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

Required Reading


Hi Tom,

An example:
One could perhaps claim that "digital programming art" began with Netochka Nezvanova (or whomever). But one couldn't say that "programming art" began there. One could at least take "programming art" back to Sol Lewitt's instructional drawings (and many have), and further back to Gysin/Burrough's cut-ups, and further back to Tristian Tzara's permutational poetry. Because a "program" need not be a "digital program." The ontological category of "digital programming art" leads to media-centric and materials-centric disucssions. The broader ontological category of "programming art" leads to practice-centric, concept-centric, and culture-centric discussions.

"Social media art" is not my term. I'm just using it because it's the term Davis chose to use, and we're talking about his article. But note, Davis doesn't use the term "digital social media art" or "online social media art."

It is tautological to say that "web 2.0 art"' began with "web 2.0 technology." Or that "television art" began with "television technology." Those are media-specific categories that beg their own questions. (Even then, "web 2.0" is some kooky/arbitrary marketing term that doesn't really delineate all that much historically or technologically, other than the introduction of a new marketing meme). Nobody needs an art historian or an art theorist to defend the claim that blogging began with blogging technology. Such a narrowly defined ontology leads nowhere interesting. I don't even think it's all that useful in staking out the parameters of a novel art movement. Because (as Maria says), "Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could."

One way to defend a novel nascent/art movement is to reject all theory and history (whether good theory or bad theory) as irrelevant to the discussion of any particular piece of work. This requires a lot of anti-intellectual smoke-blowing, and a perpetual dismissal (without the requisite intellectual dismantling) of any and every attempt at theory. Such an anti-theoretical approach is itself based on a theory and a history. It wants to return to a kind of New Criticism where the text (the work of art) speaks for itself.

This is not a very clever strategy for introducing a body of work and a collection of practices into contemporary critical/theoretical dialogue. For one thing, few believe that such a critical approach is even possible anymore. For another thing, it makes a claim for the "'new" work that is rarely defensible without resorting to a ridiculous narrowing of the criteria which constitutes the new work. More problematic to me, such an approach doesn't lead anywhere. It is an approach of reterritorialization (shutting down dialogue) rather than deterritorialization (opening up dialogue).

A better approach might be something like Ed Halter here ( http://vagueterrain.net/content/2010/02/matter-electronics ), trying to contextualize 8-bit work in terms of materialist film. I'm no great fan of always taking new media back to film (Lev Manovich has worked this mojo repeatedly [arguably] to the detriment of new media theory), but Halter is smart and a good writer and his move makes sense and opens things up in both directions (allowing us to better understand the contemporary work he's discussing, and allowing the work he's discussing to better inform the preceding film practices to which he refers). In other words, it's a successful theoretical move.

Davis's approach here is a much less successful theoretical move. But it does't fail simply because he made a theoretical move at all. And it doesn't fail because of some single instance of misinterpretation of a single piece of work. It fails because the larger theoretical armature he sets up is skewed from the beginning. This accounts for his misinterpretation of the subsequent pieces he discusses.

Regarding Bourriaud, I agree, he is better left out of this discussion (or brought in via altogether different means).

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When have you ever directly addressed me online (talked directly to me [second person] rather than about me [third person])? A link?

If you are so down with the era of social networking, why retreat back to your self-moderated, one-to-many / broadcast-model blog? Why not stay here and dialogue with me on an old school, unmoderated (although not exactly real-time and no longer mailing-list-based) bulletin board? Just link to this thread at your blog and let the dialogue play out here without your administrator-level, para-dialogue meta-commentary.

DISCUSSION

Required Reading


Hi Tom. I consider this a pesonal victory because it is the first time you have ever addressed me directly online. Your mention of stage plays reminds me of happenings, arguably another early form of social media art. The Spoleto festival curating of Mary Jane Jacob also comes to mind. All very much prior to "relational aesthetics."

Adopting a perpetual "egad" tone and rolling ones eyes hardly constitutes criticism. It's just a rhetorical strategy.

