Re: <nettime> Lev on the embarressment of digital art

[voyd@voyd.com]

 

On Mon, 21 Sep 2020 10:26:40 -0400, voyd@voyd.com wrote:
 

Steve, thanks for this, and yeah, the Tactical Media Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test was a great trip. What a ride, and it might not be done. However.

This might seem like the biggest non-committal answer possible, but I see how this slices, one way or the other. I certainly channel Steve in thinking of his position like Kandinsky calling art "of its time". Also, looked at formally, old digital art can look pretty awful - but only if you look at it a certain way. Ok, some of the old stuff is pixelated, or, or, or, and might deal with the medium a bit stiffly. But one thing that I say about things like the 80's and 90's is that there were a lot of things we just didn't have terms for, and thanks, Lev for theorizing some of it, but the New Media age was at the crossroads of Krokerian Crash hipness and the full-on Postmodern Avant, as we are with the Speculative today, or something that I look to Suhail Malik with interest for, the Post-Contemporary.

I give things a lot of slack for being of their time. Looked at in their context, I really enjoy most work.

However, I think two things - neoliberalism is just the bane of art, and institutions can just suck the air out of things almost instantaneously if you let them. 
I remember here in Abu Dhabi seeing Inventing Downtown at the NYU gallery, and and seeing the vibrancy of the Downtown scene of the 50's, all the artist-run spaces and their work. And I remember Rothko talking about the fact that they were like Shamans; something that I hold to my heart to this day.  And yes, after the artworld ballooned in the 90's and the artists with New Media MFAs in the mid 2000's hit the artworld, there is a lot more technological media art, some of it good, a lot derivative and tasteless. I roll my eyes at Vaporwave for being a bad analogy for my Atari 5200 video games, but as Cory once said, a lot; of contemporary New Media hits at a false nostalgia, and the Classicist representation of suureal figure s in immersive media hit me as an indexical gesture.

As a number of books on the contemporary art scene, including Michael Schnayerson's "Boom", the contemporary boom of the 90's and the postinternet reply to Claire Bishop's contemporary disavowal of the digital merely shifts the locus of the work as cultural value/power instrument. We have New Media artists making prints in museums that can digest them. Fair enough. I also know that Marisa Olson argues with me that the postinternet impulse was building long before the mid-2000's, but my experience is that New Media's real push into the contemporary was definitely in the mid 2000's, to be generous.

Then, with the acceptance of technoculture  by High Culture, which is often bound to the agendas of status and capital, two things I have had a strained relationship with (as one of RTMark/Yes Men), then inevitable comes. Acceptable Art. the current generations ahistorical wishes to sweep the "old" away (the Futurist maneuver). At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly. I like art that dares to be a little disagreeable, and not scrape to "empty gestures of status" (Baudrillard), and this way it just seemed that New Media got Hoovered up.

Also, as one of the Board of the Wrong, the adoption of Kepler's Garden approach by Ars was too much like ours for our comfort.  Institutional ersatz for the four 1600+ artist grass root bienniales that, in my opinion mirror Malik's notion of art's exit from the Contemporary through veracity and agency of the artist.  I understand Lev's exhaustion with Kepler\s Gardens, they seemed far more heavy and staged than the Burning man -like hoedown The Wrong throws. And in fact, Burning Man went Virtual this year, and that seemesd to be super wonky.

I feel we might be at a minor Arendt-ian crisis of culture as entities scramble around for survival and attention, but I see the genuine doing OK.

And for planned obsolescence in medi art - I made 8 Bits or Less as an impossibly low resolution with the intention of the timelessness of the pixel, usong 40 year old Slow Scan TV devices for the sheer texture of time and grain on the CRT. This has flesh and blood in it, for sure.  And for my upcoming Confinement Spaces work, I abjectly strolled the streets of Abu Dhabi. making shattered landscape scans witht he now-defunct Display.Land app, conteplating the dreamlike state the world was in, pondering my existential crises under the pandemic. My work is as "fi" as I want it at the time, as I am aware of history, the advances of technology, and I use them in my work like texture. Using time like texture, I like that.

If you're looking for media to be commodifiable, well-behaved, and fitting n a box well, then may I say your sales be plentiful. As for me, as with the unfortunate souls of many before me with names far more famous than mine, I reside in the "soul-work" of using the process of making as a critical working through of questions I never understood.  And this has meant reveling at the edge of time's sea, I don't mind seeming anachronistic, because I already made it that way - but you never know. Second Life is back; who the hell would have thought. I'm writing this from there now.

To the young feeling they made something shiny and new and for the Dutti-clad onlookers eager to see the fashionble art of the day, I will be there and give you an elbow bump in Dubai. Then I will drive my clattering Jaguar home to my culttural meth lab of an art studio, with "Joan Jett's Bad Reputation" on.

I am beginning to feel like a venerable OG, unstuck in time as in Slaughterhouse five, and feeling fine with seeing glossy articifial Bacons to the grittieest of DRRTY New Media (yes that was for you, Cates), and I grow weary as a Grandson of Fluxus, interventionism, tactical media, and all this. For all their monolithic institutionalism, AEC did OK with Kepler's Garden, but they missed the UAE and Kazakhstan, but they got Antarctica. Bravo.

For lev; Yeah, this is getting to be a lot like Netflix, and it's tedious. On the other hand, I love art for what it is, when it is, and even though they are all my friends, when I step back I see this all as multidimesional chess, and that's fine.  

For Steve: I'm probably still going to be a contestationalist til I die, and also a pataphysicist and a phemomenollogist.  I like to dissect things, and I'm sorry of that makes me a little disagreeable at time, I'm generally a good sort who li=oves kids and cats.


On Fri, 18 Sep 2020 21:16:42 +0000, "Kurtz, Steven" <sjkurtz@buffalo.edu> wrote:

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