Paddy Johnson on New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck (her title). MTAA on What a New Media Person Has to Do To Cross Over to the Gallery System (my title):There are some new media artists who cross over and make it look easy. Cory Arcangel and Jennifer & Kevin McCoy come to mind. Arcangel succeeds by acting a bit like a ethnographer who travels into hacker culture and exports the bits that make sense to the art world. The McCoys succeed by addressing the older tradition of film and not letting themselves geek-out when addressing the art world. Speaking as someone with a sneakerhold in both worlds, I'd rather spend my remaining dwindling critical energy explaining the sacred mysteries of the gallery universe to Internet users than trying to tell a gallery person why a spaceship flying over an endlessly scrolling videogame landscape with the caption "lol, usenet" is funny. My sense is the former crowd is genuinely curious while the latter is boastful of its own cyber-ignorance. I will, however, take a crack at defending a Net Art 2.0 piece that I happen to really like. As Paddy describes it, [The] Guthrie Lonergan piece MySpace Intro Playlist, a curatorial project that consists of 20 [actual, found] MySpace intro videos, inspires the same questions video art has posed to the viewer for years, “Why am I watching this?” To be honest, even as someone who uses these tools on a regular basis, I still have problems figuring out what to do with this piece. It is a cabinet of curiosities I feel I'd rather see on blogger Jason Kottke’s remaindered links, than to have it exist on the more aggrandized Rhizome Timeshares page. I'd say it's the essence of traditional video art, which deals with themes of construction of identity, guerilla theatre, acting out, and "problematizing" the medium (i.e., using it so badly it becomes self-conscious)--except there is no auteur operating the camera and doing bogus sociology. Nevertheless, as a viewer of this "artist as curator" work, as I said in an earlier post, "I feel a bit like James Stewart in Rear Window watching these normal people doing their awkward and occasionally very funny home movie bits to introduce themselves to a million total strangers. It's completely public domain but feels invasive somehow." That's the artist making me uncomfortable.
Update: In fairness to Paddy, I first encountered that piece on Lonergan's page with a link to YouTube. Some art works best "underground"--as in, you found it yourself or through a small network--and doesn't always survive an institutionally enlarged context. Cory Arcangel's Whitney Artport page is one of the few instances I can think of where an artist's anarchic
sensibility completely trumped the "normalizing" effect of a museum web page.
all interesting stuff.
www.myspace.com/alabamaclayton
"why net art doesn't suck"?
doesn't the title say it all? that is, that Paddy is a dope?
why waste your time?
Much of it does suck--the case still has to be made.
Actually, the title is New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck, but most people who ask me this are actually referring to net art. And unfortunately, I think need to do a part 3 to actually make the case that it doesn't. This would probably be a top ten list of Internet awesomeness, with some preamble about net aesthetics, since this is what people really don't get.
Whoops--I didn't notice that walter10021's (abusive) question misquoted your title "New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck." I had an "and" instead of an ampersand and fixed it.
I do tend to use the terms interchangeably. I suppose to be a stickler--someone making art on the Net is necessarily a new media artist but the reverse isn't true. Although it's hard to imagine anyone making computer pieces nowadays that are for the gallery only, and not in some way conversant with the web.
When I started showing work in galleries made with the computer I avoided "computer art" because at the time that connoted "flying toasters." In 1997 I wouldn't have thought to call it "new media." (I probably still wouldn't for that body of work, because it didn't move, light up, or go boing.) And although I was a web user I didn't have a personal site till 2000 and I still don't consider myself a "net artist"--mainly because that's too confining.
This doesn't have anything to do with the above comment but,
I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about explaining the mysteries of the gallery world to Internet users vrs explaining the mysteries of the Internet world to a gallery person. I think there is truth to what you are saying, but after some contemplation on the subject I think I fall on the other side of that fence. There are all sorts of art professionals who want to know what this is all about, can't figure it out, and feel the message from new media people is, "it's too complicated to explain, you'll never get it, leave us alone". And admittedly, it's a daunting task to try and explain this stuff to people who are still trying to figure out why their email is broken because they are getting ads for penis enlargers, but I think there are ways to do it.
