epic net art
Posted by T.Whid on June 27, 2008 10:26 am
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Another question raised on the Net Ae panel of a few weeks back was the idea of an 'epic' net art. Where is it? Is it possible? Who would want to do it?
Is Pseudo.com an example of epic net art? Did we not know that we were in the midst of the most epic work of net art ever as it went on?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/26/josh-harris-pseudo-w.html
The first piece of net art that MTAA ever did, BUYING TIME: The Nostalgia-Free History Sale was done in conjunction with G. H. Hovagimyan's ArtDirt streaming video show on Pseudo.com. (We didn't know what the hell we were doing at the time.) There was a lot of art happening at pseudo's offices (as well as really great parties). Jeff Gompertz (of Fakeshop) was heavily involved as well.
I'm bringing all this up as a way to help bolster Harris' claim that pseudo.com was a 'fake' company and an elaborate piece of 'performance art.' Perhaps it was. Did he out-etoy etoy but not tell anybody until now? Can something be an art work if no one knows it's an art work? Is he simply a revisionist fraud?
Another question raised on the Net Ae panel of a few weeks back was the idea of an 'epic' net art. Where is it? Is it possible? Who would want to do it?
Is Pseudo.com an example of epic net art? Did we not know that we were in the midst of the most epic work of net art ever as it went on?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/26/josh-harris-pseudo-w.html
The first piece of net art that MTAA ever did, BUYING TIME: The Nostalgia-Free History Sale was done in conjunction with G. H. Hovagimyan's ArtDirt streaming video show on Pseudo.com. (We didn't know what the hell we were doing at the time.) There was a lot of art happening at pseudo's offices (as well as really great parties). Jeff Gompertz (of Fakeshop) was heavily involved as well.
I'm bringing all this up as a way to help bolster Harris' claim that pseudo.com was a 'fake' company and an elaborate piece of 'performance art.' Perhaps it was. Did he out-etoy etoy but not tell anybody until now? Can something be an art work if no one knows it's an art work? Is he simply a revisionist fraud?
Josh likes attention.
"I vant to be a genius"
2000
joseph
http://loshadka.org/billy/huge
I've never seen the marquee tag used so well.
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I think the "epic" question was joined to the “can it make you cry?” question. I understood the question as being more about “can art on the web be operatic?” Sparse, quick, minimal, cleaver, abstract work (like Billy’s above) is what net art can do quite well. Artist like entropy8.com / zuper.org (Auriea Harvey and Michael Samy) use game space to build work with an operatic of scope. In general, large scale narrative works are rare gems on the net. Olina Lialina’s "My Boyfriend Came Back From the War" is a good example used by the panel. I would guess that someone will jump in here and say that their blog they have been working on for X number a years can be thought of as epic but I think that would be shoe-horning a bit. Just because it’s personal, does not mean it will have any resonance to a larger public.
Along this line - I kinda promised myself that I would not write anything about the panel. I think I’m still pissed off about that the whole mess. The after panel chat on the net is making it worse. So, I’m just going to toss this out because it’s been on my mind. I think this subject is also kicking about on another Rhiz. post. Ed asked about political art on the net and the whole panel just shrugged. That is except for Tom who went on for some time about how he blogged about 911 (Helen hissing with rage in my ear that night “Oh…that was you? You’re that guy? You’re THE guy that blogged about 911? What the FUCK.”)(I think was right before she started to heckle Tim.)
Anyways - Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, Hasan Elahi, 2006, RSG's Carnivore 2001, Ricardo Dominguez - EDT / Floodnet, Michael Mandiberg’s Oil Standard 2007, Yes Men, obn.org (Old Boy Network), Kenneth Tin-Kin hung...and on and on
Direct action, agitprop, social contentions/ dialogue - just plain art and things that seem like art but may have different goals. It’s occurred in the past on the net and continues to be a possibility on the net now. It’s just may not be what the people on the panel are interested in making at this moment. And that is fine and good. I just do not want the subject and the possibility to be dismissed.
end note - Tim, who was on the panel, started this rant with a slap on the hand to the forehead moment afterwards. As in “ Doh. Why did I not say something?”
The Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, Mahabharata, Ramayana, Genji, Heike, Gilgamesh, and Shahnama do not deal with interior states. For the most part epics recount exterior actions over and above interior psychology.
Re: Helen being mad about something I said, she should have spoken up, instead of this after-the-fact sarcasm from you.
You missed my point, which is that a blog is a way for art and politics to exist side by side. They may occasionally spill over into each other but generally agitprop art is too simplistic to be of much interest. I've written on my blog about Stuart Davis's position of being political without making overtly political art, in the context of the contentious art of the 1930s.
