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.
commodify yr consumption
Hi Eric,
I agree with your point about pluralism and the production of new activities. Still, the purpose of writing media theory is to begin to trace contours (not just similarities and differences, but resonances, oblique angularities, etc). Artistic production in the world is not simply arbitrary. All work is related to other work in some way, as all things in the world are related to all other things in the world in some way. To pick up with your example, there might well be a reason to compare installation art and drawing. Depending on the work and the artists, the two media may have a lot more in common that simply their appearance in galleries.
Just to clarify, Tom Moody's blog isn't an example to me of artistic surfing (although he is an artist, and he is surfing). I'm not dissing his blog; but it is just that, a personal web log.
Of course all art always "deals with" the Other in that it has an audience comprised of someone other than the artist. But that observation doesn't get very far in analyzing the inherited myth of the dividuated self and the role it plays in artistic production. Abstract expressionism and artistic surfing are worlds apart in terms of media, history, values, and goals -- but interestingly (at least to me), both still share an emphasis on the "expression" of "self."
As an exercise, what if we stopped [or temporarily bracketed] thinking about art in terms of media and began thinking about in terms of "artist mode" (whatever that may mean) and "audience mode" (whatever that may mean). You get a continuum that runs something like this:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. single human artist making art for an audience of several other humans.
(sums up most gallery art, but also a lot of network art. Duchamp rightly points out that all art is a collaboration between artist and audience, but he is still presuming and trying to expand this one-to-many beaux arts model.)
2. several human artists/participants/users making art for an audience of several other humans.
(sums up all collectives and most "interactive" art.)
3. single or multiple human artist(s) orchestrating/contextualizing input from natural/cultural sources for an audience of several other humans.
(encompasses most of the rest of "new media" art, whether visualizing source input from earthquake tremors or google searches or whatever.)
4. single or multiple human artists making art for an audience of themselves.
(theoretically this is Kaprow's happenings, but there were always onlookers and documentation was taken of the events to show to a future "audience" of non-participants. Some "art brut" work fits here.)
5. single or multiple human artists making art for an audience of themselves.
(theoretically this is Kaprow's happenings, but there were always onlookers and documentation was taken of the events to show to a future "audience" of non-participants. Some "art brut" work fits here.)
6. single human artist marking art for an audience of another single human.
(theoretically, this is patron-commissioned art, but the pope wasn't the only one to see Michelangelo's work. Some forms of craft and gift-giving fit here.)
7. single human artist making art for a presumed but unknown audience of humans/non-humans.
(On Kawara seems to want to fit here, but he probably doesn't.)
8. non-human "artist(s)" (the flux, systems, "nature") making art for an audience of several humans.
(this might be called "the world" as viewed from a Cartesian perspective. [cf: http://www.vimeo.com/4506035 . The video is obviously a critique of conceptual art, but the actual "work" featured seems to fit into this category.] Robert Smithson's writing touches on this kind of work.)
9. non-human "artist(s)" making art for an audience of non-humans.
(if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-and-no-one-sees-it art. Heidegerrian zuhandenheit [ready-to-hand] art; or more properly, Graham Harman-esque "tool being" art.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Note that this continuum presumes the myth of the dividuated human self. Once that myth breaks down, once "individual human" is understood to be merely a matter of scale -- individual human as a conflux of sub-systems (circulatory, respiratory, etc.) participating in larger macro-systems (economy, family, ecology, etc.) -- then the above continuum become even more fluid.
I propose this cursory continuum not to codify anything, but hopefully to open things up. Theory is useful not because it canonically freezes things, but because it slows down the raw chaotic flux of every undifferentiated thing enough to begin to reveal contours that may be useful to a practice.
Best,
Curt
I agree with your point about pluralism and the production of new activities. Still, the purpose of writing media theory is to begin to trace contours (not just similarities and differences, but resonances, oblique angularities, etc). Artistic production in the world is not simply arbitrary. All work is related to other work in some way, as all things in the world are related to all other things in the world in some way. To pick up with your example, there might well be a reason to compare installation art and drawing. Depending on the work and the artists, the two media may have a lot more in common that simply their appearance in galleries.
