Technology encompasses mechanical arts and applied sciences. In the context of recent art, technology refers not only to the tools of production but also to the digital, virtual, and otherwise computerized patterns of consumption that define contemporary life. Emergent technologies have both engendered new forms of art and occasioned meditation on older ones, whether the daguerreotype, black-and-white television, slide projector, or video Portapak. In the 1960s, many minimalist artists worked directly with industry to better control the production of their work, while the multi-pronged Experiments in Art and Technology fostered collaborations between artists and engineers, as Michelle Kuo discusses in her “Test Sites: Fabrication.” Indeed, as Kuo outlines, the interaction between contemporary art and industrial fabrication continues apace, creating a situation in which artists have repurposed scientific models and technological innovations in the service of art.
Likewise important are changes in photography from analogue to digital, in the wake of which artists have created not only works that reconsider the apparatus, but question the nature of representation it generates. Similarly, the rise of the internet has spurred a range of philosophical writings concerning production, images, sociability, and distribution, and thus bears directly on issues of globalization and access. But as Ina Blom reminds us in “Inhabiting the Technosphere: Art and Technology Beyond Technical Innovation,” it is always the body that acts as the medium and frame for the welter of digital information defining contemporary experience.
The pervasiveness of technologies of representation, of social media websites, and of video-sharing services like YouTube, has placed the nature of art and its social role into doubt. Many artists are grappling with the ways in which technological devices so often mediate experience. As David Joselit puts forward in “Conceptual Art 2.0” a shift has occurred, at least in the realm of conceptual art, in which the artist conceives of the distribution of information in a manner similar to the workings of the internet, turning artists into data-miners.
To speak of “art and technology” today still means invoking the “two cultures”—that dreaded dyad famously coined by British physicist C. P. Snow in 1956. Addressing the unprecedented innovations of postwar technology, Snow saw a dangerous separation, even incommensurability, between technology and liberal, humanistic culture.2 In order to redress the growing gap between these views of knowledge and their repercussions for education and wealth distribution, each culture would have to embrace the other. Snow’s diagnosis was, in fact, steeped in Cold War rhetoric: the West had to solve this split before the Soviet Union did, for its own survival as a civilization.
Although born of a specific postwar moment, an artifact of the atomic age, Snow‘s binary nonetheless persists. His diagnosis was echoed in the following decade’s cultural critiques of technology: In the 1960s, postwar technology was indivisible from the logic of large-scale organization, and a deep-seated pessimism concerning the power of the command and control sciences arose. Dystopian critiques of technology and the “military-industrial complex” were partly spurred by histories and philosophies of science published in the 1960s that contested linear, teleological views of scientific experimentation and progress. Varying challenges were posed by historians of science such as Thomas Kuhn but also by cultural critics, philosophers, and historians ranging from Lewis Mumford to Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Roszak, C. Wright Mills, and Rachel Carson.3 These latter voices posed technology as a force of domination, repression, war, and destruction, in direct opposition to the freedom of the human subject.
But Snow’s binary was not inviolate. By the time Michel Foucault wrote his signal text Discipline and Punish in 1975, he could argue that cultural expression was inextricably bound to the disciplinary structures of capitalist technocracy.4 The spontaneous subject that Mumford and others had opposed to technological instrumentality was actually an effect of it. With cultural liberation ever more intertwined with—even a direct result of—discipline, the notion of a cleaving between (repressive) technocracy and (free) humanistic culture seemed more and more a mirage.
Technology and cultural production were actually inseparable, for better or for worse. If Foucault had located discipline’s effects in the very production of “liberation” itself, it was to point to the pervasive reach of disciplinary power. Much of postwar art, in fact, can be seen as grappling with this condition, not least the art that adopted or embraced aspects of the new technology, whether minimalism, conceptual art, kinetic sculpture, or video. But I would argue that a number of endeavors looked at still other possible convergences of art and technology, in a manner distinct from Foucault’s unholy merger.
One of these possibilities was to repurpose models of scientific inquiry and technological invention. Could one take the existing method of technical innovation and change it, then make it produce something else? Such a test promised nothing less than circumventing the teleologies of modernist formalism and scientific progress alike. It might also, surprisingly, provide an alternative to neo-avant-garde strategies based on negation or opposition. While historians have overwhelmingly evaluated the neo-avant-gardes (however diverse) as defensive postures (however slight or oblique) against instrumental technocracy—implicitly accepting the logic of the two-culture divide, pitting art against technology once more—these antagonistic positions cannot account for the specific works and encounters I am discussing here. Indeed, it is in the arena of production that art and technology met most unexpectedly in this historical moment, a moment generative of our own. As the artist Robert Morris wrote in 1967, “Control of energy and processing of information become the central cultural task.”5 He would see the automation of production, even beyond the “advanced industrial forming” of the time, as presenting entirely new horizons of possibility for making and testing. And these potential avenues in fabrication and production would run as undercurrents throughout the art of the 1960s and 1970s, merging art and technology in ways that have now become ubiquitous.
***
This is precisely the future that I glimpsed when, several years ago, I visited Carlson & Co., the art fabrication and engineering firm in San Fernando, California. Looking into an entryway, unmarked save for an eye protection warning, was like peering through a looking glass. Inside and to the right were jumpsuited workers hovering over an iridescent plinth worthy of Stanley Kubrick. To the left loomed a plaster model of a Play-Doh pile scaled to mammoth proportions. Straight ahead was a tentacular cluster of Tyvek-and-foam-tipped steel prongs. And this was just the foreground of an immense space, a forty-thousand-square-foot fun-house reflection of the lugubrious Pepsi-Cola bottling plant that sat across the street from it. Until it recently closed, Carlson & Co. extended—even exploded beyond recognition—the legacy of industrial fabrication in postwar art. Carlson’s operations, and the legions of artists who employ similar services elsewhere, suggest that making becomes a field of action in which services, media, technologies, and relations are fair game for intervention.
Carlson & Co. was at once venerable and abstruse. To be sure, many would recognize the polished plinth I saw as a John McCracken (being readied for installation at Documenta 12) and the ten-foot-high Play-Doh form (slated for realization in rotationally molded polyethylene) as an entry in Jeff Koons’s “Celebration” series. Few, however, would know that the cage-like steel structure was a sophisticated crating system developed expressly for the transpacific transport of Charles Ray’s Hinoki (2007), a painstaking rendition of a hollow tree trunk in hand-carved Japanese cypress. If I had continued looking into the space, I would have discovered the trappings of a vertically integrated network—machines, manpower, and materials—that played a role in everything from producing Ellsworth Kelly’s pristine surfaces to developing Doug Aitken’s kinetic mirrors to fabricating, delivering, and installing Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s pop monuments.
But I was at the wrong entrance. No sooner had I peeked inside than someone redirected me through another door, into a suite of offices lined with Breuer chairs and flat-screen Macs. Carlson made a business out of this hybrid existence from 1971 until 2010, functioning as a conduit between artists and “industry” and putting at their service a multifarious array that included subcontractors in computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) and robotics as well as foundries. An in-house staff of eighty-five trafficked in project management and digital design no less than in painting and sanding.