And yes, the long form of a blog (combining art, writing, and media) can be the "epic" Ed was talking about, a point I also made in the panel.
Re: the panel and aftermath making you mad.
Tim did a "post mortem" the morning after that attempted to spin what happened, how the audience reacted, etc. I don't think it was very accurate.
I think the evening was fun, argumentative but notably free of acrimony, and the 2.0 discussion was good. The postpanel spin by the old guard Net artists has been angry and I would say threatened.
This anecdote about Helen is a good example.
That's your spin on it. ;-)
Size is a necessary but not sufficient indicator of an epic.
Epics are typically authored by multiple anonymous authors working in thematic unity. I haven't yet found a blog with a number of authors comparable to the dizzying spatial and temporal range of authors epics usually have.
Maybe I'm missing the point here, in which case I'd love for someone to link or recap the 'epic' Ed was talking about for us.
[I'm assuming you're not using "epic" in the chan senses general (i.e., "epic thread," "epic fail," etc. ... where it just means "big") or specific (i.e., in the triumvirate values of the chans, where people do things for either 1) the lulz, 2) the epic, or 3) the win).]
Also, I'm not sure that I would equate “epic” with “good” in art. Some of my favorite artworks are small and fleeting - yet they stay kicking around in my mind.
True. Blogs and other net art can be epic – it’s just that size alone doesn’t indicate whether this is the case or not.
Some epic features of net art emerging:
1. Photoshop-jam memes resemble Parry-Lord style composition, e.g., Lolcatz, Shoop Da Whoop...
2. Place in popular culture
Problem: The epics we are familiar with consist of stories that we pass on to our children – they are / were the core of education.
We may be conflating epic and folk. The discussion here calls to mind the 19th century Folk Renaissance in Europe, a key component in the development of Romanticism (imo), where the Grimm Brothers, Walter Scott, Ossian (Macpherson) et al. tried to align national literatures with the Homers and Virgils. The problem is that the Homers and Virgils, as part of the classical tradition, were more international and wider in historical perspective. The same problem of scope may be here wrt the Internet. Do lolcatz matter to some farmer in Uganda? Epics, even when national, are seldom so locally appreciated.
But yes, we should give it time.
Also, I'm not sure that I would equate “epic” with “good” in art. Some of my favorite artworks are small and fleeting - yet they stay kicking around in my mind.
Yep.
Yes.
--"It's basically the same thing large groups of teenage goth nerds were doing with their liveJournal group blogs back in 2001, except now there's something forward-looking and radical about it having to do with pop culture, memes, semiotics, and the promotional skillz of Marisa Olson"
--"I think what may have upset some of the more process oriented artists who see computer language knowledge as a key to expression was being told they were an older version of something they really had no desire to be a part of"
--"ironically posting links to existing media with your friends on a group blog"
--"You’re THE guy that blogged about 911? What the FUCK."
What I wrote was not, nor is this sarcasm Tom. Your comment was naive, if not insulting. In the context of 911 and in the context of other artist who create artwork with a belief in social change, the comment on the panel came across as, to be somewhat polite, – strange.
Which brings me to “The postpanel spin by the old guard Net artists has been angry and I would say threatened”
I find this completely dull Tom. In the end, that’s what bothers me. Threatened? No. Just disappointed. With the million interesting things going happening in art and the net right now, the us vs. them conversation is uninteresting. Write about your work. Write about work around you that compels you. Listen to questions take the criticism with a grain of salt. I’ll buy you a beer and you can tell me I’m wrong if that helps.
--"I think what may have upset some of the more process oriented artists who see computer language knowledge as a key to expression was being told they were an older version of something they really had no desire to be a part of"
means....
apples don't want to be oranges.
It's not meant to be insulting, but you did imply that your art practice (and by your own definition a form of Net Art 2.0 ) on the net somehow inherits and replaces art made by internet artists who aren't interested in blogs or social networks.
Once again, the network isn't a monarchy, noone is waiting for a coronation here.
"If your path is making art on your blog and adding in your thoughts on the world and culture at large now and then. Great. Keep it up. But that is not the only path."
That's pretty reductive (and patronizing), but I understand things have gotten personal between you and me. (Tim, too, who's reduced to little "pranks"--pitiful.)
As you noted, no one else mentioned any of these "other paths" the night of the panel, including you. I put in my two cents and you don't agree with it. But fabricating comments you say I made ("I was the only one blogging on 9/11" or whatever) and saying artists were insulted by this is pretty low.
lord. it sounds like a line from some lame cowboy / cop film.
