Notes on Tom Sherman’s Keynote Address

At the 13th Annual Symposium on Art: You Even Called Me Friend

Co-organized by the Owens Arts Gallery and Struts Gallery

by Jane Moloney, Ph.D

Struts Restorer of the Heart. Photo: Paulina Abarca-Cantin

"Our visual culture" says Tom Sherman, "operates with the horizontal characteristics of an oral culture."

Cell phones, txts, Youtube, Facebook.

He reminds us that "Marshall McLuhan had predicted that electronic, speed of light media would undermine print culture in favour of an oral culture."

Perhaps print culture has been a temporary blip on the horizon of more immediate and temporary communication.

But this is not a return to the oral cultures of the past.
The difference is the possibility of play.
A possibility that has been removed, or at least reduced, in our current anxiety-driven culture.

In this culture we are subject to constant assaults and are living, producing and reproducing in an atmosphere of fear.

Where is art in this?

Jane Moloney and Tom Sherman, post keynote address

Art now is in the immediate and the accessible but there is a contradiction emerging; our need to archive, to preserve, to record and retain.

If it cannot be recorded, filmed, posted, edited, manipulated, stored, archived, shared (promoted) we become anxious or dismiss its value.

Where is theatre in this?
Or dance?

Have we lost the confidence of our ancestors who re-told stories knowing the value of the new overlaying the strength of the palimpsest?

How do we view oral, performed (non-recorded) cultures of today?

Can we gain a sense of play in the retelling, reimagining, reforming, repetition without the reassuring preservation of a moment that has no present meaning.
How innovative can we really be if we are bound to moments of past meaning fixed in a clip that can be accessed and replayed – keeping us focussed backwards?

Or will we use our archives as part of the palimpsest?

Can they still live as part of a forward motion despite the fact that they are trapped in a still point in time?

Can we stream our .mvi consciousness and weave it, jacquard-like, into continuous possibilities of production?

When we open the Matricules archive, will we liberate something from it and continue a dialogue that creates as it samples or will we stare, mute, and desire to produce something worthy of an archive rather than of a performance?

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Tom Sherman is an artist and writer. He works in video, radio and performance, and writes all manner of texts. His interdisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally, including shows at the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Musée d'art contemporain and Festival International des Film sur l'Art (Montréal), Documenta X (Kassel), Wiener Konzerthaus (Vienna) and Ars Electronica (Linz). 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. A comprehensive anthology of his writing, Before and After the I-Bomb: An Artist in the Information Environment, was published by The Banff Centre Press in 2002. Sherman is a professor in the Department of Transmedia at Syracuse University in central New York, but considers the South Shore of Nova Scotia his home.