Amidst invitations to "become a fan of pizza" and "join the cause for world peace" something interesting showed up in Facebook yesterday: Lisson Gallery's crossword ad for Ryan Gander's upcoming show "You walk into a space, any space" [bottom right].  I would have preferred an all-art crossword in this context, but the form was enough to start free-associating to Paulina Olowska's installation at the Pinakothek Der Moderne in Munich [bottom left] and our own 2009 crossword project, a study in public, text-based relational aesthetics.

Could it be the we're all flushed with centenary fever for the crossword, a uniquely modern mass-culutral interactive text-art form? First called a "word-cross" (like a butterfly was first a "flutterby"), this grid-regulated puzzle made its debut in mass-distributed form, specifically the "Fun" section of the December 1913 edition of New York World.  This was, of course the very year that New York got its first taste for another modern artform, namely Dada, at the Armory Show. To enliven the historical moment a bit more, let's not forget that not two years earlier, Picasso brought the newspaper into the domain of art with his papier collé pieces like Glass and Bottle of Suze.  

The crossword puzzle was born without objecthood, but unlike so much mass-mediated material, it's been hitherto relatively absent as Pop art content, seemingly because it is too culturally multi-valenced: Speaking Greenbergian, crosswords are kitsch in form, but in content, they are too high-brow to be easily accessed for reconfiguration, i.e. ask yourself in earnest what day you can get to; controlling meaning is difficult in such situations of elusiveness, though the present flurry of attempts to involve the crossword in the fine arts seems to suggest some larger attempt at a reconciliation of cultural forms.  

The coincidence of a Guggenheim stripped bare by Tino Sehgal for the sole purpose of discussion and the emergence of a viral new web chatting practice, Chatroulette, dovetail to demand the urgent reconsideration of a few questions on the relational – let’s drop the aesthetics. Participation and its uneasy relationship with progress are the topics of this inquiry.  

Occupying the entire Guggenheim rotunda, Sehgal's show is comprised of only two artworks: Kiss, a non-relational (and thus traditional, if such were possible) tableau vivant of a rotating cast of dry-fondling couples in the otherwise-bare lobby, impossibly slowed like a Bill Viola video; and the main event, This Progress,  an upwardly-mobile series of conversations with Sehgal's paid employees as philosophical interlocutors.  

After ascending the first ramp, the visitor enters into the logic of This Progress upon being greeted by one of a gaggle of children programmed to inquire, "What does progress mean to you?" Children, in this context, presumably designed to spark anxious thoughts on progress incarnate, have an utterly pre- (or post-!)Rousseaian effect: even in an art museum, unattended gangs of children during school hours call up associations with City of God or the pickpockets outside the Colosseum. The kid-guide asks the visitor to follow him or her to the impromptu-dugout-like space of the first stairwell, at which point he or she introduces the visitor to an adolescent and (inevitably poorly) summarizes the visitor's responses on the topic of progress, of which they’ve been trained to demand an answer. The adolescent, in turn, engages the visitor in similar such banter at a higher level while walking steadily higher until handing the visitor to another interlocutor, who, in turn, engages the viewer in more upward ambulation and conversation, until handing the visitor to a final, older interlocutor, who engages the visitor in some generally important but contextually irrelevant topic like Sigmund Freud or the death penalty. The idea of progress is reflected in the upward movement of the walk taken by visitors and their paid Socratic Virgils, though the conclusion of the walk, with all its allegorical implications, is the emptiness of an event-less arrival at the pinnacle, which yields no special epiphany. 

