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[integer at www.god-emil.dk]

 TONGOLELE at aol.com
 
 bagatele  tzk tzk
 
 
 
 >A Modest Proposal for Josephine Bosma (jesis at xs4all.nl)
 >final review net.art/culture
 >
 >Net.Art:  a laughing matter?
 
 klap klap
 
 
 
 
 kuer! - white. male. western - !z a defekt +?
 
 
 nn - !nd!gou
 
 
 
 
 >
 > It is as if nature decided to complete the experience that the promoters of 
 >the internet have created for us. Video game parlors, cybercafes, 
 >advertisements for telecommunications and pseudoerotic displays of youthful 
 >flesh dominate the landscape of nearly every city in the developed world, and 
 >the wealthy quarters of most third world urban centers. Streets are flooded 
 >with neon and electronic billboards that provide much more light than what 
 >should be available at night.
 >
 >One of the world’Äôs most hyped art milieu can be describe in one word: 
 >depressing. The most positive thing to say about net.culture probably is its 
 >openness to artists who have access to computers, and are largely white, male 
 >and western.
 >
 >Net.culture is depressing for three reasons (I am not even counting the 
 >curators’Äô general ignorance of current art practices other than net.art, 
 >which constitute the overwhelming majority of art history past and present). 
 >First, the amount of frivolity and fatuous self-promotion and the absence 
 >contemplation of the world’Äôs current and cultural and political situation 
 >other than generalized paranoia about surveillance and libertarian rants 
 >about wanting freedom from any kind of control of any kind, including 
 >rational judgement. The endless celebration of post-structuralist theories of 
 >deterritorialization and fluidity are truly over the top.
 >
 > There is an overkill of (somehow disguised) anti-statism and self-proclaimed 
 >avant garde status that makes one either grow irritated or totally 
 >uninterested after a while. Second, this is the art form of mostly R & D for 
 >the software industry and wireless communications, in which almost everything 
 >is meaningless on purpose. Net.cultural theorists need to preach and teach 
 >about what the avant garde supposedly is leads to a third more poignant 
 >reason for depression: Net.art is above all formalist and formally 
 >predictable. There is very little conceptual depth or anything else 
 >substantive, intellectually provocative or profound about it. That is, if one 
 >does not count the rather kitschy dramatic effect of the curatorial lingo 
 >hyping most new media shows that rivals the advertising copy of Silicon 
 >Valley. Individual artists and art works seemed to be drowning in it, 
 >something they actually deserve.
 >
 >Main Impression
 >
 >Of course it is a relief to see a major art form that reflects the way the 
 >world is closing down. It sounds clichˆ©, but communication
 >technologies and mass media culture are part of the economic and social 
 >polarization of the world that reached traumatic proportions in the 1990s. 
 >Cultures  that were colonized politically by Europe from the 15th to the 20th 
 >century have slowly started to undergo new forms of colonization called 
 >neoliberalism. As a result, older forms of hybridization are being supplanted 
 >by the McDonalidization of most urban cultures and bad taste is now defined 
 >by American companies, but is bombarded into other countries via massive p
 >ropaganda campaigns that make lousy food, technologically mediated 
 >interaction, and obsessive consumerism seem desirable. Multinationals and 
 >most governments do everything possible to censor information about their 
 >faults. Most affluent people do everything possible to avoid unmediated 
 >contact that would expose their faults as well. 
 >
 >One of the things that net.culture seems to want to be is what its name 
 >implies: to be THE culture of the moment ’Äì that represents the radical 
 >transformation of the world by digital technology, or a confirmation even 
 >maybe. But it does so in a highly predictable, lecturing way. As I said, this 
 >is the art form of the internet, of radical 'art' (illustrated best
 >probably by the words of most other art curators, who usually talk about it 
 >as "that awfully ugly stuff that never downloads anyway"). A barrage of spam 
 >from a self-centered semi delusional artiste, found footage with images of 
 >home made porn re-edited, a documentary about avatars , so called 'new forms 
 >of cinema' showing the situation anti-globalization protests in Europe and 
 >North America, numerous websites announcing non-existent governments and 
 >countries and corporations for no apparent reason, endless webcam diaries 
 >about white suburban people who think their lives are interesting, and a 
 >number of works in which artists contemplate on their invented selves are 
 >mixed with grim looking
 >pieces about biotechnology and designer babies, numerous "artful" porn sites 
 >with obscenities in various languages, pages covered with code and unreadable 
 >text,  lousy computer animation, black and white streaming videos of empty or 
 >gloomy spaces  and labyrinthine MUDS and MOOS with 12 signs of depression. 
 >The relatively large number of murky photos of outer space make the 
 >impression of net.art  as literal document of our times even stronger.
 >
 >
 >
 > 
 >Net.culture is not just dominated by tepid works and