Why exactly is Johnson's practice of mail art and the community it engendered so dismissable as an early form of social media art? Why is my reading of it as a form of social media so deserving of your utter bewilderment? It is by no means a claim original to me. Are you trying to define and defend a body of art work that ex nihilo emerges with the advent of Facebook? How can such a claim be defended without the work in question being hijacked and mis-interpreted as derivative of "relational aesthetics" within broader contemporary art critical/theoretical dialogue?

DISCUSSION

Required Reading


Curt's comforting social media art timeline:
late 1950s: Ray Johnson makes mail art
1966: Kluver and Rauschenberg organize "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering"
1993: The net supports the interwebs with Mosaic
1994: net artists start making net art
1996: Mark Tribe starts the rhizome mailing list
1998: Bourriaud writes "Relational Aesthetics"
2001: a painter named Tom Moody starts a "blog"

Tom's comforting social media art timeline:
"In coming into the discussion of social media art at the Man-Bartlett-on-twitter point of entry (i.e., this year), and skipping six years of discussion including such Rhizome-sponsored events as 'Blogging and the Arts' (2004), and the Net Aesthetics 2.0 panels in '06 and '08...

DISCUSSION

Required Reading


Hi Marcin (and all),

The semiotic square is meant to be applied to obvious semiotic opposites like "night/day." "Landscape/architecture" (Krauss) and "art/production" (Foster) are a bit less obviously oppositional, but they are still in the ball park. Whereas "art/social-networks" seems like a stretch to me. I would never think of those things as inherently oppositional.

More fundamentally problematic is Davis' definition of "art" as "a relatively exclusive, closed-in type of expression." This definition is far too narrow, and it winds up fouling-up his subsequent semiotic square. In inductive analysis, you've got to closely "observe" before you begin to "interpret." Davis seems jonesing to skip quickly on to the interpretation step, but he doesn't spend enough time observing what the work is actually doing, so his interpretations are skewed because they are based on overly simplistic observations.

This article exemplifies a (bad) kind of rhetorical strategy for any theorist:
1) too narrowly determine your field of analysis
2) use a theoretical approach to broaden that field
3) claim to have moved things forward

When really, in this case, the art itself is already way ahead of this analysis. Davis first has to capture the art, then confine it, then release it, then claim he has released it.

So for instance, when Davis says, "The paradigm of 'social media art' that has begun to crystallize often takes its cues from the 'relational aesthetics' tradition," this is exactly historically backwards. You can cross-apply Bourriaud to networked media if you like; you just can't say that networked media "takes its cues" from "the 'relational aesthetics' tradition." Networked media begins in 1994 (arguably with E.A.T. in 1967, arguably earlier). The "tradition" of "relational aesthetics" begins with a single speculative book written in 1998.

I do think there is yet a useful discussion to be had (at least on a "materials/media" level) about the differences between netty art that needs a live interweb connection in order to function (network-dependent art) and other netty art that doesn't need a live interweb connection to function (network-derived or network-topical art). The discussion of these differences gets into thorny issues of curation, archiving, preservation, galleries, location-dependencies, communities of reception -- things probably worth discussing.

I also think the concept of what I have called "outsider.net.art" is interesting (again related to life/art, online_culture/gallery_culture dichotomies).

Nor do I think there is anything categorically wrong about attempting to apply a big-picture schema to stuff (to language, to art, to the reproductive habits of domesticated dogs). In other words, there is nothing categorically wrong with intellectual academic art theory. It is not art making, art criticism, art collecting, art history, or art curating; nor does it claim to be (or need to be) any of these things. But it should still be done well.

Davis's square muddies the waters in a kind of dead-end way rather than clearing them up (or muddying them in an interesting/promising way).

Regarding semiotics, Greimas' approach is still a kind of post-Saussurean (or post-Peircean) structuralism, used by Jameson and others to transition into something that might be considered proto-post-structuralism [Alex Galloway studied with Jameson and would know a lot more about all this]. More interesting to me are Deleuzean and Derridean forms of writing (and of art making) which rigorously problematize such structured schemata like this semiotic square. But note, there is a big difference between rigorous problematization and categorical dismissal. To say that something sucks hardly deconstructs it.

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re: Davis: "The only thing that would be 'social media art' in the full and genuine sense would be a social networking service actually designed as an art project, which would raise all sorts of questions.)"
cf: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ShiftSpace

Best,
Curt

DISCUSSION