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.
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.
Re: Re: Too Much Information!!! j/k, LOL
ben wrote:
>whatever your excuses for
>making art are, the goal of every artist is to make a powerful
>statement.
Oh the hyperbole! Play, hobbyism, a desire to create alternate worlds, a desire to bring things into being, a desire to communicate, personal therapy, intelleectual exploration, worship -- all valid reasons to make art, none having anything to do with making a powerful statement. Perhaps the goal of every B/MFA student is to make a powerful statement, but this too shall pass.
>whatever your excuses for
>making art are, the goal of every artist is to make a powerful
>statement.
Oh the hyperbole! Play, hobbyism, a desire to create alternate worlds, a desire to bring things into being, a desire to communicate, personal therapy, intelleectual exploration, worship -- all valid reasons to make art, none having anything to do with making a powerful statement. Perhaps the goal of every B/MFA student is to make a powerful statement, but this too shall pass.
Re: video games vs. film [was: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology]
Hi Francis. I haven't done any research. I just like to throw
around dramatic statistics that prove my point. (In this instance,
it was an independent film theatre, so I don't think it's much of a
stretch to say video games outsell independent films.)
I found this article:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid
around dramatic statistics that prove my point. (In this instance,
it was an independent film theatre, so I don't think it's much of a
stretch to say video games outsell independent films.)
I found this article:
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid
Re: Too Much Information!!! j/k, LOL
Hi Ben,
cf: http://www.file.org.br/file2004/filescript/english/textos/lev.htm
particularly the final section, "Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-sublime"
Manovich's proposed solution is *not* to make artistic visualizations more accurately/sceintifically representative of their data sources. Instead, he seems to recommend the injection of personal subjectivity into the mapping process -- not an abandonment of abstraction altogether, but the pursuit of a more intentional/resonant/subjective abstraction.
peace,
curt
_
Ben wrote:
Thank you Pall, for providing a model for viewing these works. I remain
unswayed though; not to bank everything on your final analogy, but
often a data-fed work would look the same if it were fed random
numbers, whereas "hippies" putting flowers in random locations would
have a very different effect; those flowers were guided missiles. The
question becomes, why bother feeding it real data if you need to be
told what the work is [assimilating/reprocessing]? Just use random
numbers! The conceptual statement about data overload remains the same.
In fact, everything remains the same except the stale non-novelty that
the work is drawing from live data. Just something to think about.
Further, who is actually interested in the amount of data flowing
around us constantly? I mean really interested. Is "too much
information!" a viable platform for artistic activity, or is it a
stalling tactic while one thinks of something more substantive to say?
At a certain point, to comment on the sea of data is like commenting on
the weather. Backbone traffic is high today, with a 30% chance of rain.
Personally, I would hope we could leave this topic to the first-year
New Media undergraduates and move on to something -- anything -- more
intriguing.
with optimism,
- ben
cf: http://www.file.org.br/file2004/filescript/english/textos/lev.htm
particularly the final section, "Meaningful Beauty: Data Mapping as Anti-sublime"
Manovich's proposed solution is *not* to make artistic visualizations more accurately/sceintifically representative of their data sources. Instead, he seems to recommend the injection of personal subjectivity into the mapping process -- not an abandonment of abstraction altogether, but the pursuit of a more intentional/resonant/subjective abstraction.
peace,
curt
_
Ben wrote:
Thank you Pall, for providing a model for viewing these works. I remain
unswayed though; not to bank everything on your final analogy, but
often a data-fed work would look the same if it were fed random
numbers, whereas "hippies" putting flowers in random locations would
have a very different effect; those flowers were guided missiles. The
question becomes, why bother feeding it real data if you need to be
told what the work is [assimilating/reprocessing]? Just use random
numbers! The conceptual statement about data overload remains the same.
In fact, everything remains the same except the stale non-novelty that
the work is drawing from live data. Just something to think about.
Further, who is actually interested in the amount of data flowing
around us constantly? I mean really interested. Is "too much
information!" a viable platform for artistic activity, or is it a
stalling tactic while one thinks of something more substantive to say?
At a certain point, to comment on the sea of data is like commenting on
the weather. Backbone traffic is high today, with a 30% chance of rain.