Just to clarify, Tom Moody's blog isn't an example to me of artistic surfing (although he is an artist, and he is surfing). I'm not dissing his blog; but it is just that, a personal web log.
Of course all art always "deals with" the Other in that it has an audience comprised of someone other than the artist. But that observation doesn't get very far in analyzing the inherited myth of the dividuated self and the role it plays in artistic production. Abstract expressionism and artistic surfing are worlds apart in terms of media, history, values, and goals -- but interestingly (at least to me), both still share an emphasis on the "expression" of "self."
As an exercise, what if we stopped [or temporarily bracketed] thinking about art in terms of media and began thinking about in terms of "artist mode" (whatever that may mean) and "audience mode" (whatever that may mean). You get a continuum that runs something like this:
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. single human artist making art for an audience of several other humans.
(sums up most gallery art, but also a lot of network art. Duchamp rightly points out that all art is a collaboration between artist and audience, but he is still presuming and trying to expand this one-to-many beaux arts model.)
2. several human artists/participants/users making art for an audience of several other humans.
(sums up all collectives and most "interactive" art.)
3. single or multiple human artist(s) orchestrating/contextualizing input from natural/cultural sources for an audience of several other humans.
(encompasses most of the rest of "new media" art, whether visualizing source input from earthquake tremors or google searches or whatever.)
4. single or multiple human artists making art for an audience of themselves.
(theoretically this is Kaprow's happenings, but there were always onlookers and documentation was taken of the events to show to a future "audience" of non-participants. Some "art brut" work fits here.)
5. single or multiple human artists making art for an audience of themselves.
(theoretically this is Kaprow's happenings, but there were always onlookers and documentation was taken of the events to show to a future "audience" of non-participants. Some "art brut" work fits here.)
6. single human artist marking art for an audience of another single human.
(theoretically, this is patron-commissioned art, but the pope wasn't the only one to see Michelangelo's work. Some forms of craft and gift-giving fit here.)
7. single human artist making art for a presumed but unknown audience of humans/non-humans.
(On Kawara seems to want to fit here, but he probably doesn't.)
8. non-human "artist(s)" (the flux, systems, "nature") making art for an audience of several humans.
(this might be called "the world" as viewed from a Cartesian perspective. [cf: http://www.vimeo.com/4506035 . The video is obviously a critique of conceptual art, but the actual "work" featured seems to fit into this category.] Robert Smithson's writing touches on this kind of work.)
9. non-human "artist(s)" making art for an audience of non-humans.
(if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest-and-no-one-sees-it art. Heidegerrian zuhandenheit [ready-to-hand] art; or more properly, Graham Harman-esque "tool being" art.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Note that this continuum presumes the myth of the dividuated human self. Once that myth breaks down, once "individual human" is understood to be merely a matter of scale -- individual human as a conflux of sub-systems (circulatory, respiratory, etc.) participating in larger macro-systems (economy, family, ecology, etc.) -- then the above continuum become even more fluid.
I propose this cursory continuum not to codify anything, but hopefully to open things up. Theory is useful not because it canonically freezes things, but because it slows down the raw chaotic flux of every undifferentiated thing enough to begin to reveal contours that may be useful to a practice.
Best,
Curt
commodify yr consumption
Hi Pall,
First off... Holy crap, we are having a dialogue about art in the rhizome discussion forum!
Regarding "surfing via code," I think Cage is relevant here. It's not a strict dichotomy where you either do it all yourself "as a human" or you relegate it all to chance. An artist codes the range of automation/variability/aleatory she wants to allow, and then she orchestrates the ways in which she wants to apply it to the project. In other words: how much chance to let in, what kind of chance to let in, and where/when to let it in. So in this sense, even algorithmic artists express a kind of "human" style.
