tom moody

We're a competitive species, we're told, so there's something hard-wired about wanting to know how we're scoring. It's this innate whatever that makes the current internet thrive. Grow your followers. Attract more friends. Your every utterance needs a popularity count. Five people liked your tweet! You are encouraged to check constantly by having "notification" numbers appearing at the top of your page -- it's not neurotic and fucked-up at all to investigate those numbers further, to obsess about your stats -- it's OK, it's the libertarian, neoliberal model. It's like a game, right? Game-ification results in more customer involvement with a brand. Social media allows advertisers to rate people as they are rating themselves. Give people numbers, it's fun!

The prophets and holy people of religion (particularly Buddhism) might say this was a false premise, that the internet is not a place for a healthy, mindful existence. When you're out in the world you don't have a number pinned to your back listing your total followers. It's generally considered rude, outside of Dallas, Texas, to ask when first meeting someone, "how much money do you make?" It would be creepy to ask a stranger how many internet friends he has. Your stats aren't a fit subject for discussion yet there they are, at the top of your page, like a scarlet letter. You can't turn them off. The success of the business model and the American way of life depends on these counts, we're told by our Gods, the new Gods, the job-creators and monopolizers of Silicon Valley.

Some notes on a Rhizome.org post about Joshua Decter's curated shows of mostly painting, sculpture, and photography with a "new media" gloss. Decter walks us through three projects from 1996-2006. A common thread is The Curator As Artist.

I saw his "Screen" show in '96 at Petzel, a scattershot, salon-style installation of works by top painters of the day, mainly in the abstract vein. He placed TV cameras in the room to film the works -- I supposed the images were being fed to this now-quaint web page on adaweb. Today we would call the design of that site "dirt-style" HTML -- a hideous ochre background with magenta letters, shaky frames, and a charming "while you're waiting for the images to load..." apology on the checklist page.

Decter had been writing for Arts magazine, when it flourished in the early '90s under Barry Schwabsky's editorship, and his byline began appearing in Artforum around this time, so he had gatekeeper power to attract top artists. Many of these painters may have professed an interest in electronic media but their primary focus was still the slow, hand-crafted object. Their work wasn't particularly well served to be hung in a cattle-call show, shot on video (cropped and off-center), and ultimately reduced to low-resolution raster images. Yes, there was mediation, spectacle, etc, hot buzzwords at the time, but a painter takes some pains to make an object that thrives on slow, "time-release" time scale. The disservice is even more evident now, as the captures from mid-'90s TV interwoven with the paintings on the website have a depressing, late-night infomercial vibe, while the paintings barely register.

Decter feels that his "virtual artist" and "virtual curator" kiosks at MCA Chicago in 1999 differed from the familiar interactive displays of museum education departments across the country. This seems wrong but I can't back it up with hard stats. It would be interesting to do a survey of how many virtual galleries with Google Sketch-Up-like versions of the collection have been presented by museums over the years, or programs like Decter's "Make your own Baldessari" software. They reduce the, again, slow, process of artistic thought and individuation of the physical collections to simplified mix and match objects, and minimize artists to a few characteristic style tics, e.g., "put a blue circle on a face and make a Baldessari." The MCA Chicago show also anticipates the virtual gallery trend of current new media artists, which flatters art world power structures by placing (mostly inept) 3D objects in white cube environments.

For his 2006 project at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Decter sided with the architectural community in its ongoing war against artists, typically manifested in high-concept starchitect buildings that reduce the art to ornamentation or afterthought. Decter commissioned a firm to build a crazy, room-filling kiosk -- a biomorphic jungle of sleek forms invoking HR Giger and The Matrix's robotic squids, for display of comparatively tiny, digitized versions of artists' artworks.

In all of these projects brand name artists from the gallery system serve as a salad bar for Decter's new media exploration. Most are probably resigned to seeing their works reduced in size and impact for the intellectual cachet of a modern high-tech show. And most are "old media" names: John Currin, Anna Gaskell, Andres Serrano, Matthew Barney, etc. Similar concepts to Decter's (surveillance, quantification of "unique" objects, virtual spaces) have been simultaneously limned in the new media sphere, at SIGGRAPH or Eyebeam or on Rhizome, with their own networks of curator and artist celebrities. The Rhizome post ultimately provides a fascinating glimpse at how fields with differing expectations and critical standards can exist side by side, each without ever critiquing the other.

Update: I wrote that in Decter's "Screen" show of paintings at Friedrich Petzel in 1996, "he placed TV cameras in the room to film the works." In his reply to this post on Rhizome Decter clarifies that he "took photographs of the installation of artworks, digitized these images, and worked with an editor on an AVID system at a professional studio to generate a video catalogue of the exhibition. This video catalogue was distributed as the only catalogue of the show, and was also played on video monitors within the gallery during the run of the show." Apologies for the error.

On his blog Culture Two, Brian Droitcour explains why he hates Post-Internet art.
The argument he calls knee-jerk -- “How can we be post-internet when internet is still here? Shouldn’t it be during-internet?” -- always spoke eloquently to me, ha ha. Droitcour doesn't completely disagree because he writes "the internet is always changing. The internet of five years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the internet before social media, or the internet of twenty years ago, or the internet before the World Wide Web. Why insist that the changes are over?" Rather than focus on the past or even present, he thinks we should give more thought to what the internet is becoming, and our place in it. Focus on "proto-" rather than "post-," he suggests. Sounds good to me.

There was some confusion in the comment thread about post-internet definitions and who was using which so I chimed in:

Marisa Olson used the term post-internet differently than Gene McHugh did, as you summarized McHugh's definition here. He said the "post-" referred to a historical moment when the internet changed from geeky/amateur to everyday/professional. Olson used it to describe her own art practice, consisting of performances in real space or on video that referenced internet-specific content, such as "Abe and Mo Sing the Blogs." Her definition is closer to the type of art you are criticizing here, for example, objects presented by The Jogging for gallery consumption that refer to internet content (and also reflect back by being "internet ready" in terms of lighting, camera angles, etc.). The way art galleries are using the term "post-internet" now is exactly the way Olson used it and you are right to critique it. What may work for her as an individual artist is a poor statement of general principal.
You make a good point that it's all still changing. Net neutrality may end; every country has its own rules for permissible traffic. The big internet companies are constantly working to gather users into "silos." We'll be truly post-internet when you hear sentences such as "Was that on Facebook or the internet?" Or "which internet -- the public one or the fast lane one?"
(McHugh’s blog is still available on the Internet Archive, by the way, at http://web.archive.org/web/20120422161041/http://122909a.com/)