Fast Forward - Art History, Curation and Practice after Media
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Fast Forward - Art History, Curation and Practice after Media |
Daniel Palmer, Monash University, Australia
Embodying Judgement: New Media and Art Criticism
This paper is part of a larger project exploring the impact of artists’ use of media technologies – including photography, video and digital media – on the critical reception of art. The project begins with Walter Benjamin’s foundational response to ‘art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, charts the shifting position of photography and other lens-based media in art since the 1960s, and draws out the implications of the ‘reproducibility’ and ‘deskilling’ of art on critical approaches. It concludes by looking at the meta-medium of the computer, its problematisation of the viewer’s critical position and concomitant challenge to media-specific analysis. The project involves rethinking the question of the medium – re-reading key modernist critics in light of theories around photography, video and digital media – through which to seek a better understanding of the conditions shaping art criticism as we move into the twenty-first century.
This paper seeks to explore the often fraught relationship that new media art has with art criticism. I begin with some framing remarks and an example, before turning to two recent theories of new media art that promise a rethinking of the place of the medium and embodiment in contemporary art criticism – Mark Hansen’s New Philosophy for New Media (2004), and Anna Munster’s Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics(2006).1
1. The Crisis in Art Criticism
Art criticism is widely held to be in crisis. It is argued that the critique of formalism ushered in by postmodernism has produced a toothless critical culture characterised by the lack of criteria for evaluation. In an age of pluralism, judgement appears to be on shaky ground. A further complaint is that while there is a lot of writing about art, it makes very little impact. Curators are said to have overtaken critics in terms of power and influence, and in any case art is now beholden to the market (dealers and collectors) and publicity departments. In the face of this, criticism is merely so much decoration, or grist for CV building.
Regardless of the truth of this diagnosis – one might counter-argue that crisis is the normal condition for criticism – what strikes me is that in all the literature around the supposed crisis there is no virtually mention of the impact of media technologies.2 Conservative critics sometimes cite the popularity of media such as photography and video among contemporary artists as having contributed to collapsing artistic standards (read the decline of traditional skills). However, no thought has been given to the changes in production, transmission and reception of art that new media have brought. In other words, few who claim that criticism is in crisis have paid attention to the issues raised by technological changes in the production and display of art. In this sense the new media art community may quite justifiably complain that art critics are out of touch.
This situation is ironic, given that the one place where judgements are still made about art is through online blogs, and a major oversight. The apparent blindspot is remarkable given the centrality of ‘media art’, broadly defined, within contemporary art, as well as the centrality of media specificity in modernist art criticism, however much maligned. Recall that Clement Greenberg – the most influential critic of the twentieth century – championed abstract painters in terms of their purification of the specific qualities of individual media such as painting (resulting in the quality of flatness, and so forth). Since the 1960s we have seen the collapse of this critical drive towards autonomous art forms, and the rise of various kinds of conceptual and installation art. The latter is what Rosalind Krauss has called, somewhat dismissively, the ‘post-medium condition’ – referring to the undisciplined international form.3
Regardless of our position in relation to it, contemporary art is predominantly conceptual, driven by ideas rather than media form. However, the position of new media art within contemporary art inevitably draws us to reconsider the place of the medium. It appears there is an often unspoken tension between the belief that such art is being absorbed into contemporary art, and the concurrent insistence on new medias’ unique qualities. As an art critic and someone involved with curatorial practice and the professional training of artists, I am especially interested in exploring this relationship between media technologies and the mainstream of contemporary art.
2. New Media Art and Art Criticism
The new media art community should care about the criticism of new media art, for reasons of historical documentation if nothing else. To quote Beryl Graham from her blog: “Press coverage is often all that remains of certain exhibitions, and unfortunately often never gets beyond technological hyperbole or an understanding of interaction as ‘hands-on fun’…”4. Timely criticism would seem particularly important given the notorious technical difficulties of preserving new media artworks. Furthermore, in the absence of accessible archives or critical reviews an accessible discourse around new media art is largely absent.