It would be a mistake to conceive of the artist’s relationship with Carlson as a high-tech update on the relationship between, say, Rodin and Rudier’s foundry. Nor would it be accurate to think of Carlson’s services as completely detached outsourcing. For a firm like Carlson bent both the authorial claims of the traditional studio and the subversion of the conceptualist gesture into a kind of post-Fordist pragmatism. To get the job done, Carlson would work closely with artists and yet also dispersed activity among assorted vendors. Far from merely applying prescribed techniques (such as sand-casting), its staff would solve new engineering and organizational problems with both patentworthy and outmoded or discarded technologies. It is in this sense, too, that the impulse that drew artists to Carlson diverges from the technophilia of postwar sculptural production—what in 1966 Dan Flavin cantankerously called a “scented romance in fiberglass or anodized aluminum or neon light or the very latest advance in Canal Street pyrotechnology.”6 In fact, this 1960s dalliance was never quite so straightforward, and its latent tensions continue to surface. Industrial fabrication, rife with contradictions that clearly haunted Flavin and Morris, offered no easy answer to questions of noncomposition, authorship, alienated labor, or administration. Fabrication was never simply prefabrication.
Contrary to near-mythical accounts of artists employing industrial manufacturing at arm’s length—the (largely false) story of Donald Judd blindly ordering boxes from Bernstein Brothers is only the most famous example—the disconnect between conception and realization has rarely been total. Crucial disturbances persist in the lag between thinking and making. And as that delay has only grown more elastic and complex, industrial fabrication is now hardly recognizable in its breadth. Plunged into a murky postindustrial bathwater, it is a rubric that currently encompasses both the crude and the custom, both the serial production of multiples and the highly circumscribed, often absurdly expensive one-off work of art. It is the most omnipresent overlay of art and technology in our time, demonstrating the obsolescence of the so-called two cultures.
Besides utilizing the likes of Carlson or the London-based fabrication and design firm Mike Smith Studio, artists today have armed themselves with their own formidable fabrication and research facilities (Koons, Takashi Murakami, Olafur Eliasson, Zhang Huan) and developed longstanding relationships with industry (Richard Serra with Bethlehem Steel and now the German firm Pickhan). Artists such as Urs Fischer or the duo Allora & Calzadilla may enlist specialized fabricators for a variety of purposes. They may go to the global mega-design and construction firm Arup, or to foundries outside of Shanghai, or older establishments such as Polich Tallix in upstate New York; they may take part in the explosion of low-price-point multiples or utilize globalized outsourcing facilitated by dealers and even collectors.7 The intricacy and proliferation of these scenes bear scrutiny if we are to understand the full implications of fabrication and its persistence today.
***
Overtures to industrial fabrication during the past several decades gave and took in equal measure, for the factory setting of presses and mills was rarely one of completely de-skilled banality, functionalist transaction, or unbridled machismo. Industrial fabrication often required dexterous tit-for-tat negotiation. Many of the companies that agreed to work with artists were custom metal fabricators like the legendary Treitel-Gratz Co., Inc., a family business in Manhattan (now Gratz Industries, in Long Island City since 1968) that prided itself on close collaboration. This entailed parrying on both sides. “Sometimes, it can’t be done,” Bill Gratz said in 1989, recalling the falling-out his father, Frank, had with Frank Lloyd Wright over chair designs for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum cafeteria. Wright had insisted on two cones set vertically point to point. “There was no way you could make it strong enough,” Gratz said. “But [Wright] thought he was God. You couldn’t discuss things with him.”8
When the likes of Judd, Barnett Newman, or Sol LeWitt went to work with Treitel-Gratz, they found themselves not on some Taylorist assembly line but engaged in the dialogic dance of high-end industrial design. Founded by a shrewd salesman and an MIT-educated engineer in 1929, Treitel-Gratz evolved into a successful producer of modernist fixtures. In 1948, it became the first US manufacturer of Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona furniture, turning out five exquisitely curved chairs per week. Indeed, all artists working in this setting had to contend with the constraints of mass-production techniques and synthetic material properties. But they were not so much ruled by this industrial palette as they were enabled to selectively cull materials and even alter the methods by which their work was manufactured. If Newman probed the qualities of press brake and welding torch, repetition and gesture, Judd delved into the permutations of commercial chroma and metallurgy in his peculiar fusion of the artisanal and the mechanized.9 Even LeWitt, who would often mail or telephone instructions to Gratz, left detailed drawings and maquettes at the firm—suggesting that his earlier use of skilled carpenters and that of the “factory” situation were similarly belabored processes rather than progressively immaculate ideations.10 To achieve the sheen of mechanized production paradoxically meant customizing standardized procedures.
The astonishing diversity of activities that traversed the shop floors of Treitel-Gratz (or its contemporary, Milgo Industrial, in Brooklyn) showed that, far from being utterly determined by the imperatives of mass production, artistic practice in the realm of industrial fabrication offered strange latitude. Where familiar indictments of minimalism and its peers envisioned capitalist design swallowing art whole, might we not instead view artists in this period as less easily ingested? As deforming industrial conventions, as literally conscripting both the means and the morphology of industrial design (the chaise longue, the curtain wall) for alternative ends? The space of industrial fabrication becomes a crucible for experiment—its structures not just replicated, affirmed, or revealed but vigorously tested.
Co-opting also meant cooperating. Appropriating strategies normally reserved for mass production was an interdisciplinary and interpersonal affair. The adaptation of industrial techniques opened onto overtly collaborative practices, straining the already contorted limits of artistic agency. The Connecticut-based foundry Lippincott, for example, began acquiring facility with plastics, fiberglass, and ceramics in the late 1960s—and it began to specialize in designs that preemptively accounted for the vagaries of transportation and installation. By 1970, the operation had moved into a twenty-thousand-square-foot work space on the original site in North Haven, Connecticut, complete with a field to showcase the gigantic sculptures for sale. Lippincott declared that his firm offered “the whole package of services that take a piece as smoothly as possible from the stage of conception through to the final installation,” even financing and soliciting buyers for pieces that had not been commissioned.11 On the one hand, the firm stressed its agency—Lippincott emphasized that “we often make major changes during the fabrication process,” contributing a great deal of “interaction” and “thought”—while, on the other, asserting its total subservience to the artist. As foreman Robert Giza once remarked, “We’re like their hands, or like seeing-eye dogs.”12 Individual innovation and collective production became dizzyingly entangled.
Sculpture and printmaking were, of course, the primary engines of serial workshop production, and the dying embers of the antiquated atelier and foundry—even of the fast-obsolescing Warholian Factory—were stoked and blown apart in combustion with new models of industrial research and information management. Perhaps nowhere were these sparks more volatile than at Gemini G.E.L. Begun as a printmaking studio in 1966, Gemini broadened its reach to include three-dimensional multiples when Oldenburg came to the Los Angeles company in January 1968 with his proposed Profile Airflow project. This was the latest installment in the artist’s series of riffs on the 1934–37 Chrysler Airflow, the first mass-produced aerodynamic automobile. Oldenburg sought to capture the dual fluidity and stringency of the car’s contours in a translucent molded relief superimposed over a lithograph. But to achieve the right degree of malleability at the size Oldenburg desired required a year’s extensive research in vacuum forming and new applications for polyurethane. Profile Airflow brought the Finish Fetish penchant for sophisticated plastics (think of Craig Kauffman’s advanced work at Planet Plastics in Paramount, California, at the same time, or of the pioneering fabricator Jack Brogan) into the fold of an exploratory team of engineers, printmakers, artists, and outside vendors.
