HOW MUCH HAS THE INTERNET CHANGED THE ART WORLD? As a landmark exhibition in Beijing puts digital art centre stage, Jason Farago assesses the internet’s impact on the art world. Jason Farago 26 March 2014 “Is the internet dead?” It seems at first like an absurd question, especially since you are reading these words on a computer or mobile screen. How could an apparatus on which we are all more dependent by the day be dead? Isn’t the internet bigger than ever? But for the Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl, who posed that question in a recent essay for the arts website e-flux, the very ubiquity of the internet means that it no longer has any coherence. It might, in fact, no longer exist at all. “The internet persists offline as a mode of life, surveillance, production and organization,” Steyerl argues. It infects everything from personal identities and romantic relationships to political debates and public advocacy. “It is undead and it’s everywhere,” the artist writes: the internet, having seeped into every pore of society, seems increasingly hard to pin down. So hard to pin down, in fact, that it might be nowhere at all. Steyerl is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, and she’s also one of more than three dozen artists featured in a new exhibition, Art Post-Internet <http://tinyurl.com/k4nfulb> , that opened in March at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. The latter show is a major event, and not only because it introduces so many artists from the United States and Europe to China for the first time. Digital art, long sidelined in the discourse of contemporary art, is now taking centre stage – and not in the way anyone presupposed. Double meanings The phrase ‘post-internet art’ has to be understood in two ways. On the one hand, post-internet art is simply art made after a moment of internet art: an early, slightly naive tendency that began in the 1990s. Internet art of those days often evaded galleries and museums and appeared primarily, even solely, on the world wide web or other internet protocols. Though it attracted some attention from museums (the Whitney Museum in New York, for example, collected a few internet works), it never really jumped the boundary from experimental practice to mainstream visibility. Post-internet art, in this simple sense, builds on those earlier experiments, taking into account new factors like social media, mobile technology or surveillance. Yet post-internet art is also, as Steyerl suggests, something bigger than a second-generation response to digital technology. Instead of using the internet as a medium, it takes the internet as a given, even unremarkable fact of life – and goes from there. In the work of New York-based Tyler Coburn <http://tinyurl.com/ny5d5jq> , for example, the internet seeps beyond the notorious “series of tubes” into the most intimate parts of our lives. In his project I’m That Angel, which takes the form of a performance and a book (a printed book!), Coburn tells the story of a content-farm journalist who grinds out stories that chase trending topics on Google or social media and slowly loses his sense of self amid a constant barrage of digital noise. In Beijing he is presenting a new work that uses an audio track featuring Susan Bennett – an actor best known for giving voice to the iPhone technology known as Siri. Coburn is not uninterested in digital technology; far from it. Rather, he recognises that the changes wrought by digital technology are just one component in an overlapping sequence of economic, social and psychological transformations. Ghost in the machine In bringing together so many disparate practices, the Beijing exhibition makes it clear that contemporary art that responds to digital questions has no single look or message. It also has another virtue – it brings into a museum artworks that, too often, remain outside the mainstream of contemporary art. Artists working in digital terrain, as in so many other corners of the internet, can get defensive if not downright nasty when it is pointed out, but there’s no denying it: the influence of new media artists has, until now, been very limited. Claire Bishop, an art historian at the Graduate Center in New York, delivered the bad news in an article called Digital Divide, published in 2012 and endlessly debated since. In the ‘90s, when the world wide web came into being and email became ubiquitous, Bishop expected the art world to be transformed. Largely, this didn’t happen. “Whatever happened to digital art?” Bishop asked. The answer she came up with was that the really important shift in contemporary art of the last 20 years was not towards the digital but away from it. Noting the recent popularity of real-life interactions in galleries, the huge rise in performance art and the high esteem given to obsolescent media like film and slide projectors, she concluded that the art world generally responds to the upheavals of digital technology by disavowing that they are taking place. Bishop’s essay set off a wave of responses, many from artists who felt their own work was being minimised. But as Steyerl herself observed in an interview, Bishop was absolutely right to state that the central organs of the art world – museums, biennials and fairs – have shown little interest in digital culture and often privilege analogue forms that either easily slot into art history or retain obvious financial value in the market. (Steyerl, for one, joked, “Next time I see another 16mm film projector rattling away in a gallery I will personally kidnap it and take the poor thing to a pensioners home.”) Art Post-Internet, then, represents an important step forward in reckoning with the relevance of digital practices inside museums. The real virtue of post-internet art is not that it breaks down the distinction between digital and analogue forms. This seems self-evident in a moment when so many painters use Photoshop and sculptors use CAD software. More importantly, it reveals that the internet is not a magical innovation divorced from all that came before; it is a fundamental component of life, for better and indeed for worse. As the writer Evgeny Morozov has recently insisted, the internet – or “the Internet,” as he prefers, always using scare quotes – does not exist in any coherent sense. What does exist is technology, and technology is not ideology-free. The art we call post-internet is at its best when it recognises that the internet itself, for all its innovations, is not the big story of our times. It is the stuff around and inside the internet – the economic disruptions, the political revolutions, the ecological perils and the psychological turmoil – that really matter. The rest is just pixels on a screen. BBC © 2014 >>> WHY I HATE POST-INTERNET ART by Brian Droitcour I really don’t like “post-internet art.” I don’t like the term and I don’t like the art that’s presented under its banner. Lots of people tell me that they don’t like it, either. Whether people like it, or hate it, or feel indifferent, it seems like they all know what “post-internet” means but they can’t articulate it. The vagueness of post-internet, paired with the assumption that everyone knows what it means, is one of the most aggravating things about it. