The digital art field has created its own relatively insular cultural milieu, which functions based on different principles of collection, preservation, exhibition, and contextualization than that of the traditional art world. From its mailing lists and surf clubs, to its hosting of artist-initiated web-based curatorial projects, it has largely established itself in opposition to long-held notions of ‘hierarchical’ and ‘elitist’ traditional institutions. The Internet represented the promised land in which artists could finally activate their imaginaries of a more open and democratic art world. The digital art field can therefore be put in conversation with some of the discourses and concepts of so-called ‘institutional critique’.Yet, since the early 2000’s, artists that use digital technologies to make art have enjoyed a newfound attention on their work, and have subsequently been invited to present in more traditional exhibition spaces and institutions. The tension between these two trends have at times caused fractures between art professionals that want to bring digital art to the forefront of contemporary art history, and those which understand digital art as intrinsically tied to its fragmented and networked home of the Internet. Nevertheless, the corporatization of the Internet and its platforms has driven it away from being the alternative space that artists once imagined. This paper will evaluate digital art’s supposedly ‘anti-institutional stance’ and aim to engage further debate on the possibilities of digital art’s canonization from an art historical perspective.
Artists that use digital technologies to make art were often less interested in salvaging the institution, viewing it as a territory already poisoned by ideology. Instead, they ran mailing lists and surf clubs, and hosted artist-initiated web-based curatorial projects, forging their own networked community of artists and art professionals. This field has always seemingly escaped institutional definitions, being referred to as Net.Art, Net Art, Media Art, Internet Art, New Media Art, Digital Art, amongst other terms—never truly being adequately defined by art historians. As Svašek states, “It is not just in relations between different societies and cultures that we find conflicting ideas about what constitutes art. Definitions of ‘art’ are often just as fiercely contested by different groups within the same society” (Svašek, 2007). Furthermore, the reception of awards, as well as appearances in gallery and museum exhibitions, have often been fraught with tension. Indeed, when Net Art collective JODI won the 1999 Webby Award within the ‘Net Art’ category, they famously mocked it by stating: ‘Ugly commercial sons of bitches’ (Allen, 2012). As Domenico Quaranta states, when it came to bringing Net Art into the sphere of contemporary art: “the key question tackled by critical debate was whether it was indeed possible to reconcile institutions and the anti-institutional art par excellence (namely the art that chooses the net as a means to engage directly with the viewer)” (2013: 136). The divide between traditional art institutions and artists was exacerbated by the lack of appropriate contextualization that they gave to digital art, and the fact that traditional art discourse was in many ways challenged by digital art’s own materiality. Christiane Paul argues that New Media Art can “never be understood from a strictly art-historical perspective” due to its intersection with the history of technology and media sciences (Paul 2008: 5). Nevertheless, Domenico Quaranta has called out Paul’s statement, and stated that it is time to ‘cast off this old prejudice’. As he states, “this is only true to the extent that it is true of all other artistic practices” (2011). Furthermore, the ways in which traditional museums and galleries have exhibited digital art has often had a ‘denaturing’ effect, stripping it of the browsing experience and not encompassing its whole virtual environment. Taking digital art’s tension with traditional art discourse and the contemporary art sphere into consideration, it is clear that artists should have reservations about the degree to which art institutions will adequately historicize and canonize their work.
The canon can be described as “a structure of power, a criterion of authority, and a legitimizing argument” (Rodríguez-Ortega, 2018: 2). The exemplary canons’ role is to provide ‘grandeur’ to those within the canon as well as those coming in contact with it. As Gielen states, the canon has in the past been regarded as, “The consecration of the actual work of art could only take place in relation to the deep wells of history” (2013: 16). A critical discourse has emerged since the beginnings of postmodernism around the concept of the canon, the agents involved in its formation, and its processes of selection. Indeed, the canon appears outdated in a so-called postmodern society which has rejected grand narratives in favor of a ‘radical plurality’ (Lyotard, 1979; Kooij, Toorn and Snoek, 1998). The process of canonization, however, is not as goal-oriented and static as artists and art professionals in the digital art field may fear. Although not all cultural practices are canonized, they all do have canonical rules—in other words, they have accepted standards (Sela-Sheffy, 2002). Digital art is no exception—net art mailing lists were forged by particular communities, and according to particular aesthetics. Fraser states for example that “Art is not art because it is signed by an artist or shown in a museum or any other ‘institutional’ site. (…) The institution of art is not something external to any work of art but the irreducible condition of its existence as art” (Fraser, 2015). Furthermore, although artists often attempt to create their own work and structures outside of the artwork, they can never truly do so; “just as art cannot exist outside the field of art, we cannot exist outside the field of art, at least not as artists, critics, curators” (Fraser, 2005).
