generates forms of intuition of historicity.
The "Ambient Art – action space, historicity and cultural production" project of Dr Sabine Gebhardt Fink forms part of the lead project on "Art relationships", which explores the intersections between music, visual (and audiovisual) arts, literature and dance:
Ambient art emerged in the early 1990s through the site-specific art "movement" (Miwon Kwon). Along the lines of "ambient television", the distinctive characteristic of this form of art is the connection of the action space of everyday practice with the articulation of the pictorial medium; site-oriented practices – as in Tacita Dean's film installation Boots from 2004, for example – assume the role of giving specific form to corporeal spatial experience. In this art form, the body, the real location and pictorial articulation are linked into a blended form. In contrast to installation art, the body with its spatial practice is in this case no longer the guarantor of the location, and narration processes are no longer the guarantor of temporality.
Through an analysis of selected artistic works by Tacita Dean, Thomas Hirschhorn and others, this new form of image-based conceptualization of history and the self is addressed. The performative image thereby becomes a form of intuition of historicity. Particularly exciting in this context is the appropriation of everyday pictures, photographs and internet images in the context of art, as in Thomas Hirschhorn's Bataille Maschine (Bataille Machine), Berlin, 2003.
It is demonstrated that the performance of a work of art defines both the specific (as opposed to the generic) location and the structure of the action space. Historicity is communicated in the directly experienced position / image position; in its existence, the performance of the art work generates forms of intuition of historicity. The body cannot per se generate locations, spatiality and historicity. Also tested here is Pierre Bourdieu's statement that cultural products reflect the social field, irrespective of their surface appearances. All the works of the selected artists are blended forms in the space between image, text and sound.
Questions interrogating the institutionalization and standardization of spatial practice through works of art focus on processes of identity formation, history formation and depiction.
Lecturer's qualification (Habilitation) project in ambient art.
Publication:
Gebhardt Fink, Sabine, Process_Embodiment_Site: Ambient in der Kunst der Gegenwart, Passagen Verlag, Vienna 2012