And this, it could be argued, is where Carlson & Co. got its start. Peter Carlson, who would go on to found the company that still bears his name, was not yet out of college when he joined Gemini and assisted with the Profile Airflow project. Trained in both electrical engineering and studio art, Carlson remembers the heady atmosphere of discovery and the dicey trials of the mold-and-vacuum process: “There was a Plexiglas dome on top of the vacuum chamber that removed trapped gasses on the resin before molding. One day the dome spontaneously imploded. Shards of Plexiglas put holes in the walls of the room and could have killed anyone had they been inside.”13 What’s more, the polyurethane resin used turned out to be unstable upon exposure to ultraviolet light. When the initial edition was made, the works’ brilliant aqua tone turned a dim olive—and the pieces were “recalled” in typical Detroit fashion. With this assembly-line glitch, the project’s logic starts to resemble a kind of arrested product development.
This repurposing of research and design was the wellspring for subsequent engagements with fabrication. Carlson himself cites Oldenburg’s kinetic Giant Ice Bag—Scale A (1970) (along with the entire Art & Technology exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, of which it was a part), as central to the formation of his practice. Gemini oversaw the production of the Ice Bag with Krofft Enterprises, an animation house perhaps better known for its 1969 psychedelic children’s television show, H. R. Pufnstuf. Aligning the work’s making with the system of film production, Gemini and Krofft directed the construction of complex hydraulics and cybernetic servo drives that dramatically torqued the ice bag, offering a wry simulacrum of Hollywood animatronics. This venture had no stake in improving the industrial situation or its productivity but instead detourned its leftover technologies. Perhaps the most direct heir to the pioneering work of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), the contemporaneous group founded by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Klüver to facilitate collaborations between artists and engineers, the Ice Bag brilliantly made use of the engineers’ “free” time.
Fabrication was no longer a utopian imagining of the collective or the autogenic but a leveling of both in the name of research and development. As Carlson splintered from Gemini, starting his own business in 1971 (several other Gemini employees were to do the same: Ron McPherson, for example, launched the fabrication firm La Paloma in 1977), production was increasingly distributed among a network of independent actors. Collaboration took its cue from the postindustrial think tank and the engineering lab. Carlson’s growth from a subcontractor of one to a staff of eighty-five entailed forging relationships with the aerospace, automobile, defense, architectural, and entertainment industries. Developing techniques, say, to adhere transparent acrylic polyurethane to mirror-polished stainless steel for Koons’ famously perfectionist (and exorbitantly conceived) Balloon Dog (1994–2000), Carlson represents a growing convergence of artisanal craft, the factory model of production, and the organizational services and informatics that bind these disparate elements together.
In fact, Carlson’s closing in 2010 is a near-perfect denouement to the rise of fabrication firms and the necessity for huge amounts of capital. The exact cause of Carlson’s shuttering is unclear, but it did, of course, occur in the wake of the financial crisis, which cannot have but impacted the funding for large-scale endeavors of Koons and other artists. More broadly, it may indicate the current migration of artists to ever more expansive fabrication and construction firms such as Arup or to specialized, niche, or in-house solutions. Increasing numbers of artists are executing pieces in China, for example: Urs Fischer designed a series of large-scale aluminum sculptures from 2006–8 in Switzerland and then had them cast outside of Shanghai, in a foundry that normally specializes in Buddhist monuments, just one indication that the intersection between service networks and facture is more widespread, hybrid, and diverse than ever before.
Such an amalgamation might seem paradoxical or even obsolete. But the repurposing and rerouting of the networks of production operate most forcefully in the interval between product design and serial object, the gap between prototype—as dead end and inauguration—and mass manufacture. The prototype thus marks the intersection between specialization and standardization. Typifying this crux is Carlson’s work with Josiah McElheny on The Last Scattering Surface (2006), facilitating a relationship with a computer-numerically controlled (CNC) milling operator and jury-rigging custom tools for the artist. Such strategies are also in play at Mike Smith Studio, whose work with Cerith Wyn Evans, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Mona Hatoum, and Darren Almond cuts across the employ of reverse engineering, rapid prototyping, casting, and 3-D scanning, arbitrating between artists and myriad advanced technologies.
In each instance, the work of these firms is an approximation, a necessarily provisional version of the actual production values of industry (whether BMW or Boeing). For high precision and mass production now, ironically, go hand in hand. The firm’s principal partner, Ed Suman, further observed that “artists often want qualities that could previously only have been attained through mass production,” but that “it can be extremely expensive to produce a prototype of something that is designed to be mass-produced, to attain the perfection of mass production. When it’s required, we try to push the prototype as far in that direction as possible.”14 Such a scenario portends a moment when there is absolutely no standardization, because everything is made to order and just in time; but this is a postindustrial dream perpetually deferred.
One could easily see the Carlson phenomenon as fetishizing production itself. Yet the firm—and its abrupt end—evinces a vital truth about so-called postindustrial production: The law of industry has gone far beyond that of serial production and differential consumption; it now hyperbolically assumes the digitized fantasy of infinite customization. Fabrication becomes a projection of our late-capitalist wish for total specialization and luxury material in everyday forms and experiences—which may be precisely its allure and its undoing. In this elastic arena where artists have sought to mine the possibilities of contemporary production and design and exploit the unpredictability of such adaptations, the large-expenditure project and the casual outsource operate in simultaneity—equivalent prospects dwelling in the loopholes and diversions of both art and technology.
Indeed, to presume the total permeation of technological specialization into all aspects of life is to place a kind of faith, humanistic in its own way, in man-made systems. It is to presume yet another type of technological determinism—one that fails to understand the unexpected risks and ruptures, the accidents that may render obsolete received wisdoms about art and technology. If aesthetic endeavor and technocratic innovation have become ever more aligned, such a union also constantly produces unpredictable side effects. These are the unforeseen consequences that trigger crises, burst bubbles, systemic catastrophes—and alternate possibilities, too.
Notes
1 Portions of this essay appeared in Michelle Kuo, “Industrial Revolution,” Artforum XLVI: 2 (October 2007), pp. 306–315. © Artforum, October, 2007, “Industrial Revolution: The History of Fabrication,” by Michelle Kuo.
2 C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” The New Statesman (1956).
3 For a summation of these critiques, see Everett Mendelsohn, “The Politics of Pessimism: Science and Technology circa 1968,” in Yaron Ezrahi, Everett Mendelsohn, and Howard Segal, eds., Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995), pp. 151–173.
4 Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 36; Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
5 Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture Part III: Notes and Nonsequiturs,” Artforum 5: 10 (Summer 1967), pp. 24–29.
6 Dan Flavin, “Some Remarks … Excerpts from a Spleenish Journal,” Artforum 5: 4 (December 1966), p. 27.
7 Attention to the history of these mutinous “post-studio” conditions is hardly new—including the critical studies of Caroline A. Jones, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Pamela M. Lee, James Meyer, and Helen Molesworth.
8 Quoted in Alfred Lubrano, “The Men of Iron Behind Great Artists,” New York Daily News (December 10, 1989), p. 12.
9 Nan Rosenthal, “The Sculpture of Barnett Newman,” in Melissa Ho, ed., Reconsidering Barnett Newman (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2005), pp. 115–131.
