Posts Tagged ‘novelty’

Sunday, August 15th, 2010

Performance 4 

1.

According to the computer science guru David Gelertner, the increasing migration of digital information from personal hardware to data clouds necessitates a shift in the picture one refers to when visualizing the Internet.  The Web—as in a relatively static network of data nodes—is out; the lifestream—as in continuously mutating network of data clouds—is in.  He writes:

The Internet’s future is not Web 2.0 or 200.0 but the post-Web, where time instead of space is the organizing principle — instead of many stained-glass windows, instead of information laid out in space, like vegetables at a market — the Net will be many streams of information flowing through time. The Cybersphere as a whole equals every stream in the Internet blended together: the whole world telling its own story.

For some artists working on the Web, this principal applies as well.  Creativity is–again, for some–not evaluated on the basis of an individual work of art, but rather on the basis of the artist’s ongoing, performed net presence.  For better or for worse, a week ago an artist may have created a masterpiece work of art which in previous epochs would have been discussed for decades or even centuries; in the age of the CVS Pharmacy Twitter feed, though, the artist’s masterpiece will be quickly forgotten, at best sentimentally recalled or academically cited, but no longer felt. What will be felt, though, is the artist’s ongoing engagement with time—the molding of the NOW.

It should be said, though, that Gelertner is ambiguous about this obsession with flow and the NOW.  He writes, “The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.”  Furthermore, focusing on an endless NOW, can be oppressive for an artist’s creative expression.  Part of what it means to be working in the tradition of the history of art is to work against the demands of one’s own time; or at least working in relation to it from a skewed angle, keeping everyone on their toes.  The Puck-ish delight the artist has in convoluting expectations is frustrated in this grinding system which demands one to endlessly perform, endlessly produce ever newer novelties if one is to remain relevant as an artist.  Nothing becomes shocking when there’s a new revolution every week and, thus, any avant-garde action becomes neither here nor there—it’s like whatever.

In what follows, I’ll discuss this performative approach to art making and look at the artist Seth Price’s response to some of the anxieties which it brings up.

*****

First, here is an example of how an artist may come to think of their work as performative on the Internet:

An artist has a website.  At first, this website is, depending on the artist, either a handy novelty or a frustrating necessity of the digital age.  Either way, it’s not that super-important.  One makes a work—be it digitally-created or handmade—and one, then, uploads a photograph or some other form of representation of this work to their website to serve as a second-hand reference for curators, collectors, critics, and the general contemporary art audience.

An artist maintains this website.  Gradually the artist comes to realize just how handy and how necessary this tool is for the dissemination of their work.  As newspapers, mainstream culture, an exploding amateur culture, communication with friends, banking, and a host of other day-to-day activities are increasingly conducted via the Internet, the artist realizes that not only do people greatly prefer, and even expect, the ease of viewing the work through this website, but the once-obvious line between the actual work and the representation of the work is becoming oddly blurry.  For many members of the artist’s audience, including curators, critics, and other arts professionals, the image of the work on the website is good enough.  This is exacerbated by the increasingly global nature of contemporary art, perhaps best represented by Biennial culture.

All of the sudden, the way the artist thinks about their work is at least as much dictated by how a .jpeg of the piece looks in the context of their website as they are by how it would look in the physical art space.  This is what the artist Guthrie Lonergan calls “post Internet” art—the art after the Internet changed the way that art reaches an audience.

For many younger artists who, by historical accident, came of age without ever really experiencing the “pre-Internet” relationship between artist and audience, this is not a novelty, but an obvious fact that almost goes without saying.  Even if one works in traditional media, art is primarily experienced on the Internet.

The art/curatorial collective VVORK curated a show called “The Real Thing” which was based on the idea that, as members of mediatized cultures,  most of their own knowledge of art was not accrued through the original, but through art history books, lectures, conversations, and, of course, the Internet.  In other words, through “versions.”  In their statement for the show, which was held at MU in Eindhoven, they write:

Some of our favourite works have only been described to us, unsurprisingly as the majority of our art experiences have been mediated in one form or other. The majority of works presented in this show have been selected through written commentaries, verbal descriptions and jpegs found online. In fact most of the works presented at MU are the type of manifestations mentioned above: stories, descriptions, translations and interpretations, all understood as primary experiences.

One of VVORK’s cited inspirations for the show is the following Seth Price quote from Dispersion:

Does one have an obligation to view the work first-hand? What happens when a more intimate, thoughtful, and enduring understanding comes from mediated discussions of an exhibition, rather than from a direct experience of the work? Is it incumbent upon the consumer to bear witness, or can one’s art experience derive from magazines, the Internet, books, and conversation?

