IN CLASS BLOG DISCUSSION (Respond to Ashika and Brendan’s posts)

PLEASE READ THROUGH AND RESPOND TO YOUR CLASSMATE’S BLOG ENTRIES BELOW AND MY QUESTION.  KEEP THE CONVERSATION FOCUSED ON THE SUBJECT OF ART, ART VIDEOS THAT YOU HAVE SEEN AND ART AS DISCUSSED IN THE ARTICLES.

Brendan writes:

“Instead of touching on the ubiquity and popular appeal of digital art, Bishop calls into question the digital everyday in contemporary art. I did not agree with how she dismisses new media art in favor of more traditional art like sculpture, video, and installation. She goes on to state how digital art is not visual but instead is based on code and linguistics. Regardless, the end result is a visual display. I wonder how she would fit typographic design into her discussion. However, I was most interested in her point that mainstream contemporary art is not reacting to the digital age out of fear.

It is well known that “the establishment” fears and rejects what is different, new, and/or may force it to change. Bishop attributes this fear to art’s loss of uniqueness “in the face of its infinite, uncontrollable dissemination via Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc.” This reminded me of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” specifically the concept of authenticity in the realm of mechanical reproduction. Even though reproduction weakens the aura of the original, there is really nothing like seeing the one true work of art.

Now mechanical reproduction has been replaced with digital dissemination. While re-posting a work of art on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. may weaken its integrity, it only allows a wider audience to view and comment on art that they would have otherwise never seen. Since Bishop wrote this article in 2012, I believe it is a bit dated in its evaluation of digital art. In the years since, the world of digital art has grown exponentially. The way I see it, the new media art world is niche, the mainstream art world is upper echelon niche, and the real art world is everything all around and in between.”

It is absolutely true that Bishop appears to dismiss more traditional mediums.  At Hito Steyerl writes in the interview that we read:

“But it seems to me that she very correctly described a quite ludicrous analog nostalgia in a specific corner of the artworld. Next time I see another 16mm film projector rattling away in a gallery I will personally kidnap it and take the poor thing to a pensioners home. There is usually no intrinsic reason whatsoever for the use of 16mm film nowadays except for making moving images look pretentious, expensive and vaguely modernist, all prepackaged with a whiff of WASPish art history. It made sense to use Bolexes in 1968, and indeed people used them to brilliant end. But today people use cellphones, Kinnect sensors and After Effects to deal with the present and shape it. And if artists do not expose themselves to the workflow and economies that come with contemporary means of production, they become souvenir peddlers. Or worse trying to conveniently package a bygone radical moment as a collectors item. I think Bishop said something similar more politely. Now I also understand people have been disappointed that she´s not been mentioning real contemporary practices more extensively. This complaint should be made to Artforum, though or in extension to the formally and technologically conservative artworld it represents, not to a single writer which isnt an expert in media art and never claimed to be. The debate expresses a real tension, which on the other hand is not so new either. The most interesting and challenging contemporary art was rarely acknowledged as such in it’s time often took place outside the artfield. So the real question is: could one build something outside of the existing artworlds? With what means?”

ASHIKA Writes:

Bishop’s idea of the Digital Divide resonated with me well because of how it reflected the contemporary world. She brings up two very specific ideas that were a reflection of artists’ work such as Frances Stark and Thomas Hirschhorn. First, she says “Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly mutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on our consumption of relationships, images, and communication.” My interpretation of this statement would entail the use of the short lived virtual age as an influence on the way we interact with our peers and deal with situations and static information on a whole. For example in Stark’s video (My Best Thing), her use of human personas projected onto animated ones is almost a scary reflection of our interactions in the virtual world today. It seems too artificial and uncanny to think that two human beings can interact so seamlessly over information online.

Moreover, what Stark is really commenting on here is the idea of being so inevitably connected yet so distant, which is also the second idea that Bishop brings up in her interpretation of the digital world and its divide. She says, “…each articulates something of the troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new technological regime,and proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued.”  The characteristics of this ‘so called’ technological regime is the true essence of how we stay connected today. We’re almost inevitably intimate with every individual on the earth, be it directly or indirectly. But in actual measurable terms such as distance, we are extremely far away from them. Hirschhorn’s video (Touching Reality) depicts this exact sense, we “touch” the gruesome happenings that are so readily available to us, yet what we can do and what can we feel in the situation is far apart from what the virtual world can provide to us.

Given these ideas that Bishop points out, in my opinion, what we as artists in the digital world are given is a whole playing field worth of room to use digital to comment or mock on digital. It has given us the leeway to convey our true feelings about our culture in the language that the culture speaks best. Therefore, we are given everything we need to exist as artists in the contemporary world  through this idea of “digital divide”, which is the separation between the once mainstream art world and it’s response to the digital.

QUESTION:  What kind of world could exist for art outside the art world?  What kind of platforms DO exist and COULD exist and how do they change how we understand art?

Frieze Magazine responds, o the few artists – such as Frances Stark, Thomas Hirschhorn and Ryan Trecartin – who Bishop notes are producing work that ‘confronts the question of the digital’, we might add a number of artists from a younger generation, all of whom make work that questions, uses or engages directly with the digital world that we find ourselves increasingly embedded within. Artists such as Trisha Baga, Lucas Blalock (who is featured in this issue), Simon Denny, Aleksandra Domanović, Yngve Holen, Keller/Kosmas (AIDS 3D), Oliver Laric, Katja Novitskova, Jon Rafman and Timur Si-Qin – to name but a few – all take the social condition afforded by the digital revolution as a primary subject.

Reframing Bishop’s initial question – which is a good one – we might ask: how are artists to engage with our increasingly online reality while avoiding technological solipsism or an all-too-familiar Internet aesthetic? More importantly, how, when the predominant mode of engagement with art is still in the physical world, can online systems, setups, speeds and solutions cross the ‘digital divide’? A distinction must be made between the kind of technology artists regularly use, such as the digital camera and the digital projector, and work made on, (and for) display on computer screens. The former is easily transferable to the gallery setting, while the latter is not.