10 LeWitt documents, Gratz archives, New York.
11 Quoted in Hugh Marlais Davies, “Interview with Donald Lippincott,” Artist and Fabricator, exh. cat. (Amherst, MA: Fine Arts Center Gallery, University of Massachusetts, 1975), p. 38.
12 Donald Lippincott, quoted in “Interview with Donald Lippincott,” p. 39; Giza, quoted in Leslie Maitland, “Factory Brings Sculptors’ Massive Dreams to Fruition,” New York Times (November 24, 1976), p. 55.
13 Peter Carlson, in conversation with the author, May 14, 2007.
14 Ed Suman, in conversation with the author, May 14, 2007.
Media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as a framer of information: as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images.1
The body as a framer of information: This notion, presented in the introduction to Mark Hansen’s New Philosophy of New Media (2004), could also stand as an introduction to the general condition under which art after 1989 produces and engages with technology. It marks not just a shift in thinking that concerns our general understanding of media technologies and practices, but also one within artistic practice. Here, new media and information technologies are themselves objects of thinking, investigation, and imagination. The task for art history is then to try to understand the newly prominent mediatic body that emerges with this shift—to discover its various manifestations in artistic practice, as well as its implications for aesthetic theory. In particular, we need to conceptualize its double relation to, on the one hand, technological media and the realm of media production and, on the other hand, the notion of the artistic medium.
With this shift, several influential conceptions of the relation between art, technology, and media may be questioned. Firstly, the notion of the body as a framer of information challenges some of the most influential theorizations of the cultural shift that took place in the 1990s, as the internet became a global phenomenon and digital processing emerged as a communal platform for all previously separate media and technologies of expression. One was the marginalization of art in the realm of new media. Digital media leave aesthetics behind, Friedrich Kittler claimed, with all the apocalyptic gusto of the early computer age: In distinction to the consciousness-flow of film or audio tape, the algorithmic operations that underpin information processing happen at a level that has no immediate correlation to the human perceptual system. Humans had created a nonhuman realm that made obsolete any idea of art based on the sense apparatus. And this turn of events was related to the way in which technologies of the information age severed any tangible connection with human existence beyond what pertains to the control practices of capitalist superpowers, notably warfare, surveillance, and superficial entertainment or visual “eyewash”.2 Yet, against Kittler’s bleak description of post-human technologies it could be argued that information will still necessarily have to be processed by human bodies—even if the interaction between the human perceptual system and the finely grained temporalities of digital processing open new ways of understanding the qualities and capacities of such bodies and their environments. Aesthetics is not dead or irrelevant, but in need of a new set of descriptions that will also aid our understanding of artistic practice in the age of new media.
***
Secondly, the notion of the body as the framer of information challenges an influential assumption concerning the formal characteristics of contemporary artworks. In the 1999 essay A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition, Rosalind Krauss outlines a situation in which a majority of artworks and art practices have lost their critical connection to specific media. In her reading, contemporary art is not simply multi- or intermedial but, more acutely, post-medial. Post-mediality in art is the effect of an uncritical aesthetic adaptation to a media industry in which the facilitation of economic exchange is the order of the day—in sharp contrast to the critical and properly materialist struggle with the frameworks of a particular artistic medium that characterized the modernist engagement with painting, sculpture, photography, or film. However, in Krauss’s text such engagement with medium specificity is no longer described in the more traditional, formalist terms of self-reference but through the concept of recursion: a principle according to which an infinite number of computations can be described by a finite program such that a crucial moment of invention or difference is produced from within the limits of the same. Where the concept of self-reference is easily misread as solipsism, the concept of recursion places emphasis on the fact that reflexive attention to the properties of an artistic medium does not reproduce this medium as self-identical, but as a different instantiation in each specific case. Resistance to the erasure of critical differences in the new information economies is, in other words, achieved through a conceptual framework that provides a sort of quasi-computational updating of the modernist preoccupation with medium specificity.3
Against the description of a post-medium condition, one could argue that recent art has not lost its connection to a critical and materialist notion of “medium.” It is just that the properties of this medium cannot be easily elucidated with reference to a specific apparatus or support in the way one could speak of modern artists’ engagement with distinct technologies such as photography or film. Instead, a medium today must be sought out in the more elusive interaction between bodies (or various types of existential situations) and the informational realm. It is a type of interaction that is explored in a number of recent artworks that tend to foreground a distinctly aesthetic realm of perceptual and sensorial data, while placing it within larger technological frameworks that seem to encompass the idea of an information-based mode of life.
From such a point of view, the problem with the notion of the post-medium condition is that it deals with the relation between art, technologies, and media from the point of view of old media, both in aesthetic and technological terms. The intensive twentieth-century debates about the aesthetic properties of specific media should no doubt be seen as a corollary to an industrial development of new and distinct media technologies—film, photography, gramophone, audiotape, radio, television, x-ray, radar and digital sound and image, among others—that each have their own specific formats, uses, programs, and modes of spectatorship. To a great extent, modern art production could be seen as a deep engagement with this series of technical inventions. It is an engagement that turns around the radical newness of each technology and its stakes in a yet-to-be determined future, based on its distinct medial features and the ability to generate certain (hypothetical) audiovisual, temporal, social, or political effects. As Dieter Daniels has pointed out, twentieth-century media technologies tended to develop distinct artistic practices alongside their industrial or commercial uses. Television stands as the exception to this rule in the sense that an artistic use of video was developed relatively late after the establishment of television as a state-owned or corporate mass medium. As a result, video artists not only engaged with the properties of television signals: They immediately addressed the specificity of television in terms of its function as an already existing and increasingly all-enveloping social and political institution.4 One effect of this development was that television was explored from a larger media-ecological and existential perspective that very often took the productive interface between human bodies and televisual real-time technologies as a point of departure. The television environments of Nam June Paik or the complex feedback mechanisms set up in Frank Gillette and Ira Schneider’s video installations combined macro-political critique with a techno-utopian imagination set on reconfiguring the potential of human perception and sensation. In this opening towards wider media-ecological perspectives, certain aspects of 1970s video art may be interpreted as early signs of the transformation of the critical concept of medium that emerged more fully after 1990. In many ways, it is the consequences of this transformation that is mourned in the notion of a post-medium condition. But the emphasis on loss implicit in this notion is also what blinds one to the specific features of the relationship between art and technology that emerges in the current realm of information.
***
In broad terms, this transformation can be traced in an artistic approach to technology that is no longer aligned with the invention of specific apparatuses, programs, or media formats. This is not to say that technical invention plays a limited role in art after 1989. On the contrary, a rich subfield of recent artistic practices is devoted to intensive research and development in the realm of digital technology, spurring collaborative networks between artists, scientists, engineers, and theorists.5 However, what is of late most compelling is the often overlooked generative framework under which a number of recent artworks are produced, works that do not even necessarily come across as “technologically oriented” in any very emphatic or explicit sense. Instead they express a sensitivity to what we might call “general mediality,” a type of focus that ultimately draws attention to the human as a biotechnical form of life.
If this framework should be foregrounded it is not just because it constitutes a historically new addition to the realm of artistic expression and production. It also adds to our understanding of what the philosopher Gilbert Simondon might have called the technicity of a great number of recent artworks; that is, an understanding of how they come into being as new technical events.6 The “technicity” of a work of art is in other words not a given derived from a determinate set of features associated with an already existing apparatus or technology. It indicates, rather, a set of complex feedback relations between a range of elements—technical, environmental, intellectual, sensorial—that account for the emergence of a new techno-existential situation.
