The Rematerialization of Art
Marx and Engels claimed that capitalism's "constant revolutionizing of production" ultimately means "all that is solid melts into air." The contemporary art market, however, describes an opposite process: innovations such as the flat-screen monitor, the digital print, and the editioned DVD, have helped transform immaterial forms like video and net.art into a new generation of physical, sellable objects. Underscoring the gallery-friendly moment, "Holy Fire: Art of the Digital Age" at Bruxelles's iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology presents a show of works already for sale on the art market. While it's not surprising to find a younger crew who came of age within the current market (Eddo Stern, Cory Arcangel, Paul Slocum), more significant are the first-generation net.art names who have ditched their former outsider status and joined the commercial club: note the inclusion of Jodi, Vuk Cosic, Alexei Shulgin, and Olia Lialina, as well as later, politically-pointed artists like 0100101110101101.ORG and Joan Leandre. (As corollary, observe that old media have been effected as well as new: a similar if less totalizing movement towards object-production has taken hold within the formerly market-excluded world of experimental filmmaking.) Holy Fire curators Yves Bernard and Domenico Quaranta say that to speak of new media art "doesn't really make sense today," since "all contemporary art is, someway, new media art" and many artists prefer to state their concern as "just art." With a panel moderated by Patrick Lichty of anti-corporate hoaxsters The Yes Men, the debate on that claim is guaranteed to be lively. - Ed Halter
Image: Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev, Commercial Protest, 2007
Am I to understand that this is an exhibit organized in a non-profit space, the theme of which is, "how artists are finding ways to get paid out there in the commercial realm"?
This is meager grist for a show.
If the theme is "all contemporary art is, someway, new media art" then Bernard and Quaranta really need to come over to NY and see the Whitney Biennial 2008 and "Unmonumental," shows that seem designed to prove the opposite assertion.
The galleries in those shows are dominated by physical objects and seem to be saying that assemblage is the most important practice.
We haven't talked in a while, hope all is well.
Best, Tom
Pall
Exactly what I was thinking!
Maybe shows like this are designed to convince a hesitant collector market "its safe to buy this now". Seems like such a given that anything can (and will) be packaged, marketed, and sold... the buyers I suppose are more concerned with WHEN and WHO. Its weird that the show theme appears to be so directly about that.
For the grand parade of lifeless packaging - all ready to use
The grand parade of lifeless packaging - I just need a fuse
P Gabriel
I can't believe I'm talking about this at this late date.
Maybe Paul Slocum, who occasionally chimes in on blogs, will tell us what he hopes to accomplish by being in this show--how it helps or expands the dialog around his work.
As in, "My work was in a show about selling new media because..."
Or Olia? C'mon!
To me the issue is not material vs immaterial but rather dumb show idea vs smart show idea.
And don't get me wrong--I've been in some dumb shows. Just not on this theme.
I'm happy that a discussion is getting started, even if I would expect something more on Rhizome. You are right, this is a boring concept. A boring concept for a not-boring show. You can look at the show without even thinking to the concept: what you see is a collection of interesting artworks that someone passionately started to sell and collect. Keep on calling them "gadgets", you if you like: I call them art works.
Personally, Holy Fire as been exactly the way to get rid of some boring discussions I was involved in the the last few years. New media curators saying "New media art is not exactly something a museum can invest on, because it's immaterial and processual, difficult to show and to collect". Magazine editors saying "New Media Art is out of the market". Art critics who don't even now that New Media Art exists, and has been here for a long time. Also, I'm quite tired to jump across two worlds which don't communicate between each other. Probably, if any of you would have read something more than the press release, or Ed's beautiful review, would have found some interesting statements such as:
“Questions such as: “Are new media art and contemporary art two different things? Is new media art the art of our time? Is it the art of the future or an art without a future?” never fail to exasperate me. It has something to do with the “new media” label which fits the genre like a straitjacket and sends it to a ghetto without even a flicker of compassion. Forget the new, drop the media, enjoy art.”
Regine Debatty
"We are open for business as long as we have good stuff to sell. If we don’t have good stuff for sale we shutdown the shop. Good stuff for sale is always welcome in a world full of trash. We also like to share, trade and steal from motherfuckers. It’s a complex multilayered attitude, it requires great calm but strong breathing at high altitudes. The higher you go the more blurred your mind is.”
Joan Leandre
“I consider myself to be at the ‘rear-guard’ rather than up front with the avant-garde in ‘media art’. I guess I score points by saying this, but this is not my intention. Every medium that is labelled - ‘something art’ is heading for a 1000 hurts. At the very worst it can lead to an art ghetto, where artists, whose only common link is that they are faced with the same criticism."
Charles Sandison
"New media art is a terrific expansion of available tools and the cultural playing field - an addition, not a replacement. Our goal is to actually strip the “New Media Artists” of the New Media part and deliver them to a larger pool where they are known simply as Artists."
