Search Results for: internet circulation

Some more oppositional writing in response to a Rhizome.org post, in this case Ceci Moss' Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu. Hers is yet another screed attempting to nail down a recuperative art of connection, which she calls "expanded" (a la Rosalind Krauss' "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," although Krauss isn't mentioned) after offering a laundry list of the damned of similar terms: Post internet, post media, post media aesthetics, radicant art [no, really], dispersion, formatting, meme art, and circulationism. Am not sure if I believe in hermeticism or if it's just agitprop in my role as Rhizome's resident angry comment dude. The contours of hermeticism are defined mainly by disgust with the top-down editorial conceit of circulation qua circulation as a desirable or necessary condition of the present moment. The van den Dorpel and Murphy examples are taken from Moss' essay and re-spun.

In view of the plethora of terms all saying the same obvious thing (not all internet art takes place on the net) let's propose a new term suggested by Ceci Moss' essay: hermeticism. The hermeticist artist keeps to herself in spite of the widespread and much-flacked availability of online connections in the social media era. While not shunning collaboration or eclecticism, the hermeticist artist believes "the buck stops here" with regard to artistic expression, "here" being the artist's own judgment and decision-making process. The hermeticist artist still has a studio, even if it is located in a single device. The hermeticist pursues shamanic and occult practices in the face of consensus art-making. Many hermeticist artists operate as artistic outsiders, a considerable achievement in an era of maximum surveillance and self-surveillance (i.e., commodified confession), but not all hermeticists are paranoid loners. Harm van den Dorpel's Assemblages is a classic hermeticist work, where noise from the digital economy is obsessively collected, mixed with the artist's own gestures, and fused into a primary structure resembling an atomic sphere. Van den Dorpel's private studio activity de-recuperates a wealth of data that has meaning in other contexts, creating an autobiographical talisman others find pleasurable to view. Similarly, Brenna Murphy produces discrete objects in the form of floor patterns that are individually photographed and operate according to their own perverse internal logic. These will be mistaken after the fact as metaphors for communitarian circulation when they are in fact monuments to a kind of sublime self-awareness. The hermeticist artist is not concerned on any level [with] whether art "pushes us forward" but instead moves inward at tangential angles to the dominant networked culture. [To be continued]

To Stephen Truax for mentions in his post Artists on the Internet. Will give this a closer look and report; am happy to be included as an artist but wanted to say a few words about self-promotion. Truax was the email correspondent I referred to earlier, and I am still uncomfortable with "minor leagues" and the idea of promotion in the Mad Men sense for artists.

Have written more press releases for myself and others than I can remember but they were always addressed to critics and editors of "art beat" writing for general circulation media. The goal was to communicate an idea that the artist was trying to get across, with some kind of story hook, as opposed to promoting the artist as a character or personality. When I started blogging I briefly used a photo of myself but then settled on that dot pattern because I wanted the personality of the blog to be words and pictures, not me me me.

Truax mentions several recent social media art histories, including this one by An Xiao, which, like many others', starts with the creation of Facebook. But of course before Facebook there was the "art blogosphere," which arose in tandem with the political blogosphere in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bush's Iraq invasion. Was just perusing a specimen from that era (which I still had in my browser bookmarks), the blog "Thickeye," by Benjamin Godsill, who later became a curatorial associate at the New Museum. He blogged regularly from '04 to '06, and instead of an instant network provided by Mark Zuckerberg, readers found him through links and Google searches. Here, for example, is a report he did on the Beige collective's 2004 lecture/performance at the Whitney (BEIGE was Cory Arcangel, Joe Beuckmann, Joseph Bonn, and Paul B. Davis).

Was also recently re-reading this post (with comments!) from 2005, where I was complaining about the art world's lack of awareness of the internet. All that changed a couple of years later when Zuckerberg's "internet lite" made it easy for everyone to get online.

Have been toying with the idea of a book documenting the blogosphere period, to be called The Lost Years: Art on the Net Between the Dot Com Crash and the Rise of Facebook.