***
Consider, then, a different type of aesthetic scenario. Consider, for instance, the brilliant multicolored light emanating from the grand windows of a Parisian apartment at nightfall: This is what is offered to the city public that happens to pass by Philippe Parreno’s Mount Analogue (2001). Invisible to these outside spectators, the colored light is generated from a TV screen connected to a digital video system that produces a series of colors whose hue and duration are determined by a Morse code translation of a text—a narrative about the cinematic production of the mystical/spiritual novel Le Mont Analogue, left unfinished by René Daumal in 1944 and posthumously published in 1952. Assembled here are almost every single transcription system and media platform known to modern humans: writing, publication, Morse code, cinema, television, electric light, and binary code. What is more, digital or discrete sign systems fuse seamlessly with analogue or continuous modes of imagination and projection (as in the narrated description of a cinematic production). Uniting them, however, is the fact that these familiar media forms are now all made to operate at a submerged or imperceptible level in relation to human consciousness, a level whose temporal complexities and phenomenological inaccessibility are normally associated with the mathematics of binary code only.
Writing, cinematic images, television signals, and mental imaging are here united and pushed into the background as the interconnected elements of a complex and invisible procedure of processing. Spectators only engage with the intensive dimensions of a luminosity whose precise “technical” sources can at best be guessed at but never known within the limits of the viewing situation. In a sense, they are as inaccessible to us as the neuronal wiring and firing that underpins our own thinking as it unfolds. As a consequence, what takes place in the interplay between the sensations and perception of the spectator’s body and the flow of colored light cannot be directly elucidated with reference to the mediatic apparatuses subtending the production. In relation to the bodies engaging with the raw sensory data of the work, the role of apparatuses and technologies is mainly that of an open question or a gap in our knowledge—a point of real indeterminacy as to the function and meaning of technology itself.
***
Parreno’s Mount Analogue is a paradigm of the new techno-existential scenario explored in recent art. Generally speaking, works of this kind approach sophisticated media technologies as a new vernacular, since the interfaces and modes of operation of such technologies come across as integrated in the fabric of everyday life. They are at one with the lamps, screens, and light constructions that illuminate buildings and streets, with architectural constructions, with trendy interior design as well as that of more ordinary modes of dwelling. They are at one with the way in which people interact, think, dream, and experience, as well as with the way in which connections are created between humans and other agents and entities in the world. This is, at least, how the presence of media technologies has been staged in numerous artworks: works attuned to the electronic networks that keep entire environments alive with the pulsations of real-time processing.
As if in response to this integration of information technology in the deeper fabric of everyday life, many of these works lack any kind of distinct formal or object-oriented unity and instead create associations between a number of seemingly disparate elements, often separate in time and space. A work by Liam Gillick may, for instance, take place in the interstice between the translation, publication, and distribution of a nineteenth-century utopian novel by the Italian sociologist Gabriel Tarde. The ideas and metaphors subtending Tarde’s vision of a new collectivity of sensations and perceptions are updated for the new media age through a newly written philosophical introduction, innovative translation details, a promotional video for the book, and finally an architectural arrangement (or presentational “setting”) that includes specially designed furniture and carpeting.7 Other works seem to evoke a new type of media atmospherics, as if to explore more elusive dimensions of today’s shared spaces than those foregrounded through the more traditional parameters of media critique. Take, for instance, Angela Bulloch’s practice of expanding single pixels to screen-size square boxes. Even when she constructs entire walls of such pixel boxes, as in Macro World: One Hour3 and Canned (2002), we still do not get a screen image in the traditional sense of the term, only a very tiny fragment of what might have been a rapidly passing TV-screen “output.” Connected to real-time signal transmission systems that respond to the movements of the people in the room, her enormous pixel walls and their constantly changing colors above all envelop us in a new type of atmospheric architectural surround—one which alerts us to the degree to which today’s shared spaces operate alongside the flows and temporalities of signal-based technologies.
Or take the works of Sean Snyder, which explore the relation between the technologies of information processing subtending our everyday environment and the question of “information access” in the public sphere. This relation is fraught with paradoxes. For if digital technologies facilitate the need for visual documentation, such documents are also open to manipulation in ways that constantly undermine their validity. In addition, the enormous flow of visual data from mobile cameras, surveillance systems, satellite systems, and television stations decrease the informational value of each image-document, influencing our ability to identify, differentiate, and account for relevance based on visual evidence. In Snyder’s work the tremendous flow of visual information then essentially comes across as a form of signaletic presence or atmosphere, which engages the viewer through a predominantly tactile form of appeal. For what the signaletic environment produces is above all a powerful sense of being “with it,” “in touch,” perpetually in the middle of action.8
In contrast to much of the media-oriented art of the twentieth century, Bulloch and Snyder both explore a form of collective media existence that is no longer primarily based on a viewing and digestion of spectacular images or other types of media content. Instead, their works expose and explore the intimate connections that are continually being forged between today’s sophisticated time-processing technologies and the complex temporalities of a human memory that moves at several speeds at once, combining preconscious action-oriented neuronal responses with a conscious processing of the past and future within a dynamic now-time. If today’s information technologies come across as attractive, intimate, user-friendly, and “human” (in contrast to “alienating” industrial technologies such as the conveyor belt), it is because they appear to be an extension of our neural systems and in fact include our sensorial and perceptual apparatus as part of their working components. The almost visceral sense of “connectedness” or “presence” that is brought forward in so many works, relate to the fact that shared space itself is increasingly understood as intercerebral space or a collectivity of brains, a sphere of interconnected thoughts, sensations, and affects whose political and economic dimensions we have only just begun to explore.9
***
In general, the situationist notions of the media spectacle and of spectacular society—central for much of the recent critique of the modern media and entertainment industries and their artificial version of reality—have relatively little to contribute to this new technicity in art.10 For these works often seem to move away from habitual preoccupations with the ideological and institutional shaping of media content and its construction of more or less passive spectatorship. Once attention is directed to the impact of those aspects of media technologies that function as corollaries to our own sensorial and perceptual apparatuses, we are no longer primarily seen as “users” of distinct media. Instead we are approached as human elements in a larger techno-biological process of becoming that may produce new forms of subjectivity and social identity but that also passes beyond traditional conceptions of the human self. The Manga character Annlee—the point of departure for a wide-ranging collective art project—could be seen as an allegory of such processes. In 1999 Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the rights to a Manga drawing from the Japanese company Kworks, and invited fifteen artists—Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Philippe Joseph, Rirkrit Tiravanija, François Curlet among them—to produce works with or around this generic yet “open” cartoon figure, who was named Annlee. Annlee is then essentially a legal-informational entity, a purchased set of rights that takes on fleeting aspects of personhood as it becomes the interface of the various desires, perceptions, sensations, and fantasies that are activated in the project.
