so you think you can make art?

nathan stevens: splendid arts lab 2009

AS THE SAYING GOES, “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”, SO 10 HEADS MUST BE SPLENDID. FROM A UNIQUE INITIATIVE BETWEEN LISMORE REGIONAL GALLERY AND THE MUSIC FESTIVAL SPLENDOUR IN THE GRASS, IN PARTNERSHIP WITH THE AUSTRALIA COUNCIL, NORTHERN RIVERS PERFORMING ARTS (NORPA) AND ARTS NORTHERN RIVERS, COMES SPLENDID, A NEW EXPERIMENTAL ARTS PROGRAM AIMED AT PUSHING THE BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ART AND AUDIENCE, PUTTING THEORY TO THE TEST………..

Click here to read the rest of the article at realtimearts.net

Essentially, this is a defining article, a brief essay that sets out to reify some definition to my art, and its relationship to my self; and some definition of this self as espoused through the ensuing relationships.  This is essential in coming to any consequential understanding or meaningful perspective and experience of my existence as an artist, or at least current discourse on the topic might have us consider.

As I consider my artistic practice as a means of generating, developing, and exploring my self, it quickly becomes clear to me that this is a process that could stand to be mapped out and reconsidered within this context.

Thinking back through my past practice of art, I begin to see the patterns emerge from these works. Many of the projects involved producing a representation of myself, a part of myself, an image of myself within a specific context, which I became at once subjectified/objectified.  These works seem to place myself in such a manner that I could actually watch myself perform some strange activity within an equally bizarre context, i.e. pretending to bark like a Döberman pinscher on a television chained to a small doghouse in the basement of a popular contemporary art gallery.  This is diametrically opposed to, say, a version of this situation in a virtual dream state.

At the time of creation of such projects, I was simply using myself as an actor, or model, or participant, as I was really the only volunteer that I knew that was available 24/7, and for free (how much better can it get?). I suppose in some small, yet unrealised manner, I was very much aware that this was a possibility of the events that were unfolding.  As the work evolved intuitively from feeling, as opposed to a calculated and constructed action through thought and from concept, I might have known in the back of my mind that what I was doing was, in some context, very much introspective as it was an externalisation and expression of certain feelings towards situational circumstances of the (cultural) time, in this instance perhaps it was an expression of feelings of subordination to the media constrcuts through which we can be limited in our abilities to effectively communicate.

In other words, I knew that this was an exploration of the self, the concerns, attitudes, feelings, thoughts and beliefs I held at that point in time. Looking back upon this practice as a whole practice comprised a series of similar works, I see that in my volunteerism I was in another sense exploring myself as a subject, or an individual subject to cultural conditions, ideologies, and environmental circumstances.  Considering the ontology of my existence, within the microcosm of the sculpture studio, I was an adept supernummery, a qualified extra available for free.  However, within the macrocosm of my cultural circumstance (Western contemporary art culture in the early 21st century), I was an individual installation and media artist.

From this scaled perspective, at once being very different within in varied contexts; from a physical, animate body/entity to act on the camera, to an independent individual amidst a cultural field and all the levels in between, this practice which I regularly engaged with was a phenomenon of my being, my self, how I felt, what I thought, and the agency of this being to produce an expression of this consciousness.  Art was a means of both advancing and developing of my self as well as moving away from this self in order to generate an understand and gain knowledge of this (my) self. In fact, this specific body of work embodied this duality of 1st and 3rd person, the subject-object situation. As a means of objectifying myself within a video object, I was able to examine my self from an alter perspective.  Simultaneously acting as the subject and object of scrutiny, when in the presence of these works, I had the experience of being in the work and outside of the work at once. A personal impersonality. Similar to watch home movies of ourselves, or looking at photographs of ourselves, these types of observation are necessary for objectification of our life-world and our relationships to these phenomena.

These specific projects were more like real-time snapshots of dream sequences in their ethereal, outré characteristics. The gave me multiple perspectives as they traverse the void between the actual, the virtual, and the real.  Moreover, they operated as almost a form of metacommunication, or portals into an introspection of the role that my self plays through the cultural consctructs that afford this self the possibility to become, to develop language, meaning, and communicative practices; artistic practices.

