curt cloninger
Since the beginning
Works in Canton, North Carolina United States of America

ARTBASE (7)
BIO
Curt Cloninger is an artist, writer, and Associate Professor of New Media at the University of North Carolina Asheville. His art undermines language as a system of meaning in order to reveal it as an embodied force in the world. His art work has been featured in the New York Times and at festivals and galleries from Korea to Brazil. Exhibition venues include Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Granoff Center for The Creative Arts (Brown University), Digital Art Museum [DAM] (Berlin), Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art (Chicago), Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, and the internet. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including commissions for the creation of new artwork from the National Endowment for the Arts (via Turbulence.org) and Austin Peay State University's Terminal Award.

Cloninger has written on a wide range of topics, including new media and internet art, installation and performance art, experimental graphic design, popular music, network culture, and continental philosophy. His articles have appeared in Intelligent Agent, Mute, Paste, Tekka, Rhizome Digest, A List Apart, and on ABC World News. He is also the author of eight books, most recently One Per Year (Link Editions). He maintains lab404.com, playdamage.org , and deepyoung.org in hopes of facilitating a more lively remote dialogue with the Sundry Contagions of Wonder.
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DISCUSSION

Re: R2D2: Conceptual Art


Miklos Legrady wrote:

> "the net as a whole is more interesting [than any individual work of net art.]" This
> statement does not and cannot make sense.

Hi Miklos,
You may be right, but I'd be interested to hear you elaborate. What is it about that statement that cannot make sense?

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Conceptual Art


Geert Dekkers wrote:

> if quality were to mean a serious
> try to reposition content/medium/reality/representation then I think
> we already agree that that would be a good thing.

But still not good enough. Like Rob is saying, the seriousness of the try matters less than how well it comes off.

> See? "We" (who's that) should be asking more interesting/vital
> questions. Instead, "we" are just saving our skin. (And, for the
> record, yes, that absolutely includes me. Every day.)

You're just being modest. If the "_ This Concept" Project is proto-conceptual instructionalism in the medium of prose, you've been doing the same (with even more wryness) in the medium of illustration and animation since 2009 -- http://nznl.com/geert/repository.php

There is a Bucky Fuller exhibit here in Asheville right now at the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center ( http://www.blackmountaincollege.org ). His original patented blueprints for stuff (cars, houses, machines) are hung above photographs of the actual built stuff. The blueprints themselves are exhilarating, much more so than his prose elsewhere describing the concepts behind his constructions.

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Conceptual Art


>The importance of the podcast, blogging, etc, to me, is not the
>quality of its product- I think that is an inevitability as people
>get used to the tools. But what is more exciting to me is the
>ability of any individual to access the technology to create and
>distribute thier product and to allow others to take it, manipulate
>it, and distribute the manipulations.Which makes me think of the
>conceptual art exchange that you've been talking about: by giving
>people the instructions to make a piece of art, you also give them
>the ability to customize it, interact with it much more directly,
>something that appeals to our "Pimp My Ride" culture for sure. It is
>also a different medium because it is designed to be experiential
>and generated rather than intellectualized and recieved.

right on. Eddo Stern says the net as a whole is more interesting
than any individual work of net art, and he may be right. But
networked collaborations and remix culture aren't necessarily the
exclusive province of conceptual art.

>The thing about it is, conceptual artists have already been doing
>it. My relationship with Fluxus exists solely because of the Fluxus
>Performance Work Book. I've never seen a Fluxus piece performed, but
>it still interested me just to read about them through the "scores"
>that exist. Also, it has a much earlier analog in music theory. You
>would go out and buy the instructions for performing a piece of
>music rather than a recording.

In some Baroque-era music there was even allowance for interpretive
improvisation within the score.