Magdalena Sawon & Tamas Banovich, Postmasters Gallery
http://www.imal.org/HolyFire/en/?p=97
This is Holy Fire.
About the artists in the show. The exhibition doesn't help to expand the dialogue around their work. They are here just because they are working with galleries, or sold their work to private collectors. THIS, in my opinion, helps to expand the dialogue around their work, setting them in a "wider pool", in front of a wider audience.
Hope to see you all in Brussels!
Bests,
Domenico
Re: your disappointment in Rhizome, I had hoped that Ed might pop in to defend the show he recommended so you didn't have to do it yourself, but it seems he has also left the building.
We've discussed these issues at length on my blog (including with several artists in your show, hence the first person plural). I will spare you a long list of links.
You are "preaching to the choir," as we say here in America.
You have organized your show around a defensive idea, and that is never a good idea.
If you make the ideas sexy and package them reasonably well, the rest will follow. Talking about the packaging is only interesting if it raises content issues with respect to the work. That might have been an interesting topic.
In the 2000's, it became a series of practices understood as a group of media arts
It is currently being historicized as a movement.
(However, it is also a meme used within the communications industry, which is a problem. Don't confuse them, or as little as possible.)
As moderator for the panelin the Holy Fire exhibition at IMAL, I want to chime in for a moment with a partially invested opinion. However, Domenico asked me to be there because I am a true hybrid on the subject; I am a gallery artist, curator, and critic, who, given the body of work, also critically questions material culture and the nature of art as fetish/commodity. In fact, my graduate thesis dealt with a form of Platonic tension between the (im)material in art [but almost no one has seen this body of work]. In a way, I am both for and against this practice of collecting New Media, depending on context.
I understand the tradition of patronage as well as the struggle against bourgeois culture created by the 20th Century Avant-Garde. After the collapse of Modernism, it really depends on what context and tradition you wish to address, and how you wish to frame yourself (as Nauman and Beuys created the artist as "ouevre" [body-of-work]). The joy of the Postmodern, and as we go into the next period at the moment (name TBA), is that immaterial culture's association with the material (expand at will) is that the antagonism between the art market and the avant is diffused by allowing for localized discourse. Since the "ism" was destroyed, art atomized into very local threads of genre, into small groups, and even imploded to the individual.
There is no need to rebel against Modernism once it is turned into a field on the Venn diagram, and its role as master narrative is displaced. This is not to say that it has _gone away_, and the same for the art market after conceptualism. In fact, before the 2007 financial crises, a lot of artists working in the genre formerly called "New Media" (to paraphrase Dietz) have gone to the galleries. Is this so shocking?
Part of this comes from the emergence of New Media as a Contemporary Art Form after the shows Art Entertainment Network, net.condition, Whitney Biennial 2000, 010101: Art in Technological Times, Data Dynamics, The Art Formerly Known As New Media, and so on. This is the blessing and the bane of acceptance - the greater world tradition of Contemporary Art is at your disposal, but you also have to deal with that broader community and its terms and traditions, as well as your former community in the New Media world. Many of us who are older New Media artists are now Contemporary Artists, which is something that was nearly impossible a decade ago.
However, like Video Art, which is the cultural forebear of New Media, the coming of the festival and dedicated "media" community based on common interest, cultural specificity, formal/technical exploration is still needed. Therefore the New Media community certainly still exists, even if it is pulled at by commercial agendas (art programs catering to industrial/entertainment application), the art world (as New Media now has to compete with the global art community or stay within localized discourse). We have a New Media genre/community because there is a number of us who want to share, get together, and discuss what our work is doing in the world and what we're learning from it.
With artists like Murakami/Superflat, the 8-Bit crowd (Slocum, Beige, Paperrad Arcangel, et al) there is a NeoPop resurgence, which has elements of its predecessor; that is, surface, mass production, consumption. The arrival of niche fabrication has stepped up the ante on production by allowing microproduction of limited edition items. Contrary to merely reinscribing the old agendas of material culture, the new age of fabrication threatens to reconfigure it, by creating tons of editioned items that are (more or less) easily created. Therefore, I would challenge the cursory onlooker to say that we could be entering an era apprximating Stephenson's "Diamond Age" or a "Fluxus Materialism" of easily made material art. But I think that in the age of NeoPop that the reemergence of the object and the integration of production of media artists into material culture seems oddly logical, if not appropriate.