Nope, this is not personal. This is just a conversation in a public fourm. I'll stand by what I wrote. If you don't get it, that's not my problem. Later.
I know Caitlin is out there somewhere and I know what she's thinking. "Boring!"
M.River, you pissed in the pool, now you have to swim in it.
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http://www.totaladventures.com/adventures/img/images/boring-team.jpg
First off. Yes. the ongoing snark/sarcasm/animosity between tom, tim and mriver is super/totally/unbelievably "boring."
Secondly. And this is somewhat off topic on this particular string, but I think this entire net.art 1.0 v. net.art 2.0 conversation is, while not exactly boring, maybe a red herring. To be very simplistic about it, I don't really perceive much theoretical distance between the work of 'the old guard' and the work of the current "3rd generation" net artists. I think both were/are responding to the web as it existed at the time. In the late 1990s people wrote their own html, they 'view(ed) source,' and things were for the most part text based. And the art of the time responded accordingly, creating work about language, translation and disrupting the emerging systems that the general public was so quick to accept unconditionally.
Now, the web has obviously evolved into the web 2.0 (and all that comes with it). You don't need to code to be an internet artist because no one really needs to code to use the web anymore. You just need a myspace or facebook page, access to youtube or flickr, or a blogger address and you are 'actively' participating in the web (obviously a lot of people have written about the deeper implications of this type of migration - notably Olia in her Vernacular Web 2) http://www.contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/). So if internet artists are now making work that is a collection of links, a series of other people's youtube videos? Fantastic. As far as I can tell most of this work is doing so as a means to question the ease with which we are living our most intimate moments online.
The web is a different place, and so obviously the art that comes out of it is going to be different. But I think, at its very core, it is the same. Internet Art responds to the web, its development, and how we use it, regardless of whether it was made by MTAA or Guthrie Lonergan. Like I said, very simplistic, and not a fully formed argument at this point, but I think looking at why this work is so different is far less interesting than exploring its shared characteristics.
Caitlin
ps. This is just an aside. All the muttering about the 'newer generation' of Internet artists having more gallery success is also a bit of a distraction. I guarantee that Vuk, Olia, Thomson and Craighead alone have sold/exhibited more work in the past three years than all of the newer generation put together.
The web is a different place, and so obviously the art that comes out of it is going to be different. But I think, at its very core, it is the same. Internet Art responds to the web, its development, and how we use it, regardless of whether it was made by MTAA or Guthrie Lonergan.
I was trying to make and open up a similar point here:
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/37731
But I agree with Paddy that Caitlin is much clearer. :-)
The question I'd ask is whether saying "Internet art responds to the web" implies technological or social determinism. I don't think that it does, at least no more than for any other kind of art, but I think that some attempts to differentiate old and new net art that fail to account for the continuities that Caitlin identifies will have problems avoiding it.
And given the example of Olia's essay I'd say that the similarities between old and new net art extend to its criticism. Semiotics was big in cyberculture and cyberfeminism and if it's being applied to Web 2.0 culture and art then I think that is another continuity.
word. nuff said.
I don't really perceive much theoretical distance between the work of 'the old guard' and the work of the current "3rd generation" net artists
I agree that both are responding to the net at the time. And, for the one millionth time, I will preface what I’m about to write by saying that I’m interested / into the work being done by "3rd generation" net artist. But…I think a theoretical difference exist between “net art” and “web art”. A quick time video or gif is most likely web art and “surf club” structure is most likely net art. For me, this difference has been the underlying current here. This is the same conversation we had from the get go. Yes, net artist in 90’s walked back and forth across this line. And yes, 00's net artist are doing the same. I’m not trying to place a hierarchy on the two approaches, but I think difference should not be pushed under the table for the sake of the genera.
I still don’t want net art to be or be thought of as “like painting/film/videos art…but on the internet”. I want to think of posting a collection of yourtube videos as a socially contented act not a presentation choice. Tim got some flack for pointing out the difference (ok, yeah, it might be the way he said it.) but… I think it needs to be talked about every once in a while.
just to be clear, I'd like to change that to
“like painting/film/videos art…but on or about the internet”
Again, I like the idea of a "internet informed artworks" but they tick in a diffenet than net art.