Now, when the primary experience of art is legitimately conceived in this way–as an endless series of versions–there are going to be effects.  For example, the glut of information through which media consumers are presented nudges the consumer to surf through this media, including contemporary art, rather than engaging deeply with any one particular unit.  The artist Chris Coy recently described this phenomenon in terms of the way the computer urges its users to view images in sequences, as in, for example, thumbnails.  In an e-mail interview conducted for the SFMOMA website, he claims:

A computer screen is very much a sequential image-viewing device. Which is significantly reshaping the function of the Image in my life. I have become a very adept surface skimmer – gliding my way across glossy roll over buttons, tumblr blogs and Google image searches and stock photo sites… which means hundreds, if not thousands of images pass before me on any given day. Imagery is being totally integrated into our vocabulary – I mean you can shoot, edit and upload video from an iPhone now. Even the core function of the phone is changing as technology facilitates this hypermediated kind of ubiquitous computing thing.

This understanding of the computer as a “sequential image-viewing device” necessitates a decrease, then, in the preciousness around a single instance of artwork.

This is not the end of the story, though.  What one sees happening in some corners of the Internet is a new type of temporal activation—a “net presence” in which the artist’s work is viewed as one on-going performance in which the audience follows the artist as he or she performs the act of creating individual works.  This performance, unlike the individual works of art made during the course of the performance, is where audiences are nudged to qualitatively sort out and find meaning in artistic experience on the Internet.

There is, though, a dangerously romantic appeal to this idea.  It seems to advocate for a “survival of the fittest” scenario in which the future is an endless, regularly-scheduled assembly line of novelty and only those art workers who keep up with the administered pace of production get a gold star.  Performance here sounds like “engine performance.”  This is obviously not the sort of situation which would be in the artist’s favor.  It’s not exciting for an artist (or an art theorist, for that matter) to follow a theoretically pre-prescribed pattern which was dictated by the pressures of the market, the audience, or the curatorial/critical apparatus around the work’s reception.  Furthermore, in an endless rush for new change and novelty, it becomes increasingly unclear as to what the point is or where all this performing is headed.

In many of Seth Price’s works, for example, 8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, For a Friend, and Poems, the anxiety surrounding endless performance and novelty is considered.

8-4 9-5 10-6 11-7, for example, is a downloadable, eight-hour electronic dance music mix.  It was created in the downtime from Price’s work over the course of several years.  As one begins to stream the mix, there’s something polished about its fun—it feels really open and cool and one appreciates the labor of the mix’s flowas much as the individual tracks themselves.  As the stream continues, though, an anxiety arises:  What’s all of this polished labor flowing for?  An hour has passed—it’s still going—endlessly, relentlessly upbeat.  Two hours have passed—it’s still going.  Three hours—still going.  Now, one might grow tired and leave the work’s mix mid-stream or one might keep up with it as the editorial power and taste level of the mixing itself continues unabated.  But––still—in either case, one may wonder, where is this “going” going?  Will it ever change or is it just endless tasteful funkiness?  A hint is provided by the work’s title–8-4 9-5-10-6 11-7. These numbers can be decoded as the eight hours of the daily work day: 8:00-4:00; 9:00-5:00; 10:00-6:00; 11:00-7:00.  The eight hours of music is at once both powerfully upbeat and nightmarishly endless.  The same could be said of creative labor itself, of the eight-hour work day which blurs into the twenty-four hour work day, the intermingling of “on the clock” and “off the clock”–an endless streaming of data into an already well-clogged database with seemingly no justification other than to produce more endlessly fun content.

Similarly, in For a Friend, a pair of friends engage in a seemingly endless conversation filled with reasonably interesting observations, but, ultimately, never progressing forward.  The conversation begins with an amateur philosophical discussion concerning a journalistic trope in which a writer begins an article with a mention of the date in which the events described in the body of the article take place.  However, meaningful as the content of their question may be (and there is something interesting about it), this meaning is neutralized in the text by, first, the factual inaccuracies and misspellings embedded into the examples of the trope raised by the friends, as well as, second, the illogic of the discussion which follows.  The friends go from the trope of dating the events described in the beginning of a journalistic article to the rise of personal computing and network usage, hacking, personal consumption choices, obsolescence, personal charisma, looking at everything versus seeing structure, puberty, Zen, anarchy, revolution, mythology, architecture, bare life, progress, and, finally, “self-annihilating question(s).”  Each development of the discussion raises a true-ism regarding structure, but each true-ism is itself situated in a wildly flimsy structure.  The result is that, the text becomes its own “self-annihilating question,” picturing its own limitations–its own endless series of true-isms never getting anywhere real.

