thinking about art after the mediaare scanned into a computer that can read them and then sent to a printer, what is
printed out is a portrait of the artist. however, this is just a second level on which the
work exists and is perceived. The decisive factor in the idea of art after the media is that
in this case, for example, the artist is a young man who passed through the advanced
technical media in the course of his socialization. Self_portrait.jpg succeeds as art in any
case, irrespective of technology- based art. it does not need electronics to be performed;
it simply hangs on the wall. That i know about the work’s technological side enriches
my reception of it, but is not a precondition for its aesthetic enjoyment.
There have always been people who are combinations of scientist and artist, who
one could term hybrid personalities. The French painter and philosopher pierre
Klossowski, brother of the more famous painter Balthus, was one such personality.
around 1970 Klossowski wrote a remarkable economy, which only became available
in print form in the 1990s. in his introduction, michel Foucault described it as ‘the
greatest book of our epoch’. Klossowski simply turns around the cultural pessimists’
lament about the commercialization, and thus also the mechanization of the body by
economics and technology, and declares the human body a ‘living currency’.^9 as a
radical continuation of the ideas of the marquis de sade, the human body could be
integrated into social interaction as an object of exchange. liberated from the direct
and purposeful constraints of reproduction, the body conceived of in this way is free to
become a superbly confident actor.
To experiment, which he practised as a special culture in his texts, Klossowski
assigned pre- eminent importance in his economy. The manufacture of appliances, he
wrote, is confronted regularly with its own ‘periodic infertility’. This actually
becomes more apparent because the accelerating tempo of manufacturing
perpetually forces it to prevent inefficiency (in the products), and this inevitably
drives it in the direction of wastage. The experiment, the precondition of which
is efficiency, presupposes the wasteful mistake. exploring in experiments what
might result in profitable production is geared to the elimination of infertility in
the product, but at the price of wasting material and human labour (production
costs).Figure 17.3 Yunchul Kim: self_portrait.jpg (detail), ink on paper, 90 × 140 cm; 58,806 single
handwritten characters, 2004.