Is *our* culture under epic or under lyric influence? And what’s *our*culture? West culture- globalism-or some culture without name…Local culture???But ‘local culture’ in Foucault interpretation is only way to fight against global power…to be precise-local discourse could be means to reach universal effect. In our case we are faced with some form of ‘global’ discourse which pretends to be universal. Good example is Moody’s writing…Such full of empty and stupid smugness. Isn’t it rude to ask about Duchamp? It’s so colonial…
What could we doo if is one or another?
Imagine Native American “Indians” legend and also native Serb legend about Kosovo (; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry ,
http://home.earthlink.net/~markdlew/SerbEpic/
is that some kind of primitive history(proto-history)without legal value, not confirmed and supported in right side of power/USA/ ?Or just myth –blur in time?
Both are ruined by capitalism, both are issue not very welcome in today’s politics discussions.
In beginning of XIX century epic poetry was popular around the ‘culture’ of West world’, something like ‘world music’.
Goethe was familiar with Serb epic poetry. Mallarme translates this poetry phonetically, like words without strictly meaning, like verse symmetric and universal in their own rhythm.
Now I have trouble to understand what the main problem in perception of epic is.
Is that arbitrary, non-hystoric aura, is it fact that epic could be good enough in Homer’s verse but not in other regia? After Serbs lost Kosovo these days… is epic serial from XIV century about Kosovo some kind of forgery? Wasn’t it just joke about Serb in Kosovo from XIV century? Serbs fuck bad and rarely and punish is to take them away this piece of their own country? Shiptars from Kosovo are fuck good, they have at least teen child from one woman and they deserve Kosovo? Is that fact or epic projection?
If is that so…isn’t USA epic about Iraq forgery, isn’t it just equivalent to Moody’s question about Duchamp?
Really:”Do you know Iraq? Do you know MANIK? Do you know Kosovo?”
You are one who shouldn’t know. You are out of epic, out of main stream, out of main road, out of history and culture. You should listen to your Moody’s and other Manowich’s…That’s new epic, that’s why Moody take part of Rhizome space…He personally, mmmaybe, don’t need that…it’s small and insignificant for his ambitions but it’s good for *HISTORY*, epic history of USA.Tom’s going to be part of NMA history no meter how bad artist he is…And all that *Via Rhizome*.After all: Rhizome prefer UK or USA artist than some Serbian motherfucker…MANIK.
Isn’t it so? So many friends from Rhizome wrote us personally but it’s dangerous to make ‘case’ about MANIK in public?!?
Our existence in global history (epic? lyric) depend on kindness of some Tom Moody or something insignificant like he/she is.
MANIK
PS:First divide between epic and lyric in theory was Schiler’s essay about naive and sentimental poetry…
For all of your declamations against territorialism and racism, this is a strange thing to see you write. Your statement reminds me of how white Texans complain about how they don’t have as many kids as the Mexicans do, so they feel like they’re losing their land. Pat Buchanan made a similar complaint about how immigrants are reproducing too fast and eroding “American” (=White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) values. Gallic French make similar complaints about their fellow citizens of African descent. The list goes on.
Nevertheless, I cannot be so politically correct as to ignore the fact that dhimmi is barbaric (they did the same thing in India, Southeast Asia, etc.). But that’s a separate issue.
as you know I'm an admirer of your work in general and also I'd agree with a good deal of the content of your post, which also has the great merit of taking the discussion beyond a tiny, over excited & over heated fragment of the New York art world.
But then you go and fuck it up by your resort once again to crude anti Albanian stereotypes and to racist language which disfigures & corrupts both your political & artistic points.
A shame.
best wishes
michael
Thank you for reminding me to reopen Schiller. It is easy to forget how much his work influenced Goethe and Scott, the two fathers of Romanticism, and you are right to point to “On Naive and Sentimental Poetry” http://www.schillerinstitute.org/transl/Schiller_essays/naive_sentimental-1.html as A root of the (Western) historical discussion on the place of the epic with respect to the rest of art. It may or may not be the first theoretical division of the matter (his sense of naivete is rooted in Kant’s analytic of the sublime, for example). It’s a historiographical fallacy to name historical firsts, especially with ideas.
Vijay
Epic... Interesting that we are interested int hese things. Wonder why.
I think that there are elements of what was called the theatrical in art, the grand.
I remember seeing the huge install by the Piotr Uklanski in Gagosian. These massive, sweeping pieces. That was epic.
The cry factor didn't make it for me. I'd be more for awe...
First off - Yael Kanarek - World of Awe. Good lord - this thing has morphed so many times, is so huge,,,
MTAA, 1 Year Performance Video) - another wonderfully mad piece. Its time factor.
The whole of Manik's word interventions.
Lialina's My Boyfriend...
