The digitization of Contemporary Art: Re-imagining Reality & the Cult of Culture.
The digitization of Contemporary Art:
Re-imagining Reality & the
Cult of Culture.
The digital revolution has provided an avenue of
expression and distribution for Contemporary Art that was unavailable in
previous times prior to the invention of the world wide web, iphone and the
personal computer. Contemporary art is
more than ‘art that is produced currently at this time in the 21st
century’, there is a sense of pervasiveness of the digital throughout its
production, presentation & dissemination. Whatever the distinct definition
for the current times may be, it is aptly described by media author, Marshall
McLuhan, as ‘art is anything that you can get away with’ (McLuhan as cited in
Shaidle,2002) and hence is unable to be categorized into any definable style or
formalism. With the advent of conceptualism
in the 1970’s, Contemporary Art has branched into two distinguishable forms;
one being commodified art, as collectable, and the other as Activist and
dematerialized (Milliss, 2014.p,1). In the conservative art market, an artwork
yields different amounts of value and the value can be summed up as emotional
stimulation and ideas including its impartation of these ideals (Fisher, 2013).
Concurrently it is assumed that this existential artistic production engenders
change and reconfigures the future in terms of influencing the current reality of
culture, it is not merely anthropological, art has its own codes
(Drucker,2005). Superimposed upon the contemporary culture of the last twenty
years is the increase in education, financial prosperity and the technological
advances of ‘cyberspace’ included in an affluent western world view.
The results of a new economy based on information,
globalization, and networking all as a result of electronically constructed
communications, creates “power that is increasingly organized around the space
of flows” (Flew,2008.p,85). One of these flows is constituted culturally
through the “shared experiences and practices of geographically mobile managerial
and knowledge worker elites”. This points to social inequalities of inclusion
and exclusion (Castell, 1996 as cited in Flew, 2008:89). Just as the industrial revolution created
exploitation of the working class as highlighted by Frederich Engel since 1845,
the new tech economy has compounded class struggle with affluency, gender and
ecological troubles (Atkinson, 2015.p,65&135). The pivotal difference in
the contemporary from previous times is the virtuality of this new reality,
where presence not substance dictates value (Atkinson,2015.p,198). Although a globalised capitalist economy is now
flourishing amongst the West, the other two thirds struggle on bare subsistence
levels (Singh, 2018), there is a sense of tactile
anorexia inherent within the new virtual human condition.
Meanwhile a
diamond and platinum encrusted 18th century skull made by Damien
Hirst For the Love of God (2007) sits as testimony to the
ineffectiveness of an artwork to affect any real liberation such as feeding the
poor and hungry. It serves to merely
point to neo-liberal inequalities with its opulence. Within this virtual reality there is more
hype and information overload that cheapens the ‘culture as a lived experience’
(Flew, 2008:92). Art attempts to solve this tactile anorexia through art
movements such as Activist/Eco Art and Relational Aesthetics. Relational Aesthetics aims to fill a niche to
create mostly positive community engagement and brief dalliances of interpersonal
communication via an artist’s collaboration within the gallery space as
Bourriard explains “learning to inhabit the world in a better way”. Works considered relational such as Rirkrit Tiravanija's
Pad Thai (1990) where the artist cooks curry for people in the gallery
and Vanessa Beecroft VB 35 (1998) displaying live models
instructed to stand motionless while scantily clad in black rhinestone bikini’s
(Artspace, 2016). These are examples of art culture’s attempt
to fill this social void of the passive spectator (Bourriaud, 2009. p,13). Meanwhile proving that the
intangible aspects of human consciousness have a place for expression because
there is a lack of community due to the advent of computer mediated
communication (Flew,2008:24).
These kinds of soft relational aesthetics are
criticized by art historian Claire Bishop as ignoring class struggles and not
challenging the social and political structures enough (Bishop,2014). Bishop in her article is assuming activist
art is meant to instigate change. Bishop
advocates the effect of Santiago Sierra’s 160cm line tattooed on four people
(2000) & The wall of a gallery pulled out out, inclined sixty
degrees from the ground and sustained by five people, Mexico City (2000),
while explaining that Sierra believes ‘everything and everyone has a price’ in
the economic reality. Bishop ignores
this as any kind of exploitation of cheap labor or a reflection of the cruelty
of the artist on his fellow humans claiming it to be ‘ethnographic realism’ and
merely ‘antagonistic’ (Bishop, 2014). It
seems blatant cruelty is now acceptable in the name of critically engaging
art. Could this be due to the postmodern
theorists espousing that there is no absolute truth and meaning is arbitrary so
that fact and reality of human suffering is neatly intellectualised?