***
Once the body emerges as the critical medium of such works, it becomes easier to pay attention to the specific ways in which a number of artworks explore the alignment of real-time technologies and human memory. Such alignment takes place at two levels. On the one hand, real-time technologies seem to replicate the conscious processes of recalling the contents of the past or imagining future scenarios within the parameters of a constantly unfolding “now-time.” In fact, a range of work by artists like Pierre Huyghe, Douglas Gordon, and Jeremy Deller recall collective media memories or future-oriented media fantasies through techniques of “presencing” that place emphasis on the event-like, refractive, and uncontrollable now-time of both signaletic and human recollection and projection. Cinema and television classics, historical news events, and the scenario-like presentations of real estate agents and tourist operators are given a new form of social existence by playing off the complex techniques of memory itself. Deller’s work with the folk practice of historical reenactment is a case in point: In The Battle of Orgreave (2001) he restages the famous 1984 battle between British police and 5,000 picketing miners at a British Steel coking plant in a way that interlaces the “real” reenactment of the battle with the past and present mediatization of the event through television and film. The effect is not just a refraction of the political meanings traditionally ascribed to this key event in Thatcherite politics. Even more pertinently, Deller enlarges and plays off the affects involved in the production of a so-called “media event” whose force and impact depend on its ability to enroll not just history but entire collectivities in a mode of perpetual presence.11
On the other hand, the inaccessible algorithmic operations that underpin real-time information processing might be compared with the subconscious memory techniques of a nervous system that guides our bodies through complex and action-filled contexts, so to speak, in advance of our conscious processing of what is going on around us. The quasi-natural and quasi-technological spaces created by Olafur Eliasson seem in particular to emphasize how an intimate interaction between neurological and informational processes are constitutive elements in the creation of whatever it is that we see as our immediate bodily environments today. Through relatively simple and always technically transparent procedures that typically involve manipulations of color and light, temporal and spatial experience, Eliasson creates situations where our perceptions and sensations are at once intensified and externalized—to the extent that we get a fleeting sense of experiencing our own nervous system at work in action—like getting a sudden flash of insight into the generative work of a computer code.12 A nodal point in a web of technologies and constructions that operate at a number of different levels, the body is here clearly a self-reflexive or recursive medium—one that experiences its own continual production of an environment as an integral part of the discovery of its own means and capacities, forces and limitations. This is, in short, the properly aesthetic approach to a new media reality developed in contemporary art after 1989.
Notes
1 Timothy Lenoir, “Foreword,” in Mark Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), p. xxii.
2 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 1–19.
3 Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea. Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999).
4 Dieter Daniels, Kunst als Sendung, Von der Telegraphie zum Internet (Munich: Verlag, 2002), pp. 241–249.
5 A growing number of festivals and conferences (Ars Electronica, Transmediale, the annual ISEA and SIGGRAPH conferences) testify to the urgency and significance of this activity.
6 Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Éditions Aubier, 1989). The question of technicity has been discussed in some detail in Arne de Boever, Alex Murray, and Jon Roffe, “Technical Mentality Revisited: Brian Massumi on Gilbert Simondon,” Parrhesia, no. 7 (2009), pp. 36–45.
7 Liam Gillick, Underground. Fragments of Future Histories, at Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp, 2004.
8 Sean Snyder’s exhibition Optics. Compression. Propaganda at the Lisson Gallery, London, 2007, is an example of this approach, as is the project Bucharest / Pyonyang 2000–2004. Both works use a number of different visual technologies, including photographs, satellite images, video images, digital images, and LightJet prints.
9 The political and economic aspects of intercerebral collaboration is discussed in Maurizio Lazzarato, Puissances de l’invention: La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Le Seuil, 2002).
10 The key text here is Guy Debord, La Société du Spectacle (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1992).
11 Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have analyzed the specific way in which the live media event constructs sociality through a type of journalistic procedure where the reporter is no longer an “outside” commentator cynically open to any meanings. In contrast, the media event reporter tends to be actively involved in the official meaning of the event as if unfolds. Operating in terms of televisual presence, he or she enacts this meaning. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), pp. 89–92.
12 Titles like Your Negotiable Panorama (2006), Your Space Embracer (2004), or Your Mobile Expectations (2007) clearly emphasize the way in which the work opens onto a reflexive mode of perception based on the situational experience of the individual spectator-body.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s art underwent a “conceptual turn” as marked by watershed exhibitions in Europe and the United States such as Live In Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (1969) at the Kunsthalle Bern, and Information (1970) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This first era of conceptual art was marked by newly established analogies between art and information. Dan Graham’s work, Figurative (1965), for instance, consisted of a found cash register receipt with its total cropped out. Figurative’s play on the double meaning of figure—as both a numeral and a body—emerged wittily when it was published between ads for women’s hygiene products and underwear respectively in Harper’s Bazaar in March 1968. In this context, the numerical figure was juxtaposed, and therefore implicitly associated with not only the history of the “nude,” but also with commodities dedicated to the care and discipline of femininity as represented by tampons and brassieres. As in so many works of conceptual art made during the late 1960s and 1970s, information, in the form of numbers, language, or photomechanical reproduction, was found to be fungible, subject to easy translation (or liquidity) between two distinct states.
We are now experiencing a second era of conceptual art, which might, in a nod to the parlance of software and the World Wide Web, be called Conceptual Art 2.0. Here the translation of information from one form to another (which during the 1960s corresponded to the rise of computers and the great postwar cybernetic age) suggests the distributed network of the internet. Instead of a bilateral translation from one form into another (i.e., from the figure of a woman, to the figure of a cash receipt) the possibility for multilateral and simultaneous translations and re-mediations are now legion.2 In his important book The Culture of the New Capitalism (2006) sociologist Richard Sennett demonstrates how such new capacities have affected the structure of business enterprises under global capitalism. His model is the MP3 player:
This new [business structure] performs like an MP3 player. The MP3 machine can be programmed to play only a few bands from its repertoire; similarly, the flexible organization can select and perform only a few of its many possible functions at any given time. In the old-style corporation, by contrast, production occurs via a fixed set of acts; the links in the chain are set. Again, in an MP3 player, what you hear can be programmed in any sequence. In a flexible organization, the sequence of production can also be varied at will…. Linear development is replaced by a mind-set willing to jump around.3
Sennett identifies an informational logic characteristic of search engines like Google or Yahoo!. The MP3 player is an effective metaphor for corporations because it exhibits two important qualities: first, an overcapacity for information storage; and second, the potential to access infinitely flexible configurations of information (in the shape of songs or video in the case of the MP3 player). Electronic tools such as this one, as well as large networks like the internet, consequently enable dizzying jumps from one thing to another. Think of typing any word into a search engine like Google—the results will inevitably be diverse and disconnected, making the kind of “poetic” association that existed between Graham’s Figurative and the ads that framed it in Harper’s Bazaar, but to the nth degree. The MP3 player of Sennett’s analogy formats content into a particular meaningful informational “object.” Platforms, like the MP3 player including search engines like Google, generate certain kinds of formats, just as algorithms organize data in numerically precise ways. Indeed, digital platforms not only serve as models for contemporary business enterprise, they are equally relevant to contemporary art under the conditions of Conceptual Art 2.0. Under these conditions, what matters most is not the production of content, but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and revealing. This is what I would like to call “The Epistemology of Search”—the production of knowledge through the aggregation, rather than the production of content.