ETOY Vault, Toywar
I think time is a factor here...
"Epic... Interesting that we are interested int hese things. Wonder why."
It was brought up by Ed Halter at the Net Ae panel. I believe he's trying to question whether or not net art is somehow short form. Is that the best way it works? My answer is no. One of the web's chief strengths is it's ability to create an on-going relationship with individuals. Blogs are the most obvious example of how this works. But, are there ways to create this on-going relationship that don't accept all blog conventions? MTAA's 1ypv was one attempt at examining this question.
My opinion is that 'epic' isn't quite the right word for this. "Long form" perhaps is more clear?
oops, to be clear...
"I believe he's trying to question whether or not net art is somehow short form. Is that the best way it works? My answer is no."
My meaning is that it isn't the ONLY way net art works. There's obviously lots and lots of great short and to-the-point net artworks out there.
I agree that "epic" probably isn't the right word for this, because it involves a great deal of critical, historical, and national baggage. But trying to answer the question, even in the negative, is turning up some interesting points for net artists, critics, and curators to answer -- specifically, the epic-tradition-associated historical, critical, and national baggage.
"Long form" doesn't really say much as a term, no?
I'd be interested in exploring the idea of the epic in net art. I'm not so sure the examples given thus far qualify, except for World of Awe.
1ypv is not epic (it's just long)
toywar -- maybe epic
World of Awe -- I think that could definitely fit the definition -- it's epic
My Boyfriend... -- not so sure it's epic
pseudo.com -- was it *really* art? I'm leaning heavily toward "no"
I'm sure there's other stuff... It's mostly older stuff, things that were more narrative/cd-romish.
Really? It's so first-person (though highly mediated). More Borges or Proust than Homer, eh? The assemblage calls attention to itself as such (e.g., filesystem interfaces, sidebar-equivalents-of-the-plaques-in-museums-next-to-the-paintings-telling-you-how-to-interpret-what-you're-looking-at, etc.) -- something very different from bardic grafting.
Vijay
Cf. the Everyman in the Anglo-Saxon tradition ...
- Internet art today often feels “minor” in its mode—momentary, ephemeral, and attuned to elements like satire, parody, historical referencing, rather than grand statements. So, can internet art (by its nature perhaps) produce a “major”, longform work of art? What would be the online equivalent of the novel, the symphony, the epic poem?
after that, the idea of "making you cry" was ad-libbed on the panel. I was specifically thinking to a similar idea often bounced around in videogame design: that videogames will be art only when there is a videogame that can make you cry (as opposed to simply being scared, reacting, etc.) I'm not necessarily endorsing that claim about games and art, but it is a rather interesting challenge.
To Vijay: you're correct that classical premodern epics didn't employ much interiority, but there are many modern epic poems as well that do: Whitman's Song of Myself for example.
For example, in discussions of experimental film, that mode is often called "minor cinema," not in negative sense but rather in contradistinction to "major", longer-form, bigger-budget Hollywood and parallel world cinema. For example in the title of David E. James' recent book The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles
Regarding the political question--it was meant to provoke a discussion that I agree didn't really happen. Perhaps it came too late in the evening and people were getting worn out.
Hey Ed, thanks for clearing this up. The distortion wasn't intentional, your original question makes much more sense than focusing on the 'epic' word :-)
True. Louis Zukofsky's A also comes to mind.
And to be fair, even though classical epics don't employ much in the way of interiority, they can still make you cry, e.g., the death of Achilles in the Iliad or the story of Ekalavya in the Mahabharata.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4YN_sr2GrE
and Lambert's add-art.org project are pretty
epic.
thanks,
matthew
Since 9/11 (if I can mention that date) I've been reading more writing by the non-Interventionist right.
One of their tenets is that the US Kosovo war was a warm-up for the Iraq war and that the liberal hawks provided cover for BushCo by supporting the idea of humanitarian war.
I was appalled by the bombing of Belgrade (I'm sure other bloggers were, too, Mike) but if I'd made some "political art" that said in effect "US Out of Kosovo, the Serbian Homeland" (and let's say it was fantastically clever and not just a slogan) would it have gotten to square one with any US arts funding entity?
What if I wanted to make political art saying "keep immigrants out of the US?" (The opposite of my belief--just a hypothetical.)
Because of this bias, and the simplicity of political art generally, I'd rather deal with such issues in written form, where a nuanced view can be developed. Sorry if that is insulting to anyone.