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? And it’s not a bad analogy, because post-internet art does to art what porn does to sex. But let’s try to define it anyway. I first came across “post-internet” when it was the title of the blog that Gene McHugh kept in 2009 and 2010. The use of “post-internet” as a label wasn’t common then—no one besides Marisa Olson really used it—and I misunderstood Gene’s choice of a blog name as a pun about blogging (a blog entry is a post, it’s on the internet). But he really did use “post-internet” as a term and he tried at length to describe what it means. When the internet stopped being the domain of amateurs, programmers, and hackers—when it became an inseparable part of everyday life for people with no special interest in or knowledge about computers—it changed. That’s why Gene thought it was worth saying “post-internet.” He wrote: “What we mean when we say ‘Internet’ became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from… sigh… It became the place where business was conducted, and bills were paid. It became the place where people tracked you down.” I’m sympathetic to Gene’s approach to developing a historical framework. It seems similar to an attempt to think about how radio or television changed how people live and how art is made, or how newspapers changed things when printing and reproducing images became cheap and easy. Cultural shifts like these are impossible to quantify but they become visible in art and historians have used art to describe them. The kneejerk negative reaction to “post-internet”—“How can we be post-internet when internet is still here? Shouldn’t it be during-internet”—doesn’t seem to hold up under scrutiny. Gene covered a response already. And yet, I have a problem with Gene’s response—with his “sigh” at what the internet has become. Think about it through analogy to post-modernism. Post-modernism doesn’t mean modernism doesn’t exist anymore. Modernism penetrates all aspects of life: any big new building in any city owes a debt to modernist architects. Modernism infiltrates domestic life via Ikea. Everybody loves abstract painting now—it decorates the walls of banks and hotels. Modernism’s infancy was the period when it had the most potential, but that ended and now it’s living a dull adult life. Post-modernism doesn’t mean that modernism is gone. It means that modernism is familiar. It’s complete. It’s still alive but its features are recognizable, and that’s precisely why it can be repeated and reused. Scholars may continue to argue about the particulars of modernism, about the facts of its infancy, but they can do so because they have a handle on its general contours, which are out in the world in plain sight. Post-internet says the same thing about the internet that post-modernism says about modernism. But isn’t that a little presumptuous? “What about what we mean when we say ‘Internet’ changed so drastically that we can speak of ‘post Internet’ with a straight face?” asked Gene on his blog. I’d agree that it changed drastically but I’d also ask: Why assume that it can’t change again? The internet is always changing. The internet of five years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the internet before social media, or the internet of twenty years ago, or the internet before the World Wide Web. Why insist that the changes are over? Artists who begin with the proposition that the phenomena of their world are boring and banal, who begin with an exasperated sigh, are going to produce art that is boring and banal, art that produces exasperated sighs. That was the case with a lot of conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s, when artists explored the aesthetics of administration, producing charts and diagrams and photocopy texts that presented viewers with the particulars of bureaucracy. Sigh. What’s the new equivalent of the aesthetics of administration? The post-internet art object looks good in the online installation view, photographed under bright lights in the purifying white space of the gallery (which doubles the white field of the browser window supporting the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop. The post-internet art object looks good online in the way that laundry detergent looks good in a commercial. Detergent doesn’t look as stunning at a laundromat, and neither does post-internet art at a gallery. It’s boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space. It’s frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive and proliferate images in networks, awe at the way networks are ruled by brands. It’s like a new form of landscape painting, a view of the world as it is, and that’s why its visual vocabulary is hard to distinguish from that of advertising and product displays. An artist’s choice to make art that way—as a plain reflection of reality and the power systems that manage it—shows a lack of imagination, when there are so many other ways of making art available. Post-internet artists know what the internet is for, and it’s for promoting their work. Post-internet art flaunts a cheap savvy of image distribution and the role of documentation in the making of an art career. Post-internet art seems like art about the idea of art world success—the art one would make to become a well-known artist if one doesn’t care about anything else. Should I name names? What’s the point of an angry rant if I don’t even call anyone out? I don’t want to do that, mainly because discussing the body of work of a particular artist or critiquing certain pieces would require a level of research, attention, and thought that I’m not willing to spend on post-internet art. It also seems futile because