And in Poems, Price presents a series of fragments scribbled in notebooks.  Snippets of pseudo-intellectual conversation networking into nowhere; analyses of philosophical thought without clear points; calls to political action lacking in direction; lists that only make sense if one rationalizes them.  Occasionally, phrases seem to summarize what the poems are about.  One that got me was titled “Fantasy of History.”  We see a post-it note attached to a piece of paper, reading, “The idea of trying to remember something and getting it wrong–But embarking successfully on a quest from wrong information.”  Unfortunately, though, one remains unsure of whether or not this, too, is just another dumb idea in a notebook full of dumb ideas.  One of Price’s most powerful effects is his ability to draw one deeper and deeper into thinking they have a handle on something—anything—and then—bam—pulling the rug out from under one’s feet.  What one is left with is an image of something that seems like it might be about this or that theme, but whose meaning will be endlessly deferred.

Through his career, though, Price has developed strategies which resist these anxieties.  Two of those strategies are delay and re-versioning.

In Price’s text Dispersion, he discusses “delay.”  He writes:

Slowness works against all of our prevailing urges and requirements: it is a resistance to the contemporary mandate of speed. Moving with the times places you in a blind spot: if you’re part of the general tenor, it’s difficult to add a dissonant note. But the way in which media culture feeds on its own leavings indicates the paradoxical slowness of archived media, which, like a sleeper cell, will always rear its head at a later date.  The rear-guard often has the upper hand, and sometimes delay, to use Duchamp’s term, will return the investment with massive interest.

His work with the Continuous Project collective, for example, is dedicated to public readings and illegal publishing of historical art (and occasional non-art) texts.  By distributing these archival works as contemporary works, they are given a new lease and sense of relevance.

Similarly, in 2009, Price exhibited for the first time a set of calendars that he originally produced in 2004.  In the press release for this exhibition, he writes, “Sometimes it’s good to go forward and then double back, and circle around again. To those who turned their feet around so that their tracks would confuse their pursuers: why not walk backward?”  The calendars’ content is composed of a collision between pre-AbEx American painting and graphic design tropes dating from the early 1990s which read as “futuristic.”  WPA-era painters like Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, are–for better or for worse– best known, not for their own work, but rather for paving the way for an artist like Jackson Pollock, who was a pupil of Benton’s.  The “hot” cursive fonts and gradiated neon backdrops read the same way:  they are—for better or for worse–all but forgotten—depreciated–not unlike an out-of-date wall calendar.

I don’t believe that in either the case of Continuous Project or the calendar pieces, Price is dedicated to the idea that the delayed effect of a given work re-introduced into the art system will ever necessarily solve anything or become all that meaningful.  Perhaps what they each do accomplish, though, is to create meaning through a sort of quietism, serving as memento mori—a reminder of one’s own finitude and the inevitable obsolescence of any new novelty in art and visual culture.

The other strategy Price employs is to re-version his own work.  For example, Dispersion is a text which, for Price, is a mutable document, continuously open to change and alteration.  And his artist lecture, Redistribution, is likewise open to further revision.   By re-versioning an older work, it is re-inserted into the cultural system and given a new opportunity to create an effect.

These strategies keep the past alive by erasing it, introducing false memories, and avoiding a static personal archive of work.  As mutable digital code, the artist’s archive is just as open to continuous revision as anything else displayed on the Internet.

The art critic Tim Griffin argues that as Price disappears through a continuous re-tracing of his own personal archive, he is able to successfully elude calcification at the hands of the art world, but at a significant cost: the evacuation of any memory or stable sense of meaning of this personal archive.  In Griffin’s words: “He behaves as a kind of filter, continually reintroducing a sense of this loss in his work, this emptying of memory, in order to mine the effects and affects of such depletion.”

There’s something sacrificial about Price’s work, then–killing it in order to preserve it.  However, at some future date, Seth Price will himself die and will no longer be able to go back and confuse his pursuers by introducing false memories and histories, and a reading of his work will become crystallized and the galleries and museums will sum it all up and show something that stands in for it the whole thing.