Duchamp was mentioned because he is the lingua franca of the International Gallery Art scene (which I'm told is now centered in Europe). "Do you know who Duchamp is?" is a litmus test all who would be artists must take. (I also happen to think he is more relevant than, say, Broodthaers, to 2.0 practice)
let's call it craft or whatever...
just an idea! tee hee hee
When you say Duchamp is more relevant than Broodthaers to 2.0 practice (whatever 2.0 practice is), that is a potentially interesting assertion, but I'd like to know which aspects of Duchamp -- the full trajectory of his life's practice, his writing, his painting, his chess, the large glass, the green book, the readymades, the fountain as institutional critique, his cross-dressing, his correspondence with Joseph Cornell? I don't read your blog. I don't live in your city. If we are to have a discussion, it will have to happen here. From my brief encounters with you in this forum this summer (you've still only indirectly addressed me), it seems like you are none too interested in the possibility of a dialogue that might lead to a place neither of us have been yet.
I mentioned Broodthaers because he seems very relevant to a kind of art making that is not just "finding," but collecting, re-taxonomizing, re-contextualizing, and re-distributing along alternate/disruptive axes. Contemporary heirs might be http://mjt.org , Haim Steinbach, and Fred Wilson. It is not necessarily curator as artist (surface time), but archivist as artist (deep[er] time). The art lies in the implicit connections drawn between the things. I make a go of it at http://deepyoung.org In 2002, Ann-Marie Schleiner called it "filter feeding" ( http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_curation_schleiner.html ). Thus I mention Broodthaers.
Regarding "epic" terminology, I like "Wagnerian" (alluding to Packer/Jordan's "Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality"). Wagner's own term is "Gesamtkunstwerk." Yael's "World of Awe" would also top of my list. And http://titler.com
Regarding "political art," I think it is an easy straw-man term to attack. It is a tough term to defend, because one thinks of something like Keinholz's http://www.artchive.com/artchive/k/kienholz/war_memorial.jpg , which is not doing much for me. Instead of "political," I would offer "rigorous, purposeful, work that matters." I understand that certain formal experiments can contain implicit cultural critiques (as did Judd). When you begin dealing rigorously with material, then it's always going to matter. Play can also be part of it. It seems simplistic to pit pop art against political art. The best pop art is always going to have some aspect of cultural criticism.
Best,
Curt
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2624538 (wait for it.)
http://lab404.com/video/pop/
hahahahahaha
If only I could think of a good example... would kdm100 count?
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"Contemporary culture isn't epic in the sense that it doesn't allow for heros [snip]"
What about Batman and the rest?
;-)
On an unrelated note: Why did Marvel webcomics fail so hard? Was it because they tried it in the 90s with unimaginitively done up HTML and JavaScript such that the web-ness of it was just light ornamentation to what was otherwise the equivalent to the paper comic, i.e., the only thing you could do was mouseover a "POW!" sign and it would get bigger or make a <POW!> sound.
With stuff like Marvel, DC, and most mangas, people still buy paper comics at brick and mortar joints or torrent the scans.
Seems like all the webcomics are independent.
Have I missed something here? Have the big commercial comics houses put out any interesting work on the web since?
I guess all the money in comics these days is in movies. :|
"Duchamp was mentioned because he is the lingua franca of the International Gallery Art scene"
- that struck a chord with me about something I've been thinking about. For the past year or so, I've been thinking about the gallery, collectors, museums and the "International Gallery Art Scene". The Holy Fire show was great research, so was Art Brussels, AB Miami, and a lot of other points of intervention "inside the scene".
But "epic art" transcends this.
Although I work in it part of the time, there are times when I find the gallery/museum/academy etc. ecosystem solipsistic and boring as hell. We have a bunch of very well-regarded people talking, largely, to a very narrow niche - no one's been saved, and in the end, what's been gained? Perhaps chasing some inspiration. About it.
Perhaps it's a crisis of faith, but I think that this is why I have never called myself an artist, because this ecosystem is about art as self-fulfilling tradition, and I don't like being that confined, although I'm part of it. But obsessing about how one is going to get positioned here or there or make the next piece or whatnot - it's just onerous.
And this is why I liked Duchamp - because he was one of the biggest wrenches in the gears of the art machine of the 20th Century. From the Armory Show to the Larrge Glass to (pretty much) going off and playing chess for decades while making the Illuminating Gas (Now that's EPIC!). I think that this is why there is a hate/reverence relationship to Duchamp. He played both sides of the chessboard with a skill that infuriated and amazed the world, playing both inside and throwing boulders at the art world with an unparalleled undeniability. He both refuted the art world while creating work that we're still wrestling with.
