Gupta's Blessedbandwidth, Guardian Angel, etc.

The latest Rhizome Digest just came across the screen with recommendations
to look at two sites, Gupta's blessedbandwidth at the Tate and Guardian Angel
by one of Curt Cloninger's students.

http://www.tate.org.uk/netart/blessedbandwidth/
http://mmas.unca.edu/~amallen/guardianangel.html

Guardian Angel is what it is, a student project, the kind of thing you take
seriously in the classroom. Gupta's piece, by virtue of its Tate cache and her
history of previous work, asks for more: an international audience, thoughtful
consideration, a place in contemporary art practice. But like so much net
art, it is essentially a one-liner in which the labor of production far exceeds its
cultural or intellectual or aesthetic value. It comes supplied with essays which
attempt to place it in contemporary political and aesthetic contexts. But
works of art can't stay afloat on the the life-jackets of the texts that surround
them. Yet this is so often the practice in contemporary net art and often–
though not in this case–the essays have more interest than the works
themselves.

The question of labor exceeding value is of central importance to the
discussion of net art. Anyone who has ever put together a complex web site
or programmed a complex piece of software art knows how much work goes
into the production. But despite this labor the result for the viewer is often
minimal–some programmed twists of image manipulation or repetitive sets of
images and/or texts in a database, where the viewer soon tires of looking at
yet another of the same, or as here, in Gupta's case, an extended interactive
site built around a one-liner, also repeated various times over.

Where, in fact, is the primary value of such works? The value is in the artist–
in the personal experience of the artist in the process of creating the work, a
that value is not sufficiently reflected back outward to the viewer. This is a
significant alteration of the centers of value that we normally associate with
art. And it's my feeling that until this changes, net art will remain peripheral–
insititutions like the Walker will feel no compunction in shedding free of it and
its audience will remain largely one of "experts".


Myron Turner | http://www.room535.org | –land safely in cyberspace–