The artist wears multiple hats, each shaped by the practices, processes, and aesthetics of the work they are engaged with. The role of artist changes when their practice changes. Their practice changes because of a “problem” as Deleuze might describe it; a multiplicity of highly different factors prompting the creation of a response”. This problem, not in a negative sense, in this context is a great change in the tools materials and venues of the artist as afforded by new media on the early 1990’s. How does the role of artist change with an increased presence of new media, and in turn an increased opportunity for the actualization of the virtual?
As new media generates the response of new virtual art forms and processes, the Internet gives birth to new social roles and aesthetics, new audiences, and new ways of being an artist.
Artists took on a new meaning with the virtualisation that accompanied the new media of the 1990’s. (Green 2001). New media such as the Internet gave birth to an entirely new culture of artists and creative practitioners, one being the aptly defined as Internet artist. The Internet artist, in some ways consecrates the social freedom of the artist, who is constantly bound by the institutionalization of practice and aesthetic. In her text Internet Art (2001), Rachel Greene describes the Internet artist as one who is:
[…]actively reclaiming public space and circumnavigating boundaries that seem entrenched in the world of galleries and museums. Internet art has redefined some of the materials of current art-making, distribution and consumption, expanding operations from the white cube gallery out to the most remote networked computer (p. 11-12).
With the aid of the digital computer and the WWW artists can create art using virtual material and tools in the form of digital code, hyperlinks, etc. Early Internet art such as the work of Heath Bunting (King’s Cross Phone In, 1994) exemplify the transitivity of artistic practice between the virtual and the actual, but also the democratic interactivity and immersion that new media perpetuates (Greene 2001, Rush 1999).
Furthermore, in extension to the expansion of practices and forms of art-making, Greene and Rush describe the roles and responsibility of artists as changing. If an artist designs and programs a website, which functions as art internal and external to the institution of the white cube, is the artist still an artist, or is the artist a (web)designer, or is the artist an “artist-as-designer” as Bishop (2004) describes. According to Manovich, design and art are distiguished by the content-interface dichotomy; “in contrast to design, in art the connection between content and form (or in the case of new media, content and interface)… merge into one entity and no longer can be taken apart.” (Manovich 2001, p. 67). It would appear that the artist, in the face of new media, becomes variable and modular, transcoded by the very principles of the new media they interface.
While the artist can variably and simultaneously adorn so many hats, they can easily become buried under the pile. In this situation, has the ‘artist’ lost meaning or transcended meaning? When the artist casually performs all creative roles in a society, do they disappear without the possibility of a differential? Joseph Beuys might say they do, in the shamanistic sense of disappearance. Perhaps this was the ground for his proclamation that “every human being is an artist”. If it is not the particular act that the artist performs, if it is not their mastery, their talent, then what makes them an actual artist? Perhaps all artists became virtual with the onset of these new media.
Fortunately, for the museums, collectors, and institutions, it appears that the artist evolves, rather than disappears. Changing forms and processes of artistic practice direct its players, artist and audience, towards change as well. This is demonstrated in a changing sociality of the artist, the role of the artist as something other than a “master of craft”, which the artist has been considered as for centuries (Bolt 2004, Greene 2001). When the artist transforms into something other than the “master of craft”, the social dimensions and response to art change as well.
There is often a cultural resistance to the artist becoming something other than that which they have been conditioned as for centuries. This is particularly evident of the Internet artist, as Greene (2001) notes:
“A related criticism is sometimes aimed at the works’ creators: that Internet and software artists often self identified as programmers, are not ‘real’ artists. This critique can be taken as a symptom of the changing modes of art and the evolving expectations of what artist should be, what skills or trades they should possess, and what their critical concerns should be. The objections can be sustained only if the role of the artist as producer is imagined in limited ways, and exist, perhaps anachronistically, outside the tune and reach of the web” (Greene 2001, p.13).
There are new opportunities for the artist. The job market has inverted. With the virtual embodiment of the connectedness of humanity in the Net the artists and the audiences become empowered through the democratisation of creative practice afforded by the network, not only through the virtuality of form and material, but through the social architecture of the network. This becomes a pivotal time for the relationships between artist and art and audience. The audience becomes a necessary component of artistic practice, now even more necessary than the traditional tools and materials, venues of the past.
Claire Bishop (2004) relates the changing role of the artist directly to the idea of project-based art works promoted by the gallery-as-laboratory paradigm. The last decade of the millennium saw a “visible tendency” to “reconceptualize the ‘white cube’” in more of a “laboratory” setting for contemporary art (Bishop 2004, P.51). Art produced in the 1990’s was “open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure”. Bishop sees this idea as being derivative of a “creative misreading of post structuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.” (Bishop 2004, p. 53). The role of artist was also symptomatic of this flux, taking on many forms, in part driven by institutional agendas of transforming the white cube of the exhibition space into something new and experimental (and experiential). The gallery or museum became “marketable as a space of leisure and entertainment” in which the artist [was] invited to “design or trouble-shoot amenities [within the museum]” which then were presented as works of art. (Jorge Pardo at K21, Dusseldorf) (Bishop 2004, p. 52). In effect, the role of the artist became “artist-as-designer”.
The “artist-as-designer” embodies architect or interior designer, or possibly marriage counsellor and [art] therapist? It seems as though, any terminology even remotely concerned with creative activity/facility takes on a variability in an information age. Artist, designer, mediator, facilitator, producer all become a placeholder for the actual aestheticised practice of an entity (individual or collective). These non-conventional roles are becoming more commonly conflated with the “artist”, as the artist becomes more virtual. The word artist now implies much more than it used to. It has taken on a variability, a discursive multiplicity in which artist can mean nearly anything. As Deleuze and Guttari (1972) might suggest, it has become “rhizomatic”. This variabililty seems to accompany the widening array of practices and processes afforded by new media, specifically the Internet, as artist began working with new tools/materials and exhibiting in new venues; all afforded by the actualization of cyberspace.
None the less, these altered roles lead directly onto the pulpit of relational aesthetics, where social bonds and relationships are emphasised in response to the representationalism and individualism residuals of modernism. As Bourriaud describes,
“Relational art is seen as a direct response to the shift from a goods to a service-based economy. It is also seen as a response to the virtual relationships of the Internet and globalisation, which on one hand have prompted a desire for more physical and face-to-face interaction between people, while on the other have inspired artists to adopt a “do-it-yourself” (DIY) approach and model their own “possible universes” (cited by Bishop, 2004, p. 51).
References:
Bishop, C. (2004). Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics. October 110, Fall 2004.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Understanding Deleuze. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.
Greene, Rachel. Internet Art. New York: Thames & Hudson.
Manovich, L. (2000). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Rush, M. (1999). New Media in Art: second edition. New York: Thames & Hudson.
