Online at http://www.netartreview.net/monthly/0705_3.html
FEATURE.REVIEW: Reflections on Conceptual Art and its relation to New Media,
a month long conversation at Empyre
BY: Eduardo Navas
I was a guest speaker on Empyre during the month of April 2005. The
following text is a revision of two particular postings on Conceptual art,
which I here use as launching platforms to reflect on the long debate that
took place between Raul Ferrera Balanquet (CU/MX), Kate Southworth and
Patrick Simons(UK), and myself. Other invited guests included Lucrezia
Cippitelli (IT), Heidi Figueroa Sarriera (PR), Raquel Herrera Ferrer (ES),
Lucas Bambozzi (BR), Andres Burbano (CO), and Joeser =C1lvarez. This text is
also part of a larger essay which will be published at a later date in its
entirety.
The conversation was fruitful in various ways, ranging from abstract
theoretical propositions to more personal statements. The online exchange
proved to be one of the most important experiences for me until now, because
I learned that colonial ideology is more powerful than I expected. It is
thanks to Raul's intervention (this is how he considered his writing) that I
realized this shortly after the discussion came to a close. Such realization
will be the subject of reflection for the second part of this series. In
this first part I will focus on the premise proposed by Christina McPhee for
the month long conversation.
The theme of the month at Empyre:
Do conceptual art and curatorial practice merge in post digital cultural
production? How are new media art, criticism and curatorial practice a
'transgressive' ecology"?
While it is true that artists part of the net.art group were influenced by a
certain type of conceptualism, the premises behind conceptual art as it is
understood from its origins in the New York scene is practically irrelevant
in new media practice. When it is brought up it is often in allegorical
form. In regards to this, we can consider a work that has been reviewed
here. MTAA's One Year Performance,[1] which allegorizes Performance artist
Sam Hsieh's One year performance where he stayed in a cell for a whole year.
Conceptual art, mainly in the New York, developed in reaction to
Greenbergian modernism; this is specific to Joseph Kosuth and his
contemporaries. However conceptual practice became quite diverse and took on
many approaches around the world.[2]
Critical art practices since the turn of the twentieth century have relied
on a materialist approach to art making.[3] To be specific, the artist looks
at the subject and considers key material elements to then make them obvious
to the viewer, who if the work is developed carefully, will come to question
it according to the exposed contradictions, coherences, limitations, and
excess, which can be read as open-ended questions, or at times as forms
subject to the sublime (the latter may be problematic for some
conceptualists who are critical of ideology). The artist can claim that what
she has done is nothing but show what was already there, thus appearing
critical and detached with proper distance, thus questioning not only what
the role of the artist is, but also the idea of originality. This is what
Duchamp did with his famous Urinal.[4] As it is commonly known, he did
nothing but choose a work that exposed the artist's role in art practice and
her/his relation to the growing industrial world. However, he was not
directly questioning the material aspect of the work of art. Conceptualism
did-New York conceptualism to be exact.[5] Whether moving towards or away
from the object; the point is that, in conceptualism, the materiality of the
object of art was in question, or at least it was the subject of reflection.
Yet, if this is to be contested, what can be said about Conceptualism is
that its subject was the idea as the object of art.[6]
With new media we experience works that are not materialized in the
conventional sense to which conceptualism reacted. This is in part because
new media works are easily reproducible. What is unique about new media art
is that it did not face what other mediums had faced in the past to be
legitimated. Issues of originality and purposiveness were previously dealt
with by other media such as photography and most importantly Film. In fact,
new media was understood so quickly as a vehicle for efficient dissemination
that it swiftly moved to affect previously existing media. New media is
considered to have pronounced major reciprocal effects, especially in
Cinema. As Lev Manovich explains:
"Computer media redefine the very identity of cinema. In a symposium that
took place in Hollywood in the spring of 1996, one of the participants
provocatively referred to movies as "flatties" and to human actors as
"organics" and "soft-fuzzies." As these terms accurately suggest, what used
to be cinema's defining characteristics are now just default options, with
many other available."[7]
Here we notice how new media's language comes to redefine how previous media
is negotiated creatively. And so, it can be stated that new media art rides
on the histories of previous media thus functioning allegorically. It uses
the language of film and photography--not to mention painting to create
works that take on different forms according to specific contexts, and the
viewers accept such work because the codes at play are already common
knowledge. The power of such language allows for the actual object to
disappear and eventually lets information take over.