The ostensibly banal data harvested in great quantities at checkout counters or online by corporations like Wal-Mart is useless without the capacity to derive emergent profiles from them. Data can function as an asset only when it is formatted to respond to different marketing queries, such as the success of the sales of a particular product; the ebb and flow of shoppers during an average day; or seasonal variations in consumption. Google understood this logic already in 1998. When search engines arose they were a service without a business model. Now Google is one of the most financially successful corporations of the early twenty-first century, and for a simple reason: In economies of overproduction, value is derived not merely from the intrinsic qualities of a commodity (or other object), but from its searchability—its susceptibility to being found, or recognized (or profiled). Art is equally dedicated to searching for emergent patterns from image worlds. The creative act, as Marcel Duchamp proposed long ago, stands in a relation of delay or belatedness to the ordinary business of (commodity) production. Contrary to the normative interpretation of Duchamp’s legacy, it is not merely the artist’s “choice” that characterizes an aesthetics of retrieval, but the much more complex and multi-layered procedure of search. This is why contemporary art marginalizes the production of content in favor of assembling new formats for existing images. Like algorithms, art reformats existing streams of images and information. They practice both an epistemology, and an aesthetics of the search engine. And art, like search engines, connects—indeed degrees of connectivity account for contemporary aesthetic value. In other words, the structure, density, and speed of associations—both outward into the world and within the artwork itself—that an image formats is what counts, not the “meanings” that freeze their circulation into a static artifact.
In the realm of the internet, “hits” and “cookies” are the key to searchability. The greater the scale of a network (in other words, the greater the extent of image saturation within it) the harder it is to retrieve any particular bit of information. Search engines, for example, rank web pages according to the number of hits they receive, and what matters is density since links to other sites increase hits. “Cookies” are small text files equipped with ID tags that are placed on computers by websites so that they can store information and recognize users when they return. In a global economy, cultural visibility also depends on a logic of hits and cookies. Saskia Sassen has argued that despite the common-sense assumption that globalization should lead to decentralization, world financial capitals such as New York, London, and Tokyo with their hyper-concentration of technological infrastructure and human talent have become ever more concentrated and dominant as the hubs or nodes within global networks.4 Such global capitals profit from densification: a vast net of connections ranging from the fine-grained texture of urban neighborhoods to fast electronic links to locations around the world. To put it bluntly, New York gets more hits than Cincinnati. This is why art fairs and biennials have proliferated across the globe: They are gambits for cultural densification (which is always closely linked to financial densification). They are the stock exchanges of art where the world comes to speculate on cultural currency.
As identity tags, cookies have become equally essential in the global production and distribution of artworks. Despite the onset of conceptual art as a kind of lingua franca in the 1970s (in text, photography, video, and readymade assemblage), success as an artist—primarily but not exclusively outside the “unmarked” West—requires that a quantum of “Chineseness” or “Africanness” or “Russianness” be easily communicated in any particular work. Indeed, the globalization of readymades has made this relatively simple: If you are Subodh Gupta, you include utensils native to India in your giant skull, Mind Shut Down (2008); if you are Damien Hirst, inhabiting the world financial capital of London, you choose diamonds instead in For the Love of God (2007). Globalization, as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein, requires a division of labor which is distributed worldwide: For instance, production of components for a particular product might take place in Mexico and Indonesia, to be assembled in the Southern United States for a company whose headquarters are in Tokyo.5 We know that in the current global economy development involves a progression from modes of production that have very low value added (such as sweatshop manufacturing) to very high value added (such as investment banking and art production). India, for instance, has effectively moved a proportion of its economy up the ladder from production to services. Cultural densification, like that recently experienced in Beijing’s 798 neighborhood, is an instance (not merely a reflection) of economic densification. And in the art world, cultural identity adds value as long as it is susceptible to easy translation into the rhetoric of Conceptual Art 2.0.
As curator of Documenta 11 (2002) Okwui Enwezor traveled the world organizing five platforms. Taken together, these symposia in five global cities expanded art’s public, and Documenta’s reach, beyond the confines of Kassel, its mid-size German host. Each platform included representatives from the primary constituencies of contemporary art—artists, scholars, and community representatives: “In proposing the five platforms that make up our common public spheres we have above all else been attentive to how contemporary artists and intellectuals begin from the location and situation of their practice.”6 A platform, in Enwezor’s terms, unlike totalizing models of power such as “capitalism” or “democracy,” is a public space that is finite, local, and site-specific. But like computer terminals that function as discrete portals onto open networks, Documenta’s platforms were oriented toward sending information (or content) into the wider world in a particular kind of format. In other words, a platform translates local information into recognizable products capable of circulating globally.
It is no coincidence that Enwezor used the term platform commonly associated with digital architectures like Google, Twitter, or YouTube, to describe his symposia, and indeed, the term has proliferated in art discourse. As I have suggested, alongside new virtual spaces produced by digital platforms, objects of art, as well as the spaces for discussing and evaluating them, have undergone a significant transformation of their own. What matters now is how artworks collect and configure an array of activities—how they produce various informational objects often changing from one state to another in the course of an exhibition or action. In behaving like search engines in real space, works of art exhibit capacities like those of Sennett’s MP3 player for translating, reformatting, and transporting images electronically. This mutability in form corresponds to related changes in political agency—and political theory—where traditional nation states have been challenged, undermined, or remade through the recognition of vast migrations of people across borders whether as refugees, migrant works, or high-skill laborers, whose forms of collectivity have been theorized in terms of the multitude.
The best effort to come to terms with this new model of “network” objectivity is still Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of “relational aesthetics,” which describes the artwork as a kind of physical platform for social interaction.7 Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Secession, presented by the Vienna Secession in 2002, was such a platform. It occurred around the gradual construction, through the course of the exhibition, of a physical platform: a pavilion in the form of a section of Viennese architect Rudolf Schindler’s 1922 home in Los Angeles that was entirely faced in reflective chrome. This pavilion-platform-in-process presided over a number of activities including Thai massage, a summer party, and a weekly DJ session and film screenings. On Thursdays the exhibition was open 24 hours, in theory making it available as an overnight hostel for drop-in visitors. Tiravanija has described his mirrored platform as a time game: “What we’ll remember from this exhibition is the construction of a space in chrome, a space which reflects everything that happens inside. It’s temporal camouflage. It’s an exhibition that’s comprised of a series of games…. Time games. Chrome is a great agent of time.”8 The irony here is that while all the activities hosted by the platform were indeed reflected in it, these reflections could never be fixed in the mirrored surface as photographs can be. Tiravanija’s platform is a container for activities that disappear in time. His emphasis on fugitive temporalities is enhanced by the physical platform itself—the “return” or transit of Rudolf Schindler’s house to Vienna, where he began. Indeed, this platform is itself a kind of physical or objectified memory. It reformats experience in real time—there is no “object” to be found, just changes in the state of form that I have associated with Conceptual Art 2.0.
As images (including the kind of live action enabled by Tiranvanija’s Secession) pass through successive formats, their force, speed, and clarity is moderated or regulated. Formats can store power or squander it. Mediums are subsets of formats—the difference lies solely in scale and flexibility. Mediums are limited and limiting because they call forth singular objects instead of nodal points of exchange or nets of differential charge: they are analogue in a digital world. A format channels information or content into a particularly contingent state. It can store image power like a battery (as in Hanne Darboven’s or Xu Bing’s vast inscriptions of invented languages, or On Kawara’s One Million Years (1969–) which records in notebooks an imaginary accumulation of time exceeding human comprehension). Or formats can stage extravagant expenditures, as in Thomas Hirschhorn’s eruptions of pictures drawn from everywhere, frozen into igneous flows of misery and consumption, or Isa Genzken’s sharp stalactites of clotted stuff. Formats can offer (faux-modestly) an empty platform for actions to emerge, as in Liam Gillick’s structures resembling slick playgrounds designed by Donald Judd, or formats may furnish fantastic landscapes for prosaic commodities to develop new behaviors—new social lives—as in the work of Rachel Harrison or, through different means, Pierre Huyghe.