On the other hand, as in a recent talk in Amsterdam, the distinctions between cultures may be more centered in class. While the "ism" has been decentered, and conceptualism still abounds, and that Media Art is in increasing acceptance, the Art World, the markets, and its community of patronage is still firmly in place, even though additional protocological levels have been created to address new niches. The problem as I see it is that many Media artists either wish the art market would go away, lose its relevance/power, allow the artist to become hegemon, stop assigning cultural value to "poor" works, ascribe value by intellectual/cultural means rather than those of power and wealth, etc. etc. What I see is a discursive mismatching, in that much New Media does not account for/negotiate Contemporary social, cultural and institutional traditions, and vice versa. What I find fascinating from a purely phenomenological POV is that these effects are happening, whatever your stance.
And it isn't boring - what is happening is a fracturing/reconfiguration of the discourse of dematerialization of the object itself, begun with Duchamp himself, and chronicled by Lippard in her seminal book. Immaterial artists are returning to atoms, which is relatively avant- at the moment. I see this analogous to discussions by a number of scholars of my acquaintance regarding a "New Humanism" that acknowledges the real, throws out the Foucaultian 'body' in terms of the human being, while still accounting for individual plurality, thus not being a "Neo-Modernist" backlash.
Lastly, I want to mention something regarding the valuation of art in context of media - especially New Media. At a recent symposium on computer art at Northwestern University's Block Museum, I challenged the endless worrying about New Media's persistence in relation to its valuation. For example, there are many well-known artists whose work is certainly highly prized, but ephemeral - Oursler, Flavin, HIRST, and even many of the mid-20th century masters like Pollack have been falling apart. I wonder how well Ofili's elephant dung is rated for archival? This taken in context with the fact that most digital/New Media artists are held to wholly different standards (Will your print last for at least 200 years?), or the persistence of a work when compared to lesser standards by more "traditional" contemporary artists merely makes certain power and cultural relations visible.
I also realize that others may not share my views, but in many ways, I feel like saying that one thing this show asks is whether New Media has been accepted as Contemporary Art (i.e. become part of the gallery/museum world), whose practices have been accepted, how that fits into the current contemporary dialogue, and how does that relate to larger "mainstream" art historical traditions.
"one thing this show asks is whether New Media has been accepted as Contemporary Art (i.e. become part of the gallery/museum world), whose practices have been accepted, how that fits into the current contemporary dialogue, and how does that relate to larger "mainstream" art historical traditions."
That's three things. Taking the questions in turn the answers are:
1. No. (See my comment above about the current Whitney and NewMu surveys)
2. The galleries have their own idea of media art--it's mostly video but there is sometimes a computer component (tabulating data, etc.). The computer is not front and center, it is usually in the back story.
3. Computercentric art has not been accepted into the mainstream and won't be as long as shows are only "about" packaging/marketing. We need more than that to be inspired (e.g "a NeoPop resurgence"). You are providing context after the fact for a show with a weak premise. Maybe Domenico should have consulted you before organizing the show.
narrative!
what is needed is narrative! even minimalistic/bitcentered/geekLikeable ones, but narratives.
and packaging/marketing.
I understand the tradition of patronage as well as the struggle against bourgeois culture by the 20th Century Avant-Garde. After the collapse of Modernism, it really depends on what context and tradition you wish to address, and how you wish to frame yourself (as Nauman and Beuys created the artist as "ouevre" [body-of-work]).
In return -
1: Tell Cao Fei that, Jaume Plensa, Jenny Holzer, John Simon, Lincoln Schatz, Cory Arcangel, and many others.
2: New Media in the gallery isn't about putting a computer in a showroom - that's the infrastructure, not the experience. That's only one model of representation, and the most narrow one - the one that keeps New Media in the festivals.
3: The show is creating dialogue, which I think is healthy - and some rather hot debate; again quite healthy. But would Oliver Grau, Roy Ascott, Eduardo Kac, Oron Catts and Paul Vanouse think New Media is computational - I think they'd say it was also inclusive of Biotech, Friedman and Rozen probably of Robotics. Is Tactical Media, also New Media, more computational or social? This is the problem with only saying that "New Media" is about "computer-centric", which, while being a dominant form, isn't.
The dialogue seems more important than whether we are putting computers in galleries - this is what I mean by the difference between the Contemporary artist using New Media and the contemporary New Media artist. The latter expects the gallery to accommodate them, which they rarely even do for the traditional artist. The idea that New Media is somehow "entitled" to infrastructural support is a grave misconception to anyone working in the New Media genre to work in Contemporary circles.
That's just the technical end - on the Cultural end, we can stretch the discursive envelope, but we can't sit in a yurt in Mongolia, and expect the public to have to fly thousands of miles, trek by camel and jeep, and then not get it.
The point is, where it is reasonable to expect to present some challenge to the audience, curators, and gallery owners, it is also unreasonable to say that the gallery owner has to provide support beyond that of other artists, and that the public would not be provided with some elements of common cultural reference (i.e. ties to contemporary or art history) in order to "grok" what one is getting at. We're communicators - and if the message is not getting across (even if it's a "sublime" experience), we've failed.