Perhaps, though, one can think of Price’s project not as an endgame, but as a sort of therapy for the knots one gets into when conceiving of art as endgame.  It’s a method for future artists to keep going.

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Friday, July 30th, 2010

Performance 2

1.

In “The Present Age,” an 1846 essay by Søren Kierkegaard, the author lambasts his own age for its passionless stance towards the world in which everything is sort of interesting and sort of boring at the same time and, as such, nothing is worth loving or dying for.  Kierkegaard felt that the massive quantitative increases in information which emerged in relation to the rise of the “public sphere” of the nineteenth century were a disaster because they leveled out the sorts of experiences one could have.   When everyone is encouraged to be opinionated about everything, no one knows anything with any depth and, in turn, no one really cares about anything with what could be called love or the sense that one would sacrifice themselves for that one particular thing.  According to Kierkegaard, a reliance on consensus, daily newspapers, and scientific expertise to define the course of human life is a sure way to create a world in which sacrifice is unnecessary and love is almost impossible.  When nothing stands out as any more qualitatively interesting than anything else, it becomes difficult to say that one “loves” anything and really mean that word.  In other words, it was a prototype of the age of “whatever.”

About a decade ago, the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus compared Kierkegaard’s vision of the “present age” to the rise of the Internet in his own contemporary moment.  According to Dreyfus, the qualitative leveling-out of all experience at zero which Kierkegaard describes in relation to the public sphere is “perfected” on the World Wide Web and, furthermore, that Kierkegaard’s proposal for a risky, unconditional commitment or “leap of faith” in the face of this leveling out is made almost impossible.  This impossibility is due to the technology’s simulated and anonymous experiential reality which, according to Dreyfus, demands no commitment to any particular decision.

For a contemporary artist who believes or at least wants to believe that what they are doing is more than a vague combination of “interesting” and “cool,” the prospect of making work in the type of world described by Kierkegaard and Dreyfus is a daunting prospect.  Why sacrifice one’s time to making art if no one cares, including oneself?

One response is that one could simply not participate in the online arena, at all.  That certainly seems plausible—the artist Tino Seghal, for example, goes to all sorts of great lengths to avoid new technologies.  But, even by not participating, one is still highly engaged with this media environment by going out of one’s way to avoid it.  That is, it’s still, at the very least, a source of anxiety. So, if one is going to directly participate, how would one do that and maintain any belief that their works of art are meaningful?

For the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg, that question is based on a faulty premise which will always inevitably bog one down.  For Steinberg, an individual work should not be thought of as a “good investment” in meaningfulness.  One work will always be a hive of contradictions and limitations.  And, furthermore, anytime an artist becomes anxious about the meaning or lack thereof in regard to a given one of their works, that anxiety won’t be resolved by reasoning one’s way to its meaningfulness.  What’s meaningful—or at the very least a way to cope in the face of all that novelty—is to, following Kierkegaard, make a “risky investment”–a “leap of faith”–going into each and every new day with an openness to experience and to the shifting of criteria in one’s world, and, then, making meaning out of that.

In what follows, I’ll discuss in greater depth the relationship of the Internet and making artwork on the Internet in relation to Steinberg’s ideas regarding the potential for meaningfulness in art.

2.

The pop star Prince, has, since 2007, been at war with the Internet in regard to, amongst other claims, its users’ ability to distribute his music for free.  A recent highlight of Prince’s feud with the Net came several weeks ago when Prince declared that “the Internet is over.”  According to the artist, “The Internet’s like MTV…At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

Contrary to Prince’s analysis, though, while it’s debatable whether or not the Internet is hip anymore, it’s not necessarily “over.”  In fact, the amount of time people spend consuming media online is only increasing.  And, according to a study conducted by the Kaiser Foundation which was reported in The New York Times, young people in the United States are consuming an eye-popping seven and a half hours of electronic media a day—basically every waking minute outside of school—which actually increases when one considers the layers of media involved in multitasking (for example, surfing the Web while listening to music), pushing the figure up to eleven hours of media consumption a day.  According to Donald F. Roberts, one of the study’s authors who was quoted in the Times, “In the second report, I remember writing a paragraph saying we’ve hit a ceiling on media use, since there just aren’t enough hours in the day to increase the time children spend on media. But now it’s up an hour.”

