davidg. on Wed, 12 Mar 97 19:29 MET |
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nettime: Art on Net |
Art on the Net not Net-Art After a long absensence (since the late eighties) it is once again a normal experience to go into galleries and museums and find works in which exciting artists use video. Significantly what neither the artists, nor the critics have reverted to is the term "video art". Artists such as Georgina Starr or Matthew Barney may be geographically apart but share a certain sensibility, they are also shrewd enough to avoid of the trap of being confined within the metaphor of given medium. Much of this new work is in fact revisiting the strategies of a much earlier generation Aconci, Abromovich/Uly etc, whose approach to video was also quick and dirty. Unlike those who came next there was no mystification of the medium, no "video art" as such. It was a tool, not an ideology. The same is true for the recent generation who grew up with the camcorder as just another household appliance, part of a continuum of media possibilities and almost as easy as picking up a pencil. It feels very natural, and the art is better for it. This new generation may not have been around, but they are probably prevented from taking the wrong direction by some residual folk memory of the theoretical somersaults and tedious technological formalism that accompanied debates about what might or might not be *real* "video art". Is there a lesson for us to learn from this history? Yes, I believe that those of us who love the net and love art, and want to work in both should learn from the past and avoid the simplistic device of marrying these two terms. The term net-art (as opposed to art that happens to appear on the net) should be quietly ditched. David Garcia -- * distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission * <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, * collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets * more info: majordomo@is.in-berlin.de and "info nettime" in the msg body * URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@is.in-berlin.de