March 2014

Nicholas O'Brien attempted to initiate some discussion of New Inc, the New Museum's incubator cube farm for artistes mentioned earlier. Mostly he got pushback from the "art and technology" sphere, along the lines of "how can you criticize it when it hasn't even started?" and some condescending speculation as to his motives from Sterling Crispin. Crispin unhelpfully reduced the argument to Turing vs Duchamp and opined that New Inc is mostly meant for residents of "Turing Land."

Struggling to get the conversation back on some reasonable track, O'Brien threw out some questions:

[A]gain what is the eventual audience for the products that get made this incubation of innovation? Is that audience the same as the rest of the museum? What will be the hopeful benefit from the cross-pollination between these communities that only a museum can provide? How do the strategies of innovation incubation funding effect the types of cultural production that will occur in this studio? How can artists in this space remain autonomous yet still "gain access"?

So I put in two more cents as O'Brien's sole unequivocal supporter (speaking up from the humanities side of the divide):

Your question "How do the strategies of innovation incubation funding effect the types of cultural production that will occur in this studio?" is the key one for me. I would phrase it: "is artistic innovation the same as invention of a product?" and say, no, it's not. The two can overlap but art is not science, or engineering. Crispin's "Turing vs Duchamp" polarity leaves out so much. The Duchamp rotoreliefs could be perceptual science, but the Large Glass is absurdist poetry - it's not about learning, earning, or making the world a better place. Where do Matta, Eva Hesse, or Oskar Fischinger fit into a Turing vs Duchamp scheme? To answer these questions you'd have to have strong opinions about art and willingness to laugh at the certainties of science. I don't see anyone with that mindset getting past the gatekeepers looking for innovation in the logical positivist sense. You would have to lie on the application form, which is what capitalism-averse artists routinely do to get Creative Capital grants.

In an earlier comment I noted some connections between O'Brien's questions regarding venture capital-funded art and Mark Ames' criticisms-in-advance of Glenn Greenwald's gazillionaire-funded investigative journalism outfit, First Look. Similar issues of intellectual autonomy are raised, and a similar veil of silence descended from "the community."

For me, as an artist trying to figure out something interesting to do with a computer in the mid-to-late-'90s, Jeremy Blake was the competition. (He won.) There wasn't much actual critical dialogue around his work, though. Blake died a few years ago, and now Michael Connor, as curator, is doing some post-mortem chin-scratching in the course of keeping the Blake myth fires burning by grouping Blake with current young Blakes. As a witness to history and the MSPaint road not taken, I hurled this Solo Jazz cup of cold water in response to Connor's Blake essay currently up on Rhizome:

The Fahrenheit 451 connection is intriguing -- a '60s vision of abstraction-as-dystopian-mass-entertainment is certainly an interesting jumping-off point for a '90s body of work. As one who watched Jeremy Blake's career from the start I'd say he hit it around '98 with Bungalow 8, depicting transparent walls of a modernist apartment sliding in and out of each other - and then it was all downhill, as his work became "pure" abstraction (such as what appeared in Paul Thomas Anderson's film Punch Drunk Love), and then the later narrative, collage-y stuff, which was the least successful work he did (except in the commercial/exposure sense). Liquid Villa was essentially a repeat of Bungalow 8, with what seemed to be gratuitous Mediterranean stylings.

One quibble with this essay is the use of "prosumer" at the end. One reason Blake was able to distance himself from new media (or what was then still often being called "computer art") was that no one in the art world knew anything about the programs or effects he was using and he didn't talk about it. The "prosumer" dialog that you've identified with artists such as Michael Bell-Smith is all about "look what we did with this or that program that mid-level professionals use." Blake's work would have benefited from that kind of demystification at any stage. Instead it was treated as some kind of mysterious painted video that emerged from the mind of a genius.

Not that anyone asked, but here's what I wrote about Liquid Villa in 2001, discussing a Tim Griffin-curated group show:

"Only two of the artists make direct, hands-on use of the computer. Conjuring post-human exercise videos, Asymptote Architecture's looping, slowly morphing pod-shapes on small display screens combine machine curves, body contours, and textures scanned from athletic apparel. In Jeremy Blake's DVD light-show-in-a-box, pulsating color field patterns alternate with views of a synthetic Mediterranean villa, as if to say that inside the computer, it's all just planes and colors. Both artists favor the sleek airbrushed look typical of commercial digital work and display their pieces on pricy appliances such as wall-mounted plasma screens and Apple G-4 hard-drives; this is fine, but the danger of embracing the dominant economy's techno-fetish is that (as Joseph Kosuth once said of painting) one also embraces 'the tradition that comes with it': consumption, fascination, waste."