One reason why it’s possible to spend that much time consuming media, is that there is now an effectively unlimited amount of instantaneously available, free media through which one may consume twenty-four hours a day as well as the devices through which one can execute this consumption.  It becomes plausible to just sit and consume all day, popping from one interesting thing to another interesting thing to another—all of them different and equally interesting.  For instance, while I don’t remember the actual circumstances in which I read the article about Prince, I’m picturing a typical scenario in which it would have been crammed-in amongst thirty other news items and a half-dozen advertisements on a Web page, which is itself nestled-in amongst four other tabs on my browser–all of which contain other interesting media.  No matter what the actual circumstances, though, I almost instantaneously forgot about it in my rush to continue consuming other interesting media.

I bring all this up, though, to actually sympathize with Prince and with every other person creating all of these hours of free media which are consumed at these astounding rates.  How, after all, is one supposed to make a living as an artist in this scenario?  And, perhaps more importantly, how is one supposed to find any meaning in participating in this scenario?  That is, how is one supposed to find any meaning in one’s work when it’s competing to make a little noise in an endlessly noisy room?  Even if one’s work is fortunate enough to receive fifteen minutes of fame, will that fifteen minutes be enough to provide one with a sense of meaning in regard to what one is producing?   I recently read something the filmmaker Harmony Korine said about his own frustrations with producing anything in the cultural context of the media explosion engendered by the Web.  He said,

…at a certain point everything becomes noise. I find it increasingly difficult for movies to have a lasting emotional resonance, the way they did when I first started watching. You would see something and it would live with you forever and could change the way you thought about things. There seems to be this shift where now it is just about consuming them. Even the movies that people say they love for the most part they forget the next day.

There’s a paradox to democratic culture in which all media is accessible, but, because all media is accessible, it all becomes equal in value to zero–like fifty almost identical brands of shampoo in a super market.

2.

This concern is related to the “plight” of contemporary art which the art critic and historian Leo Steinberg describes in his 1962 essay “Contemporary Art and the Plight of its Public.”  In this essay, Steinberg describes a contradiction in the very idea of Modernism in which the Modernist imperative to continually overturn the hard fought insights of the generation of artists just historically prior to one’s own, compounded by the ever-narrowing cycles of these generations, results in the absurd situation in which no one—no matter who they are—feels secure in the knowledge that any individual work of art they produce or any artistic breakthrough they accomplish  will retain any meaning for anyone in more than a year or two, most likely in less time than that.  When faced with this reality, how can an artist believe that what they’re fighting for or fighting against has any meaning?  This contradiction creates, for Steinberg, an anxiety.   He writes,

I know that there are people enough who are quite genuinely troubled by those shifts that seem to change the worth of art.  And this should give to what I call “The Plight of the Public” a certain dignity.  There is a sense of loss, of sudden exile, of something willfully denied—sometimes a feeling that one’s accumulated culture or experience is hopelessly devalued, leaving one exposed to spiritual destitution.  And this experience can hit an artist even harder than an amateur.

For Steinberg, this anxiety is bound up with both the quantity of new art pumped out every month in the contemporary art system as well as the speed in which this system seems to be moving since it became aware of the demands placed on it by both the art market and the art magazines hungry for “the next big thing.”  That is, all contemporary art comes with what, in a related essay, Steinberg terms “built-in obsolescence.”

Thinking of these anxieties in the context of the Internet, then, this situation is further compounded as the surfeit of art through which to sift through is by now greater and the cycles of built-in obsolescence are by now narrower.  This is especially true in relation to the history of artists working directly on the Internet.  The “net.art” generation of artists in the 1990s and early 2000’s, for example, seem, for better or for worse, like distant art history and even Internet Surfing Clubs which created buzz in the net.art community for a couple of key years seem like a hazy memory which is too difficult or embarrassing to remember in the face of keeping up with RIGHT NOW.  Furthermore, if the words you’re reading right now are at all “interesting,” that interest will be long gone within a month—you won’t even remember reading this.

Perhaps this was always the case, though.  Perhaps artists have always dealt with this and it’s besides the point to even bring it up because it’s so obvious.  But the particularly disarming element of the contemporary moment which Steinberg presciently noticed in his own time is that the rate of turnover at present is so accelerated that it rubs this built-in obsolescence in one’s face and doesn’t allow one a decade or two of breathing room in which to pat one’s self on the back.  No one can even pretend to love an individual work of art anymore (another’s work or one’s one) because one knows that that love will be obsolete almost as soon as it’s proclaimed.

So, why even do it?  Why even participate in this system if one’s work is going to be chewed up and spit out without much serious reflection?