(Atkinson,2014.p,209) There is a dark side to the permissibility of
contemporary art highlighted by “the very value-ladenness of the term
‘creativity’ carries the assumption of goodness in such a way that we cannot
talk of an evil creativity without it seeming a contradiction in terms, even in
a post-Frankenstein age in which science itself does not hold that all human
creativity is good or at least morally neutral regardless of its
consequences.”(Patterson, 1999.p,126).
At least artist and writer Hannah Black reduces political artist’s
activisms to white cultural tokenism.
Black describes ‘both to be a miraculous body, capable of absolving
white and misogynist institutions just by your presence, and to have this
miraculous power ascribed to a narcissistic desire for difference’ expressing
that collective struggle is too much for any artist to carry (Black,
2016). Black’s point that ‘Art is a
place to think, even it it’s also a place where that thought gets repackaged
and commodified’ relates to works such as Sierra’s as using marginalised people
and the capitalistic system for the artists own benefit. Yet we don’t see Sierra lining up to be
tattooed in his own relational artwork.
Contemporary Art, as it digitally develops in volume and interactive
features, is serving as a radar for the health of today’s culture (McLuhan,
1964.p,xi) as well as an inevitable commodified product. Even though dematerialized art practices
motivated from the radical activist point of view are intangible, the
digitization of art enables still photos and recordings to be exhibited and a
physical experience of the event is not necessary.
It is important to outline how this tactile anorexia
mentioned previously has originated rather than focusing entirely on the
greyness of social conscience. This cultural deficiency is explained by the
tremendous value that western society has placed on literacy. Media theorist McLuhan points out that “as an
intensification and extension of the visual function, the phonetic alphabet
diminishes the role of the other senses of sound and touch and taste in any
literate culture…Phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their
feelings and emotions when engaged in action.
To act without reacting, without involvement is the peculiar advantage
of western literate man” (McLuhan, 1964.p,87). The eastern cultures of China
and India with their use of ideograms ‘enables them to retain a rich store of
inclusive perception in depth of experience that tends to become eroded in
civilized cultures’(McLuhan, 1964.p,86).
McLuhan illustrates this with an example from The Ugly American
where well-meaning UNESCO workers build pipes to bring water to tribal homes in
an Indian village and they are promptly told to take them out as the communal
fabric had become impoverished because there were no longer interactions at the
local well (McLuhan, 1964.p,88). Perhaps
the water pipes can be equated to the invisible electronic networks of the
‘matrix’ undermining the social fabric of face to face connection under the
guise of a faster, cleaner more efficient existence. The
role of contemporary art ‘transforms lived experience into symbolic forms’ (Drucker,2006). Art may have the ability to fill the gaps with
personal interaction where western culture is lacking in depth of experience
for the individual. This is due to a
digital isolation via the virtual social experience through various personal
LED interfaces that affect reality namely facebook or Instagram (Flew,
2008)&(Atkinson, 2015.p,198). Literate people become their own curators of personalised content with the pervasiveness of low cost technology and the modern ease of uploading data into the virtual world.
The place of art criticism in shaping culture is
important whether it functions to grade an artwork according to quality and
generate interest like an advertising campaign driving converts to a product or
‘rousing the lethargic public to a more ardent appreciation of the refurbished Muses’(Fisher,
2013:p,2) to create deeper meaning. Modernism strived to separate art from mass
culture and artists articulated their differences as a culturally distinct
movement, culture was only high culture because of literacy
(Levenson,2011.p,197). The shock and hype of groundbreaking art such as Duchamp’s
Fontaine (1917), the readymade, was reverberated throughout the
contemporary culture for decades because of the slow pace of the early 19th
century telegraph/print communications.
Yet in more recent times street artist Banksy remotely shreds his Girl
with Balloon (2004) purchased for $1.4 million dramatically self-destructing
in a Sotherbey’s auction (Reyburn,
2019). The event fades away within weeks due to the hype and informational overload
of the digital age. It is unlikely that
Banksy will ever receive the same kudos as Duchamp (Willsdon, 2004) for
deconstructing mindsets about art. The
key issue for the public today is the “lightning speed and prolixity with which
symbols are invented and used for communication before their meanings have had
a chance to become established” (Fisher,2013.p,5).
