MULTIPLE TEXTS: ABOUT POST-INTERNET ART

THE IMAGE OBJECT POST-INTERNET - Artie Vierkant

‘Post-Internet Art’ is a term coined by artist Marisa Olson and developed further by writer Gene McHugh in the critical blog ‘Post Internet’ during its activity between December 2009 and September 2010. Under McHugh’s definition it concerns ‘art responding to [a condition] described as ‘Post Internet’ - when the internet is less a novelty and more a banality. Post Internet is often associated with New Media Art and Conceptualism.

New Media is here denounced as a mode too narrowly focused on the specific workings of novel technologies, rather than a sincere exploration of cultural shifts in which that technology plays only a small role. It can therefore be seen as relying too heavily on the specific materiality of its media. Conceptualism (in theory if not practice) presumes a lack of attention to the physical substrate in favour of the methods of disseminating the artwork as idea, image, context, or instruction.

Post-Internet objects and images are developed with concern to their particular materiality as well as their vast variety of methods of presentation and dissemination. In any case, the representation through image, rigorously controlled and edited for ideal viewing angle and conditions, almost always becomes the central focus. It is a constellation of formal-aesthetic quotations, self-aware of its art context and built to be shared and cited. It becomes the image object itself.

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A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF ART IN THE POST-INTERNET ERA - Mark Gens

The impact of digital technology and the Internet is yet another dynamic force. It’s not a simple case of artists using the technology as part of their practice or even the vast distribution potential, though these factors count, what is taking place is a redefinition of authorship, collaboration, and materiality as well as a both a theoretical challenge and a continuation of historical notions of the meaning of art.

“Post-” whatever epochs seem to happen more and more frequently. The word suggests a shift, a time of change or perception.

Distinguishing one from the other relies primarily on the idea that Net Art lived only on the Internet, it required that viewers see and interact with it on the Internet.

David Joselit, preferring the term “after art” to Post-Internet writes, “The work’s power lies in its staging of a per formative mode of looking, through which the single image and the network are visible at the same time […] What results in the ‘era after art’ is a new kind of power that art assembles through its heterogeneous formats. - Joselit, David. After Art. Princeton University Press. Princeton NJ. 2013. Pages 39, 91.

Van den Dorpel says of his work, “I like the material object. I could just simulate everything with software but I think I need this materiality to make the thing. The [object] is made of printed textures from a stock footage material collection. I printed the materials on it but when you come close you can see that it’s the actual real material, but you can also see it’s still a print.”

The artist’s practice, being a combination of technology as material – digitally printed plastic – and technology as a source of idea and image, is distinctly Post-internet.- Kay, Jean. An Interview with Harm van den Dorpel. atractivoquenobello blog. July 16, 2014.

It reflects “the notion that it is not the style nor the content of the works at play here, nor even their chosen medium or mediums, but rather the interconnectivity between ideas and forms, the very practice of creativity and the process by which it is realised.” - Folks, Eva. Concerning Art Post-Internet. Much in the way Internet users amass self-curated collections images, GIFs, video, music etc. they also consume products they feel are representative of themselves.

The World Wide Web is so much an extension of ourselves that perhaps we no longer see it for what it is and the job of the Post-Internet artist is to remind us. The nature of the beast confounds what’s public and what’s private confuses what is an original and what is a copy, conflates production and consumption and nearly deconstructs the boundary between the real and the virtual.

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THE PERILS OF POST-INTERNET ART - Brain Droitcour

‘Post-Internet’ avoids anything resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the context of digital technology.

Olson, who has a strong claim to the term’s invention, situated the ‘Post-‘ not so much in social history as in her own process as an artist: simply enough, after using the internet, she makes art. Participation in Internet culture, Olson suggested, yields distinctive approaches to art making. McHugh was more interested in defining an epoch, one in which the Internet stopped being the domain of programmers and hackers and became an inseparable part of everyday life for people with no special interest in or knowledge about computers. But the widespread use of "Post-Internet" now obscures these writers' work, displacing it with arts peak’s murky mystique—a doom prescribed, I think, by the term's self- seriousness despite the good intentions with which it may have once been used.

Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online: photographed under bright lights in the gallery's purifying white cube (a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

The same supporters might also say that Post-Internet art offers a critique of how images of art circulate online in service of the art market. The Post-Internet art object looks good in a browser just as laundry detergent looks good in a commercial. Detergent isn't as stunning at a Laundromat, and neither does Post-Internet art shine in the gallery. It's boring to be around. It's not really sculpture. It doesn't activate space. It's often frontal, designed to preen for the camera's lens. It's an assemblage of some sort, and there's little excitement in the way objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the mass- market products in it. It's the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at the way brands thrive in networks.