James Bridle made a statement reflective of other artists’ sentiments, arguing that: ‘the gallery is now part of the Internet, not the other way around’. Nevertheless, whether the gallery is brought into the sphere of the Internet or not, it has been acknowledged that—just as the so-called physical world is not separate from the so-called virtual one—it does not wholly consist of an alternative territory for art. Furthermore, as Omar Kholeif states: “we have yet to fully discuss how the commodification of our most shared space, the Internet, affects not only artwork but also contemporary curatorial practice” (2017: 85). Although the Internet ‘flattens the field’, it also means that “people now come across art and media projects randomly, removed from the context of a history accompanied by critical discourse,” (Stallabrass, 2013). Christiane Paul therefore notes that the writing of a comprehensive history written by museums and art institutions remains valuable. In the creation of Media Art Net, Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels also acknowledged that despite media art’s ‘anti-institutional stance in relation to the mass media’, its historicization and preservation necessitated more ‘concrete material on art that works in and with the media’ (Frieling and Daniels, n.d.).
Although several waves of institutional critique have challenged elitist regimes of canonization, they have also assailed the institutions’ value regimes. Paul Gielen argues that this has made institutions vulnerable to the logic of what he calls the ‘flat world’. This ‘flat world’ is a product of the neoliberal regime, and is characterized by heightened network speeds and a silent algorithmic equivalence—a world in which art, and its values and institutions, are now under siege (Gielen, 2013). Indeed, Hito Steyerl notes how once criticism could no longer ‘establish clear antagonisms’ within the sphere, “it started to fragment and to atomize it” which aided the disintegration of the public sphere in favor of market logic (Raunig, 2009: 17). We must remember that “critique of the institution is only possible thanks to the shelter of that same institution and the values it represents” (Gielen, 2013: 15). Indeed, as Steyerl and Fraser also point out, institutional critique ‘has always been institutionalized’ to some extent (Raunig, 2009; Fraser, 2015). Critique itself therefore relies on the institution’s own regime of values. Gielen argues that, if institutional critique is to be productive in the ‘flat world’ of today, it will have to make the “time-and-honored modern values of the art institution its ally” (2013: 16). In other words, the apprehensive discourse of the early 90’s around institutionalization and canonization must be reframed for institutions to protect the value regimes that allow for critique in the first place.
The ruptures and dissolution of collective infrastructures in our increasingly fragmented, de-centered, networked and privatized world increasingly showcases that perhaps “institutions were never as unified or total as some of their critics may have implied”. In other words, institutions are not monolithic totalities marked by ideological consistency, but are collective infrastructures marked by ‘internal divisions, conflicting value systems, and dissatisfaction from within’ (The Natural History Museum, 2014). To revive an oft quoted statement by Fraser, ‘we are the institution’, and to speak of it as if we were not complicit in its creation, is to avoid action or responsibility for its ‘complicities, compromises, and censorship’ (2005). As artist Hans Haacke states in 1974, artists are as much setting the frame as being framed. Fraser uses Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus to explain the ‘institution made mind’, arguing that the institution does not come into being ‘out there’ but is rather embodied and internalized from within (2005). Just as much as the institution is not an static elitist entity, the process of canonization does not lead to an end product which dominates the rest of art history—rather, it is an invitation to acknowledge and discuss particular artists within the frame of a particular discourse.
In order to spur this discussion forwards, LIMA have undertaken the task of attempting to canonize digital art’s complex history through their Digital Art Canon project. In collaboration with Josephine Bosma, Martijn van Boven, Annet Dekker, Sandra Fauconnier and Jan Robert Leegte, LIMA has done so according to the several criteria that the work:
1) has artistic value (substantive depth, conceptual depth) within the field of visual arts
2) is artistically innovative (at the time)
3) is also relevant outside the domain of technology
4) is also relevant and interesting for foreign countries, not just for the Dutch (digital) art field
5) is unique and / or has a pioneering role (does not follow an existing type of aesthetics nor repeats artistic strategies already that are already used by others in a similar way)
6) has a national/international pioneering role
7) is exemplary for the development of digital culture (in the Netherlands)
8) will be remembered: ‘that was very special’
9) has made a valuable contribution to the visual arts
10) belongs to the ‘technical’ avant-garde
11) is a link to older works or new works (by other artists, or within a maker’s oeuvre)
12) can be regarded as the beginning of a new technology in its time; the start of a new genre
13) visualizes a particular cultural, technological, physical or philosophical fact by its unique use of technology
14) falls under the broad definition of digital culture, as used by Creative Industries Fund NL
15) reveals the aesthetics of a technological phenomenon in image and sound. In doing so, they hope to further debate on the role of the institution when it comes to the exhibition, contextualization, and historicization of digital art.
