Cay Sophie Rabinowitz
My vision for a future art takes the form of a challenge to the enthusiasm surrounding cyber art. So I seem rather to be exploring what my vision is not. While the Internet can be well used to exchange and communicate message and image texts, I am not ready to engage the Internet as an alternative to visiting a park, museum, urban square or concert hall. Initially it seemed that I avoided computer terminals with interactive displays in museums because I spend hours on a computer. But it now seems that my questioning of the "aesthetic potential" of Internet art is not merely due to professional exhaustion. I am wary of the simplified and non-symbolic code that dominates cyber creations and do not appreciate the anti-social nature of most cyber encounters. Nor do I accept the much-touted claim that the net is a wider global egalitarian domain dismantling borders and embracing world cultures. Most importantly, I cannot help but recall the history of our last technological revolution nearly one century ago, when an oversimplification of the message and its mediation through new image technologies led too many to forget that what one experiences as beautiful must always also be ethical. Perhaps my Anthology colleagues will agree with Michael Parmentier, that "ethics cannot emerge from the pen of a journalist addressing the use of new materials and new technologies without provoking outbursts of laughter." Perhaps I will eventually come to support the Internet arts when, as David Hopkins predicts, "it fulfills its potential to generate a new pool of creative energies in the manner of 1960’s Conceptualism." Unlike video art, which became undomesticated through the benefit of new installation strategies, Internet art is relegated to a purely private world, a world that does not acknowledge lived communities, a world that can obliterate history in the selecting and deleting of a text block, a world that has the potential to "data enter" always-already selected information and to substitute this record for the event. In cyberspace, an ultrasimplification of languages prevails over the figural complexity of natural languages. As Baudrillard warns, with the cloning of human thought, (the binary coding and decoding) language as a medium of symbolic exchange becomes useless. The computation of texts and images in cyberspace is created from cloned replications of simple x's and o's. Call me old fashioned for my commitment to form, be it poetic, in two or three dimensions, but it seems to me that a "non-virtual" Real art can more easily maintain an ethical dimension, because of its materiality. It requires some point of view -- a position in relation to where one stands both physically and intellectually. Despite institutional limitations, at their best, museums are still public places where objects and images can be displayed and enjoyed socially. That is, viewing can be considered a shared experience at least insofar as many are present and aware that the work addresses many. The Anthology is not a candidate for my critique of web-based art. The Anthology seems to be a project that is designed not to take the place of visual encounters in public space nor, as far as one can tell, does this project conceive of the web world itself as a substitute for the world as such. Rather the Anthology seems to be designed to use the Internet for an exchange of literal ideas in a public forum but not to substitute this for other forms of public address. I know that my vision of a future art reveals a pervasive (even pathetic) fear of how technology has been most dangerous when controlled by a few to mesmerize many. Recall Riefenstahl's films of the 1930's, that masqueraded as beauty to propagate party ideals. It is my fear that the use of digital technology will mirror the use of the new photographic, printing and film technologies of the early1900's. Like those photo illustrators and filmmakers, the 21st Century techno-savvy web-artist will too easily be controlled and marketed by the society of rulers. This is not to suggest that artists should be underdogs but that they shall not be used to execute another's ideas. The artist should be independent of ruling parties, concepts or ideas unless these emerge from the artist herself. Just as politics overshadowed the execution of every Leni Riefenstahl film, for example, Chris Cunningham is still a commercial artist making commercial films. In my opinion, these individuals are not visual artists and should not be featured in exhibitions of visual art. No work can be beautiful that is not ethical. Since a judgment about the ethical stature of a work depends on a shared experience, any contemporary art medium that requires privacy and resists materiality is not my vision for a future art. Cay Sophie Rabinowitz is the Senior Editor US of Parkett. Cay Sophie Rabinowitz New York |
