First
draft presented at "Historicising Digital Art" sessions at
the annual meeting of the Association of Art Historians, University
of London, Berkbeck College, London, UK, April 11-12, 2003. Charlie
Gere, Chair. Revised drafts were presented at the Future Technology
: Media Arts and Culture Colloquium, Wexner Art Center, OSU, Columbus,
Ohio, April 28, 2003 and at the MediaArtHistory meeting at Villa Vigoni,
Menaggio, Italy, May 28, 2004.
About a decade ago I discovered a couple books on art and technology
that changed my life: Jack Burnham's Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects
of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of This Century (Braziller,
1968) and Douglas Davis' Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of Collaboration
between Science, Technology and Art (New York: Praeger, 1973). It was
1993 and the rush of the 21st century as the very near future simultaneously
bore down and uplifted me with great intensity. Recent developments
in consumer technologies, including relatively powerful personal computers,
user-friendly software, and interactive media, including CD-ROM and
perhaps more significantly, Mosaic (the first GUI web browser), which
seemed to open up a new future of creative expression and exchange in
which everyone could be a content-provider and thus break free from
the tyranny of the culture industry. Of course, it quickly became clear
that such utopianism was realistic only as a commercial marketing tool.
Nonetheless, I began to think more and more about what effects science
and technology was having on contemporary art and about how artists
might use technology to envision and create aesthetic models of the
future. Very quickly I realized that I had to study the history of art
and technology in order to have a clue about what was happening at the
moment, much less what its future might bring.
I would like
to discuss a set of problems concerning the history of art and technology
with respect to the larger canon of western art history. This paper
constitutes a report from the trenches and a call-to-arms of sorts.
I have forsaken subtlety in order to provoke, so there are some rough
edges, if not exaggerations. My focus is on method and canonicity and
my aim is to begin a discussion of long-range goals for critics, curators,
art historians, and other cultural workers whose research focuses on
the nexus of art, science, and technology, which I'll simply refer to
as art and technology. Here I am most interested in artists who seek
out or create technologies as the media through which they pursue their
work, and especially those who use technology as a means to either envision
alternative futures or to provide a meta-critique of technology itself
and its relation to culture and society. Although the distinction between
science and technology is important, in order to simplify my argument
I will not differentiate between them here, so please bear with that
simplification.
Although there
has been important scholarship on art and technology, there is no comprehensive
technological history of art, as there are feminist and Marxist histories
of art, for example. What similarities and differences, continuities
and discontinuities, can be mapped onto the use of technology for artistic
purposes throughout the history of art? Why are there periods of fervent
activity and others of apparent dormancy? Much of the best historical,
critical, and theoretical English language literature in the field has
thus far been written by artists: Jack Burnham, Douglas Davis, Roy Ascott,
and Eduardo Kac, to name just a few. Leonardo, the primary journal in
the field has historically focused on writings by artists and scientists.
When it is not being written by the artists themselves, the preponderance
of current literature on contemporary art involving technology is being
written in other disciplines, such as comparative literature, film history,
and cultural studies. So this leads me to ask: What is the voice of
art history with respect to the technological art of our time? What
unique and valuable contributions has my discipline made; and what contributions
can it make now and in the future historicize the subject both in art
history as well as in a broader cultural framework? Although I don't
have the answers to these questions, it seems about time that someone
ask them. And I hope that these provocations will spur debate and dialogue
so that artists and art historians, collectively, can more clearly define
the problems of our specialized field and begin to address them, if
not in a systematic and concerted way, then at least in an effort that
has explicit methods and goals.
I'll begin from
the somewhat over-determined premise that the development and use of
emerging technologies by artists always has been, and always will be,
an integral part of the art-making process as we know it. Yet, the canon
of western art history failed to recognize the centrality of technology
as an artistic medium and theme or as a hermeneutic tool for critics
and historians. In the absence of an established methodology and comprehensive
history that would help clarify the interrelatedness of art and technology
and compel revision, this oversight will persist. As a result, many
of the artists, artworks, aesthetic theories, institutions, and events
that might be established as the keystones and monuments of this historical
narrative will remain relatively unknown to general audiences.
Moving to the
problem of historicizing contemporary art involving contemporary technology,
one can see that the task is bound up in at least two other issues:
1) the problem of defining a method for interpreting artworks on the
basis of technology and creating a comprehensive history of art and
technology; and 2) the problem of gaining canonical recognition that
technology always has and always will play an integral role in art-making.