A sheaf of essays grappling with the meaning of "Post-Internet" by tracing a genealogy from Olson onward would be inadequate to describe what Post-Internet has become: a term to market art.

Altmann shares some concerns and visual tropes with Post-Internet art but in my mind she sheds the "Post-." The way she equates installation photography with other image genres reminds me of the definition of Net art given by critic Josephine Bosma in her book Nettitudes (2011): art that can be present in several places simultaneously, that links its audience to other Internet cultures, "that is created from an awareness of, or deep involvement in, a world transformed and affected by elaborate technical ensembles." Bosma's definition of Net art—which rejects medium specificity, the idea that Net art only happens in a browser—is rather close to the definitions of Post-Internet art found in the writings of Olson and McHugh. But her emphatic disinterest in the art world's institutions puts her far from what Post- Internet art has become. The Internet of five years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the Internet before social media, or the Internet of 20 years ago, or the Internet before the World Wide Web. And yet Post-Internet artists seem to have a clear idea of what the Internet is: a tool for promoting their work.

But until then, Post- Internet art reflects an Internet where the only change worth thinking about is the extent of an installation shot's reach.

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POST-INTERNET, NOTES ON THE INTERNET AND ART (INTRODUCTION) - Gene Mchugh

‘Post-Internet’ is a term heard from Marisa Olson talk about somewhere between 2007 and 2009. The Internet, of course, was not over. Rather, let’s say this: what we mean when we say ‘Internet’ served as shorthand for this change.

On some general level, the rise of social networking and the professionalization of web design reduced the technical nature of network computing, shifting the Internet from a specialized world for nerds and the technologically-minded, to a mainstream world for nerds, the technologically-minded and grandmas and sports fans and business people and painters and everyone else. Here comes everybody.

Furthermore, and hope for the Internet to make things easier, to reduce the anxiety of my existence, was simply over – it failed – and it was just another thing to deal with. What we mean when we say ‘Internet’ became not a thing in the world to escape into, but rather the world one sought escape from..sigh. It became the place where business was conducted, ad bills were paid. It became the place where people tracked you down.

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POST-INTERNET ART CRITICISM SURVEY

Accompanying this change in what we mean when we say ‘Internet’, there was a change in what we mean when we say ‘art on the Internet’ and ‘post Internet art’ served as shorthand for the change.

On some general level, the shift of the Internet to a mainstream world in which a lot of people read the newspaper, play games, meet sexual partners, go to the bathroom, ect. No matter what you deal was/is as an artist, you had/have to deal with the Internet – not necessarily as a medium in the sense of formal aesthetics, but as a distribution platform, a machine for altering and re-channelling work.

It’s not that all contemporary artists must right now start making hypertext poetry and cat memes, but rather that, somewhere in the basic conceptual framework of the work, an understanding of what the Internet is doing to the work – how it distributes the work, how it devalues the work, revalue it – must be acknowledge in the way that one would acknowledge, say, the market. What Guthrie Lonergan called ‘ Internet Aware’.

Timotheus Vermeulen, assistant professor in cultural studies and theory at the Radoud Universiteit in Nijmegen, founding editor of Notes on Metamodernism, based in Düsseldorf:

– I would definitely say the Internet has affected the aesthetics and ethics of a new generation of writers, just as television influenced the generation of novelists Foster Wallace famously described in his essay on irony in literature. Over the past few years, writers such as Roberto Bolano, Zadie Smith and perhaps above all Adam Thirlwell have adopted new strategies of storytelling focusing on what we may call 1. a “linked narrative” (epic tales at once coherent and disjointed, often through different POVs); 2. suspended contemporaneity (the happening of too many events at the same time, which manifests itself in Bolano, through unfinished sentences, whilst as Alison Gibbons has pointed out, Thirlwell often begins sentences with a “while”, suggesting two events taking place simultaneously, but then only describing one of them); 3. utopistics (Wallerstein’s term for achievable alternatives); and 4. the return of an alienated yet repositioning subject.

Pernille Albrethsen, Nordic editor of Kunstkritikk, based in Copenhagen:

As the possibilities of the Internet – as overall discourse and tool – are far from fully uncovered, we are witnessing a lot of art making marked by what I refer to as the “Portapak syndrome” – where the new media briefly dominate, taking precedence over the ideas and overall direction of the art making. Like in the late 1960s when artists were blown away by the possibilities of the invention and accessibility of the Portapak and would spend hours recording boring videos. The real landmarks of the new tool only came after the artists had experimented with it for some time. Today artists are experimenting with the effects of the index-finger touch experience, the perceptible flatness of smart TV, the eternal instantaneity of everything, the multiple presence-ness of everyday life, etc.…. And, as far as I see, so far the writers are just trying to follow pace.