Here is a good place to contextualise my current ontological stance in regards to the orientation and situation of existence. These writings are presupposed by a philosophy that the ‘world’, its being, knowledge and experience of this existence are existent as multiplicities, all co-habiting a simultaneous existence. In short, everything conceived exists, right now! This is sort of a phenomenological theory of relativity of self reification. It is the movement of perception and of the phenomena of these states of existence that, in part, determine the emplacement of its being and our epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological relationship to this phase/form/version of being.  Furthermore, existence is existent in terms of an experience or lack of experience of the possibility that a thing may or may not exist within any context, state, or representation of its existence.

Art allows one to experiment with one’s position within the fields in which they awaken. We awaken in different fields continuously, throughout our being. The activity involved with the creation and realisation of art, the processes of art, is our means or technique of engaging with our self within these fields.

This is a technique of self, or a technical knowledge of the self which is adjacent to a relational model of work (technical) knowledge, practical knowledge, and emancipatory knowledge as suggested by Jürgen Habermas (Foucault, 1993).  Foucault (1993) describes this concept of the technology of self as an additional technique of the individual within society:
“…in all societies whatever they are, another type of techniques [exist]: techniques which permit individuals to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on. Let’s call this kind of techniques a techniques or technology of the self? “

Art, in this context, is an agency of self, or a method of this technology of self, made possible by the cultural conditions that foster the possibility of an individual within a society.  The concept of society is founded on the basis of the existence of selves, or individuals acting (working) independently and democratically within a structure that incurs interaction and counteraction,  interdependence and counterdependence.  This is evidenced in the relationship between self and other, as demonstrated through society.

My practice as an artist has allowed my to come to an understanding of my existence, the existence of my practice as an artist, and the relationship between my self and this practice through the emplacement of my self and this practice within various frameworks, one being my practice as an artist amongst other artists within a field of art, another being my practice as an individual amongst others within a social framework or field, such as art or the academy.

Furthermore, as this practice, and the reflection of this practice are not separate but co-exist in an evolving relationship my practice is reflexively shaped by my exploration of it, and extensions that develop through presentation and representation of this practice, .ie. media.  This is a type of emancipatory knowledge production that exists (Habermas).

Because the concept of self is a reality within a broader social reality, or at least conferred by this social state, and art too is a specific form or field within this broader field of social reality, art can exist as a means of constructing the self in relation to the social reality that constitutes and contextualises the existence of the other (in this case me and the things that I do and make within this context).

Because I exist in relation to others, I perceive and experience my self as a self amongst other  selves, and ‘theirfore’ constituted by this relationship.  I often think that if no other existed, or was experienced in any possibility of the definition, would I exist (in the epistemological and phenomenological sense of the concept)?  If the only entity in existence was my self, I would have no frame, no point of reference, no horizon to measure up against, I would correspond to nothing, relational to only a singular dimension of my self (perhaps not even ‘my’ could exist, but rather a self, which would yield to the oblivion of being or the creation of an other).  I envision this as the point where either a singularity (white hole) or a black hole becomes.

Coming back down to Earth, where I exist with my practice, my peers, and all my art surrounding me in boxes it is here within these relationships that my self develops. Self projects acquire meaning through their situation in relation to other self projects within an approximate cultural correspondence.

Unpacking these boxes in a specific place, with specific conditions (physical, cultural, environmental, etc.) avails certain relations. If I unpack the art in one time and place, I might see it as valuable to a specific project, at another time and place it may remain undiscovered, unrelated and too distanced to promote capital; dependent on the strength and value of the relationships that are produced through a relational presence. However, art as capital seems to operate under different circumstances than other types of capital.

Art carries a surplus value, as Diederichsen (2008) puts it. The surplus value of art is the added bonus that releases art from the subordination to any globally dominant law, such as economic value, or meaning.  Art is an interstice, a space that can exist outside of normal relations (Bourriaud, 1998).  Artistic Mehrwert, according to Diederichsen,  “...refers to the fact that art is ‘good for something’ and therefore has a use; it is legitimate and must exist, despite the fact that its meaning lies precisely in not being useful. “(1)

It is precisely here, that art as a field, yet a field with no edges, it is a desert of a field, slowly expanding and consuming its periphery as it gains relational ground through the multiple practices occurring within its margins.

References

Bourriaud, N. (1998). Relational Aesthetics. Paris: Les presses du réel.

Diederichsen, D. (2008). On (Surplus) Value in Art. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Witte de With Publishers.

Foucault, M. “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth”. Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May, 1993, 198-227.)

Habermas, J. (1981). The Theory of Communicative Action. Boston: Beacon Press.