Personally, I would hope we could leave this topic to the first-year
New Media undergraduates and move on to something -- anything -- more
intriguing.
with optimism,
- ben
Re: Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology
Hi Ben (and all),
I'll respond point by point to various posts:
ben:
The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
ideas.
curt:
I agree with Rob and Pall here. There is a way to critically discuss abstraction that may involve engaging in formalistic/graphic design aesthetics that seem outmoded to you. So we can't discuss them because such critical discourse is not currently en vogue? But aren't we the ones (critics, artists, curators) who shape where the critical dialogue is going? If things on the net are becoming more hodge-podged and interbred with pop culture, what's to keep art critics from approaching such pieces as rock music critics or graphic design aesthetes? Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level. MTAA are reinterpreting early conceptual works and recontextualizing them in a hyper-mediated environment. None of this seems intellectually bereft to me, nor does it seem out of bounds or culturally irrelevant. If one current artistic mode is the remix, then we can expect to see earlier aspects of the "art tapestry" show up in the mix as well (whether consciously or unconsciously).
curt:
> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.
ben:
Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged
assumptions, made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if
sometimes implicit) questions.
curt:
But is the sum of the worth of their art the fact that they were remembered for it? Had they not been remembered, would their art still have value as art? Can it still be appreciated out of the context of its production? There are plenty of artists who have gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists, craftspeople in local artisan subcultures.
ben:
I definitely want to avoid personal
statements, but anyone who thinks these or any artists are
[important/interesting] because their work is aesthetically pleasing
has an [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded
hystorical context in which the work was produced. All "important" work
is about ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s
minimalists made their own provocative arguments.
curt:
So you assert. Here are some contrary voices:
"Knowledge and intelligence are puny flippers alongside clairvoyance. Ideas are a dull gas, a rarefied gas. Only when clairvoyance is extinguished do ideas and the blind fish of their waters -- the intellectuals -- appear. The reason art exists is because its mode of operation does not take the mode of ideas."
- jean dubuffet
"Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. More must happen than simply logically understandable things. Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art. It could then just be logical sentences in a form of a text for instance. Where objects are concerned it's more the sense of an indication or suggestion."
- joseph beuys
"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. By asking, "what does this mean?" they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things."
- rene magritte
Are they to be understood as Newton to your Einstein? That seems a convenient dismissal without having to actually counter the forcefullness of their positions. I'm hesitant to subscribe to the paradigm of paradigmatic revolutions in art and art criticism. As you concede, art ain't science.
curt:
> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever
> done.
ben:
It's not about waves,
it's about the dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work.
If what you do isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that
dialogue.
curt:
Challenging by whose criteria? As Pall points out, abstraction of data flows can be particularly challenging from several angles beyond just pure abstraction. Here are a few pieces to consider:
http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic angle)
http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)
ben:
As the "contemporary
art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.
curt:
I'm not sure which critics you're talking about and which artists your talking about here. Anyway, is it the artist's role to give critics "interesting" fodder? What if the artist is diametrically opposed to the contemporary paradigms of materialistic critical discourse? cf: http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/essays/curt.html
ben:
"Outsider"
art will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb"
about as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.
curt:
Sweet prose. Well played.
ben:
To call
the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
going to go that route, how about you take all of the
diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
say. ;)
curt:
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/
ben:
the most
interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum,
it's happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just
not engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.
curt:
I totally agree. But then some work doesn't lend itself well to contemporary critical dicussion. Is the problem with the work, or with contemporary modes of critical discussion? If all you can say of work like http://www.complexification.net is that it's FlashFormalism [insert silence], then I don't know where we go from there.
ben:
It's willful
intellectual amnesia.
curt:
another juicy nugget. excellent.
ben:
We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so
let's not forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes
anti-Semite, full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated
anti-Artist: "the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts
amateurs."
curt:
And Picasso was a womanizer. And Pollock an alcoholic. And Wagner!
ben:
We could [explain/understand] his now-controversial
positions by examining his hystorical context, but by his own
direction, maybe he would rather we ignore his context and take his
creeds of that era at face value.
curt:
Indeed he would (he might even take issue with you tacking on "of that era"). Either his argument fits into your box ["chesterton is outmoded"], or your argument fits into his ["ben is using a contemporary rhetorical gambit to avoid having to wrestling with the veracity of old ideas by declaring them outmoded"].
rob:
Illustrating fashionable art discourse *will* lead to footnotes. net.art's would-be-social-engagement was trivial, getting some critical *distance* and autonomy is a good next step. R&D rather than R&R.