Probing these Tino-bots, I learned, in fact, that they are allowed to discuss anything except the piece itself, which, of course, was the aspect that interested me most. I had lots of questions for them: “Does participation constitute progress?” “How is this piece a progressive step in the narratives of Modernism and Post-Modernism that the museum seeks to illustrate”? “What is Tino’s idea of progress?” etc. To no avail: Medium self-reflexivity, de riguer since Manet, was denied. Contrary to the inquiry-based revelatory procedures that these chatty “sculptures” demanded of the viewer, the Tino-bots were mute on the subject of medium-consciousness, which proved disappointing and possibly suggested conceptual corruption within an ostensibly radical conversation practice. This avoidance, along with the insistence on the spoken signature voiced through the Tino-bots--“This is a piece by Tino Sehgal”--along with the strict prohibition on photography, which I defied as a small political act of civil disobedience, led me to believe that in fact the work, having no aesthetic output, is, in its mythologization of the individual artist/creator, even more harnessed to a hegemonic author function than typical market art. Sehgal has made no objects and has shifted the entire burden to the participant, who intellectually labors under his name. Sehgal, the artist, has dictated the form and subject of the experience with the only variable being what arbitrary information the visitor exchanges with his randomly-generated employee-interlocutors. This Progress only “works” on the way up the spiral. No intersubjectivity on the way down--the bots will ignore you. 

A key question, which the bots refused to discuss, is how This Progress relates to our notions of art historical progress, which is still at the heart of museological curatorial practice. There is indeed an absurd contradiction in “progressing” up an empty museum, but a greater discord lies in the confrontation of that experience--one which seems infused by nihilism--with the framework of the very institution of an art museum itself: Despite Arthur Danto’s perhaps far-too-early conviction that ours is a post-art-historical age (in the Hegelian sense of the unfolding of spirit), the art museum continues to be a space defined by its portrayal of time, and specifically the development of culture over time right up to the present, expressed, as always, in the development of the style of objects and thought produced in successive periods. This Progress is the most recent Guggenheim show and the one produced by its youngest artist ever to get full-rotunda treatment – younger by several years than Matthew Barney in his 2003 show of the “Creamster” cycle. Thus, the implication, unspoken there, is that Sehgal’s prescribed rhetorical events are somehow an expression of art historical progress, a new incarnation of both performance art and minimalsim, unprecedented in degree of the ever-more desirable quality of “participation,” an illustration, in short, of the progressive. 

In a recent lecture at the Cooper Union's Interdisciplinary Seminar, theorist Irit Rodoff presented a series of questions on the topic of another, but closely-related, question: "What does it mean to participate in culture?” She presupposed: 1. Theory is a productive practice like an art practice (true enough). 2. Art experience is inherently political in its potential to re-animate spaces (physical, cultural, otherwise) through new intersubjectivities, and thus, art need not be explicitly political in content to have political function (think of Chris Burden's comment that to paint daisies is a political act), and thus that making “political art” can be a sort of tautology. 3. Rather than look for the explicitly political as an outcome from art-space experience, we should look for (probably small) transformations in subjectivity that come from the inherently relational intersubjectivity of art space, both from our interaction with that which is exhibited and, in performative fashion, by taking part in the intersubjective spectacle of an art event. Following Rodoff’s presupposition #2; might we not extend this? Explicit political content in art and political potentiality are not co-extensive, and similarly, personal actualization that results from an encounter within the intersubjective performative spaces of art exhibition need not necessitate actually interacting verbally with artworks. i.e. if the space of the art gallery is already a performative one, might it not similarly be tautological for the artwork to interact directly with the visitor?  Further, Rodoff’s suggestion that relational art-space experience is defined by the non-religious occasion is, in the case of This Progress, undermined by Sehgal's treatment of the ziggurat-like Guggenheim Museum as a temple-for-ritual-enactment, with directives for movement, speech, and by extension – thought.  

It is clear that the staged intersubjectivity of Sehgal’s This Progress and its systematic production of arbitrary verbal interactions reflect larger interests in contemporary culture, perhaps most recently and strikingly articulated in Chatroulette, a new website launched this past November 2009 by 17-year-old Muscovite high school student Andrey Ternovskiy. It is a peer-to-peer interface system, in which the user (subject) dials up a Stranger, as they are known in the system, and he or she is paired with a Stranger with whom to communicate by either text or videocam or both (an example of overmediation). Without any exchange of username, profile (which is non-existent), IP address, or any other data, chat commences instantaneously and ceases instantaneously and irrecoverably – and like a Tino Sehgal, ends without a product, unless like me, you screenshoot the exchange. Arbitrary, product-less, authorless – at least in its interface, potentially endless, and useful only to the extent that an intersubjectivity emerges, Chatroulette is unwittingly a more authentic relational aesthetics than Sehgal’s managed megalomania. Further from religious events, the encounters of Chatroulette suggest the potentiality of chance, although the potential for both release and construction of highly counter-productive energies must also be factored into an awareness of this new interface. Chatroulette is not a prescription as much perhaps it is a warning through absurdity.  