The recent 49th Art Basel
exhibition in Switzerland called PUSH IT TO THE LIMIT! ART BASEL UNLIMITED
2018: ART UNLIMITED is the most compelling evidence of this inundation of new
symbolism (Voloshyn, 2019). The symbol
needs time to become conventional such as with advent of Abstraction in the slower
paced times of modernity. Due to the the modernity axis of Paris/Milan/Munich/London
renowned art critic Clement Greenberg and most art historians to this day have
no idea that two women preceded the movement before Kandinsky (1911). Georgiana
Houghton (1871) Solo Exhibition New British Gallery, London and Hilma Af Klint
with Promordial Chaos (1906). Klint’s
complete collection of works of 214 pieces was locked away in Switzerland for
20 years after her death due to conditions in her will, plenty of time for the
symbolism of abstraction to communicate.
Further to that there is still limited realization in the pedagogy that
trained the
abstract canon of artists revered today from Piet Mondrian, Sonia Delaunay and
Kazimir Malevich, all went through a particular unique kind of childhood
education devised by Frederich Froebel which spread across Europe, USA, Russia
and England from 1840 -1900 (Brosterman
and Togashi, 2014.p,28). This educational method was responsible for plotting grids,
geometry and primary colours, a new conventional symbology, into the minds of
the young across continents when no other method was available for ideas to be
transmitted between abstract artists globally in that time period.
Today’s
cyber-television child is up to date with inflation, rioting, wars, gender
issues, taxes, gaming, graphic design and a case of information overload is
inevitable with over 30 billion web pages available in 2007
(Flew,2008.p,28). The problem across
culture and its formulation of reality is that digital information can store
misinformation “as much as it can store the truth, so that the text or images
it generates may be wholly misleading and produce erroneous belief rather than
knowledge”(Graham 1999.p,89 as cited in Flew, 2008). This is where sublimation is significant, a
Freudian term used to describe any form of artistic production where the
libidinal drives are re-channelled into social goals and is dependent on the
artist to be subjective and separate from publicly received knowledge (Willis,
2007.p,129). The opinion that the artist
becomes controlled by mass-media and hence de-sublimated. Creative impotence is
a possibility and has the dangers of re-imagining a desensitised reality as can
be seen with racial domination ideals conveyed though Hitler’s nationalism
propaganda (Debord, 1999.p,50). This
explains how the term cult can be applied to culture as the moral indicators of
how people treat one another are watered down gradually via the cauterising of
community conscience through a virtual life of high turnover fads, celebrity
worship, materialism and the “highlighting of aberrant and quirky behaviour
which becomes images for others to imitate” (Bell, 1978 as cited in Harrison,
2003). Hence the current ubiquity of tattoos, street art, beards, hipsters,
unicorns, alpacas (Willis, 2007) and Lady Gaga’s personal vomit artist Millie
Brown indicate that mass media is creating superficiality, a dangerous utopia
of ‘simulacrum’. As long as an image or
set of images is reproducible it can create reality according to sociologist
Baudrillard (Atkinson,2015.p,198). These
examples also support Debord’s theory that human rationale is influenced by a
fabricated reality of images. This creates a distorted consciousness which does allude to the existence of a true authentic unique identity which is covered over by
this conformity to a capitalistic regime (Debord,1999). Finding hope for humanity beyond scientific rationale and donating to endless charitable crowd funding campaigns is challenging when every well fed westernised literate person loves their comfort,money and complete denial of the spiritual implications of their behavior. Who shall ever save us? Certainly not Contemporary Art or the act of immersing oneself electronically into the slippery folds of the cult of culture.
The contemporary art world is only one of the machines
that feed the cult of culture and its value can be found in the stimulation of
ideas and token gestures of experience for mass culture consumption. The sheer
inundation of information & cultural scope provided by the digital age has
brought in a keener sense of social justice, ecological issues and awareness of
inequalities. Yet this virtual
connectedness is a form of isolation, a reduction of the sensorial experience
of culture due to a reduced tactile participation, a ‘simulacra’. There is also a redundancy of artistic
currency at a rate far greater than seen in the art movements of modernity and
postmodernism. This is due to its
digitization creating sheer volumes of information, without authentic
experience or guarantees of life enhancing knowledge. Artists that succeed to make a living must be
able to place themselves right on the edge of social and political arenas in a
competitive manner and have a currency that engages perceived value for
galleries, museums, wealthy patrons and spectators alike. Activism with ethical public production and
commodification of contemporary art seem to combine well for public spectacle.