I think in many ways, this open contradiction, rather than today's cool irony, is what I love about Duchamp, and (from my research) he was a charming fellow all the while.
But I'm not addressing Web 2.0...
Let’s take as a modest baseline Jameson’s definition of colonialism:
“Colonialism means that a significant structural segment of the economic system as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience of the home country, in colonies over the water whose own life experience and life world—very different from that of the imperial power—remain unknown and unimaginable for the subjects of the imperial power, whatever social class they may belong to. Such spatial disjunction has as its immediate consequence the inability to grasp the way the system functions as a whole…. Daily life and existential experience in the metropolis … can no longer be grasped immanently; it no longer has its meaning, its deeper reason for being, within itself.” (“Modernism” 50-51)
In the days of epics, conquering meant something different than it did, say, before the 17th century (roughly around the time that the above definition of colonialism kicks in with the maritime mercantilist prefigurations of modern imperialism). After a war, when Country X had conquered Country Y, country X’s people would move into Y and mix with the populations there (e.g., the Angles’ and Saxons’ takeover of Celtic Britain, the Aryan conquest of the Dravidian countries of the Subcontinent). It was not really a case of a distant cultural metropolis from the subjugated countryside. War was a merger of territory, populations, and capital (see Marinetti on the history of rape). The great colonizers gave to and took from the arts of the conquered (not necessarily isomorphically, but definitely dialectically).
The Hittites, for example, incorporated Sumerian, Akkadian, and even Vedic arts of sculpture, cuneiform, calligraphy, law, horsemanship, religion, technology, and literature. “Hittite culture” is no monolith, being itself a bricolage of Anatolian, Near Eastern, Proto-Indo-European, and Eastern Semitic cultures. In this culture there was no truly solar element toward which other cultural organisms in the Hittite tableau had to attach to to survive (as in, for example, Turkish court culture in India under Babur, or Chinese court culture in Silla Korea).
In our mindest of the Internet or postmodernism we sometimes forget how “cosmopolitan” many ancient civilizations were. In fact, postmodernism’s values are largely late reactions to colonialist demarcations amplified by maritime separations of metropolis and country – Modernism’s celibate machines.
The Internet has the potential to tap into the positive/formative values of that ancient cosmopolitan outlook, as opposed to postmodernism’s negative/reactionary values. The former is “positive” in that different arts, regions, and discourses can merge or complement each other organically, as opposed to postmodernism’s exhausted irony of reductive duplication, collage, reframing, hypersurface, etc.
So I disagree with MANIK and Foucault that the local is the only available antithesis to colonialist power. The authenticity of the “local” is unverifiable, ever suspect, and subject to propagandic mutilation and manipulation. The semantics of the local are so unstable that Team Goebbels could hack three different German histories, Icelandic saga, Norse mythology, Sanskrit symbols, and other cultural bits toward a German aesthetic.
These are a few but not all the reasons why Internet may be a capable platform for the epic.
The Hittites were culturally unified by common technological practice. I'm speculating that technologically defined communities can be by that fact culturally centrifugal.
I think the Internet is like this, and so I see no obvious impediment to the emergence of epic net art.
Vijay
ok I'll shut up now really
I see Rem Koolhaas everywhere, Eno. Gore, Gates, Oprah, Madonna, Koons.
Maybe not heroes, but we have stars again.
Batman! Yeah! Batman!
Actually, I propose a net art piece where we all submit an MP3 or video clip reprising Michael Keaton's epic line, I'm BATMAN!
Kilmer, Clooney, hell, all of us are BATMAN!
Because I am an asshole, I like to read The Believer. There was a quote I read this morning that has stuck with me all day and I don't know why; it's from novelist Tom McCarthy:
"One of the real structural understandings of great literature is that it's an event. It's not something you can contain and narrate but it's like this seismic set of ripples that goes on throughout time, backward and forward. Contemporary novelists don't really understand that, but contemporary artists do."
Seems like that would be the most pertinent definition for "epic" net.art that I could ever muster; we focus a lot of our efforts (in web-based whatever-making) on ripples outward, but not the art itself as one ripple in a time line. Not sure if that is for the better or the worst, but it's an observation.
2.
Regarding this old-guard net.art stuff, Tom, I'm sure the 2.0 is a distinction that makes things easier on a marketing/strategic level, but at the same time, this discussion - intended to build up a generation gap of some sort - is failing. From my perspective, it reminds me of my own annoyance with the Fluxus old guard that were resistant to embracing new work without some kind of distinction. "Fluxist," I believe they settled on, which I'm pretty sure we can all agree is totally stupid.