Written before reading your repl(ies).
Jenny Holzer got her start tacking truisms up on New York phone poles, not in the new media sphere.
Rather than a show about packaging/marketing, it would seem better to pair new media sphere artists with non, and not make a big deal about what you're doing.
An example off the top of my head: pair Douglas Gordon's 24 hour Psycho with Cory Arcangel's Slow Tetris. This bootstraps Arcangel into the discourse of a known "media art genius" from the gallery side and he comes off rather better for the comparison, because his piece is more cheeky/fun. The theme is "time in media," not sales.
Not saying this isn't being done with Arcangel--it is (maybe even with those pieces, I forget). My point is that's a better way to bring art into the computercentric world the rest of us live in than these circle the wagons exhibitions.
Not a good barometer - New Museum MoMA, and Whitney are good for plumbing the US art scene, and I never judge from 1:only NYC, and 2: only biennials.
However, there was July, Klima, Lazzarini, Flanagan, McCoys Napier, MTAA - a bunch more. Maybe not those museums, this year. Your point is taken, just isn't mine.
"Jenny Holzer got her start tacking truisms up on New York phone poles, not in the new media sphere."
Not the point. What I'm getting at is how New Media techniques are becoming part of Contempoary practice. I'm not that concerned if you started with New Media or not (I did).
Rather than a show about packaging/marketing, it would seem better to pair new media sphere artists with non, and not make a big deal about what you're doing.
An example off the top of my head: pair Douglas Gordon's 24 hour Psycho with Cory Arcangel's Slow Tetris. This bootstraps Arcangel into the discourse of a known "media art genius" from the gallery side and he comes off rather better for the comparison, because his piece is more cheeky/fun. The theme is "time in media," not sales.
"Not saying this isn't being done with Arcangel--it is (maybe even with those pieces, I forget). My point is that's a better way to bring art into the computercentric world the rest of us live in than these circle the wagons exhibitions."
Not sure I'd call it a wagon maneuvering exercise - the show is not perfect, but few are. I think it's more about looking at the current generation of media artists and considering the shifts in art world practice, which is hardly "let's talk about New Media", although it is in a media arts center. We could probably rewind this 25 years and stick a VCR in our hands.
Computer-centric world - just my 2 cents, but I really hope that artists working with technology aren't limited to talking about technoculture.
Salvatore mentions narrative (good!), and:
""the point" possibly shifts toward the perspective that in the contemporary era *all* production is aesthetically characterized, creating a radical change in which what really makes the difference is the visual (sensorial) fetish incorporated in a "thing". And that's the a really substantial change running from Marx to Adorno or Benjamin.
In this perspective everything is actually new media, whether you print it, paint it, code it or whatever. "
Yes, exactly. the formal codification of what New Media is represents a real problem, or what people would like it to be, like web art becoming browser art.
Interesting thing is that I'm making completely solid state NM using embedded microprocessors. Very computational, but also very material, and (unless I'm wrong) should last as long as a VCR tape.
Honestly, I'm more interested in cultural media persistence than commodification.
Olia - very interesting about not wanting to be part of the "contemporary" scene. Very provocative.
If I recall correctly, that was done quite recently in Portugal. An exhibition curated in part by Christiane Paul. I don't remember the name or place but it was announced here on Rhizome at the time.
"My point is that's a better way to bring art into the computercentric world the rest of us live in than these circle the wagons exhibitions."
By the rest of us I mean most of contemporary culture where jobs mean staring at a computer all day, banks are doing away with paper checks and urging you to go online, etc. You don't have to ask the gallery to show an actual computer, just get it to acknowledge its own retro devotion to old handmade forms as a misplaced antidote to computercentric culture, which is the norm outside the galleries (even in Mongolia).
"the point" possibly shifts toward the perspective that in the contemporary era *all* production is aesthetically characterized, creating a radical change in which what really makes the difference is the visual (sensorial) fetish incorporated in a "thing". And that's the a really substantial change running from Marx to Adorno or Benjamin.
In this perspective everything is actually new media, wether you print it, paint it, code it or whatever.
xDxD
1
1 Regarding the position of the art buyer, is not it that (s)he is expressing its fetishtic feelings of being around the work of art that urged to invest in it in the first place. The work of art can never be sold , and remains always in its hermetic isolation. The only sellable item is the actual presence of the artwork.
2 Regarding the position of the artist, is it not that s(h)e is actually selling his artistic position in the social context of being in an art environment, the more esteem, the higher the price. and it is still not the work of art what is commodified but the social, relational, human interaction which is expressed in capitalization .
So , whatever point of view one takes the immaterial 'being' of the work of art is not in anyway materialized, neither in the contained work nor in the apprehension of the spectator.
For me as an artist , the only reason to ever think about selling my work, is in knowing that my work cannot be owned.