While some new media artists – net.artists in particular – have acted as their own critics, writing their own histories, the new media community generally seems to have an antagonistic relationship to mainstream art criticism. And it is easy to understand why. Consider as typical a recent review of Bruce Wands’ book Art in the Digital Age (2006) in The Australian newspaper, in which the art critic and academic Rex Butler decried the avant-gardism of new media art practice5. The review argued that the work “display[s] all the worst faults of the amateur: an infatuation with technique for its own sake, over-sincerity and too much respect for art.” Moreover, Butler says that “for all the claims made about [digital art’s] revolutionary nature… [such artworks] appear to replicate fairly closely the traditional categories.” Such criticism cannot simply be brushed aside as the last gasp of an embittered and irrelevant art critic, as the new media art community are wont to do. While the review may be ungenerous, such critiques need to be taken seriously. Butler’s broader critical claim is an old one, that art serves to reconcile us to capitalism by “endlessly offering palliatives”, and this leads what he sees as the complicity between new media art and techno-capitalist boosterism. In relation to Wands’ approach to his subject, he points to what he considers a striking lack of self-reflexivity on the part of new media artists in that what they are doing is mediated by other forces: social and political, not to mention art-historical. The result, he says:
is the production of airless, claustrophobic, lifeless little worlds, child-like and autistic in their emotional range. It reaffirms the cliché of computer geeks or game addicts, hunched over their keyboards and consoles in darkened rooms, refusing to open the door.In Australia, cynical views about new media art were commonly heard in the late 1990s, when a lot of money flowed into projects on the back of the tech boom. But they were rarely expressed in writing, or in aesthetic terms, as Butler does here. In my experience, the response of the new media art community to this kind of criticism can be as arrogant as the attitudes of the critics who dismiss new media art. One classic example is the frequent yet dubious claim that practices such as net.art are inherently more democratic or critical than mainstream contemporary art. But just because net.art doesn’t involve institutions and curators it doesn’t necessarily follow that it is automatically more democratic, and nor is contemporary art necessarily exclusive.
The reality of contemporary art practice is that it is often a hybrid of old and new media. And while new media artists seem to wish increasingly to be accepted by the art world, rather than circumvent or smash it entirely, a residual tendency exists among new media artists to dismiss what is called ‘traditional art’. This strikes me as a defensive and self-congratulatory gesture. For one thing it amounts to suggesting that new media is a homogenous field of practice. Perhaps we can all agree that a too-confident avant-gardism on the part of the new media art community has been spurred on by a collective fascination with the newness of ‘new media’ art.
In their recent book, New Media Art, Mark Tribe and Reena Jana have suggested that new media art may be conceived as a ‘tendency’:
As the boundaries separating New Media art from more traditional forms like painting and sculpture grow less distinct, New Media art will likely be absorbed into the culture at large. Like Dada, Pop and Conceptual art, it may end as a movement but live on as a tendency – a set of ideas, sensibilities, and methods that appear unpredictably and in multiple forms. 6For Tribe and Jana, new media art is both a movement and a relationship to emerging media technologies. In an interview, Tribe further suggests:
New Media art was one of the few historically significant art movements of the late 20th century. There were a lot of other historically significant practices, but none of them galvanized as movements per se. The defining characteristics of art movements, in my view, are: self-definition (the artists tend to use a common term, or set of competing terms, to name their practice); the existence of dedicated organizations, venues, publications, and discourse networks; and a common set of artistic strategies and concerns… New Media art could be described, generically, as avant-garde. 7For Tribe – who seeks to distinguish new media art from contemporary artists using computers, and also from computer artists – new media art becomes a historically specific subset of media art, circa 1994–2004. However, Tribe and Jana also describe new media art more generically in terms of “projects that make use of emerging media technologies and are concerned with the cultural, political, and aesthetic possibilities of these tools.”8 The defining feature, as Tribe argues, is self-criticism in relation to the media used: “New Media art almost always takes a critical position in relation to media culture and media technologies.” And here, of course, we return to the question of the medium.