Virtual networks enable protests to be heard but established symbology and
impact cannot be felt due to the inundation of media information. Positive
effects of mass media culture and literacy has leveled out the previous
demarcations of art as separate to culture but only in the affluent West. The contemporary artist is not always subject
to rigorous research methodologies compared to the days of Duchamp or Kandinsky
and de-sublimation of the artistic practice risks the removal of essential
ethical considerations towards human life. Nevertheless, the artist still has a
license to discover ways in which the creative depth of experience can be
pushed to overcome the constraints of a society drowning in the complexity of
excess information.
References
Artspace (2016). What
Is Relational Aesthetics? Here's How Hanging Out, Eating Dinner, and Feeling
Awkward Became Art. [online] Artspace. Available at:
https://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/what-is-relational-aesthetics-54164
[Accessed 24 May 2019].
Atkinson, S. (2015). The
Sociology Book. London: Penguin Random House, pp.64-335.
Black, H. (2016). The identity
artist and the identity critic. Artforum International, [online]
54(10), pp.338-339. Available at: https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/docview/1795826137?OpenUrlRefId=info:xri/sid:primo&accountid=16926
[Accessed 1 Jun. 2019].
Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism
and Relational Aesthetics. October, 110, pp.51-79.
Bourriaud, N.
(2009). Relational aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel.
Brosterman, N. and Togashi, K.
(2014). Inventing kindergarten. New York, N.Y.: Kaleidograph
Design.
Debord, G. (1999). The
Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone.
Drucker, J. (2006). Sweet
dreams. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, p.xi- xviii.
Fisher, E. (2013). The
Art Business Builds a Tower of Babel. [ebook] Available at:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4609471 [Accessed 23 May 2019].
Flew, T. (2008). New
media An Introduction. 3rd ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press,
pp.21-90.
Goldstein, A. (2018). Art
Basel's Marc Spiegler on Why Art Fairs Aren't to Blame for the Current Gallery
Crisis | artnet News. [online] artnet News. Available at:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/marc-spiegler-art-basel-gallery-crisis-interview-1299947
[Accessed 16 May 2019].
Harrison, C. and Wood, P.
(2003). Art in theory 1900-2000. 1st ed. Oxford: Blackwell,
pp.1108-1125.
Hirst, D. (2016). For the Love of God - Damien Hirst.
[online] Damienhirst.com. Available at:
http://www.damienhirst.com/for-the-love-of-god [Accessed 30 May 2019].
Levenson, M. (2011). The
Cambridge Companion to Modernism. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp.197-208.
McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding
media: The extensions of man. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw hill Book Company.
Milliss, I. (2014). Love
among the ruins: The ends of art in the Anthropocene. [online] Artlink
Magazine. Available at: https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4245/love-among-the-ruins-the-ends-of-art-in-the-anthro/
[Accessed 13 May 2019].
Patterson, S. (1999). Realist
Christian Theology in a Postmodern Age. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p.126-130.
Reyburn, S. (2019). Banksy
Painting Self-Destructs After Fetching $1.4 Million at Sotheby’s. New
york Times. [online] Available at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/arts/design/uk-banksy-painting-sothebys.html
[Accessed 30 May 2019].
Shaidle, K. (2002) ‘The art of
kiddie porn’, Report / Newsmagazine (Alberta Edition), 29(5), p. 28.
Available at:
http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.scu.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=6266260&site=ehost-live
(Accessed: 17 May 2019).
Singh, J.
(2018). Differences between Problems of Scarcity and Problems of
Affluence. [online] Economics Discussion. Available at:
http://www.economicsdiscussion.net/economy/differences-between-problems-of-scarcity-and-problems-of-affluence/830
[Accessed 18 May 2019].
Voloshyngallery.art.
(2019). Push it to the limit! Art Basel Unlimited 2018: Art Unlimited /
VOLOSHYN GALLERY. [online] Available at:
http://voloshyngallery.art/eng/news/push-it-to-the-limit-art-basel-unlimited-2018-art-without-borders.html
[Accessed 30 May 2019].
Willis, G. (2007). Contemporary
Art: The Key Issues:art,philosophy
and politics in the context of contemporary cultural production [ebook]
Melbourne: University of Melbourne. Available at:
https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/bitstream/handle/11343/39368/67645_00004031_01_gary_willis_1.pdf?sequence=1
[Accessed 7 May 2019].
Willsdon, D. (2004). Duchamp's
loo flushed away tired notions of `high art'. [online] Telegraph.co.uk.
Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3613289/Duchamps-loo-flushed-away-tired-notions-of-high-art.html
[Accessed 29 May 2019].
This is the greatest essay I have ever written ! But is anyone even having a great read of it?
ReplyDelete