I think and like to discuss this further.i.e. A work of art cannot be owned. The economical value attached to it by art dealers and art consumers is a derived value which has no connection with the immaterial artistic value added to it by the artist. A consumer can buy a material residual approximation of the original, fixed in a more or less transportable object, which acts as a fetish for the immaterial value it represents. By owning such a material object , the owner can feel in the proximity of these immaterial value, but never can claim any right for that particular value.
A. Andreas 2008
To answer your question "what you hope to accomplish to be in this show?"
Nothing to accomplish, I'm just very glad to be in it. Dragan and me have produced some works recently. They are not web art, but works about the web.
Let me quote from my own text Flat Against the Wall:
“For a long time it did not make sense to show net art in real space:
museums or galleries. For good reasons you had to experience works of
net artists on your own connected computer.
Yesterday for me as an artist it made sense only to talk to people in
front of their computers, today I can easily imagine to apply to
visitors in the gallery because in their majority they will just have
gotten up from their computers. They have the necessary experience and
understanding of the medium to get the ideas, jokes, enjoy the works and
buy them.”
I'm very happy that there are galleries like ABC in Moscow and And/Or in Dallas who value our digital craft and that there are collectors who are interested in the works where the web is immortalized :)
But there is something I'd like to achieve as well by being present at the debates at Art Brussels. I'm very very much against the merge of the new media into the contemporary art scene. I think that position, spoken by Regine Debaty -- forget media, drop new, enjoy art -- is sort of reactionary. I don't enjoy art, I enjoy some of the new media, especially WWW and I find media specificity to be the most exiting thing. So I'm really looking fwd to make this statement at the art fair.
One nice thing about this show is that Alexei and Jodi and Olia and I will meet after quite a while.
Heath was in Brux 10 days ago and can't make it, but he is traveling to Croatia this summer and we will meet then.
One other nice thing is that we don't have to go around painting other people's apartments in order to keep making and doing art. Now we are payed for covering those walls with artwork. That is much better, principally because of the price difference per square inch.
Olia, please remind me to give you the 100 Euros for selling that file of mine to the Spanish museum.
Hey readers of this, I want to do shows and work again, anybody game? This retirement shit is killing me. I grew fat. I need to work in order to lose weight. Help me.
1. What exactly is the problem with organizing a show around collected artwork?
Seems completely natural to me. What is the problem with good artists making
money selling GOOD work? This is the way things are supposed to be…no?
2. New Media (which for now is very much a valid category for the lack of better vocabulary) is starting to sell big time. The interest in work is growing practically every month. Buying new media is buying a right to display and re-sell an immaterial entity (legally an intellectual property). This is becoming a common knowledge amongst the more educated collectors. You buy art the way you buy software. You invest in a conceptual brand. Again, see nothing funny about it.
3. It is the immaterial entity which generates certain physical representation, but those ARE secondary, thus often parts of the edition. A singular piece of new media art is an edition of one. Welcome to the age of info-capital reproductionJ
The re-emergence of objecthood in the new media doesn’t negate the immateriality: it asserts certain well-expected dialectics…
4. Whitney: what can I say, the show is ok, but mostly NOT CONTEMPORARY art. This was the choice made by curators … has nothing to do with appeal of new media to the general public, which I find to be unprecedented.
5. Finally: I can’t see contemporary art without new media. for me they are almost synonymous.
Peace out
"Organizing a show around collected artwork"--no problem; that happens all the time. "Organizing a show around collecting work"--it's not enough, considering all the other things there are to talk about. It's like my complaint about "art about the art world"--it's too insular and meta.
>>What is the problem with good artists making
money selling GOOD work?
Are you addressing this question to me? Seems I've been defending that proposition all along.
This is a bunch of good work first. The concept according to Ed is rematerialization. I would just call it a selection of new media works from collections...
People are defending this show based on what they want it to be, not what it is, a show about sales. Is that not a shopping cart in the picture at the top?
Since this show runs in parallel with an art fair going on in Brussels and quite a few of the works are from a huge private new media collection located in Brussels, the collecting theme makes some sense to me. Turning some new collectors on to new media seems like an okay idea.
There is something to be said for being considered part of the contemporary arts milieu however - reminds for Shawn Decker's comments at ISEA in San Jose where he spoke about how happy he was when his audio installations began to be shown in "real" (emphasis mine) art shows as opposed to group shows of audio installations - his works could finally be heard (quite literally).
Hey Vic Cusok, lose weight now, ask me how! I've lost 6 pounds over the last three weeks performing/walking 10-12 miles daily in Second Life using a treadmill - come join me!
I have not "left the building" but am in fact rather busy this a week-long project and attending the final NYUFF...but I will check in with this lengthy discussion when I have a chance soon! (and, as a new staff writer here, am only today realizing that anyone actually uses these discussion boards -- I read Rhizome on rss, so I kind of miss out on that usually...)
