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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Required Reading


more:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU
http://www.eddostern.com/video/BestFlamewarEver_EddoStern_Med.mov
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2kAnTZBnTg

There is also a classic Saturday Night Live skit called "Monsters of Monologue '94" with Adam Sandler as Eric Bogosian vs. Michael McKean as Spalding Gray.

And there is Brody Condon inviting Tom to an oil wrestling match:
http://rhizome.org/editorial/3563#61910

DISCUSSION

Required Reading


Hi Duncan,

I still think it is a legitimate critical activity to relate contemporary art practices to previous art practices. Not in order to construct a hermetic Alfred Barr chart of linear cause and effect (the same kind of cause and effect implied when Davis claims that "social media art" "takes its cues" from relational aesthetics). This makes it seem as if someone like Guthrie Lonergan has closely read Bourriaud (or that he has read someone in Artforum talking about Bourriaud). I don't think any of that is particularly relevant.

But the flipside is this -- just because an artist is willfully (or accidentally) ignorant of art history, this doesn't magically keep them from falling into the same dead-ends traps as previous artists, nor does it insulate them from being critiqued based on the assumption that previous art history did actually happen. I don't mean that everybody posting to dump.fm needs to read Robert Smithson or Allan Kaprow. It is just curious to me how quickly some members of this community cry foul when any practice prior to 2000 is mobilized to contextualize their work. It's like kids covering their eyes and thinking that this keeps other people from seeing them.

So, for instance, I can write a theoretic essay contextualizing "surf clubs" in relation to a larger ongoing art dialogue about "the everyday" ( http://lab404.com/articles/commodify_your_consumption.pdf ). None of the artists mentioned in my essay need to have ever read de Certeau. Perhaps my essay will lead a curator to contextualize an exhibit ( http://mybiennialisbetterthanyours.com/statement.html ). None of the artists in that exhibit need to have ever read de Certeau. An artist and her friends may enter into the ongoing public dialogue about their own work (via words, animated gifs, links, dismissals, parodies, exhibits) -- thus re-enacting (willfully, intentionally, or ignorantly) the old conceptual art attempt to control and contextualize the reception of one's own work.

Best,
Curt


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