While the history of media art is a debate in process – we are currently in a phase of its historicisation – the challenges it poses for art history have received limited attention. Meanwhile – although it is absent in art criticism – aesthetic debate around new media art has largely concentrated on locating the defining qualities of digital media. In his influential book The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich proposes a form of digital materialism only to offer cinema as his ‘key conceptual lens’ for looking at new media. However, he usefully introduces a model of layers to advance “from the material foundations of new media to its forms”.9 He thereby identifies such characteristics as the database at the centre of information aesthetics. Less helpfully, for our purposes, in a 1996 essay, ‘The Death of Computer Art’, Manovich somewhat parodically argued that the difference between contemporary art and new media art boils down to an irreconcilable split between Duchamp-land versus Turing-land. The Turing-land of new media, Manovich suggests, is oriented “towards new, state-of-the-art computer technology, rather than ‘content’.” For Manovich, “[t]he convergence will not happen”, since “Duchamp-land wants art, not research into new aesthetic possibilities of new media.”10
Anna Munster makes the point that “In general, the aesthetic debate concerning new media artwork has concentrated on arguments that seek to locate medium specificity for information aesthetics. Interactivity, virtuality and telepresence have all been offered as defining qualities of new media art.”11 While the art may be done a disservice by being grouped in such as a way, it would seem common sense that media art can’t be properly understood without some critical sensitivity to the technical media involved. Of course this stance risks marginalizing new media art from ‘post-medium’ contemporary art by restating the modernist paradigm of medium specificity. Moreover, the computer, as a meta-medium, works against medium specificity: as Australian artist and critic John Conomos remarked in 1994, the computer has subtly transformed the whole sphere of moving image production: cinema, video, television and photography have all contaminated one another, creating new ‘in-between’ art forms. So what is the alternative to specific media? To suggest, say, that new media entails a shift from object-centred to reception-centred or participatory aesthetics fails to discriminate between new media and other contemporary art of the post-Minimalism period. Even post-expressionist abstraction, such as Op Art, must be seen as a precursor. Interactivity is not the exclusive realm of the media arts: many studies have traced genealogies of digital art, looking at precursors. There are also parallel histories operating in the present. At biennales the world over we can observe how artists are incorporating relational and interactive techniques into their installation-based art practice. One thinks of Carsten Holler’s spectacular spiralling slide installation, Test Site (2006), which attracted thousands of daily visitors to Tate Modern – without any digital technologies whatsoever, aside from the digital video screens enabling the attendants to monitor the safe ride of participants.
Like other interactive and immersive art, the experience of new media art is often temporal; it cannot be taken in at once, synchronously.12 Instead it is a temporal experience, experienced transitively, in a process of spatialization that challenges the tradition of aesthetic distance. As Oliver Grau points out in his book Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, speaking of the transformation of spatial experience brought on by simulation technologies such as telepresence, “inner and visual distance are essential prerequisites for the experience of art and the world in general. Since the eighteenth century, aesthetic theories have regarded distance as a constitutive element of reflection, self-discovery, and the experience of art and nature.”13 Grau cites the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, for whom distance constitutes the subject and is solely responsible for producing the “aesthetic image space”.14
While immersion has a long history in Western aesthetics, in the face of new media artworks that require the active involvement of the viewer, in which the work is constantly updating and transforming itself, we are faced with a new situation. Grau suggests that “in certain seemingly living virtual environments a fragile, central element of art comes under threat: the recipient's act of distancing, which is essential for enabling any critical reflection.”15 In many instances we are left with the ‘interface’ in place of the art object. For example, photo-based art in the digital era increasingly becomes a spatialised interface for embodied viewer interaction. Its ‘flexible data set’ may be contrasted to the traditional photographic image’s static inscription of a moment in time, as Mark Hansen suggests.16
3. New Theories of Hansen & Munster
If conventional critical methods seem poorly equipped to assess new media art, what alternative models or theories might we draw on? I now want to turn briefly to two ambitious new efforts to theorise the aesthetics of new media. In recent books, Mark Hansen and Anna Munster both locate ‘digitality’ in terms of embodiment, even as they attempt to shift the focus away from the medium or technology. Both, in distinct ways, link bodily affect with an ethical dimension in ways that appear promising for a new form of art criticism.
