Tom Sherman: a man with a message

Tom Sherman was the keynote speaker at the 13th annual Symposium of Art at The Owens Art Gallery in Sackville, New Brunswick.

http://www.strutsgallery.ca/archives/2008symposium.htm

"Tom Sherman works in video, installation, radio and performance, and writes all manner of texts. His interdisciplinary work has been exhibited widely, including shows at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Musee d’art contemporain, the Museum of Modern Art, Documenta X, Wiener Konzerthaus, Ars Electronica, and the Impakt Festival. He represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1980. In 2003 he was awarded the Bell Canada Award for excellence in video art. He performs and records with Bernhard Loibner (Vienna) in a group called Nerve Theory. His most recent book is Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, The Banff Centre Press, 2002. He is a professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University in New York, but considers the South Shore of Nova Scotia his home."

Tom in the New Brunswick sunshine at the Bridge Street Café. Photo: Paulina Abarca-Cantin

His keynote address was called:

Messages that Stick (and ways to escape the limitations of adhesion)

it addressed ideas of communication for artists, or rather as artists. How do we deliver our messages without being stranded as branded?

This is the trouble of our time, a time that he considers to be marked by the message. He described in an entertainingly glib fashion, that for an art work to succeed today it is best to deliver its point within 30 seconds, repeat it, and ideally have some cute cats, perhaps on fire. (this was a joke people, be calm)

Tom Sherman has accepted the current cultural climate and will tell you he has altered his practice to suit. He is also warning us that the so called avant garde is only further alienating its audience by continuing to make art "that functions in self-complicating, ambiguous, poetic ways". Such art "will likely receive diminishing attention. While deep reading and imaginative interpretations by audiences are increasingly unlikely, there are many opportunities for positive outcomes."

Tom said he no longer reads books, or poetry. He is a man of this moment as he was man of other moments before. He has not suffered the "limitations of adhesion". He is not stuck. He is clearly able to identify the zeitgeist and has both the cultural capital and physical stature to ensure his participation within it.

i still read books.

call me old school, but i also still (try to) engage in deep reading and imaginative interpretations. While listening to Tom Sherman and the audience members participate in a dialogue, i couldn't help but think of one text in particular. It was published a very long time ago, 1944 to be exact, in the face of the economic and cultural devastation of the second world war. While we currently also live in a time of war and economic devastation, many of the direct references of the text are out of date, but the ultimate "message" within it, is overwhelmingly current.

In The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer described how all cultural production was being reduced to a style that took little time, repreated its message, and that crossed all platforms of production. In so doing the dominant idea of "staying on point" was born. Adorno and Horkheimer described how new technologies allowed for high and low art to homogenize to the detriment of both. So called "high art" was challenged in its efficacy to deliver a message, while the potential for resistence or rebellious content in "low art" was stifled.

(one of my favourite comments on Adorno is this, " His analysis may be elitist but that doesn't mean it's wrong.)

"The so-called dominant idea is like a file which ensures order but not coherence. The whole and the parts are alike; there is no antithesis and no connection."

This is where the acceptance of the ubiquitous message society idea troubles me, that in fact there is NO connection. There is only a delivery, a deposit, a wet spot. The flurry of message delivery rarely gets at ideas of actual communication, you know, that stuff that happens after delivery, wherein something else and someone else enters the picture, establishes relation. What of the complicated space where something is not just sent or received? what of contact? what of poetry?... to quote the woman in the crowd that night, what of beauty?

I am certain he is right, such things will no longer receive much attention. One can see that this has already happened. So one must make decisons based on what they think will come of their practice or their way of being, or rather what they want to come of it.

i am sticking with Michel Foucault on this one...

"...I really work like a dog and i have worked like a dog all my life. I am not interested in the academic status of what i am doing because my problem is my own transformation. That's the reason also why, when people say, "well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else," My answer is "well, do you think I have worked like that all these years to say the same thing and not to be changed?." This transformation to be changed by one's self by one's own knowledge is i think something rather close to the aesthetic experience. why should a painter work if he is not transformed by his own painting?"

I think Tom Sherman is very engaged in the the transformation of himself and states clearly in his talk title that he welcomes change. He has been at the forefront of many movements and he is adroit in his personal placement. I worry though that work that mirrors perfectly the dominant style of the culture industry is all too readily fully recuperated by it. It then becomes an empty signifier, a void or worse, a tool to be used against those that want more or different. Therein lies the rub.

please read the Adorno/Horkeheimer essay yourself, don't worry, its on line ; ) ...hot linked above!

and definitely read this excerpt of Tom's latest text.....

you should know i am proud to call him my facebook friend!

Enduring Messaging
By Tom Sherman

(the whole text is in the Fall issue of Canadian Art magazine, September 2008)

The 21st century is awash with messaging. Instant messaging, text messaging, voice messaging, email and social-networking profiles with digital photos and video galore… Messages are traded in real time and left all over the place to be picked up later. Messages are signals that confirm and reaffirm one’s presence. I send messages daily, hourly, periodically and relentlessly; therefore, I exist, and control the way I’m perceived, to a certain extent.

Microcommunication technologies adorn our bodies. This gear
augments our senses and teleports our appearance. Where are you now? I’m over here. I feel like getting a bite to eat. I’m all dressed up and looking for action. Listen to me. Check out my new look. I’m completely up to date. I’m wired and I smell good.

Messaging is where it’s at. Meat space is still ground zero. Our physical bodies are the base track, the flesh-and-bones architecture for our fashion statements. But we are connected to satellites and a vast menu of other social worlds through little screens, buttons and earphones. The rhythm of our walk is punctuated with ring tones, beeps and voices that come out of nowhere. There is no such thing as an interruption anymore: attention is defined as the heavily perforated veil of our consciousness. I give away my attention by the split second
to incoming traffic. The mobile phone I pack demands my voice and fingertips and mug shot. My phone is my lifeline, a sweet nothing, a rant waiting to happen, my eyes and ears at a distance—a game, television, jukebox, tiny movie theatre and art gallery...