But I guess it goes to show the value of the "brand names." Net.art has left a rather tired legacy, in hindsight, and that's something that the handful of still-working artists are also struggling with, because, to be fair, a lot of them are solid artists who got put on the burned-out end of a hype-wick. The energy has been sucked out of net.art because it was so over-amplified in its infancy. I almost shudder to think how many artists in the first net.art section of the Whitney Biennial are still making work; I would not be shocked if the net.art bubble's burst left a lot of very awkward crow being eaten by those who went to bat for it; the result is a kind of net.art fatigue, and I don't blame anyone who wants to reboot the franchise.
That said, you've yet to answer a single question I've asked regarding why you think the "2.0" is valid or earned, but then, I have no idea if you even wanted the "2.0" in the first place, so, whatever. The point is, I guess, that the "old guard" isn't doing this just to be a bunch of pricks. I, for one, would be glad to jump on the 2.0 bandwagon if it could be properly defined as something that hasn't already had the marrow sucked out of its dry bones, and I have yet to see that in any of these discussions.
So why does it matter?
"We focus a lot of our efforts (in web-based whatever-making) on ripples outward, but not the art itself as one ripple in a time line" is a pithy observation, one that both defines and goes beyond discussing the epic.
Time is one of the most important aspects of the epic. When reading an epic as a whole, epic time often alters one’s sense of scale, number, causation, reproduction, consciousness, destruction, space, capital, and many other things we consider(ed) axes or basic facts of nature. These basic changes in turn affect our values, desires, fears, willpower, esprit de corps, etc.
Epic time, like time in net art, is not always experienced linearly. Recursion, nondeterminism, process forking, various degrees of infinity, metempsychosis, and other funky complexities pop up in many epics.
Some examples:
When Hanuman flies south over the jungle carrying Rama’s ring as a token to Sita imprisoned in Sri Lanka to tell her that Rama is alive, he accidentally drops it into a lake. He lands to get it out, looks into the lake, and finds an infinite number of rings in the lake. The Ramayana has happened an infinite number of times, and it will happen an infinite number of times again.
Odysseus goes to the underworld and finds his mother in the underworld, who died of grief waiting for him to return to Ithaca. The chapter hops around various time tracks of various planes of existence that yet answer to each other through language. Foucault talks about the language of this chapter in his essay on parrhesia.
Dantean contrapasso involves a (frequently perverse) “sampling” ethic not unlike Curt Cloninger’s “Pop Mantra” series (and just as punishing).
…
Vijay
Vijay,if you have something to say first check around,use Internet-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthrate
http://www.wluml.org/english/pubsfulltxt.shtml?cmd%5B87%5D=i-87-2631
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/europe/news/article_1373467.php/BACKGROUNDER_Kosovo_-_Europes_highest_birth_rate_smallest_GDP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo#Demographics...
Michael...is fact that somebody have teen children and other just one racism? When MANIK talk about something important,he/she always use facts.You are one who melted facts in ideology no matter of price.It’s not our fault you have strong feeling about Shiptars.After all...there’s nothing to be shame of.
We can’t see rolle of Internet in your life.Just tell us that you never heard for Afganistan-Kosovo *drugs road*?You’ve never heard for Shiptars hospitals for taking Serb prisoners organs... from live Serbs?Where have you been all that time.Walking around in countryside?
Bondsteel?...Nothing!( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Bondsteel )
http://english.pravda.ru/world/europe/02-04-2008/104752-Carla_del_Ponte-0
Isn’t it just like Nazi project,eugenica http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics ?
MANIK is racist when he/she said ’Hitler ordered to kill six billion Jews?'
Extremly high natality come after sex,so in best case Serbs should be angry on MANIK because of his/her observation about their sexual potential,not Shiptars, not you...Vijay and Michael.
High natality is and it always was Shiptars national and state project.Just compare numbers from 80-es and end of 90-es.You could see there high expanding of Shiptar population and reduce number of Serbs and others(just look at link here,you don’t have to add nothing,just read ...).
Vijay-MANIK newer conect *power*in wider sense of that word with ’colonial power’.It’s bit naive to make that kind of tautology.Power IS colonial,imperial,destructive,ugly,best,left and right,power’s everywhere and fight for power start local,just like Foucault said.Or to make you easier to understand-is Texas place where you fill sorry for emigrants and fight for their rights?And by the way:do they demand Texas to be part of Mexico like Shiptars already make Kosovo in close future part of Great Albania?MANIK’s not interested in questions about natality, here’s question about how some ethnic