Thinking about four recent projects (Other Side, HAL2009, FAIR FM, and Splendid),  I reflect back upon my past works and consider how they functioned, how they were purposeful for me, what they did for me and/or allowed me to do?  Recently, in examining my artistic practice, how it functions and what it does, and more importantly why this is valuable, I have come to some conclusions on the my process of reflection and the value of reflexivity in artistic practice, which I will discuss here.

I have adopted a new framework, or a thought structure, for thinking reflexively about my artworks and looking at my overall artistic practice (and other’s artistic practices for that matter). Setting up a binary structure of opposition, I try to think about each artwork on a descriptive level and on an analytical level.  This can be further reduced to what the work is being, thus framing the work within descriptive questions of how it is and what it is; and what the work is doing, thus considering, or analysing what the work does, how it does it, and why it does it.  The distinction lies within the separation of what something, a form, an action, an object, or a subject does as opposed to what it is.

Scaling out to a macrocosmic level of my overall practice as an artist, I can then consider the gestalt of my art as a relationship amongst a series of individual, microcosmic artworks, how they are, how they be (holistically) in relation to what my practice does, or what each artwork might do in relation to how my practice is and exists. These comparisons can quickly become complex as multiple works, and even multiple practices enter into the equation. This structure becomes necessary as a means of contrasting my processes and methods as an artist, as my works develop intuitively and much so through a felt and visceral knowledge of the world.  This thought structure’s oppostional form, provides me with a very simple way of approaching each work and outlining its conceptual foundations, thus allowing me to create connections between multiple artworks, and thus begin to visualise an overall aesthetic or dynamic to my practice as an artist.

As I read through past descriptions of my practice, or of singular works of art I have produced, I would generalise how each artwork explored concepts of boundaries, disruption, and separation.  These are the conceptual characteristics of the works that I identified with. By describing the work I would arrive at an analysis of how these characteristic functioned within the work, but for some reason I would stop just shy of considering what the purpose of this function of the work was doing for me. I was describing the art and what it might do for others within various cultural contexts, but not what it was doing for me, in a personal context. This prevented me from experiencing my practice on a macro scale, and rather kept me focused on the internal mechanism of the art that I produced. Perhaps, as the artist, as my self making the artwork, as it is felt, and intuited, there was no need to see the work on this scale, no need to think about the work.  From this understanding, the work was for me.

What has changed?  Why do I now feel it is important to think about the work, as it is felt and experienced?  Thinking vs. feeling?

I am at a point of change within my practice as an artist. I have developed a large enough body of work, with multiple bodies within that some contrast begins to emerge, and thus there are immediate aesthetic divergencies and congruencies. It is here that the descriptions of these differences begin to develop into more fully realised analyses. As I begin to analyse my past work in contrast to my recent work, I find the communicative importance, the agency, the power of the artworks, in their abilities to communicate and span the margins within my self and between others. It is here that my practice congeals.

REFRACTORY ANALYSIS

As I begin to look at the work from another angle, or refract upon my work, I begin to see what the work was doing for me (as opposed to how I was doing it, or what the work was being).  As I step out away from the processes involved, I can catch a glimpse different effects the work may have produced.  Moreover, I another step out I could see my relationship to the work, beyond my attachment to it through the processes of conception, development, and creation. What was I actually doing in the process of making the work? This is a separation of being and doing, this is part of praxis and reflexivity. Moving to a place where I can understand this is empowering, as it gives me a broader vision of the multiple plains that this work exists upon.  Taking this step back to look at myself making the work, going through the various processes and actions of collecting, transforming, distributing, disruption, displacement, and facilitating allows me to start to understand and decide how this is important to my self, outside my identity as an artist, how this as an extension of my self can be influential and important in relation to others.

This was a complexity inherent in my practice, as my artistic activities were strongly reflexive in their content.  My work on one level is about looking at oneself suspended through the media that we extend through. I increasingly became the subject of my own practice.  I was researching myself in a way, ever work was very personal, yet starkly impersonal and detached. In these works, mainly video installations, I simultaneously objectified and subjectified my self via media channels.  Works such as PiP (2005), Beware! (2006), It happened like that (2007) all represented this displacement of self, this video objectification/subjectification. It is here that could communicate my self to myself in a way that is very unique, I could channel in on my self.