May I say up front that I do not consider any Rhizome blog post to be an "endorsement" in and of itself. I certainly don't read other blogs that way. I view the practice as providing an informed comment on something that is happening, and a link, allowing you to check it out and think about it for yourself. I figured this was a basic concept most internet readers had a handle on, so I'm surprised it has caused any confusion.
But I don't find the concept for the show "boring" in the least. It's quite provocative, in fact, and it certainly appears to have provoked Tom.
Also, I think this whole in the market / outside of the market dichotomy is rather un-nuanced. For example, even if all of these objects are for sale and selling, we might consider how central to the market they really are. I would guess that with a very few exceptions, a well-known new media artist makes far less money on his or her art than a painter or sculptor of comparable status. I have absolutely no knowledge of Cory Arcangel's bank account, but I would bet you a euro that any young painter with the same level of press attention and status would have moved a lot more product by now. Of course, Marcin argues that this is changing rapidly, but I still wonder about the sense of economic scale here.
I don't think this show is about "proving new media is sellable" but rather an observation that, de facto, a mode of art often thought of being beyond the market is in fact, right now, already within it.
Furthermore--and very importantly--most if not all of the artists in these shows do not centrally locate their practice in the production of said gallery objects. If anything, the sellable objects for many of them constitute more recent or relatively peripheral activities, and pretty much everybody still spends a lot of time producing things that aren't sellable -- performances, online work, sharable art, writing, etc. Again, significantly different from the traditional model of painting or sculpture or even certain gallery-centric video artists. I think this in a very important point to make here. Nobody as far as I can tell is migrating completely into the object-creation model and thereby abandoning all extra-market activities.
this morning I woke up and I found out in my inbox a plenty of emails coming from Rhizome about Holy Fire. Even if Tom, on his blog, ironically points out that someone already played the "show must be important see how much commentary it's generating" card, I still think that discussion is important, and if a show is able to generate it two weeks before the opening, this is some kind of a success. Not too bad for "a show with a weak premise". ;-)
Many things have been told and I haven't found the time to read them all. What I'm trying to do now is to clarify some points in order to enrich the discussion.
First of all, no surprise that most of the comments are coming to me by night (that is, from the US time zone). Holy Fire is a European show, and some of the things we are talking about make a different sense in the US and in Europe. In the US, a lot of artists stepped up the game, entering the contemporary art scene often without the "new media art" label upon their heads. Cory Arcangel is an example. Brody Condon is another. When I started working on Holy Fire, I contacted Brody. We discussed a lot about the show, and in the end he decided not to be part in it. He told, among other things: "every time you describe these artists by material, you are hurting, and not helping them [...] It's about ideas, not material. I don't give a shit about new media, it's just the material I understand intuitively from my youth." I know that he is right, someway. I had no chance to discuss with Cory, but probably his position is very similar. But I also now that in Europe the barriers between these two worlds (and for worlds I don't mean only "markets" and "exhibition venues", but also "discursive contexts") are very strong. Personally, I'm fighting against these barriers. Is this the right way? I don't know. The first shot is not always the best one, but I have to start in some way...
Tom says: "pair Douglas Gordon's 24 hour Psycho with Cory Arcangel's Slow Tetris. This bootstraps Arcangel into the discourse of a known "media art genius" from the gallery side and he comes off rather better for the comparison, because his piece is more cheeky/fun. The theme is "time in media," not sales." Curiously enough, this is exactly what I'm saying in my essay for the catalogue. One of the things that Holy Fire wants to show is that "new media art" is quite a precarious definition, simply because the Mattes and Casey Reas have nothing in common but the medium. What Tom is pointing out is what I call "the next step". You maybe are ready to take it in the US. What's happening here is that Douglas Gordon goes to Palais de Tokio, and Cory goes to transmediale (ok, this is not the right example, but you may undestand what I mean). After a long and surprising career in the new media context, the Mattes had to start from the beginning when they entered the contemporary art world. For the art market, they were not the big net.art stars they are for us, but just beginners.
Pall made a (partially wrong) reference to a show by Christiane Paul. It was called "Feedback", and was hosted by the LABoral center in Gijon (Spain). Unfortunately, I have not seen Unmonumental, but I've seen Feedback, and it was very important for me. There I realized that the best place for Casey Reas is next to Sol LeWitt, and that you can understand more about Jodi if you see his cheats in front of Nam June Paik. But, again: Christiane Paul is a "new media curator" and LABoral is a "new media center": where is the next step?
One of the ambitions of Holy Fire is to show to both these worlds (new media art world and contemporary art world) that segregation is not simply useless, but meaningless. We are ALREADY talking about the same things, we are ALREADY part of the same context. Most of us can already now this, and find this statement boring. But there are a lot of people who don't usually visit Transmediale: for them, seeing some fresh new works at Artbrussels can be interesting.