In lo-res/lo-tech "surface" artistic surfing I infer a kind of quasi-heroic re-assertion of human subjective agency. It seems very much akin to the "personality" that a DJ "expresses" in her set. (I am the DJ, I am what I [dis]play.) Many artistic surfers have pseudonyms, many work collectively, and all begin with someone else's source material. Nevertheless, there is an implicit concern with an inflection of personal "style." That work "looks like" Paper Rad, or Loshadka, or whomever. Again, Cage is relevant. Regardless of his own zen rhetoric, he was never quite able to disappear from his work. His work still "sounds like" Cage, regardless of how many variable iterations are possible.
From the perspective of a commercial artist, it is "valuable" to have a recognizable style. Even from an old school "tactical" Situationist perspective (particularly if you read Raoul Vaneigem) there is this implicit assumption that "the man" will be "resisted" by the eruption of our playful, unique, personal, subjective "selves." Deleuze and others problematize this assumption by pointing out that our "selves" may simply be one more mythology constructed by "the man." So even if an artist claims to be unphilosophical, the kind of art she chooses to mak is going to depend on her anthropology (what she thinks a human is). Artists as diverse as Olivier Messiaen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Stelarc, and Ryan Trecartin are all involved in critiquing this implicit myth of a "unique human self."
So it is ironic (or at least telling) that many self-proclaimed amoral/post-modern/neo-pop artist nevertheless implicitly subscribe to an inherited notion of the unique human self. They will "humanize" the templates of "the man" by using them badly! And this unique/original/personal [ab]use will constitute some sort of assertion of agency. They wind up asserting: "I like playing! I am not ethically obliged to resist the man! I am not ethically obliged to assert any political agency!" The problem is that they keep repeating "I." Artist as hero or artist as anti-hero, both still subscribe to the same anthropology. The difference between "I made this" and "I found this" is not as radical as the difference between "I" and "the other" (animal, emergent systems, aleatoric code, etc.)
Personally, I don't have a problem with the reassertion of the idiosyncratic self into art (but then I personally believe in the existence of the human soul). But this reassertion is bound to be an epic fail. It has already ended in tears. It will always end in tears. That being the case, I would rather see the idiosyncratic artist perpetually self-implode in a bonfire of sound and fury. The snide/clever one-liner art feels really safe and dissipative to me. Give me Chris Burden over John Baldessari any day. But then I love "The Eagle and The Hawk" by John Denver, so maybe I'm just a quixotic loser.
As far as the issue of "meta-producer," I agree totally -- you can telescope out to meta-meta-meta producer: from who makes the software you use, to who makes the hardware you use, to who made the cosmology you inherited which tells you how to use anything at all. Behind all the ethical critique of Flash as an artistic tool is the assumption that there is some pure, unadulterated, Platonic essence/source underlying everything. If we can get back to that source, our art will be "pure" (original/originary). When you give up on that idea of original purity, and you realize that we are all just modulating stuff we inherited (which was already modulated by someone else who inherited it, etc.), then "modding" templates is not such an abomination after all. Template tweaking is actually a kind of philosophical proposition; it proposes an un-Platonic way of being in the world.
I think there are lots of overlapping "realms" when it comes to making art -- self/other (anthropology), making/remixing/finding (process), production/consumption (politics), earnestness/irony (tone), getting famous/changing the world (ethics), etc. Artists can get all caught up thinking about one realm and overlook the others. I think a lot of new media artists are really caught up in process. So amongst new media artists, there seem to be these radical rifts between "surface" artists who use templates and "deep" artists who hand-code, but really it is all just a bunch of artists focusing on the process realm. But the best art takes into account all the realms, because they all overlap and interrelate, whether we are paying attention to them or not.
Best,
Curt
First off... Holy crap, we are having a dialogue about art in the rhizome discussion forum!