Coming back to the idea of stepping outside of my practice and witnessing myself in action, making art, it is here that I actually come to know these parts of my self in a ‘knew’ way.  This is through a creative act of reflecting upon myself, through a reflexivity of reflection. As described above, I found mass and new forms of media to be highly versatile and practical medium for these creative communicative acts. The screen, in particular, affords a dimensionality to this form of reflexivity that supports its dynamism, and the ‘degrees of separation’ that a reflexive process and practice espouse.

This is the nature of my self as artist and my practice as me simultaneous being and doing me.  This is me becoming or creating (doing/making) myself through the process of being myself.  This is a form of self-reliance, self-exploration, self-consciousness.  For me, this self-becoming is done intuitively, and it is through the conscious act of thinking, reflexively, that this can then be communicated, a communicative act.  Therefore by describing this to you, I’m at once being and doing, and thus I am conflated once again, ready for the emancipatory process of reflexivity via artistic process.

This is the concept of ‘Dasein’, the concept of ‘presence’ that Heidegger theorizes on our experience of one self in the world.  I, my self, am quite interested in Dasein as impacted by my concept of ‘uniplicity’ (a singleness exhibited amongst multiple subjects), particularly as it is influenced by forms of media, especially new media. Expressed through many past works, I have employed various forms of new media, i.e digital video, physical computing, Internet, etc. into this process of reflexive introspection, as well as traditional media forms, such as radio and printed text.  These are the tools (objects) and processes by which I can transform parts of my self into forms that function within the reflexive situation of my practice.

Thinking about how these works subjectified my self as at once the object and subject of my observation, it becomes apparent that the art that I was concerned with was in my relationship to these works.  I was at once objectified and subjectified through the mediafication of my self within my practice as an artist. From this perspective, the works were activated in my presence, and in effect, types of models waiting to be put into use in my absence.

I believe that all that is art, at times, demonstrates these qualities or a relationship to these reflexive qualities.  This is the surplus value of art as described by Diederichsen (2008), or the interstice value contemplated by Marx via Bourriaud (1998), it is valuable in infinite contexts beyond itself.  These artworks that I describe are not solely one thing.  They do not only represent some thing in the world, they are some thing in the world at once.  Just as we are at once a subject and an object, being and doing (making) our selves as individuals.  This is the parallel dimensions of self, the mulitplicity of self and identity.  So it is not a question of what does it mean, or what is it, or what anything… it is a question of why is it where and when it is and how is it to me, you, or us?

As the roles and responsibilities of those associated with the ‘art world’ are continuously shifting, expanding, and transforming, we see many artists adapting their practices into what can be considered ‘curatorial’ roles.  Works like “The Play of the Unmentionables” (1992), by Joseph Kosuth or the more recent “Fabiola” (2009) by Francis Alÿs are prime examples of how artists, through an appropriation of the work of other artists, act in very much a curatorial mode, selecting and organising art as a means of producing art.  Why?  Is it a reflex of the artist to act out the conditions that we operate within? After century’s of the artist or the art being exposed to the processes of curation in traditional gallery and museum contexts,  are we as artists ready to move on, move past the conventional art world activity of curation.  Art seems to have reached a climactic reflexivity as the conventions of institutional art are replacing themselves by canceling themselves out; when the activity of art references its conventions as a means of progression.  Is it time to consider where curation is headed? Why, as artists do we feel the need to be curatorial in our practices? What is the role of the curator in today’s open-source world?

In May 2009, the Positions in flux: On the changing role of the artist and institution in the networked society took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (NIMK).  This symposium spearheaded much needed discussion on these very questions concerning the transformation of curatorial roles in contemporary arts and media practice. A series of three panels featuring discussion by international artists, academics, theorists, and curators addressed the issues of the media culture and art institutions, contemporary media/art and political action, and art production and curation. According to an overview of the symposium, a major topic was the idea of open source networking in media and information technology and the relationships with curatorial processes. Presented by Joasia Krysa founder of KURATOR, “a cultural organisation operating as a curatorial agency and research platform at the intersection of art and technology. It has a particular interest in an emerging discourse and practice that links curating with software and networks.”

Aligning the processes and responsiblities of art curation with those of the software programmer provides an interesting angle on the placement of the purpose and function of contemporary curation (and conversely programming).  With the potential for closing off cooperative and egalitarianistic development in a closed-sourced system, the necessity of open-source concepts, as demonstrated in Linux operating systems or creative commons licensing increasingly applied to media, are absolutely crucial for the productivity and advancement of the Web or the Net, as well as the practices involved in the critical and conscious development of these media structures.