neil young:
the lasers are in the lab
the old man is dressed in white clothes
everybody says he's mad
no one knows the things that he knows
rob:
Regarding the art, silence can be a statement, fantasy can be realistic and formalism can have social content and meaning.
curt:
Agreed (and so pithily expressed!) Indeed, art is the one realm of human activity where abstraction and formalism can *speak* into the cultural "dialogue." But now it's time to muzzle them and move toward a more didactic coceptualism because... ?
rob:
Pure abstraction is resistant to the dominant mode of criticism (the dreary romanticism of the expanded text), and a semiotised (grammatical, algorithmic, kitsch) culture. It certainly seems to make some people uncomfortable, and not just the plebs who still don't grok it.
In a society where aesthetics has long since triumphed over ethics, aesthetic engagement is social engagement with or without Adorno. Pure aesthetics may find a new space, or at least a new point or angle. The contempt that mediatised govenrments express for Media Studies is telling, it is mirrored in the contempt aestheticised critical regimes hold for aesthetics.
One of the damn things is indeed enough. Break-out is needed to get back in.
curt:
agreed. plus it's so danged pretty! (does this mean I can keep my subscription to wallpaper magazine?)
I'll respond point by point to various posts:
ben:
The problem I see is that the newmedia discussion is at risk of
becoming less-than-engaging. If FlashFormalism continues to be received
with excitement and a deafening silence of critical discussion,
newmedia will be stillborn; irrelevant before it ever reaches critical
mass. To avoid becoming such a footnote, we need to inject the
criticality that's missing by not having a wider recognition &&
discussion in the hyper-critical art world. In fact, who better to
critique this work than us, the combination [audience/creators]? I just
don't see that critical discourse happening. I see a lot of wrangling
over the terminology and technology, but not much attention paid to the
ideas.
curt:
I agree with Rob and Pall here. There is a way to critically discuss abstraction that may involve engaging in formalistic/graphic design aesthetics that seem outmoded to you. So we can't discuss them because such critical discourse is not currently en vogue? But aren't we the ones (critics, artists, curators) who shape where the critical dialogue is going? If things on the net are becoming more hodge-podged and interbred with pop culture, what's to keep art critics from approaching such pieces as rock music critics or graphic design aesthetes? Casey Reas is re-discovering Sol LeWitt and taking his instruction-based conceptualism to a more gorgeously abstract level. MTAA are reinterpreting early conceptual works and recontextualizing them in a hyper-mediated environment. None of this seems intellectually bereft to me, nor does it seem out of bounds or culturally irrelevant. If one current artistic mode is the remix, then we can expect to see earlier aspects of the "art tapestry" show up in the mix as well (whether consciously or unconsciously).
curt:
> I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting
> primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time.
ben:
Then that truly is a fundamental disagreement, because both of those
artists (and every other major artist in history, almost without
exception) are remembered precisely because they challenged
assumptions, made people uncomfortable, and posed controversial (if
sometimes implicit) questions.
curt:
But is the sum of the worth of their art the fact that they were remembered for it? Had they not been remembered, would their art still have value as art? Can it still be appreciated out of the context of its production? There are plenty of artists who have gained notoriety for their craft and invention, working within a pre-defined tradition they didn't pioneer. Pre-impressionist artists, craftspeople in local artisan subcultures.
ben:
I definitely want to avoid personal
statements, but anyone who thinks these or any artists are
[important/interesting] because their work is aesthetically pleasing
has an [incomplete/impoverished] understanding of the hyperthreaded
hystorical context in which the work was produced. All "important" work
is about ideas; even the works of abstractExpressionists and 1970s
minimalists made their own provocative arguments.
curt:
So you assert. Here are some contrary voices:
"Knowledge and intelligence are puny flippers alongside clairvoyance. Ideas are a dull gas, a rarefied gas. Only when clairvoyance is extinguished do ideas and the blind fish of their waters -- the intellectuals -- appear. The reason art exists is because its mode of operation does not take the mode of ideas."
- jean dubuffet
"Art is not there to provide knowledge in direct ways. It produces deepened perceptions of experience. More must happen than simply logically understandable things. Art is not there to be simply understood, or we would have no need of art. It could then just be logical sentences in a form of a text for instance. Where objects are concerned it's more the sense of an indication or suggestion."
- joseph beuys
"People who look for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. By asking, "what does this mean?" they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things."