Cedar Lewisohn, curator, artist and writer, based in London:

– Writing about art seems to be in constant crisis, not matter what the genre. This maybe has something to do with how art is perceived in society and the function writing about art is supposed to fill. In terms of the Internet and generational shifts, yes, things have changed. The main thing is, and I am stealing from Žižek here, that there are no experts anymore, just people with opinions. This is certainly true for those who write about visual art. I mean, I look at something. I write about it, you disagree and make a “comment” below the text. I’m wrong, you‘re wrong, who can say? Well, everyone. As Sol LeWitt so elegantly wrote in 1967, “I do not advocate a conceptual form of art for all artists. I have found that it has worked well for me while other ways have not. It is one way of making art; other ways suit other artists.”

Georg Diez critic, author, based in Berlin:

– Art is always a struggle, or at least conflict. Otherwise there would be no reason to produce art with meaning. Art that is consensual is superfluous. Art is in time and before its time. That is why it doesn‘t matter how old the artist is, and where he or she comes from. The view on the world is different. Same applies to those who write about it. They should be accomplices, they should take sides, be abrasive and cruel in their judgement, and adoring, nurturing, whatever. But never tepid. They should form alliances. They should be partisans in this most peaceful battle, the continuous triumph of sublimation. That‘s why we‘re human.

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WHAT IS POST-INTERNET ART? UNDERSTANDING THE REVOLUTIONARY NEW ART MOVEMENT

It's a bemusing term you may have heard floating around the art world recently, and now a new exhibition called "Art Post-Internet" at Beijing's Ullens Center for Contemporary Art—organized by critic/curator Karen Archey with writer/gallerist Robin Peckham—has set out to encapsulate the budding movement, which may be the most significant of its kind to emerge in a while. The key to understanding what "post-Internet" means is that, despite how it sounds, it doesn't suggest that the seismic technological developments associated with the Net are finished and behind us. Far from it.

Instead, in the same way that postmodern artists absorbed and adapted the strategies of modernism—fracturing the picture plane, abstraction, etc.—for a new aesthetic era, post-Internet artists have moved beyond making work dependent on the novelty of the Web to using its tools to tackle other subjects. And while earlier Net artists often made works that existed exclusively online, the post-Internet generation (many of whom have been plugged into the Web since they could walk) frequently uses digital strategies to create objects that exist in the real world.

There are already a handful of artists and galleries that are closely linked to post-Internet art, and curators are aiming to sum up the way these artists reflects our new relationship to images and objects inspired by the infinitely variable culture of the Web. What follows is a summary of some of the major figures associated with the emerging world of post-Internet art

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FINALLY, A SEMI-DEFINITIVE DEFINITION OF POST-INTERNET ART

Those in search of a definitive text on post-internet artmaking now have a source book to download. Curators Karen Archey and Robin Peckham have released Art Post-Internet, a catalogue to accompany their show Art Post-Internet at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing China. More than that, it’s full of primary source research and information about post-internet art from dozens of critics, curators and museum professionals. These include Christiane Paul, Ben Davis, Domenico Quaranta and myself to name a few. Each catalogue receives its own unique download number, as well as a weather report for the day and place where it was downloaded.

This design decision by the Berlin-based studio PWR is the quality that perhaps most closely ties the work to post-internet art, as they define it. For posterity, their description of the term is:

…art, consciously created in a milieu that assumes the centrality of the network, and that often takes everything from the physical bits to the social ramifications of the internet as fodder…This understanding of the post-internet refers not to a time “after” the internet, but rather to an internet state of mind — to think in the fashion of the network. In the context of artistic practice, the category of the post-internet describes an art object created with a consciousness of the networks within which it exists, from conception and production to dissemination and reception. As such, much of the work presented here employs the visual rhetoric of advertising, graphic design, stock imagery, corporate branding, visual merchandising, and commercial software tools.

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What I make is less art "on" the Internet than it is art "after" the Internet. It's the yield of my compulsive surfing and downloading. I create performances, songs, photos, texts, or installations directly derived from materials on the Internet or my activity there. - Marisa Olson

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REFERENCE

http://netartnet.net/news/inbox/item/834-inbox-this-month-everyone-is-concerned-about-post-internet-art

http://artfcity.com/2014/10/14/finally-a-semi-definitive-definition-of-post-internet-art/

http://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/post_internet_art

http://www.kunstkritikk.no/artikler/post-internet-art-criticism-survey/