Search Results for: surf club

Michael Manning gives Brad Troemel's essay "From Clubs to Affinity: The Decentralization of Art on the Internet" a thorough rebuttal and fact-check on his blog. Manning's conclusion:

The historical narrative you portray: 90’s utopia disrupted by a web 2.0 capitalist regime, which paved the way for a group of elitist artists seeking institutional recognition via surf clubs, and which was finally brought down by the populist Tumblr using Internet artist, is in the end simply inaccurate, and overly dramatized.

Troemel's essay follows a familiar pattern of art world writing. Tell a story of how a particular kind of art changes or evolves, quote some interesting, semi-related theory from a Frankfurt School philosopher, and then draw analogies between the art and the philosophy. The reader comes to feel that the art changes must be important and learns some theory in the process. In "Clubs to Affinity" the philosophy is Jurgen Habermas' notion of an evolving "public sphere," which Troemel grafts into the story of "art on the internet since the mid-'90s." Yet he gets many parts of the art narrative wrong, as Manning notes, making the graft awkward and unconvincing.

An important part of a public sphere, surely, is the open exchange of ideas and information. Yet when Manning submitted his essay as a comment to the 491 online magazine, the comment "experienced 'problems' when submitted and was for whatever reason not able to be posted," according to Manning. Yet a comment supporting Troemel's essay was approved. I asked the editor of 491, Bret Schneider, about this. My comment has been awaiting moderation since yesterday (see note* below).

It may be that arguments such as this one from Manning are just too strong for 491:

The minimal shift in platform from a WordPress (surf clubs) to a Tumblr (web 2.0 decentralized artists) most importantly did not replace or make obsolete the collective site or format of the surf club. Joint Tumblrs and collective curatorial exercises perpetuate the hierarchy that the surf clubs 'created' unintentionally. These types of Tumblrs similar to surf clubs are exclusive and have received institutional recognition (which to be clear I find acceptable, exclusivity doesn’t bother me all that much). The essay assumes that by giving everyone a Tumblr that they will each carry the same clout and the democratic process of peer 2 peer social interactions (likes and reblogs) will determine the success of work. The downside of this platform is describe[d] as users that become [quoting Troemel] "hollow shells waiting for Facebook comments, Tumblr reblogs, and promotional Tweets to provide the substance of [their] being" which hypocritically seems to epitomize the type of elitism mistakenly ascribed to surf clubs.

*Here is my comment to Schneider; if he publishes it and/or replies I will do an update.

Update: After Manning posted his comment on his own blog and the response was noted on a couple of sites, his original submission appeared on 491 in mangled form (no hyperlinks, text missing, font inexplicably switches to italic halfway through). My comment asking where the post went was never approved.

Update 2: The mangled version was taken down and the comment now consists of a link to Manning's post on his own blog.

Update 3: My comment appeared a few days after Manning's.

A few more responses to Brad Troemel's internet art history:

1. Many of those 90s "art" websites such as Mouchette, praised by Troemel for their utopian anonymity, were famously insider-y and hard to navigate. Sally McKay nailed the work of that period as "long-loading, find-the-place-to-click-me narratives packed with theoretically correct reference to the body or lack thereof."

2. Troemel suggests that after the dot-com collapse and 9/11, anonymity went out of fashion and people started identifying themselves. Yet the most talked-about sites of the "warblogging era" (on the left, at least) were Media Whores Online, Eschaton, Hullabaloo, and Billmon, all anonymous. The first art blogs, while not as covert as the political bloggers, tended to have handles such as Iconoduel, NEWSGrist, Bare and Bitter Sleep, etc. rather than proper names.

3. This is pretty, er, imaginative: "The surf clubs’ initial underdog status soon transitioned to one of institutional success for many members as venues like the Venice Biennale, the New Museum and a slew of international galleries endorsed club participants." Troemel makes no distinction between the club members's individual careers and their activities in the clubs, and greatly inflates "institutional success." A place in Miltos Manetas' "internet pavilion" is what Troemel means by "Venice Biennale"; the one-off IRL exhibition in Williamsburg is his link for "galleries" in that phrase "a slew of international galleries."

Brad Troemel (or is it Bret Schneider?) has another long footnoted screed up, this time tying a history of net art to Jurgen Habermas' notions of the "public sphere."