Participation has, of late, come, by received wisdom, to be regarded as inherently valuable or progressive, additionally edifying, or fundamentally good, not just in art practice, but in the classroom, the web, and society at-large: Instructors get higher evaluations for high participation, websites are increasingly judged by the degree to which comments, social networking, or other user activity is enabled, despite that certain other realities lurk: For example, interactivity in the web sphere may be perceived, for example, as an inoculation against awareness of the Intenet’s service as a mechanism of mass-docilization. What’s lost in the multi-directional is the educational precision of teaching, the flow of information from greater to lesser; as in art, what’s missing in relational aesthetics is a flow from object to subjects, which informs the very process of inter-subjectivity.

The question of whether print is dead should perhaps not be asked as such. It is as self-answerable as the question of whether painting is dead, posed in various, increasingly sophisticated forms since the advent of photographic techniques. Instead of death, we might instead consider the current state of print to be one of migration from form to content, perhaps best theorized in terms borrowed from media theorist Marshall McLuhan, whose precocious formulae prove ever-more applicable to the present situation.  McLuhan proposed that “the content of a medium is always another medium”, i.e. speech becomes the content of writing (though of course in public-speaking situations, writing, in turn, often becomes the content of speech).  Further, McLuhan posited, writing becomes the content of printed publication.  And now, of course, print has become the content of web publication.

Despite past predictions, painting is, from even the most cursory glance at the past decade, an undead medium, but certainly one whose content is now fundamentally complicated by the representational techniques of the very media that took it as content, namely photographic and cinematic media, which in turn, have, in various ways become painting’s content.  Painting is not dead, to be sure, but its tasks have also just as surely changed in the hundred-seventy-one years in which we’ve been able to directly fix images to surfaces.  With the development of more efficacious imaging techniques, the use value of painting as a tool of representation became overtaken by its exchange value as art. The present crisis of format in publication appears to have analogues: the efficacy of web publication, with all its approximations, renders print increasingly in the realm of the fetish, with its use value as an information distributor increasingly nullified next to digital forms.  The dilemma is but a fragment of a defining discourse of our age, namely the accelerated shift in most of our mediated forms.  The printed page, like much of our physical world, is meeting an imperative to become the content of digital media.  Despite the persistence of a physical double in many cases, printed publications are, by a certain measure, already one of the most thoroughly digitally integrated forms.  The very use of the form and term, “page,” for individual amounts of web-published information may seem to be an inevitability after a mere decade-and-a-half of thorough digital integration and naturalization, but this structure, one of many possible original solutions to the construction of an Internet, was a choice of format, part of a larger discourse to enlist printed forms as content and maintain digital equivalents of its vocabulary – files, folders, scripts, clipboards, bookmarks—itself part of a larger enlistment of the forms and names of the physical and even metaphysical—desktop, office, library, memory, and so forth.

Rather than ask if print – and more generally, physical forms, are dead or dying, might we not, instead, attempt to assess the relative merits of new and traditional media in an effort of estimating what is gained and lost in the seemingly inevitable process of the digitization of everything? Post-photographic painting cannot escape co-existence and mutual exchange with the new-media forms it spawned, and the future of print will seemingly look similar.

Within the digital-only sphere, it seems that the stratification of media will increase in unknown ways. This topic arises every time the prompt asks if I’d like to “print to a device” or “print to a PDF,” assuming that the transmission of information from a workable state such as Word or InDesign to the fixed format of a PDF is a manner of printing in its guarantee of completeness.   The question becomes: shall I make an internal print or an external print?  How, in the future, will finished or published states be adequately distinguished from working states? By extension, might we conceive of physical printing as the content of the internal printing medium? In the future, how many layers of finish will be distinguishable from each other within the machine itself, and in what new ways will distinctions between the external and internal be replicated within the machine itself?