It is important to note that there is no physical object of art with
many new media projects--especially Internet art. Of course we can say that
we have moved on to the actual discourse and its form as information
becoming the object, but when this shift happens the criticism also shifts.
We can consider the role of an electronic mailing list such as Empyre in
relation to intellectual capital and its new power position within the gift
economy as an example where discourse becomes the object of
contemplation.[8] Their description reads:
"Empyre facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary
issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests-key new
media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in
thematic discussions."[9]
In such a list, discourse is always incomplete, ongoing (as the list moves
from discussions from month to month), and full of slippages due to the
immediacy of e-mail correspondences. Yet, those who participate in such
lists have intellectual Capital that can be spent online to further their
network connections. The lists depends on the academic institution to make
it possible for those with the knowledge and the time to write, to
participate in an activity where no actual pay is expected. This is
important to consider in relation to early paradigms of conceptualism, which
aimed to problematize institutionalization and academization of art
discourse in the art institution.
What actually happens with this shift from object to information is that the
artist --in particular the new media artist--can develop work using a
materialist approach following the parameters of conceptualism while not
worrying about an object and this may be why some people confuse new media
practice following a materialist analysis with Conceptualism as understood
with the likes of Michael Asher or (to show the complexity of Conceptual
art) Adriane Piper. However, the basic criticism that made conceptualism a
specific movement of resistance is no longer there; meaning, the object of
art is no longer expected to be present, or critiqued in order to call
something art, in the realm of new media. This type of criticism itself has
become institutionalized, becoming part of what today is called
"Institutional Critique." This does not mean that there is no such thing as
a conceptual online practice that of critiquing the object or the
institution, only that the criticism of such practice is quite different
because the object of art is information (data) that can be presented in
various forms.
So, the object of art (of new media) is metadata/data. Materialization of
information (however this may be) is an after effect of power relations
ending in careful distribution through diverse forms--for the information
can be reconfigured to meet the demand of a locality according to a global
market. This is the object of contemplation in new media practice and this
is where artists who have made works of note in such a field have focused.
And here we can find renewed forms of resistance, and new forms of
criticism.
To further complicate this, the new media artwork is not easily labeled as
just "art"; much of it crosses over to activism, hacktivism, and pervasive
media. Without going into detailed definitions of these terms, it should be
pointed out that they are all activities that actually influence the
political spectrum around the world. It would appear then that the lines
between art for a selective audience and mass media start to blur in New
Media Art practice. And this is the model that carries the conceptual trace.
The reason being that in new media, and online practice because there is no
actual object, the focus is by default on the idea. But this is a default
and this is the major difference in the aesthetics at play; meaning that the
type of resistance expected of a New York conceptual avant-garde practice is
not expected of online practice. This does not mean that some artists are
not critical following the tradition of previous conceptualists, it just
means that such practice is actually a specific choice. The model for new
media practice is dependent on ideas not forms, and this is particular to
new media, just like objecthood is for painting and sculpture in the fine
arts.
1 MTAA, http://turbulence.org/Works/1year/ See Review:
http://www.netartreview.net/
weeklyFeatures/2005_01_09_archive.html
2 Alexander Alberro , "Reconsidering Conceptual Art, 1966-1977," Conceptual
Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: MIT Press, 1999),
xvi-xxxvii.
3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
4 The pros and cons are reviewed by Thierry De Duve, see Thierry De Duve,
"Contra Duchamp," Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Massachusetts: 1998),
454-462.
5 Joseph Kosuth, "Intentions," Conceptual Art: a Critical Anthology,
460-469.
6 Sol Le Witt, "Sentences on Conceptual Art," Conceptual Art..., 12-17.
7 Lev Manovich, "Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image," The
Language of New Media (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: 2000),
293.
8 Empyre, http://www.subtle.net/empyre/
9 Ibid.
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