Then, obviously, there is the issue of the market. This is a slippery ground, no surprise if we slip on it. What I can say is that the show doesn't take a definite position about it: it just want to start a dialogue. In the beginning, it was no more than a bet: let's try to make a new media art exhibition just contacting private collectors and gallery owners, and let's see what we are able to put together. What we found out was a surprise for ourselves. Commercial galleries specialized in new media, and many others which simply look at new media as an important part of contemporary culture. And a lot of passionate collectors. Putting them in touch, developing this little, rising economy into a network (a system?) is another ambition of this project. This is just the beginning.
I know: too many ambitions for a little, cheap show set up at the periphery of the Empire. That's why Holy Fire took a multilayered attitude, even if we curators have some clear positions about these issues. A multilayered attitude into which different ways of thinking, such as Olia's and Regine's, can be the point of departure of a discussion.
And, finally, if what I get from this show is just to put Vuk in touch with his friends and make him produce some good new stuff, well, this will be a great result indeed!
My bests,
domenico
New media art (and net art) has never been outside the market (you have to buy a lot of equipment and services to make and experience it) but it has been outside the art market. This was part of what made it interesting as art (where it didn't make it just academic). And this was always going to make it ultimately irresistible to the art market. New media art is in danger of being the new spraycan art.
Moving new media art into the economic hyperspace of the art market is not really rematerialization. Quite the opposite. It takes something that is sociologically and aesthetically solid and melts it into the economic air. If new media art is to survive in the art market as anything other than the reified forms of the subculture that produced it then we need to set the terms of engagement. I think that "Holy Fire" helps to do this.
Pall
Immateriality, when talking about the immateriality of NMA it seems that everyone is skirting around the term conceptual art, Sol Lewitt is mentioned but that is as far as anyone has gone.
This brings me to my next question, why does it seem that when discussing NMA there is this talk as if it has spontainiously emerged out of the ether with no connection to any history or art making from the past?
And when there is an attempt to connect it to the past it is always derived from cinema, aka, Manovitch (sp) et al.
I do not grasp the meaning of this so called discussion.
It seems as if it should be fun to talk and meet other people working in the art sphere, to get attention and maybe some financial profit by exposing your work in a 'social' art context.
What has this to do with an art discussion?
When you feel comfortable with these mumbo jumbo small talk , just go ahead, but do not pretend to discuss.
The point is , why should the capatilistic paradigma, of which the majority of the world population is suffering from, be transported to yet another realm. i.e. NMA.
It will be better to question the position of the artist in this perspective in place of producing quasi intellectual sound bites.
Maybe you neglecting the fact that there IS a difference between Europe and America, and as an European, I do not like to be , again, ursurpated by an financial art mechanism which is not beneficary for us , 'normal' people, who like to communicate by our art and not by our price tags.
So yes I am very negative about bringing , a possible new way of artistic behaviour, NMA, into the sphere of finance and plain old capitalism.
In France there is a rumour about getting a State funded loan from about EUR 15.000,00 , without having to pay interest. This is sold to the public as supporting the bad French situation on the global art market. Why , for god's sake, is it possible that people are displaced from their houses because they cannot pay their rents and at the same time someone is able to get a interestless loan, to buy art? This can only happen when the art world is not interested in what happens outside its splendid isolation.
So where is the involvement, the political awareness, the guts, the pain, the suffering?
AA
Yeah.
"This brings me to my next question, why does it seem that when discussing NMA there is this talk as if it has spontainiously emerged out of the ether with no connection to any history or art making from the past? "
Actually, I think (just based on various conversations and readings over the years) that there is a general acceptance of prior history even though it's not necessarily always mentioned. I think most people have pretty much quit thinking that NMA popped, fully formed, out of the head of Zeus. Just skimming through the posts here I see a few historical references that are not connected to video, especially in Patrick's first post.
Pall
Mainly that sculpture has always adopted new techonolgies as well as explored scientific theories.
yes I know way off topic.
for those who understand french also check: http://www.fluctuat.net/blog/9941-Holy-Fire-le-net-art-est-il-soluble-dans-le-capitalisme-
not Rematerialization but the post is.
Returning briefly to this discussion after a 36 hour hiatus.
One of the reasons I turned off comments on my blog was people were always pointing to the long threads as evidence that the work being mostly pilloried was in fact good. Both of you guys have defended Holy Fire that way, and I suggest it is rather avoiding the question.
I am excited to read from Domenico's response that Brody Condon turned down the show and for excellent reasons. He is now in my hero canon along with Barnett Newman who refused to be in a Whitney show about "geometry in art."
I have some thoughts about Ed's "rematerialization of art" thesis vis a vis 40 years of art practice and will put them up on my blog.