In New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen focuses on the bodily experience of affectivity. Hansen correlates the aesthetics of new media with a strong theory of embodiment, and addresses the themes of digitality and agency. He seeks to develop a new phenomenology – in dialogue with the works of Henry Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, as well as Walter Benjamin and cognitive neuroscience – in which visuality is shaped by visceral bodily elements rather than the abstract power of sight. He maintains the digital image is processual: highly dynamic, capable of being modified at any moment. More importantly, the body ‘enframes’ information; the body becomes the active framer of the image. Exploring large-scale video-based installations by Jeffrey Shaw, Bill Viola, Char Davies, Douglas Gordon and others, Hansen draws on Bergson’s notion of the affective, prediscursive body as a “centre of indetermination” and active source of meaning.
However, as reviewers of the book have noted, one has to ask if there is anything specifically digital about Hansen’s theory. In his discussion of the way in which a work like Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993) reveals new perceptual experience – technically expanding the ‘now’ to reveal the role of affect in the flux of consciousness – Hansen could be speaking of any slow-motion film. Moreover, his enthusiastic response casts him in the modernist tradition of marvelling at the expanded field of vision that new visual technology enables (a la La´szlo´ Moholy-Nagy, or Benjamin, more critically, in the 1920s and 1930s). Furthermore, the body rarely actualizes data as an image in seamless fashion in real time. Inevitable lags in transmission ensure that the medium remains visible to some degree. Moreover, when Hansen writes that the body functions as a kind of filter that selects, he invokes an old-fashioned notion of aesthetics as authentic experience. Thus he writes of “the aura that belongs indelibly to this singular actualization of data in embodied experience” in ways that sound suspiciously like a highly individualised aestheticism17. Indeed, is this “singular actualization of data” – this “properly creative role accorded the body as the source for a new, more or less ubiquitous form of aura” – ultimately just another name for taste?18 Perhaps this explains why Hansen assumes a universal ‘body’, rather than specific bodies located in time in space, marked by history. Ultimately, Hansen’s complex theory seems to offers disappointingly little in the way of a new critical approach to new media.
Anna Munster, in Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, presents a similarly ambitious and wide-ranging speculation on digital aesthetics as a new material regime of the senses. What she calls ‘the digital’ is “a flow of information, technologies, cultural and social deployments, potentialities, delimitations and regulations.”19 At the core of Munster’s argument is that “digital media involve a translation of the continuity of embodied experience into a discontinuous code”, but that this should not be interpreted in terms of disembodiment.20 For Munster, “the incorporeal vectors of digital information draw out the capacities of our bodies to become other than matter conceived as a mere vessel for consciousness or a substrate for signal.”21 Embracing the deterritorialising effects of new media, Munster proposes that “living with contemporary digital machines produces… everyday encounters of doubling, splitting and reverberating as new aspects of our bodily experiences.”22 Munster seeks to redeem this “informatic affect” as “a process of subjective bodily recomposition that occurs in relation to the alterity that pattern and code renderings open up for us.” 23 Instead of attempting to delineate a new aesthetic based on the qualities of the medium, Munster argues that the focus must transfer to the mutability of media forms, and recommends an exploration of “digital embodiment”, which she describes as “a differentially produced mode of living or experiencing the body.”24 This, she suggests, necessarily involves an encounter with alterity and ethics: “factoring in the differentials of others’ experience, place and the material conditions of information culture can lead us from aesthetic to ethical consideration of new media.”25 Thus we have an emerging model for aesthetics which incorporates affect – such as ‘wonder’ – and, crucially, seeks to politicise these experiences.