Regarding "surfing via code," I think Cage is relevant here. It's not a strict dichotomy where you either do it all yourself "as a human" or you relegate it all to chance. An artist codes the range of automation/variability/aleatory she wants to allow, and then she orchestrates the ways in which she wants to apply it to the project. In other words: how much chance to let in, what kind of chance to let in, and where/when to let it in. So in this sense, even algorithmic artists express a kind of "human" style.
In lo-res/lo-tech "surface" artistic surfing I infer a kind of quasi-heroic re-assertion of human subjective agency. It seems very much akin to the "personality" that a DJ "expresses" in her set. (I am the DJ, I am what I [dis]play.) Many artistic surfers have pseudonyms, many work collectively, and all begin with someone else's source material. Nevertheless, there is an implicit concern with an inflection of personal "style." That work "looks like" Paper Rad, or Loshadka, or whomever. Again, Cage is relevant. Regardless of his own zen rhetoric, he was never quite able to disappear from his work. His work still "sounds like" Cage, regardless of how many variable iterations are possible.
From the perspective of a commercial artist, it is "valuable" to have a recognizable style. Even from an old school "tactical" Situationist perspective (particularly if you read Raoul Vaneigem) there is this implicit assumption that "the man" will be "resisted" by the eruption of our playful, unique, personal, subjective "selves." Deleuze and others problematize this assumption by pointing out that our "selves" may simply be one more mythology constructed by "the man." So even if an artist claims to be unphilosophical, the kind of art she chooses to mak is going to depend on her anthropology (what she thinks a human is). Artists as diverse as Olivier Messiaen, Natalie Jeremijenko, Stelarc, and Ryan Trecartin are all involved in critiquing this implicit myth of a "unique human self."
So it is ironic (or at least telling) that many self-proclaimed amoral/post-modern/neo-pop artist nevertheless implicitly subscribe to an inherited notion of the unique human self. They will "humanize" the templates of "the man" by using them badly! And this unique/original/personal [ab]use will constitute some sort of assertion of agency. They wind up asserting: "I like playing! I am not ethically obliged to resist the man! I am not ethically obliged to assert any political agency!" The problem is that they keep repeating "I." Artist as hero or artist as anti-hero, both still subscribe to the same anthropology. The difference between "I made this" and "I found this" is not as radical as the difference between "I" and "the other" (animal, emergent systems, aleatoric code, etc.)
Personally, I don't have a problem with the reassertion of the idiosyncratic self into art (but then I personally believe in the existence of the human soul). But this reassertion is bound to be an epic fail. It has already ended in tears. It will always end in tears. That being the case, I would rather see the idiosyncratic artist perpetually self-implode in a bonfire of sound and fury. The snide/clever one-liner art feels really safe and dissipative to me. Give me Chris Burden over John Baldessari any day. But then I love "The Eagle and The Hawk" by John Denver, so maybe I'm just a quixotic loser.
As far as the issue of "meta-producer," I agree totally -- you can telescope out to meta-meta-meta producer: from who makes the software you use, to who makes the hardware you use, to who made the cosmology you inherited which tells you how to use anything at all. Behind all the ethical critique of Flash as an artistic tool is the assumption that there is some pure, unadulterated, Platonic essence/source underlying everything. If we can get back to that source, our art will be "pure" (original/originary). When you give up on that idea of original purity, and you realize that we are all just modulating stuff we inherited (which was already modulated by someone else who inherited it, etc.), then "modding" templates is not such an abomination after all. Template tweaking is actually a kind of philosophical proposition; it proposes an un-Platonic way of being in the world.
I think there are lots of overlapping "realms" when it comes to making art -- self/other (anthropology), making/remixing/finding (process), production/consumption (politics), earnestness/irony (tone), getting famous/changing the world (ethics), etc. Artists can get all caught up thinking about one realm and overlook the others. I think a lot of new media artists are really caught up in process. So amongst new media artists, there seem to be these radical rifts between "surface" artists who use templates and "deep" artists who hand-code, but really it is all just a bunch of artists focusing on the process realm. But the best art takes into account all the realms, because they all overlap and interrelate, whether we are paying attention to them or not.
Best,
Curt