There are two categories of contemporary formats that I would identify as structuring Conceptual Art 2.0: nodes and nets, each of which emerges from—and transforms—a modernist genealogy. By joining diverse streams of images in overlapping and often contradictory patterns, nodes are the progeny of avant-garde collage, montage, and assemblage, all of which establish striking visual collisions. Nets, on the other hand, rework modernist (and postmodernist) seriality and the readymade, which share a foundation in mass production’s infinite reproducibility. While within networks, nodes and nets are inextricably linked they exhibit significant structural differences as aesthetic formats. Nodes are extensive because they function as points of exchange, re-routing image currencies in the manner of freeway interchanges, while nets are intensive, displaying a differential charge across a uniform (or nearly uniform) field of components like a system of roads.
We might describe nodes as a kind of image commons. Lewis Hyde has recently defined commons as “a kind of property (not ‘the opposite of property’ as some say) and I take ‘property’ to be, by one old dictionary definition, a right of action.”9 In other words, every form of property involves rights of action as well as limits on action. If one owns a house in the United States, for instance, one has the right to live or host a party there, but not to synthesize crystal meth or other illegal drugs in the basement. A commons does not dispense with ownership, but stages several overlapping layers of rights to action: In a traditional British context, for instance, some might have the rights to graze their cattle in a commons while others are only entitled to gather wood there.10 These limits to unbridled use are called stints. Like a commons, a nodal work of art may host several actions, both actual and virtual. Nodal commons often function as platforms hosting an array of activities ranging from actual events (involving human participation) to virtual events (implying the dislocation and relocation of objects). Rirkrit Tiravanija’s Secession is a good example of the former. In different ways, Tiravanija’s activities shifted the rights of action away from the museum as sole proprietor of its property and toward its users as shareholders: The Secession was reinvented as a contemporary version of a commons.
On the other hand, an artist like Rachel Harrison builds new platforms for ordinary things that are derived from standard museum pedestals in some works, and in others consist of complex topographical or labyrinthine environments. In describing her 2006 sculpture Tiger Woods, Harrison says:
I was at a gas station deli and I saw a can of iced green tea; at first glance, the guy whose picture was on it looked like [George W.] Bush. What was also interesting about the can was that it had some writing in Chinese characters. This seemed incongruent with the picture—it was actually Arnold Palmer, the golf pro. So I made the sculpture Tiger Woods. I wanted to have the same initial involvement with the can, but since it was no longer at the gas station, this was not possible. My art is not representational, so I had to create an entirely different experience for the can to be present in the world.11
In modernist practices of collage and montage the raw material of consumer culture is staged as a collision of values that is commonly linked to the chaotic rhythms of the early twentieth-century city. For Harrison as for many artists of her generation the task of “assemblage” is quite different—it accomplishes the release of objects from their limiting commercial values in the spectacular early twenty-first-century city of mass consumption—of Big Box stores and gas station emporia. In a world where commodities carry dominant ideologies, creating “an entirely different experience” for them serves to free them—at least conceptually—for common use. Harrison symbolically liberates things—it hardly matters if it’s a can of tea or a vintage photograph—from capitalism’s imposition of singular meaning (and hence quantifiable value).
If nodes create a rich and potentially chaotic image commons, nets, on the other hand, distribute differential charge across a set of standardized, or minimally differentiated, units. Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings epitomize the kind of gradient field I would like to associate with nets. From a limited number of permutational rules conveyed matter-of-factly to assistants for execution LeWitt produced optically complex nets through very modest means. His drawings are certainly “conceptual” but they share with an artist as different and “expressive” as Jackson Pollock an exhilarating optical levitation (not unlike the pixilated projections of digital screens). LeWitt is the hinge figure between Conceptual Art 1.0 and Conceptual Art 2.0. Nets of lines, however, still belong to the logic of painting as a discrete object (even if that object is expanded to encompass an entire wall). Our contemporary aesthetic challenge is no longer to compose lines, but rather to manage whole populations of images. Many accounts of modernist or minimalist seriality emphasize the philosophical significance of simple repetition. But in Sherrie Levine’s practice of seriality, as in Postcard Collage #4, 1-24 (2000), for instance, which includes twenty-four of “the same” romantic postcard of a seascape each framed individually and installed in an array, she offers an invitation to the viewer to examine the same image again and again. If you slowly move from postcard to postcard and really look, something marvelous happens: Each picture is both the same as and different from the others. Within their population, the postcards function as both figure and ground, since revisiting the “same” image is never the same experience, and occurs against the “ground” of every other occasion of looking. The set of identical postcards functions almost diagnostically as a tool for tracking a viewer’s thoughts and emotions: An attentive spectator—she who patiently looks at all twenty-four postcards rather than “grasping” a meaning right away—is paradoxically pulled in two directions at once: drawn in and pushed out of the individual image, in a complex passage from the internal logic of the artwork to its framing network.12
The differences between the first phase of conceptual art and Conceptual Art 2.0, like the innovations that produced Web 2.0 are best understood as a shift in emphasis rather than a thoroughgoing transformation. Conceptual art made two fundamental discoveries: that works of art may translate existing content from one format to another; and that the circulation of information, in general, is governed by an aesthetics (as well as an economics) of communication. In Conceptual Art 2.0, as in Web 2.0 there is a tendency toward interactivity—what is known as “social media” on the internet, and what we call relational aesthetics in the art world. And secondly, there is a multiplication and acceleration of translations from one format to another that reinvigorates the venerable twentieth-century traditions of montage and assemblage, but with a difference. Data-mining is now one of the most important functions of commerce, government, and entertainment (including the entertainments offered by museums: performances, educational events, travel, and consumption). Artists are data-miners, too, but unlike politicians and executives, they do not presume the documentary veracity of information. Just like Wal-Mart, artists make profiles, but the desires they impersonate, whether modest or monstrous, are not extinguished by a purchase.
Notes
1 This text reworks part of my “Platforms,” in Stefano Chiodi and Domitilla Dardi, eds., Space: From MAXXI’s Collections of Art and Architecture (Milan: Electa, 2010), pp. 266–273, as well as material from my book, After Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012).
2 See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
3 Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 47–48.
4 See, for example, Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
5 See, for example, Immanuel Wallerstein, World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
6 Okwui Enwezor, Democracy Unrealized: Documenta 11_Platform 1 (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2002), both quotes, p. 1.
7 See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Matieu Copeland (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002) and Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006).
8 Rirkrit Tiravanija: Secession (Cologne: König; New York: distribution outside Europe, D.A.P., 2003), p. 14.
9 Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), p. 24. I am grateful to Virginia Rutledge for guiding me to Hyde’s work.
10 Ibid., pp. 27–28.
11 “Rachel Harrison & Nayland Blake” [conversation], Bomb, no. 105 (Fall 2008), p. 49.
12 For a related discussion of painting and networks see my “Painting Beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall, 2009), pp. 125–134.