What do these theories offer for new media art criticism? It is striking that these two attempts to theorise new media have both found recourse in notions of embodiment; both also rely on a Deleuzian model of ‘affect’ (if differently understood, Hansen is more attached to Bergson, Munster to Brian Massumi). Both explore the corporeal dimension, locating human bodies as the key to ‘computational engagement’. Underlying both is the inescapable phenomenological tradition of Maurice Merleau-Ponty – with the body as our inescapable anchorage and opening onto the world. It is possible to think backwards to the way that this understanding extends or offers a challenge to modernist art criticism. One thinks especially of the influence of phenomenology on the minimalists and what modernist critic Michael Fried derisively characterized as that art’s theatricality (because of its temporal duration and reliance on a beholder). Much more could and should be written on Fried’s bias in the current context.26 While Fried himself has shifted his attention from painting to photography, new media art must be considered as part of a broader shift from the representational tradition of visual art to one engaged in the more presentational mode. Much like minimal and performance art, and relational art more recently, it invariably incorporates the sense of the here and now, with the viewer participating in the very space of the object, images or action. It seems unfortunate, then, that although Munster claims that digital art “exploded into the art world” in the 1990s, her efforts to locate new media art within the mainstream of contemporary art are very limited and she has little to say about these alternative traditions.27
4. Conclusion
Arthur Danto has built a career around his belief that the role of the art critic is to identify the idea embodied in the work, and assess the adequacy of its embodiment.28 In practice this is easier said than done. What appears to be introduced by both installation art and new media art is new mode of embodying judgement, focused on the viewer’s encounter with the artwork’s potential. No wonder that critics of new media, both affirmative and negative, find themselves writing about the experience of fellow viewers or users of the art, such as children (for exponents, children’s enthusiasm for new media is a sign of success, of accessibility and future literacy; for critics it is a sign of the work’s infantilism). What is clear is that it is no longer sufficient to lazily speak about the difference between new media and so-called ‘traditional media’, partly because contemporary art is post-media and enjoys more sophisticated levels of critical reception than is usually suggested by the caricatures. Claire Bishop, for instance, has attempted to categorise works of installation art by the type of active experience that they structure for the viewer.29 As she notes, because installation art addresses the viewer directly as a literal presence in the space, a relationship comes to be implied between ‘activated spectatorship’ and active engagement in the social-political arena. But, contrary to what Hansen assumes, the viewer is not universal; we must also pay attention, as art does, to the social matrix of class, race, gender, and sexuality of the viewing subject. New media theorists too often assume a universal user, and in this sense, Munster’s insistence on critical context is important.
Reading Hansen and Munster one is reminded of Marshall McLuhan’s idea that all media are extensions of the body; the difference now, perhaps, is that media art often questions these extensions (we don’t need Stelarc’s prosthetics to remind us of this). Nevertheless, in the new media theories of Hansen and Munster, the aesthetic experience remains fundamentally singular despite their efforts to institute an ethics of active agency. But there are important alternatives, outlined by supporters of relational art or other participatory or intersubjective practices.30 While on the one hand, contemporary art, with new media, seems increasingly to present itself in individualized ways – embracing the subjectivization of aesthetic experience – some of the most successful recent art projects also seek to engage art as a site of collective meaning. I would include some net.art and locative media in this category – such as work by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Once again, Carsten Höller’s slide project at Tate Modern is again instructive, in the way the installation combines the embodied individual experience of the slide-goer with the gaze of other Tate Modern gallery visitors (and utopian theoretical aspirations). Only a similarly open stance will enable us to further the critical discourse around new media art within the expanded field of contemporary art.
Notes
1. Mark Hansen (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Anna Munster (2006), Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics, Hanover: Dartmouth University Press.