What is the point of having footnotes, though, if they don't actually support what you're saying? Troemel cites the internet surfing club Nasty Nets as an example of Habermas' "early bourgeoisie [sic] public sphere." (Hard to type that sentence and not laugh, since no one in the club makes a dime off of it.) Troemel claims that by Nasty's and other clubs' creation of "a meta-organizational structure within the internet"--this was around 2006--"not everyone would be able to participate in posting works, though many more viewers would be able to engage the work of prominent and emerging internet artists... due to the convenience of the clubs' unifying site of display." Yet one of the things that was often noted about Nasty Nets (within and without the group--speaking as a longtime user) was that it wasn't a platform for people's individual art, but everyone had some idea of a "good Nasty Nets post." Troemel acknowledges this, sort of ("surf clubs also espoused no specified intention beyond serving as a host environment to a series of visual-conceptual jests"), but then makes great hay of the idea that members had to be "qualified," as in having special talents or credentials. His footnote for that, a Guthrie Lonergan interview, doesn't really support that assertion, in fact would seem to contradict it. Here's the relevant passage from Lonergan:

In early 2006, I wanted to start some kind of Internet surfing community site with surf buddies John Michael Boling and Joel Holmberg. We rolled around a ton of different complex structural ideas, but we eventually decided to simply start a blog (duh). Marisa Olson helped us get it going... Basically, Nasty Nets was all the surfers I'd met through trading links on del.icio.us who'd already been developing a special "taste" in surfing: a fascination with defaults and a certain kind of banal deadpan. (I'll point to Travis Hallenbeck as the obvious best example of this kind of surfing.) It seemed like a wonderfully unpretentious and playfully nerdy thing to do, for artists who live in different parts of the world to unite though an online club. (Of course collectives Beige and Paper Rad were big influences here...) I love that every surf club seems to develop its own rhythm, even without setting forth any official goals or rules something coherent seems to develop organically (like a band). I think after a while, a lot of us felt like NN lost that rhythm and got too big... I've been praying that new surf clubs would pop up in its (temporary?) absence-- I'm really stoked for Kevin [Bewersdorf] and Paul [Slocum]'s new surf club, Spirit Surfers!

"Special taste in surfing" is meant to be sort of ironic here, I think. Am missing the part where Lonergan lays out qualifications for membership. It's semi-important to nail this down. If the surf clubs don't stand for what Troemel says they stand for ("contained unity"), then his arguments based on Habermas about the post-surf club environment being "a form of consensual affinity" make even less sense. Lonergan notes that the "club" (again, that's supposed to be ironic) had its origins in a shared bookmarking site anyone could sign up for, del.icio.us. How was the Nasty Nets "club" really different from a Yahoo! Group (where founders grant admin privileges--or not--to new members) or a YouTube playlist? Guthrie, John Michael, and Joel "curated" a group of surfers with whom they had "affinity." Tumblr and dump automate surfing and re-surfing to a much larger, faster degree, but a group blog is just another vehicle for how affinities are expressed in the Web 2.0 melee. The surf clubbers' "prominence" is mostly in the mind of the viewer--the props from one institutional site were nice but Troemel also vastly overstates its career-making potential.

Have spent much time dumping at dump.fm the past few weeks (chat page possibly not work safe). Am now in the Hall of Fame (caution--giant crab; also updated hourly so the fame will be fleeting). Dump.fm is a non-exclusive surf club (anyone can sign up and dump) that has vastly broadened the range and speed of internet consumption/recycling/restating/original-content-making. It's not really described as a surf club (rather, it's a real-time image sharing site) but the design and technology have resulted in a collective style and wisdom and people with talents that might not be appreciated elsewhere, much as was the case with Nasty Nets, et al.

Dialog on the site is sketchy since it's a chat room but discussion was never a strong suit of surf clubs anyway. It has been interesting to watch big names on the Net (net art wise) come to the site, assert a personal style, and then sink or swim in the permanent tidal wave of in-jokes and sensory overload. Some get it into it and adapt their styles to the house and others never come back. Not sure if I have the stamina but am giving it my best shot because it's fun and am learning so much.

Will not single out my favorite dumpers but really like a few who scour the net for small, understated finds that shine when taken out of context or can be made into new artworks: the fruits of old GIF sites, bad webpage graphics, Op Art patterns, scientific diagrams... Also a few artists who make surprising juxtapositions of images, and/or animated, multi-part collages. You can have Bravo-TV and its reality show: I am watching the real art being made in real time on the net.

