Post-Migraine Thoughts on CAA
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Good morning. I still have the residual throbbing of a migraine brought on yesterday afternoon by spending too many hours at the College Art Association (CAA) annual conference, held in brightly-lit rooms with perfumed attendees. To help recalibrate my brain, I thought I’d write for half an hour on the parts of the CAA conference that I enjoyed. Happy Valentine’s Day! I guess you could say that this is my quickly written love letter to historians, theorists, and artists—with unedited flaws and all.
Revising Media Archaeology
I was moved by Jessica Bardsley’s contention in her paper “Fluid Histories: A Feminist Alternative to Media Archaeology” that media archaeology’s reliance on geological metaphors has resulted in “stratigraphic thinking” about artists as connected to each other by styles embedded in a period. Contemporary art and curatorial practices are rampant with these metaphors of “terrestrial aesthetics” as well, with an obsession of mining the archive, along with other archaeological metaphors of digging and excavation. Bardsley is working on a media theory of water in contemporary art, one that focuses more on the connections of “fluid assemblage” that links different temporalities, species, and materialities through the sea but without placing them into unmovable categories.
Similarly, Charles Eppley’s “Beating: Sound Installation as Queer Methodology” prompted reconsiderations about how to connect the conceptual and material relations of sonic experience. Eppley’s talk interrogated the simultaneity of both materialist and conceptualist studies, calling upon Nina Sun Eidsheim’s notion of the voice as a “thick” event as a consideration for how to amplify and create new intimate spaces. (Think: thick, fluid, and viscous, not the hard layering of a geological archaeology.) While not a provocation against media archaeology as such, the revelations of queer re-use of former technologies, such as a 1940s radio calibrator (I hope that’s right?) found at a thrift-store then spray-painted pink, and further explorations of the machine’s “blunt eroticism” (Eppley’s smart, pithy statement), contributed to rethinking our relationships to machines, sound, and each other in unexpected, non-binaristic ways. The stakes for being able to revel in difference are too high—protect trans rights!
A further addition to complicating media archaeology arose in the first panel I attended, “Reconstructing the Electronic Superhighway: Radical Media Art and Techno-Community at the Margins of the Global Village.” While I’m running out of time, Valeria Federici’s extensive research into the social spaces and politics of Italian new media works of the 1980s and 1990s shared a similar attention to rethinking our archaeological metaphors. Federici mentioned that she prefers the “hybrid” and networked history to one of “fluidity” due to the metaphor’s lack of differential specificity, but the “thick” characteristics of oceans and sound might be helpful to providing ways to reconfigure this history. After all, the oceans are hybrid spaces, composed of fluids, solids, and old and new media like undersea cables. But in Federici’s case, fluidity and networks hasn’t always mixed well, e.g., “surfing the web” isn’t helpful in disclosing what occurs in browser.