The way Steinberg addresses this anxiety in the essay is to quell the need one has for each individual work to be thought of as anything like a “good investment” in terms of either financial or art historical capital.  As long as one focuses their desires on the worth of an individual instance of one’s ongoing art practice instead of on the ongoing evolution of the art practice itself, one will always inevitably run into these anxieties.  Steinberg’s goal here is not to reverse the situation or to reason himself away from it, but rather to come to grips with this loss of one’s ability to love a work of art, identify it as an anxiety and propose a way forward.  What he comes to is that for the contemporary artists or the contemporary art lover, a shift in focus is needed in which one focuses their attention away from investments in individual works and towards an ongoing, daily practice.

What’s potentially horrifying in regard to this, though, is that it requires, for Steinberg, following Kierkegaard, a “leap of faith” with zero logical certainty in regard to the value of this potential evolution in daily practice.  At least with the individual work of art, it’s there, you know it’s done, it’s something concrete which you can evaluate.   What comes next in one’s ongoing practice or “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, is completely anybody’s guess.  If one is to follow his argument, though, it’s the only way forward for both artist and art lover if they are to overcome the anxieties of “the present age.”

4.

Although perhaps lacking the existentialist angst which Steinberg describes, many artists working on the Web right now, particularly younger artists working on tumblr blogs and sites like dump.fm, have come to a similar conclusion: no single instance of a work which is thrown up onto the Web is going to be very meaningful.  What could be meaningful, though, is a discernible shift in the object of inquiry from the individual work to the ongoing performed practice of creating work.

I, personally, became interested in this idea through my experience of watching “Internet Surfing Clubs” around 2007 and 2008.  Internet Surfing Clubs are blogs authored by multiple users in which short, visually immediate posts–each of which often involve re-mixed or readymade material appropriated from elsewhere on the Internet–are shared in on-going conversation.  The Surfing Club I was aware of first and to this day have the most affection for is Nasty Nets.

Before I became acquainted with Surfing Clubs, I wasn’t particularly interested in art and only moderately interested in Internet culture.  I came from a background in film production and, while I was still watching  certain filmmakers, generally speaking, I had hit a brick wall with film on a creative level.  This led me YouTube where my interests were rekindled.

On YouTube, the attraction, at first, was to surf through the archive, finding weird stuff that I watched as a child in the 1980s, television news bloopers, “mashups,” etc.  Eventually, though, I became particularly interested in following regular YouTube users who talk into their webcams everyday—sometimes to large audiences of people.  Many of these personalities were genuinely intriguing and I began to pick up on the fact that it didn’t matter if what they were saying was logically incoherent or creatively limited, I loved the fact that they kept going, they kept performing everyday and, in the best cases, they kept transforming themselves.  And you could watch this transformation happen in real time.  For me, this was revelatory: the individual movie was sacrificed for the performance of daily moviemaking over time.  What becomes valuable is the performance of it—the fact that the person will be there, improvising, talking, interacting with the network of other users and they’ll do it (almost) every day.  To my mind, this is where the energy of cinema was going—focusing on the improvisatory authorship of cinematic objects, as opposed to the cinematic objects, themselves.

Shortly after this, I became aware of Surfing Clubs and, in particular, Nasty Nets through “The Year in The Internet 2006” which was a series of “best of” lists by people interested in Internet culture and Internet memes.  It was edited by the artists Michael Bell-Smith and Cory Arcangel, who also made a similar list the year before.

On Nasty Nets, the same principles applied except, in this case, there was a level of meta-criticality in regard to what was being shared.  It was Internet culture about Internet culture, and, in some cases, it was about the history of conceptual art, as well.  Once again, though, the point, for me, was not to spend too much time asking whether or not the individual posts were good or bad, but to simply follow the stream, day after day, every day.  And, just as in my experience on YouTube, in the process of following these streams, the posts began to differentiate themselves and different performative voices began to emerge.  I didn’t know anybody that was on a Surf Club or have any idea what their backgrounds were, but, all of the sudden, certain surfers on Nasty Nets became, to me anyway, the most relevant, significant artists that I knew of—period.  If one watches this type of work, one quickly realizes that the meaningful art on the Internet is accrued through “each day’s gathering” as Steinberg calls it, following the performing of the making of art on the Web.

5.

When faced with a leveling-out of all individual units of culture to right around zero, both the artist and the art-follower are presented with a choice: either drown or surf.  The work which one views on the Internet which retains a sense of meaning and the possibility of inspiring further work by artists and further following by art followers is, more often than not, produced by those who surf.

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