 >frivolity and self-aggrandizement. What is rather puzzling within this 
 >net.culture is the odd presence of certain 'old favorites' in the aesthetic. 
 >One wanders from site to site filled with what I described above and then 
 >suddenly, slightly lost, there is a space filled with works that look 
 >strangely like repeats of structuralist film, 70s femininst autobiographical 
 >video, or neo-geo painting (even worse the seconc time around). Even if these 
 >genres have yielded very interesting seeing them here made one
 >wonder why specifically people argue that net.art represents a total rupture 
 >with the past . Also interesting works by 'newer' artists or artist groups 
 >that have nothing to do with nettime/Next Five Minutes/Ars/ Transmediale 
 >circuit are rarely noticed by the players of the "scene".
 >The political brainwash of the majority of the field is so strong that
 >it overpowers all works and leaves one with very little room for serious 
 >ideological and political interpretation. The question then haunts you: what 
 >makes the work of few serious artists in net.culture ignored by most 
 >nettimers? One tries to think like the curators have seemed to think, so here 
 >we go: is it because they are somehow not easily packaged as cyberhype, 
 >because the work is about the inequities of net.culture and the world outside 
 >it (thus a sign of net.culture’Äôs decadence) or because  this work offers 
 >critical  perspectives or contemplation on the fetishization of technology  
 >or simply because the artists who made them are not 'white' and make (again) 
 >contemplative, interesting pieces?  Even if the works of the Electronic 
 >Disturbance Theatre and Walid Ra’Äôad (who is the Atlas Group, since the group 
 >doesn’Äôt exist as a group)  fit in this net.art scene perfectly I don't think 
 >they really benefit from it.
 >
 >New media
 >
 >Net.culture does not just suffer from its ideological molding. I can very 
 >well imagine that somebody who actually likes the position of the curators
 >still would find some things lacking in  net.art. Concerning media other than 
 >net.art the curators of new media  are far less informed as any randomly 
 >chosen
 >museum director, which means they aren’Äôt. Maybe a special night course for
 >acquiring knowledge of the rest of art history would do the trick. The 
 >net.art curators are simply
 >out of it when it comes to knowledge about art in any other media and their 
 >projects
 >would gain a lot in credibility if they learned more , since many issues
 >tackled in net.art are represented so well and abundantly in the rest of the 
 >media of art making in most of the world.
 >If one tries to think from the ideological position of the new media 
 >theorists and radicals 
 >again there are plenty of good people who should be part of their events but 
 >rarely are. Surfing from portal to portal and list to list there were numeral
 >instances that I thought: "Wouldn't some intevention of refugees in all this 
 >discussion by white people with passports about refugees make this discussion 
 >a little more grounded?  "Isn’Äôt it time to look at the absolutely horrendous 
 >labor conditions in assembly plants where poor women go blind putting 
 >together your computers as part of the reason why technology isn’Äôt liberating 
 >everyone?" "Wouldn’Äôt it help to deflate the pretense of all those who claim 
 >to have reinvented art practice if net.cultur-ites actually engaged in 
 >discussion with art historians and practiioners who have expertise in 
 >previous waves of new media?" "Wouldn't some politicized  artists of color 
 >question whether it is enough for nettimers to collect software designers 
 >from every corner of the planet and call that diversity? 
 >
 >Finally
 >
 >Politics has always been part of the artistic endeavor of the West  from the 
 >didactic dramas of classical antiquity to the centuries of religious 
 >propanganda financed and controlled by the Catholic Church, to deployment of 
 >Abstract Expressionism by the CIA -- Why do net.culture people forget this so 
 >easily? One reason could be that part of the neoformalist revival in art in 
 >the 90s was more trend then strategy. The art market simply needs new trends 
 >to survive and net.art was one of them.  "New products - new art, new artists 
 >- are displayed,
 >new trends are announced, new players are introduced and old relationships 
 >are reinforced." Looking at it from that perspective net.art just might have
 >succeeded in pushing a few new artists to the foreground.
 >
 >Is it impossible then to have a good time in net.art spaces? Absolutely not. 
 >There are still plenty of good works to see. And, as an artist said to
 >me, it always is inspiring to see a bad art. Maybe it would be better
 >to see net.culture as an art work itself, a project by the telecommunication 
 >industry, software giants, and European and American governments using arts 
 >funding to revive their post-industrial economies
 >whose message will probably resonate for quite a while after this wave of 
 >net.art is over, no matter what the final interpretation of it will
 >be. It seems fairly sure that on the short term the museums were inspired by 
 >it. Several opened net.art portrals and made miserly commissions to virtually 
 >unknown artists when they were shutting down most other possibilities for 
 >artists without big dealers and collectors backing them to exhibit anywhere.
 >
 >Coco