Keylines
A platform for open, collaborative conversation about contemporary issues relevant to the new media community. Each thread below was initiated by a "seed post" author and anyone can contribute to the discussion.
Defining the Problem: Canonocity, Methodology, and Historiography
The development and use of science and technology by artists always has been, and always will be, an integral part of the art-making process. Nonetheless, the canon of western art history generally has not recognized the centrality of science and technology as co-conspirators, ideational sources, and/or artistic media. Bound up in this problem, there is no clearly defined method for analyzing the role of science and technology in the history of art. In the absence of an established methodology (or constellation of methods) and a comprehensive, canonical history that would help clarify the interrelatedness of art, science, and technology (AST) and compel revision, this exclusion or marginality will persist. As a result, many of the artists, artworks, aesthetic theories, institutions, and events that might be established as the keystones and monuments of such a revised history of art will remain relatively unknown to general audiences.
Indeed, there is no comprehensive scientific/ technological history of art, as there are feminist and Marxist histories of art, for example. This leads one to wonder what a history of art written through an interpretive lens that emphasizes AST would look like. What would be its monuments? How would they be related through historical narrative? What similarities and differences, continuities and discontinuities, might be mapped onto the use of technology for artistic purposes throughout the history of art? In other words...
How would the story go if standard survey texts, such as Janson's History of Art, were re-written with an emphasis on the entwinement of science and technology in the history of art?
Leading art historians have contributed greatly to the understanding of AST during the Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern periods and in photography, though their work seems to have little impact on mainstream canonical discourses as measured by survey texts (1). In this regard, the sharp new two-volume set, Art Since 1900, written by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin Buchloh, ignores the history of art and technology to such an extent that Billy Klüver and E.A.T. are not even mentioned. Such exclusion from a text that clearly aspires to gain canonical status has significant, deleterious ramifications for the history of AST.
Much of the pioneering historical, critical, and theoretical English language literature on AST has been written by artists (2). A great deal of influential current literature on new media is being produced by scholars who apparently know little about the history of AST or the history of art in general. Rather than argue for the primacy and originality of the innovative theoretical positions that characterize AST's history, as embodied in works of art and articulated in artists' and historians' theoretical writings, much recent criticism, both within and without the discipline of art history, is dominated by citations of the usual suspects: Baudrillard, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze, Latour, and Virilio. Summoning such demi-gods to lend authority to an argument, however, reifies existing structures of power and authority in academic writing - a result that not only diminishes the importance of AST but conflicts with the aims of the aforementioned gurus of post-structuralism.
As Suzanne Stone Maretto, the psychopathic TV journalist played by Nicole Kidman in the film To Die For stated, "you're nobody if you're not on TV." The same logic applies to any form of public discourse: You're nobody unless you're footnoted. The historic monuments and historiography of AST will continue to be excluded from the canon of art history and broader intellectual history unless their theoretical contributions to critical and discourses and popular culture are underscored. I'm not suggesting that writers gut Benjamin from their footnotes but that they highlight AST's own monuments and cite them as them as the aesthetic and intellectual core of critical and historical practice.
- These include Jonathan Crary, James Elkins, Linda Henderson, Martin Kemp, and Barbara Stafford.
- These include Roy Ascott, Jack Burnham, Critical Art Ensemble, Douglas Davis, Mary Flanagan, Alex Galloway, Eduardo Kac, Margo Lovejoy, Simon Penny, Peter Weibel, and Steve Wilson to name just a few. Notable exceptions include the work of Jonathan Benthall, Marga Bijvoet, Dieter Daniels, Charlie Gere, and Frank Popper, the media-archaeological scholarship of Oliver Grau and Erkki Huhtamo, and the criticism and editorial work of Tim Druckery. Survey texts, including Christiane Paul's Digital Art and Rachel Greene's Net Art, together with anthologies, such as Ken Jordan and Randall Packer's From Wagner to Virtual Reality, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort's New Media Reader, and Judy Malloy's Women, Art, and Technology (MIT, 2003), as well as the web-based resource, Media Art Net, also have helped to historicize the field, though it must be noted that of these works, only the essays in Media Art Net are written by art historians with doctoral training.
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