Was sort of a proto dumper (see examples from 2003 / 2007) so am feeling very at home in this environment and am learning many new tricks from other dumpers.

For the next few posts will be recycling/remaking some of my dumping contributions.

Update: Jesse Patrick Martin and Hypothete have also written about their experiences on dump.fm. More dumpology to be posted soon.

A theory listicle

Duncan Alexander:

Postmodern art is at the end of its life. The monolith of Modernism was torn down successfully decades ago, and since then, the once hip, edgy and avant-garde movement has run out of places to go. Instead, 'fine' art has turned inward, gnawing at its own structures in critique. Meanwhile, popular culture has dramatically changed around art from a mainstream, centralized package into a plurality of fandoms with their own artistic methods and traditions. With this essay, I intend to explore the nature of this shift, its implications for art, and the methods which current artists are using in the new cultural model.

[...]

A friend of mine once half-seriously joked that "Postmodernism died on August 7, 2000." This was the day that Deviant Art, one of the largest arts-and-crafts based communities on the Internet, was founded. What he meant by this remark was that the relevancy of fine art in society had begun to diminish because of the rise of group-centric art practices. Deviant Art allows producers of images, music and literature to band together via connected profiles and share their content. Most of the content hosted is 'fan art,' unofficial art depicting characters from pop culture. These works fall all over the board in quality, from highly polished paintings and sculptural work to crude (and often vulgar) crayon drawings produced by the sites’ younger or less talented inhabitants. The advantage of this system for all participants is that it contains an artificial structure – all artists know what the characters should look like, and so can test the flexibility of the personas and settings that fans bring to the Web.

[...]

My examples of localization that I have discussed so far have been internet-specific, but I should be clear that the phenomenon is not limited to online, 'outsider' art. I would go as far as to include artist Takashi Murakami in this trend, with his use of the now globally recognizable Anime aesthetic. His art does not need an understanding of art history in order to enjoy the work. Viewers can choose to delve into the political underpinnings of his paintings, relate to them by their personal experience of Anime, or even enjoy them purely aesthetically. They are a new form of Pop, more interested in the “stock image” shapes that construct Anime than the content itself. Murakami’s Kaikai Kiki collective also explores multiple reinterpretations of the base of the Anime aesthetic, resulting in the style/philosophy that they term 'Superflat.'

My reply to Alexander (it's not fair for me to re-post this reply to just excerpts--you really need to read Alexander's whole essay):

Belatedly catching up to your "Big Picture" essay. I mostly agree with it. It's relevant to the Boris Groys discussion at AFC [Alexander posted a link to it there - ed.] but only tangentially. My guess is Groys doesn't know beans about fan culture (I'm reading "Art Power" now and can report later on his knowledge level.)
The problem of trying to put something like deviantart or 4chan into a grand timeline of art history movements is there is no cause and effect. Artists can be interested in these subcultures but the reverse isn't true. This is where the Groys lecture "Everyone is an artist" perhaps comes in - he's saying it doesn't matter if the people with the cat websites are schooled or not - it's enough that they're drifting away from the dominant culture, thereby weakening its foundations. "Professional" artists can similarly drift away into areas of niche expertise or semi-private activities.
My biggest quibble with your essay is your choice of some artists. I've written about Takashi Murakami--I don't trust his motives or like his work--he's cynically exploiting western curatorial anxiety about being "too Western." His ambitions are too large and too capitalistic. Martin Denker is an interesting choice--I didn't know that work.
I would say, forget the historical narrative at this point. The painters hanging out at Paddy's (see Amy Sillman threads) aren't interested in where technology might take us--why should we help them by retroactively validating them as links to present practices? I am more interested in developing a way of talking about the present subcultures you are interested in without always referring back to the story of movements and countermovements. Arguably postmodernism is broad enough to capture all Balkanized, post-historical practices, including deviantart, and I'm happy to leave it at that.

Rhizome Surf Club vs 4Chan discussion

Rhizome Surf Club vs Rhizome discussion

Creepy Clown vs New Media (my post wrestling with this topic eight years ago: the concern was more with fan subcultures vs institutional "new media" than fan cultures vs the institutional art world and its history).

Deviantart mentions on my old blog

Update: Changed an erroneous link to an Amy Sillman AFC thread. The angry painter threads are here and here.

Update 2: My conversation with Duncan Alexander is continuing here.