- rene magritte
Are they to be understood as Newton to your Einstein? That seems a convenient dismissal without having to actually counter the forcefullness of their positions. I'm hesitant to subscribe to the paradigm of paradigmatic revolutions in art and art criticism. As you concede, art ain't science.
curt:
> Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the
> work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever
> done.
ben:
It's not about waves,
it's about the dialogue we as artists participate in by creating work.
If what you do isn't challenging, you're not contributing to that
dialogue.
curt:
Challenging by whose criteria? As Pall points out, abstraction of data flows can be particularly challenging from several angles beyond just pure abstraction. Here are a few pieces to consider:
http://textarc.org (from a lit crit angle)
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/song/mono.html (from a synesthetic angle)
http://rhizome.org/rsg (from a play angle)
ben:
As the "contemporary
art world" wrestles with how best to absorb us into their discussion,
the problem they're encountering is not how best to fit us into a
gallery, but rather how to [talk/write] about work that doesn't seem to
have anything interesting to say. BUSTED.
curt:
I'm not sure which critics you're talking about and which artists your talking about here. Anyway, is it the artist's role to give critics "interesting" fodder? What if the artist is diametrically opposed to the contemporary paradigms of materialistic critical discourse? cf: http://www.somedancersandmusicians.com/essays/curt.html
ben:
"Outsider"
art will emerge from this network of insiders known as the "interweb"
about as often as wild feral adults will emerge from Manhattan.
curt:
Sweet prose. Well played.
ben:
To call
the distributed cognitive processing of the art community a "conceptual
fashion show" is to declare war against intellectual pursuit! If we're
going to go that route, how about you take all of the
diamond-in-the-rough idiotSavant "outsiders" you can "discover," and
I'll take all of the intellectually curious people who have anything to
say. ;)
curt:
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/outsider/
http://www.deepyoung.org/current/dyskonceptual/
ben:
the most
interesting newmedia isn't happening on the front page of ArtForum,
it's happening on and off lists like these. Unfortunately, we're just
not engaging in enough critical discussion about that work.
curt:
I totally agree. But then some work doesn't lend itself well to contemporary critical dicussion. Is the problem with the work, or with contemporary modes of critical discussion? If all you can say of work like http://www.complexification.net is that it's FlashFormalism [insert silence], then I don't know where we go from there.
ben:
It's willful
intellectual amnesia.
curt:
another juicy nugget. excellent.
ben:
We are, after all, talking about Chesterton, so
let's not forget-to-remember that he was a curmudgeonly sometimes
anti-Semite, full time anti-Feminist and an art-school-educated
anti-Artist: "the artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts
amateurs."
curt:
And Picasso was a womanizer. And Pollock an alcoholic. And Wagner!
ben:
We could [explain/understand] his now-controversial
positions by examining his hystorical context, but by his own
direction, maybe he would rather we ignore his context and take his
creeds of that era at face value.
curt:
Indeed he would (he might even take issue with you tacking on "of that era"). Either his argument fits into your box ["chesterton is outmoded"], or your argument fits into his ["ben is using a contemporary rhetorical gambit to avoid having to wrestling with the veracity of old ideas by declaring them outmoded"].
rob:
Illustrating fashionable art discourse *will* lead to footnotes. net.art's would-be-social-engagement was trivial, getting some critical *distance* and autonomy is a good next step. R&D rather than R&R.
neil young:
the lasers are in the lab
the old man is dressed in white clothes
everybody says he's mad
no one knows the things that he knows
rob:
Regarding the art, silence can be a statement, fantasy can be realistic and formalism can have social content and meaning.
curt:
Agreed (and so pithily expressed!) Indeed, art is the one realm of human activity where abstraction and formalism can *speak* into the cultural "dialogue." But now it's time to muzzle them and move toward a more didactic coceptualism because... ?
rob:
Pure abstraction is resistant to the dominant mode of criticism (the dreary romanticism of the expanded text), and a semiotised (grammatical, algorithmic, kitsch) culture. It certainly seems to make some people uncomfortable, and not just the plebs who still don't grok it.
In a society where aesthetics has long since triumphed over ethics, aesthetic engagement is social engagement with or without Adorno. Pure aesthetics may find a new space, or at least a new point or angle. The contempt that mediatised govenrments express for Media Studies is telling, it is mirrored in the contempt aestheticised critical regimes hold for aesthetics.