Domenico, "Unmonumental" is dominated by physical sculpture and wall work--the new media stuff is sprinkled throughout and is mostly in back corridors. As I mentioned we have several galleries here in New York that make no distinction between the gallery and new media subcultures. A rich discussion is going on in them about the possibilities of hybridizing practices. Sales are part of the process of keeping gallery doors open, nothing more.
* * * *
Please note that neither sales nor selling have been discussed so far. Halter's rematerialization rhetoric is old news in the art world. The '80s was all about a "return to painting" after the conceptual experiments of the '70s; like Halter, critics came up with a term to defend a retrograde practice. Back then it was commodification, supposedly a Marxist critique of what the galleries were doing--making bushels of money--that was more of an ironic celebration.
A "net artist" joining a gallery stable merely revisits, say, Jenny Holzer's transition from a "relational" artist tacking up her truisms on New York phone poles to an internationally-feted mega artist using increasingly bombastic (and highly sellable) LED displays (similar to corporate stock tickers).
The rematerialization part isn't new and the sales part isn't interesting.
After the Halter thread on Rhizome I had a phone conversation with Aron Namenwirth of artMovingProjects, where I've been showing work. He's been mixing media and non-media in his gallery, and the felt the reason for materializing art (forget the De- or Re-) was to get it into a public space where people could look at it, hear it, and talk about it. When we were doing the "Room Sized Animated GIFs" show and the BLOG project space we were talking mainly about how to translate theretofore privately-consumed Web work for a "commons" where people would be walking around and presumably would not want to be bored. Believe it or not, some people have a jones for a white box space and seeing what happens in it. Doing the shows required a hybrid thought process of thinking about what was important online and what was important in meat space/meet space. Yes, we talked about the f*cking sales process, a necessary part of keeping the gallery doors open, I think, but the excitement of the shows was, um, the shows.
* * * * *
Your point about the "return to painting" in the 80s after the conceptual upheavals of the 70s is well taken. However, I think you're trying far too hard to pose my blog post as making a much more wide-ranging claim than it really was. Clearly, I'm not talking about the rematerialization of art as such, across all disciplines. Holy Fire is a very specific show: it's only about the entry of what was called new media art into today's commercial gallery system. In this sense, rematerialization is only a term to refer to the ironic fact that an art practice predicated on immaterial stuff like data (remember "information wants to be free"?) would turn to producing objects that can be bought and sold. And no, it is absolutely not a new story--the same thing happened to video art and installation in the 1990s, so if anything it is more a sub-set of a larger trend.
A significant part of that larger trend is that the gallery world today is overwhelming for-profit rather than non. There are exceptions of course. So while I think your observations about MBS's show are correct--that it's as much about translating the experience into a physical location as it is about making an object for sale--the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of the spaces in which this process occurs are places in which anything within its walls is potentially for sale, not merely exhibited for the fact of doing it. Your disavowal of this process ("Yes, we talked about the f*cking sales process, a necessary part of keeping the gallery doors open, I think, but the excitement of the shows was, um, the shows.") expresses a desire to wish this fact were not so. But it is. You may not wish this were the case--that the gallery could exist without the necessity of selling its objects and just be about exhibiting good work--but that is not the model under which most art is showing nowadays. Holy Fire, for me, may offer an opportunity to think look at our own moment, and judging from the activity on this thread, it's already starting to do that job. (If there is a critique one could make of it, it is that in its desire to provoke a response, it does fail to account for still-happening practices that do exist outside of this system--online work, the sporadic but continued existence of non-commercial art spaces, live performance, etc.--all of which remain a major part of new media art, although one could make further arguments what role they take vis a vis the market system (oppositional, marginal, supplementary...)
And Tom, please, don't keep trolling this issue by claiming that I am automatically "defending" a practice just by giving it a name. You know better than this. May I remind you of your own words when describing the style of my book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: "He has a deceptively calm 'just the facts ma'am' style that lays out all the information and leaves it to readers' heads to explode." ( http://www.digitalmediatree.com/tommoody/comment/36892/ )
Sorry for trolling. My head was already exploding on this issue, but you get props for coming up with a dangerous coinage that I think others will use.
So, please respond and let us know whether or not your statement on "the gallery world" is based on your experience within the US or if you really think this applies at a global, or at the very least a "Western" - Northern-hemisphere, level. If you feel the need to do research, I suggest you begin by looking due North. Then go East.
Not denigrating, just observing.
"So while I think your observations about MBS's show are correct--that it's as much about translating the experience into a physical location as it is about making an object for sale--"
I wasn't making such a comparison. I was only discussing how the display of hardware in the gallery impacted the art. I didn't mention the pieces' success or failure as sellable objects. I didn't mention commerce at all, unless saying "Please note that neither sales nor selling have been discussed" counts as that.
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