DISCUSSION

Re: Conceptual Art


Hi Eryk,

Hope you are doing well.

e:
Whether I ever hear a podcast that blows me
away is almost irrelevant to the benefits of the technology simply existing.

c:
but that's just enthusiasm about the potential of a new communications technology. I agree; it's potentially exciting. I'm certainly not arguing against the value of concepts. I'm not even arguing against art that traffics in concepts (most art does).

e:
Conceptual art is a means of breaking out
of boxes and exploring different ways of doing things (and a lot of it is
deliberately engaged in violating the rules of language itself as a means of
exploring the limitation of language itself. An idea is not always, as you
say, "a collection of words").

c:
in the sixties and seventies conceptual art was a means of breaking out of boxes. now conceptual art has escaped those boxes to become its own box. describing one's concepts without ever implementing them is the next logical means of breaking out of *that* box. Twice the concepts in half the time; and you can spend your free time actually making good art. Instructionists of the web, post forth!

e:
But I have never really been comfortable with the
segregation of "forms" of creative thought.

c:
I'm even less comfortable with the segregation of concept from craft, as if the former trumps the latter and is totally independent of it.

e:
Artistry is fast losing its definition as a skill set; technology is going
to make sure of it. As that opens up the creative process, ideas are going
to grow far more important than the technical execution of an idea. It's not
about the quality of the art, it's about the quality of the articulation.

c:
but what is "quality of articulation" if not "artistry" and craft (unless you're talking about "crafting" an artist statement)? If what you're saying is true, why "articulate" anything at all? Just post instructions.

e:
(A more
practical example is the notion of audio tracking software that allows for
an entire genre of popular music to be made by individuals without any idea
of how to play an "actual" instrument). As technology accelerates the number
of radio producers, musicians, film makers, magazine publishers, and
artists, the tangible output is going to be secondary to the concept driving
it. In other words, if anyone can make anything with the tap of their
finger, then the idea of what they make, and the fact that they have
articulated it, will be far more important than the process of how it was
made.

c:
There is still craft in electronic music and hip-hop, otherwise anyone could be Amon Tobin or DJ Spooky. Such music is not accomplished with a mere tap of the finger. It's craft applied to a different aspect of the creative process, but it's sure enough craft. As Brian Eno observed as early as 1975, the recording studio itself is an instrument.

e:
I've read Curt using, specifically, the example of Michael Mandiberg's
"After Sherri Levine": Walker Evans takes photographs of share croppers in
1936, Sherri Levine, in 79, takes pictures of the pictures and puts them on
line. Mandiberg, in 2001, scans Evans' originals, and puts them on line,
then scans Levine's pictures of those pictures and puts them on line,
elsewhere. Curt says the work is poor because it couldn't exist without an
artists statement- and that, therefore, the artists statement is the piece.
The artists statement is always an explanation of history and context. But
Mandiberg's artist's statement is a history and a context, of art, and how
we re-evaluate art as technology changes our interactions with the world.
"After Sherri Levine" makes a point that strikes a nerve; but also crackles
the synapses as it makes new connections between ideas.

It is not exactly a moving piece of emotional art, a call to arms, a protest
piece, or anything of the sort. But it does say something interesting in an
interesting way- and saying something interesting is about all any of us
with access to the right technology will need to know how to do.

c:
i think "After Sherri Levine" is a cheap one-liner. Ba-dum-bum. I think art can do better.

Mere technology didn't usher in the promises of a brave new modern world in Le Corbusier's time, and I'm not holding my breath for it to happen in ours (although Wired keeps assuring me it's just around the bend). Luckily, I don't have to wait on technology. Heck, I don't even have to wait on an intern. As a proto-conceptual instructionist, i need only post my concepts. Whether a bot or a human is able to implement them is no longer my concern. Up with the mouth! Long live the mind! Down with the hand! Death to the eye!

the love below,
HAL 3000

DISCUSSION

Re: Regarding The "Anti-Nike"


Joe Nolan wrote:

> A friend of mine just sent me a link to Charlotte's front page
> rant/spoof regarding flooding the meme-way with concepts alone instead
> of "realized" conceptual art. Although this is obviously a fun/tongue
> in cheek call to arms, in many ways I think this is a fundamental
> critique of "conceptual art" and a pointed observation of it's
> fundamental flaws.

http://www.spark-online.com/issue24/cloninger.html
lightning rod as maypole. round and round we go.

> Being somewhat over-the-top as an artist and a person I, naturally,
> tend to push this to it's logical conclusion and concern myself with
> the ultimate "unspeakable": God and man's impulse toward the
> transcendent.

http://biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus35:30-37:29