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Paddy Johnson on New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck (her title). MTAA on What a New Media Person Has to Do To Cross Over to the Gallery System (my title):Speaking as someone with a sneakerhold in both worlds, I'd rather spend my remaining dwindling critical energy explaining the sacred mysteries of the gallery universe to Internet users than trying to tell a gallery person why a spaceship flying over an endlessly scrolling videogame landscape with the caption "lol, usenet" is funny. My sense is the former crowd is genuinely curious while the latter is boastful of its own cyber-ignorance. I will, however, take a crack at defending a Net Art 2.0 piece that I happen to really like. As Paddy describes it, I'd say it's the essence of traditional video art, which deals with themes of construction of identity, guerilla theatre, acting out, and "problematizing" the medium (i.e., using it so badly it becomes self-conscious)--except there is no auteur operating the camera and doing bogus sociology. Nevertheless, as a viewer of this "artist as curator" work, as I said in an earlier post, "I feel a bit like James Stewart in Rear Window watching these normal people doing their awkward and occasionally very funny home movie bits to introduce themselves to a million total strangers. It's completely public domain but feels invasive somehow." That's the artist making me uncomfortable.
Update: In fairness to Paddy, I first encountered that piece on Lonergan's page with a link to YouTube. Some art works best "underground"--as in, you found it yourself or through a small network--and doesn't always survive an institutionally enlarged context. Cory Arcangel's Whitney Artport page is one of the few instances I can think of where an artist's anarchic sensibility completely trumped the "normalizing" effect of a museum web page.
- tom moody 8-16-2006 4:30 am
all interesting stuff.
www.myspace.com/alabamaclayton
- anonymous (guest) 8-16-2006 5:34 am
"why net art doesn't suck"?
doesn't the title say it all? that is, that Paddy is a dope?
why waste your time?
- walter10021 (guest) 8-16-2006 4:52 pm
Much of it does suck--the case still has to be made.
- tom moody 8-16-2006 6:08 pm
Actually, the title is New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck, but most people who ask me this are actually referring to net art. And unfortunately, I think need to do a part 3 to actually make the case that it doesn't. This would probably be a top ten list of Internet awesomeness, with some preamble about net aesthetics, since this is what people really don't get.
- Paddy Johnson 8-16-2006 8:30 pm
Whoops--I didn't notice that walter10021's (abusive) question misquoted your title "New Media: Why It Doesn't Suck." I had an "and" instead of an ampersand and fixed it.
I do tend to use the terms interchangeably. I suppose to be a stickler--someone making art on the Net is necessarily a new media artist but the reverse isn't true. Although it's hard to imagine anyone making computer pieces nowadays that are for the gallery only, and not in some way conversant with the web.
When I started showing work in galleries made with the computer I avoided "computer art" because at the time that connoted "flying toasters." In 1997 I wouldn't have thought to call it "new media." (I probably still wouldn't for that body of work, because it didn't move, light up, or go boing.) And although I was a web user I didn't have a personal site till 2000 and I still don't consider myself a "net artist"--mainly because that's too confining.
- tom moody 8-16-2006 9:09 pm
This doesn't have anything to do with the above comment but,
I've been thinking a lot over the last couple of days about explaining the mysteries of the gallery world to Internet users vrs explaining the mysteries of the Internet world to a gallery person. I think there is truth to what you are saying, but after some contemplation on the subject I think I fall on the other side of that fence. There are all sorts of art professionals who want to know what this is all about, can't figure it out, and feel the message from new media people is, "it's too complicated to explain, you'll never get it, leave us alone". And admittedly, it's a daunting task to try and explain this stuff to people who are still trying to figure out why their email is broken because they are getting ads for penis enlargers, but I think there are ways to do it.
- Paddy Johnson 8-18-2006 3:14 pm