The canonization of digital art is not an obstacle to the field’s desire to be appropriately contextualized, exhibited and historicized; rather it is a process by which its rich legacy can be made accessible to new audiences. Conceiving of the institution and the canon as ‘always in the making’, and as part of a larger social field, we can begin to think of ways in which we can tactically intervene in its processes of historicization. Today, there is a general understanding within art professionals in the field that digital art’s historicization and preservation needs more concrete approaches to face new challenges posed by the contemporary art world and the internet’s increasing corporatization. It is a given that the canon will forever be negotiated, contested, and altered throughout time, but there must be a central institutional node through which these shifts can be illustrated and inscribed in the ‘flat world’ of today.
Bibliography
Allen, M. (2012). A Suitably Bizarre Interview With The Early Web Provocateurs At Jodi.Org. [online] The Awl. Available at: https://www.theawl.com/2012/06/a-suitably-bizarre-interview-with-the-early-web-provocateurs-at-jodi-org/ [Accessed 17 Jan. 2018].
Cook, S., Graham, B., Gfader, V. and Lapp, A. (2013). A Brief History of Curating New Media Art. Berlin: Green Box.
Fraser, A. (2005). From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique. Artforum, [online] 44(1). Available at: http://www.marginalutility.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Andrea-Fraser_From-the-Critique-of-Institutions-to-an-Institution-of-Critique.pdf [Accessed 23 Sep. 2018].
Frieling, R. and Daniels, D. (n.d.). Media Art Can Only be Conveyed by Multimedia. [ebook] Media Art Net. Available at: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/overview_of_media_art/editorial/ [Accessed 25 Sep. 2018].
Gielen, P. (2013). Institutional Attitudes: Instituting Art In A Flat World. 1st ed. Amsterdam: Valiz.
Kermode, F. and Alter, R. (2006). Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon. 1st ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kholeif, O. (2017). You Are Here: Art After The Internet. 2nd ed. London: HOME.
Kooij, A., Toorn, K. and Snoek, J. (1998). Canonization and Decanonization. 1st ed. Leiden: Brill.
Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, [online] 30(2), p.225. Available at: http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/960750/44dcc8a00174875e5cc34d04e5ed7575.pdf?1491367098.
Lee, C. (2017). Who’s Afraid of Digital Art?. [Blog] The Lumen Prize. Available at: https://lumenprize.com/whos-afraid-of-digital-art/ [Accessed 25 Sep. 2018].
Lyotard, J. (1979). The Postmodern Condition. 1st ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
O’Neill, P., Obrist, H., Basualdo, C., Hoffmann, J., Bang, L., Gillick, L., Sheikh, S., Deliss, C. and Enwezor, O. (2011). Curating Subjects. 1st ed. London: Open Editions.
Portalés, C., Rodrigues, J., Gonçalves, A., Alba, E. and Sebastián, J. (2018). Digital Cultural Heritage. Multimodal Technologies Interact, [online] 2(3). Available at: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030058 [Accessed 19 Sep. 2018].
Quaranta, D. (2013). Beyond New Media Art. 1st ed. Brescia: LINK Editions.
Raunig, G. (2009). Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. 1st ed. Mayfly.
Roestenburg, N. (2016). INTERVIEW | Olia Lialina, 20 years MBCBFTW. [Blog] Institute of Network Cultures: Post-Digital Blog. Available at: http://networkcultures.org/postdigital/2016/02/25/interview-olia-lialina-20-years-mbcbftw/ [Accessed 23 Sep. 2018].
Rodríguez-Ortega, N. (2018). Canon, Value, and Cultural Heritage: New Processes of Assigning Value in the Postdigital Realm. Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, [online] 2(2), p.25.
Santos, B. (2007). Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon. London: Verso.
Sela-Sheffy, R. (2002). Canon Formation Revisited: CANON AND CULTURAL PRODUCTION. Neohelicon, [online] 29(2), pp.141–159. Available at: https://m.tau.ac.il/~rakefet/papers/Canon-formation-revisited.pdf [Accessed 14 Sep. 2018].
Stallabrass, J. (2013). The Canon After the Internet: (Discussion with Katrina Sluis and Christiane Paul). Aperture, 213, pp.37-41.
Svašek, M. (2007). Anthropology, Art and Cultural Production. 1st ed. London: Pluto Press.
The Natural History Museum (2014). The Museum Divide: Beyond Institutional Critique.
Video Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFqyuCPQwfc [Accessed 23 Sep. 2018].
Weibel, P. (2017). The Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds. Transnazionale, 1(1).
Jawdat, L. (2014). The Digital, Reality and the Canonization of Art. [Blog] Remix and Dialogic Culture. Available at: https://blogs.commons.georgetown.edu/cctp-725-fall2014/2014/02/15/the-digital-reality-and-the-canonization-of-art/ [Accessed 15 Sep. 2018].