concept.biz

Veteran conceptual and net artist Peter Luining's new project Art Domains recasts internet domain name trade as a legitimate art practice. Proposing a strategic confluence between the virtual and the lucrative, Luining seeks to capitalise both on slight modifications of existing domain names (whitecube.com becomes whitecube.us, etc.) and on the legacy of conceptual art elders like Mel Bochner, whose "Working Drawings And Other Visible Things On Paper Not Necessarily Meant To Be Viewed As Art" first smuggled informatic ephemera into the gallery space. Luining inflects this canonical ruse by presenting his business plans and outcomes in ring binders perched atop plinths at art fairs and museums worldwide. The project also delivers a jab at the marginalisation of media art within an institutional art world that would barely exist were it not for the domain names that locate it in the Web of all knowledge. Here, Luining engages with e-business as an immaterial economy that can help him both jettison the art object that remains pivotal to the contemporary art market and to reflect on that market's own relationship to immateriality. - Marina Vishmidt