One of the damn things is indeed enough. Break-out is needed to get back in.
curt:
agreed. plus it's so danged pretty! (does this mean I can keep my subscription to wallpaper magazine?)
Re: Thinking of art, transparency and social technology
Hi Ben,
It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in dialogue with the contemporary art world. I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time. Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever done.
Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious social change). This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be). Human culture has changed a great deal, but individual humans have been wired pretty much the same for a good while.
If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue," artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of conceptual fashion show. Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since Romanticism? Dang.
This quote (which I've posted here before) seems pertinent:
"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age... It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question."
- g.k. chesterton, 1908
I would remix it this way, "What art a man can [enjoy/receive from/be moved by] depends upon his propensity, not upon the clock or the century."
(But as t. whild has pointed out previously, the quote is almost 100 years out of date, so there you are.)
peace,
curt
_
ben syverson wrote:
I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
uncomfortable -- I don't think abstraction has made anyone
uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
really saying anything.
> For example, Paul Klee's work is neither psychedelic nor impotent and,
> although no longer contemporary or en vogue, was and is potent and
> relevant. I'd include Stan Brakhage in that category as well.
And yet Klee's work was extremely challenging when it was being
produced; at various times "primitivist," child-like, surrealist,
cubist and transcendentalist, there was a heady conceptual backing to
everything Klee did. All of these artistic movements that he was
influenced by (and exerted influence on) were socially radical, as was
his work (and even the very concept of abstraction, at that point).
Similarly, Brakhage came out of the 1960s, and his desire to bring
pre-verbal consciousness-expanding sublimity to the viewer, through the
manipulation of light and the rejection of narrative and traditional
film production techniques, was extremely provocative and radical.
However, it's no longer 1917 or 1968. Abstraction/formalism is no
longer [surprising/upsetting/challenging], even when it's on the
computerBox. What does formalism have to say today? Lets break it down.
Unlike Brakhage, these folks aren't breaking the means of production to
interesting ends, nor are they saying anything uncomfortable or
challenging. Apps like Flash and Photoshop were designed to make pretty
pictures -- making swirling lines and random sounds in Flash is like
making a traditional film in 1968, or painting straight portraits in
1917. Subtle statements can be made, but you contribute nothing to the
global discussion we call "art."
Creating your own tools is more interesting, but when the end result is
the changing Rhizome logo, your hard work is for naught. It's the
equivalent of the straight portrait painter grinding his own paints in
1917 -- admirable work for the service of art which has nothing to say.
> C. Overtly political art does not inherently imply:
> 1. potency
> 2. maturity
> 3. proper moral use of art
I never said it did, and anyone who does has an extremely Marxist view
of artmaking. However, I don't understand why someone would make art
which says nothing when there is so much to say.
> D. Generative techiniques in artwork do not inherently imply:
> 1. visual abstraction
> 2. a-conceptualization
I love these rule systems you built! :) But really, I never implied
anything about all "generative art." What I did was to suggest that the
preponderance of "generative art" is [abstract/formal]. In this way,
it's mostly about itself, and how cool it is that it's generating
material, sometimes interactively, sometimes using clever data as
input. In short, most "generative art" doesn't have much impact after
the initial coolness, like browsing Wallpaper* magazine.
> "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for
> dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting
> art.
Most certainly. Like the early video moment, sometimes the important
discussion takes place outside the [gallery/museum] system, and the
intersections with galleries are awkward and in many ways unsuccessful.
The point is that it's important not to articulate newmedia as divorced
from the hystorical threads that wove it.
- ben
It seems we fundamentally disagree on the importance of art being in dialogue with the contemporary art world. I don't think Klee or Brakhage's work is important or interesting primarily because it was radical or heady or novel in its time. Brakhage wasn't really making any sizeable waves in the 60s, and the work he made a few years ago is as intriguing as anything he's ever done.
Art can speak individual to individual without proceeding through the sanctioned filters of the "contemporary art world" and still have great value and "potency" (yea, even potency for ye olde precious social change). This is the interesting thing about outsider art and one of the things I think the net is good for (if we'll let it be). Human culture has changed a great deal, but individual humans have been wired pretty much the same for a good while.
If it's alway primarily about "forwarding the canonical dialogue," artmaking can quickly devolve into a chasing after newness, a sort of conceptual fashion show. Collectors as venture capitalists and artists as aspiring CEOs hoping to go public with their newest art venture. Where's the passion in that? What? You say passion's been out of date since Romanticism? Dang.