post-internet isn’t necessarily a permanent identity for any given artist; an artist can make post-internet art sometimes and another kind of art, for better or worse, at another time. Post-internet is an outfit that can be worn and discarded. So it’s better to call it out as a trend, or to call out the scenes and social groupings that do the most to popularize the trend. The Jogging—the people closely associated with it and the people who want to be closely associated with it—abuse post-internet most egregiously. The scenes that have been cultivated around Berlin galleries Kraupa-Tuskany and Societe are bad, too. If it’s at Higher Pictures gallery in New York I probably won’t like it. If it’s in a group show curated by Agatha Wara I’m sure I’ll hate it. If it’s on a cool Tumblr I can’t be bothered. So post-internet is bad. But if we’re not post-, then where are we, when are we? What prefix can people who love labels use to situate themselves in history? Recently I’ve become enamored with Mikhail Epstein’s writing on proto-, which supposes that the modern age of humanity is over, and that sweeping changes to nature and technology herald the onset of a new, still nebulous era. Epstein writes: “The period we are entering is no longer a period after something: postcommunist, postmodernist, ‘postthis,’ or ‘postthat.’ The present era is ‘proto,’ but a preface to what, we do not know. Proto- is noncoercive, nonpredictive, and unaccountable: a mode of maybe. The future is a language without grammar, an unconscious without dreams, pure nothing. Inescapably the future becomes everything so as again and again to remain nothing.” Post- presupposes finitude, closure, knowing retrospection. Proto- points to multiplicity and possibility. An art that is proto- would approach the internet’s ubiquity not as a boring given but as a phenomenon ripe with transformative potential for the mediation of people and art (or people and people), for the creation of new genres from the microforms of texts or tweets, or from game design, from karaoke and fan art, and so on. Proto- is okay with not knowing or not working. As Epstein says, we don’t what proto- is a preface to, and so there’s no way to append it to a root and complete a buzzword. Proto- sucks for promo. But as a starting point for an artist, as a disposition for art, proto- is a lot better than post-. CultureTwo >>> WHY IS OUR ERA’S GREATEST ART MOVEMENT MISSING FROM THE WHITNEY BIENNIAL? Paddy Johnson Thursday, March 27, 2014 Andrew Bujalski, still from Computer Chess (2013). <http://tinyurl.com/l3pktus> In this year’s Whitney Biennial, the only bit of Internet art on display could easily be missed. It’s a command line that looks like this: |: |: |: It appears in a scene near the end of Andrew Bujalski’s black-and-white feature film Computer Chess, screening in the Whitney’s second-floor film and video gallery. The repeated command streams down the left side of a computer’s screen, mimicking the scene’s rainstorm and echoing its grim mood. It’s a death scene, and that expressionless emoticon sums up the nuts of bolts of a movie about the differences between programmed behavior and human behavior. That computer death scene comes a little late in the context of the Whitney Biennial, which seems to have pulled the plug on the Internet art medium long ago. Over the course of the last six biennials, the museum has shown a total of two artists who use computer hardware as a core part of their practice, and they had created a collaborative piece—by Cory Arcangel and Paul B. Davis, in 2004. Artists whose practices exist almost exclusively on the Internet have been all but non-existent in every Biennial since 2002. That year’s show was an irregularity among biennials. It followed the 2001 exhibition “BitStreams,” the Whitney’s most significant foray into net art, and exploration of the dot com boom’s impact on art. The 2002 Biennial had a whole section devoted to net art and included works by several new media artists, including Mark Napier, Mary Flanagan, Yael Kanarek, Stephen Vitiello, and John Klima. Andrew Bujalski, still from Computer Chess (2013). <http://tinyurl.com/kalz67a> But one Biennial in 12 years with decent representation of what has become a major field of contemporary art isn’t a very good record. Other museums and galleries are recognizing the importance of new media and Internet art. Artist Lorna Mills recently curated an animated GIF show to compliment the David Bowie exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Steve Turner Contemporary now represents Petra Cortright, an artist who got her start online. And Zach Feuer represents Jon Rafman, best known for his Google Street View series, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View, and is showing Brad Troemel, co-founder of the popular blog The Jogging—whose exhibition I reviewed here. The net art field is admittedly more international than the Biennial’s US focus typically allows, but that’s not to say there aren’t plenty of artists to chose from. And New York has no shortage of media-friendly galleries, non-profits, and curators. Transfer Gallery alone has shown enough new media art to fill the Biennial five times over, not to mention what gets shown by the non-profits 319 Scholes, Rhizome, and Eyebeam. Curators aren’t that hard to find either, as those working in the field of new media never stop organizing shows. Karen Archey, Christiane Paul, Kelani Nichole, and Lindsay Howard are just a few resources that could easily be tapped for the job. And luckily the Whitney will have plenty of additional space and resources to make this happen in the 2016 Biennial, the first in its new Meatpacking District building. Two years from now, I’d like to see the museum focus on artists working with the Internet and engaged with digital art. The field is simply too large and networked to ignore. The dark mood of Computer Chess’s death scene may reflect feelings many of us have about the current state of contemporary art as a whole, but it doesn’t tell the full story of artists working in the digital space. It’s a great time for online makers. What’s happening online is the closest thing we have to a major art movement today, and that’s something to celebrate and showcase. ©2014 Artnet Worldwide Corporation Art Faul The Artist Formerly Known as Prints ------ Art for Cars: art4carz.com Stills That Move: http://www.artfaul.com Greens: http://www.inkjetprince.com Camera Works - The Washington Post . |