2. See, for instance, James Elkins (2003), What Happened to Art Criticism?, Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press and George Baker, Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Andrea Fraser, David Joselit, James Meyer, Robert Storr, Hal Foster, John Miller and Helen Molesworth (2002), ‘Round Table: The Present Conditions of Art Criticism’, October, 100, Spring, pp. 200–228.
3. Rosalind Krauss, despite her criticism of installation art, proposes the notion of the medium’s “differential specificity”, based on its conventions. As an alternative to Greenbergian orthodoxy, she proposes a concept of the medium as “aggregative and thus distinct from the material properties of a merely physical object-like support.” See Rosalind E. Krauss (1999), "A Voyage on the North Sea”: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson).
4. Beryl Graham (2005), post to New Media Curating List, 21 October 2005 (http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/new-media-curating.html)
5. Rex Butler (2006), ‘What’s new is old again for the digital avant-garde’, The Australian , 22 August 2006.
6. Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, New Media Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2006), p.25.
7. Domenico Quaranta (2006), ‘The Last Avant-garde: Interview with Mark Tribe & Reena Jana’, posted to New Media Curating List, 31 October 2006.
8. Jana continues: “New Media artists were not simply experimenting with digital editing to make their video art easier to produce or creating online animations of their paintings (two examples of practices that often were described as "digital art" in the late 1990s and conflated with New Media art). Instead, New Media artists use emerging mass-communications tools to comment on the social, cultural, and philosophical effects that such tools trigger.” See ‘The Last Avant-garde’
9. Lev Manovich (2001), The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 9.
10. Lev Manovich (1996), ‘The Death of Computer Art’ Posted to Rhizome mailing list, 23 October 1996 (http://www.rhizome.org).
12. Beryl Graham has speculated whether the key difference to address when considering new media art as opposed to other contemporary art forms is one of process: “the process of art making (versioning), the process of curating, the process of distribution, the process of documenting, the process of criticism, the process of historicising.” Graham, 2005.
13. Oliver Grau (2003), Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, trans. Gloria Custance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, p. 286.
14. Cassirer’s reflections on the power of distance for intellectual productivity and creating awareness owes much to Kant's transcendental idealism. See Ernst Cassirer [1927], The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1963).
15. Oliver Grau, ‘Immersion and Interaction: From Circular Frescoes to Interactive Image Spaces’, in Rudolf Frieling & Dieter Daniels (eds.) (2004), Media Art Net 1/A Survey of Media Art, Vienna: Springer, pp. 292–313; 304. But on the contrary, poet and essayist Paul Valéry, in his essay ‘The Conquest of Ubiquity’, predicted in 1928 that the new future would see the reception of artworks transmitted from afar by electricity, as Grau also notes. (286) As Grau puts it “In some ways the spiritual father of McLuhan, Valéry envisioned a medium that would convey polysensorial stimuli and be on tap everywhere, like electricity or water, and speaks of “a company specialising in the free home delivery of sensorially perceptible reality.” (287) Grau wonders if with “the imminent possibility of theoretically infinite numbers of new spaces of experience created through telepresesence” we will perceive a “loss of experience of the world” or “an expanded cognitive process of sensory perceptions and direction participation in distant events.” Grau (2003), pp. 287–8.
26. The same might be said of the influence of Clement Greenberg, who did apparently see some digital art but said, apparently, that it “hurt his eyes”. Email correspondence with James Faure Walker, 12 November 2006.
27. See my review of Anna Munster’s book in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, 7:2 (2006), pp. 99–103.
28. See, for instance, Arthur C. Danto (1994), Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays & Aesthetic Meditations, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.
28.Claire Bishop (2005), Installation Art, London: Tate. The ‘activated viewer’ is divided in Bishop’s book into four main categories: psychological, phenomenological, libidinal withdrawal/subjective disintegration, and political subject.
30. See, for instance, Grant H. Kester (2004), Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press and Claire Bishop (2006) ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’, Artforum, February 2006, pp. 178–9.