This quote (which I've posted here before) seems pertinent:
"An imbecile habit has arisen in modern controversy of saying that such and such a creed can be held in one age but cannot be held in another. Some dogma, we are told, was credible in the twelfth century, but is not credible in the twentieth. You might as well say that a certain philosophy can be believed on Mondays, but cannot be believed on Tuesdays. You might as well say of a view of the cosmos that it was suitable to half-past three, but not suitable to half-past four. What a man can believe depends upon his philosophy, not upon the clock or the century. If a man believes in unalterable natural law, he cannot believe in any miracle in any age. If a man believes in a will behind law, he can believe in any miracle in any age... It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things. Therefore in dealing with any historical answer, the point is not whether it was given in our time, but whether it was given in answer to our question."
- g.k. chesterton, 1908
I would remix it this way, "What art a man can [enjoy/receive from/be moved by] depends upon his propensity, not upon the clock or the century."
(But as t. whild has pointed out previously, the quote is almost 100 years out of date, so there you are.)
peace,
curt
_
ben syverson wrote:
I wasn't making the case that abstract art == psychedelia, but I will
make the case that abstract art is impotent in today's art context. If
anyone disagrees, then enlighten me: what does pure abstraction have to
say? Is it a comment on our fragmented, post-modern times? If so, it's
a half-century-old sentiment. Great art makes the people of its time
uncomfortable -- I don't think abstraction has made anyone
uncomfortable for decades. I'd go further and say that formalism hasn't
made anyone uncomfortable in quite some either; representational or
abstract, if all you have going for you is aesthetics, you're not
really saying anything.
> For example, Paul Klee's work is neither psychedelic nor impotent and,
> although no longer contemporary or en vogue, was and is potent and
> relevant. I'd include Stan Brakhage in that category as well.
And yet Klee's work was extremely challenging when it was being
produced; at various times "primitivist," child-like, surrealist,
cubist and transcendentalist, there was a heady conceptual backing to
everything Klee did. All of these artistic movements that he was
influenced by (and exerted influence on) were socially radical, as was
his work (and even the very concept of abstraction, at that point).
Similarly, Brakhage came out of the 1960s, and his desire to bring
pre-verbal consciousness-expanding sublimity to the viewer, through the
manipulation of light and the rejection of narrative and traditional
film production techniques, was extremely provocative and radical.
However, it's no longer 1917 or 1968. Abstraction/formalism is no
longer [surprising/upsetting/challenging], even when it's on the
computerBox. What does formalism have to say today? Lets break it down.
Unlike Brakhage, these folks aren't breaking the means of production to
interesting ends, nor are they saying anything uncomfortable or
challenging. Apps like Flash and Photoshop were designed to make pretty
pictures -- making swirling lines and random sounds in Flash is like
making a traditional film in 1968, or painting straight portraits in
1917. Subtle statements can be made, but you contribute nothing to the
global discussion we call "art."
Creating your own tools is more interesting, but when the end result is
the changing Rhizome logo, your hard work is for naught. It's the
equivalent of the straight portrait painter grinding his own paints in
1917 -- admirable work for the service of art which has nothing to say.
> C. Overtly political art does not inherently imply:
> 1. potency
> 2. maturity
> 3. proper moral use of art
I never said it did, and anyone who does has an extremely Marxist view
of artmaking. However, I don't understand why someone would make art
which says nothing when there is so much to say.
> D. Generative techiniques in artwork do not inherently imply:
> 1. visual abstraction
> 2. a-conceptualization
I love these rule systems you built! :) But really, I never implied
anything about all "generative art." What I did was to suggest that the
preponderance of "generative art" is [abstract/formal]. In this way,
it's mostly about itself, and how cool it is that it's generating
material, sometimes interactively, sometimes using clever data as
input. In short, most "generative art" doesn't have much impact after
the initial coolness, like browsing Wallpaper* magazine.
> "Classic, clear-cut examples" of net-specific art may make for
> dramatic object lessons, but they don't always make for interesting
> art.
Most certainly. Like the early video moment, sometimes the important
discussion takes place outside the [gallery/museum] system, and the
intersections with galleries are awkward and in many ways unsuccessful.
The point is that it's important not to articulate newmedia as divorced
from the hystorical threads that wove it.
- ben