~squidboot

Signs transmit meaning. The transmission of meaning has two components: medium and content. Mediums are available to everyone, from our own body to the growing availability of its electronic extensions. However, the content or, put another way, the sign's addressing of other people, is largely in the hands of specialist practitioners acting collectively to manage demographics, for instance: Hollywood, advertising agencies, tabloids, corporations, and governments. This content is usually highly conservative in what it describes, confirming present standpoints and challenging them only within limited boundaries, according to purpose.

The sign's ability to address gives it the means to influence how we behave. Signs refer to the content of our inner experience and, from this, gain the authority to suggest how it is to be interpreted and acted upon within the social field. Specialist practitioners tend to refer to our emotional, instinctual and prejudicial content in order to suggest our rationalised, interpretive and considered content, which then informs our decisions. For instance, a lot of advertising, after researching spontaneously emergent behaviour and attitudes within their target demographic, addresses us with emotively toned content that ambiguously refers to our insecurities then, thus primed and distracted, places the product as a means to counteract them. That is to say, we are deconstructed in order to be reconstructed.

Identity, as the negotiation of my selfhood with a collective, takes up these means and, over time and under pressure to be linguistically and socially solvent, becomes instinctual.

The medium of content delivery is generally of a fine quality in these processes in order for them to have the immediacy to engage the viewer in the first place and in the right way. The viewer comes from a context of ubiquitous high material quality media increasingly in her own possession, these must be matched and, better still, surpassed in order to have the warranted effect. Although deliberate use of lower material quality can have the same effect in so called "eye-to-eye" engagement stratagems.

Contemporary fine art shares these mediums of delivery with everyone else, and also use of such processes of capture. However, it has developed other aims due to historical differences in practice and descriptive concerns, encouraged and institutionalised by the gallery system.

Where advertising tends to deconstruct the act of viewing and viewer in order to reconstruct them for its own ends, fine art leaves the reconstruction to the viewer themselves, removing as many constructions as possible toward an efficient and pure effect on the viewer, that is, modernism's tendency toward abstraction pursuing the fundamentals of description. With these lessons learned, "post-modern" conceptual art has continued this same ideal through self-subversion, describing something of the "apparatus of capture" in the piece itself and through the emergent relationship between viewer and piece; revealing latent, uncertain, contradictory and superfluous tendencies within conservative descriptive practices, undermining power structures that depend on their persuasive quality.

Psychologically speaking, this has happened because the practice of addressing descriptive concerns tends to feed back meaning per se as having a general potential to be grounded in artifice. Signs come not to refer to a final objective self, but instead, in the words of Baudrillard, "refer only to other signs" that construct a provisional subjective self moving fast enough to escape, explore and evade recapture by persuasive processes; generating, in Heidegger's terms, an ontology of the self that goes full circle and re-accesses the apriori use of properties through the ready-to-hand on its own terms, away from "alienation".

The viewer can come to this and, helped and encouraged by the deconstructive mediation of the gallery, share in this alternative process, perhaps becoming a more individuated actualiser of her own possibilities.