May 2014

After finally seeing "The New Romantics" show at Eyebeam (a closing reception was last night) I read Paddy Johnson's Artnet interview with Nicholas O'Brien, one of the three curators. Her questions drip with understandable skepticism and the answers are not satisfactory. Johnson asked if technology was making us lose our sense of awe, and O'Brien replied with an observation about his college-level digital art students:

They not only feel overwhelmed by access to our history, but I think they are overwhelmed by the amount of things that need to be considered and the amount of things that should be considered when being a responsible artist in the 21st century.

"Responsible artist in the 21st century" -- there's the problem right there. Can you be a romantic and be that? It suggests a better title and concept for the show than "The New Romantics." This is a show of up-and-coming new media artists who aren't overwhelmed by choice, aren't opposed to using the tools and algorithms of consumer society they're told they must use to exist responsibly in the modern world (Apple computers, Samsung screens, 3D printers), and are all looking for validation within an academic system that expects them to work and teach responsibly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The New Conformists.

Some of the work was good and would have been better if viewed through a non-Romantic lens. I particularly enjoyed Jonathan Monaghan's baroque decoration flying apart and slowly drifting through a virtual cubicle environment, Krist Wood's collection of physics-modeling demos by one- or two-time users culled from YouTube and elsewhere, Katie Torn's Tanguy-esque collages, and other non-romantic works.

Completely missing from the show was the lo-fi or DIY trend in new media that's as close as the field gets to a Romantic impulse, in the sense of the Arts & Crafts Movement's response to industrialization or William Blake's contention that Isaac Newton killed the cosmos. This rebel, self-help tendency has been manifested in the past with the Bent Festival (circuit bending), Blipfest (chiptunes made with "obsolete" gear) or anyone trying to make their own computers or an alternate, non-corporate/government Internet. At Eyebeam it was Apple gear as far as the eye could see. Sorry, Steve Jobs was not romantic.

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We're a competitive species, we're told, so there's something hard-wired about wanting to know how we're scoring. It's this innate whatever that makes the current internet thrive. Grow your followers. Attract more friends. Your every utterance needs a popularity count. Five people liked your tweet! You are encouraged to check constantly by having "notification" numbers appearing at the top of your page -- it's not neurotic and fucked-up at all to investigate those numbers further, to obsess about your stats -- it's OK, it's the libertarian, neoliberal model. It's like a game, right? Game-ification results in more customer involvement with a brand. Social media allows advertisers to rate people as they are rating themselves. Give people numbers, it's fun!

The prophets and holy people of religion (particularly Buddhism) might say this was a false premise, that the internet is not a place for a healthy, mindful existence. When you're out in the world you don't have a number pinned to your back listing your total followers. It's generally considered rude, outside of Dallas, Texas, to ask when first meeting someone, "how much money do you make?" It would be creepy to ask a stranger how many internet friends he has. Your stats aren't a fit subject for discussion yet there they are, at the top of your page, like a scarlet letter. You can't turn them off. The success of the business model and the American way of life depends on these counts, we're told by our Gods, the new Gods, the job-creators and monopolizers of Silicon Valley.

Some notes on a Rhizome.org post about Joshua Decter's curated shows of mostly painting, sculpture, and photography with a "new media" gloss. Decter walks us through three projects from 1996-2006. A common thread is The Curator As Artist.

I saw his "Screen" show in '96 at Petzel, a scattershot, salon-style installation of works by top painters of the day, mainly in the abstract vein. He placed TV cameras in the room to film the works -- I supposed the images were being fed to this now-quaint web page on adaweb. Today we would call the design of that site "dirt-style" HTML -- a hideous ochre background with magenta letters, shaky frames, and a charming "while you're waiting for the images to load..." apology on the checklist page.

Decter had been writing for Arts magazine, when it flourished in the early '90s under Barry Schwabsky's editorship, and his byline began appearing in Artforum around this time, so he had gatekeeper power to attract top artists. Many of these painters may have professed an interest in electronic media but their primary focus was still the slow, hand-crafted object. Their work wasn't particularly well served to be hung in a cattle-call show, shot on video (cropped and off-center), and ultimately reduced to low-resolution raster images. Yes, there was mediation, spectacle, etc, hot buzzwords at the time, but a painter takes some pains to make an object that thrives on slow, "time-release" time scale. The disservice is even more evident now, as the captures from mid-'90s TV interwoven with the paintings on the website have a depressing, late-night infomercial vibe, while the paintings barely register.

Decter feels that his "virtual artist" and "virtual curator" kiosks at MCA Chicago in 1999 differed from the familiar interactive displays of museum education departments across the country. This seems wrong but I can't back it up with hard stats. It would be interesting to do a survey of how many virtual galleries with Google Sketch-Up-like versions of the collection have been presented by museums over the years, or programs like Decter's "Make your own Baldessari" software. They reduce the, again, slow, process of artistic thought and individuation of the physical collections to simplified mix and match objects, and minimize artists to a few characteristic style tics, e.g., "put a blue circle on a face and make a Baldessari." The MCA Chicago show also anticipates the virtual gallery trend of current new media artists, which flatters art world power structures by placing (mostly inept) 3D objects in white cube environments.

For his 2006 project at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Decter sided with the architectural community in its ongoing war against artists, typically manifested in high-concept starchitect buildings that reduce the art to ornamentation or afterthought. Decter commissioned a firm to build a crazy, room-filling kiosk -- a biomorphic jungle of sleek forms invoking HR Giger and The Matrix's robotic squids, for display of comparatively tiny, digitized versions of artists' artworks.

In all of these projects brand name artists from the gallery system serve as a salad bar for Decter's new media exploration. Most are probably resigned to seeing their works reduced in size and impact for the intellectual cachet of a modern high-tech show. And most are "old media" names: John Currin, Anna Gaskell, Andres Serrano, Matthew Barney, etc. Similar concepts to Decter's (surveillance, quantification of "unique" objects, virtual spaces) have been simultaneously limned in the new media sphere, at SIGGRAPH or Eyebeam or on Rhizome, with their own networks of curator and artist celebrities. The Rhizome post ultimately provides a fascinating glimpse at how fields with differing expectations and critical standards can exist side by side, each without ever critiquing the other.

Update: I wrote that in Decter's "Screen" show of paintings at Friedrich Petzel in 1996, "he placed TV cameras in the room to film the works." In his reply to this post on Rhizome Decter clarifies that he "took photographs of the installation of artworks, digitized these images, and worked with an editor on an AVID system at a professional studio to generate a video catalogue of the exhibition. This video catalogue was distributed as the only catalogue of the show, and was also played on video monitors within the gallery during the run of the show." Apologies for the error.