It is this very concept of an open source, a source of information and its design that is open and accessible for use and more importantly concerted cooperative revision, that in the advent of new technology drives innovation to its fullest potential. Within the institution of artistic practice there is a similar open-source ideal that spurs interactivity, dialogue, collaboration, and other shared forms of cooperative experience. In many ways it is a trans-evolutionary activity, the conversations that take place through artists inspiring each other, or especially artists inspiring non-artists, i.e. curators, viewers, collectors, critics, etc.

Coming back to the process of curation, it becomes important consider how, through this lens of open-source activity, the conversation between the concpets of art curation and of art production. In today’s media saturated atmosphere, the processes of how is art made vs. how these processes are communicated become important in this discussion.

While the idea of curating is in essence a specialisation in the selection, presentation, and composition of cultural collection and exhibition, it can succinctly be summed up as a process of controlling and managing the boundaries of individual and social identifiers, thus communicated through cultural forms.

So how is the act of curation, in institution, in individual practice, in its many cultural forms, moving beyond this at present, how is this evolving? While the NIMK symposium considers art presentation in its proximity to the design, development, and distribution of software and other new media, there is also a more social or even political orientation of curation that is linked to interactive and relational artistic activity. Looking forward to this contemporary concept of ‘open-source’ media, it is the methods by which these relationships can produce new possibilities for the creation and exhibition of art and ideas.

The Netherlands Media Art Institute describing a session at the Positions in Flux conference, questions these relationships between artist and curator, media and art, production and presentation as follows:

“This session deals with the concept of open source for art production and its presentation. The open source movement is driven by the idea of collective, process-based, sustainable production and improvement. In software development this strategy has already proven to be valid; however can this model be applied to other products such as artworks or even exhibitions? In how far does the open source model differ from other forms of artistic collaboration? Is there a new role model for both the artist and the curator in the future? Which (economic) value and impact has expertise in open source production? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend? How could institutions and organisations respond to this trend and create public domains?”

Responding to ideas about interactivity, selectivity, social modeling, media development, and communicative practices, my artistic practice can be used as a means of focusing some of these questions. Recently, I have moved into this curatorial mode through the development of a community pirate radio station, FAIR FM.  This radio station was set-up in an art gallery and project space in the city. Passerbys, viewers, and gallery-goers were invited develop programming, host a radio show, or volunteer for the station. In many ways, as the artist coordinating the project, I was required to act in a curatorial capacity; acting as a conduit, a mediator, a selector and organiser (at least initially), working with the users, helping them become the artist in a sense, initiating them into their role as producer, radio host, or actor.  In many cases, those interested in working with the project, developing content for broadcast, were artists, musicians, and active creative-types.  My role was really more of an initiator and facilitator, thus adapted roles of the curator.

My initial interest in the project was not so much to define what was exhibited, but rather to allow a space for this collective exhibition, or rather presentation to evolve. The idea of exhibition vs. presentation comes into play.

The FAIR FM project allowed for the development of communication through the opening up of communicative spaces.  In this way the project was an open-source situation in its practical accessibility through artistic interaction, an open-source art event. The outcomes of FAIR FM fostered an adaptation of a certain type of curation of what was to become art within the interactive model provided through the project. In other words, my process of allowing other to be “the DJ selector” on air developed wholly out of a sensitivity of traditional media (and art to a degree) censorship.

Thinking again about the relationships between curation and open-source programming, and the statement that “The open source movement is driven by the idea of collective, process-based, sustainable production and improvement”, the FAIR FM project superimposes this “collective production” over the act of curating content for the radio station and its programming. Curation in this context is altered, under the same conditions that enable open-source in media programming and production. Imagining for a moment that all products of art culture and the ‘art world’ are open-source, the code of the artist-in-culture, that of the curator-in-art or the viewer-in-art culture, we as participants in this world collectively, processually, and sustainably produce and improve these programs.  It is simply a matter of selection, or actually election, picking and choosing.

As the artist, it seems as though we are always enduring processes of selection.  It is our compositional nature that perhaps requires us to select parts of our lives consisting of parts of others lives and compose these, exhibit or present these in a way that allows other others to see them as part of a different collection.  It is the act of continuous collection and the proximity between individuals that is exposed through the components of the collection, as Alÿs is exhibiting, in part, through his curatorialesque project “Fabiola”.  For Kousth, it is the otherness, in its unmentionable form, that is collated through his exhibition-as-art-as-exhibition.

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.