Indeed, only when such recognition and inclusion are achieved for the
historical embeddedness of technological innovation in and for artistic
production can the critical historicization of digital, biotech, and
other emerging artistic media take an authorized place in the larger
history of art. I should mention that I see the evolution of methodology
and historical narrative as a mutual and reciprocal process, in which
each functions for the other as both the cart and the horse that pulls
it. Using Jack Burnham as my foil, I'll begin by reviewing some of the
historiography of art and technology in order to simultaneously support
and problematize my position. Next, I'll give a few examples and discuss
some of the difficulties I've encountered in my own attempts to historicize
cybernetic, telematic, and electronic art within a larger art historical
context. The three illustrations are Powerpoint slides from my talk
at the MediaArtHistory meeting in May 2004 and relate to Section III,
part 2 below, which outlines some concerns I addressed in a related
series of articles published between 1998 and 2001, "Gemini Rising,
Moon in Apollo: Art and Technology in the US, 1966-71" <http://artexetra.com/Gemini.html>,
"The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnhams' Concept of Software
as a Metaphor for Art" <http://www.artexetra.com/House.html>,
and "Art in the Information Age: Technology and Conceptual Art"
<http://www.artexetra.com/InfoAge.pdf>.
Jack Burnham,
in his essay "Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed"
(1980), argued that the union of art and technology had nothing to offer
to the unfolding of western art history since the Renaissance. This
position appeared to constitute a bold about-face from Burnham's earlier
championing of art and technology in his classic monograph Beyond Modern
Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of
This Century, 1968. In this work, his method was teleological in nature.
Tracing a history of art and technology, he argued that technology was
playing an important role in the 20th century by helping art increasingly
embody the vitality of life, including such functions as metabolism,
motility, intelligence, and interaction. As a fellow at the Center for
Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1968-69, Burnham had the opportunity
to work with computers first hand. His essay, "The Aesthetics of
Intelligent Systems" (1969) discussed that experience and drew
parallels between art and information processing. These ideas were later
manifested in the exhibition, Software: Information Technology - Its
New Meaning for Art (1970), when as curator, Burnham used the metaphor
of art as software to explore and integrate his structuralist theories
about the mythic structure of art, the increasing conceptualism of art
in the late 1960s, and the latter's convergence with information technology.
Again, his method was teleological. Following Hegel and Kosuth, he prognosticated
that art was becoming philosophy, or "art as idea as idea."
In Software, as in his book The Structure of Art (1971), Burnham argued
that the internal logic of art's history could be understood as a progressive
stripping away of the invisible, naturalized, and unchallenged rules
that define the discipline's mythic structure. He interpreted Conceptual
Art as leading the charge (after Duchamp) and that art was "dissolving
into comprehension," as Willoughby Sharp put it in a 1970 interview.
Beyond Modern
Sculpture remains, in my mind, the most comprehensive account of the
history of art and technology. Yet, for all his brilliance and erudition,
Burnham's methods obscured his ability to understand the broader implications
of technology as an integral part of art-making. Technology was, for
him, merely a means to a pre-determined end that had nothing to do with
technology, per se. By stripping away surface layers he believed he
could uncover a grand scheme that explained why art unfolded and evolved
as it did and would continue to do so. In Beyond Modern Sculpture, beneath
the surface he found life. In Software and The Structure of Art, he
attempted to uncover the ineluctable structural foundations of art as
a social institution. This self-reflexive methodological approach may
be likened to an advanced stage of Post-Greenbergian formalism taken
to a meta-level of analysis.
While vitalism
and structuralism may remain important philosophical models, their limits
in explaining the grand scheme of art's history hardly need to be rehearsed.
Indeed, one of the important lessons of post-structuralism has been
a suspicion, if not outright rejection, of the very idea of master narratives,
a deconstruction of what Burnham himself might have described as the
mythic structure of western epistemology. Interestingly, Burnham's own
method was prepared for such an interpretation and his own conclusions
were but one order of analysis removed - that crucial level that distinguishes
structuralism from post-structuralism. Despite this and other shortcomings,
The Structure of Art remains a fascinating if abstruse text that begs
critical reappraisal as part of a larger reconsideration of Burnham's
important contributions to art history.
OK, so let's
say we strip away vitalism and self-revelation and any other master
narrative from Burnham's histories of art… what are we're left
with? Technology.
Without making
any grand-scheme claim, I would like suggest that from the invention
of one-point perspective and the creation of oil paint to the development
of interactive virtual reality environments and telematic art, technical
innovation and the use of emerging technologies as artistic media and
themes have substantial continuity throughout the history of western
art. This is at once not saying very much while also making a significant
claim. For one could just as easily and correctly state that various
forms of sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, along with other
concerns and analytic and creative tools have been consistently employed
in artistic practice and art historical interpretation throughout history.
What makes my claim significant is that the discipline of art history
has embraced biography, feminism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, aesthetics,
and various post-isms as bona fide methodologies. This leads me to ask,
How can this field develop a more comprehensive understanding of art
and technology without a method designed to bring it into relief? What
would such a method even be comprised of? What insights might emerge
into the relationship between art and technology, especially during
periods when they seem relatively unrelated?
Just as the
field has failed to incorporate the study of technology (both as history
and applied science) as a basic method, so the canon of art history
similarly reflects an impoverished understanding of the role of technology
in the history of art-making and the contributions of artists who have
been important innovators in that regard.
As you may have already sensed, this is a slippery slope. For on the
one hand, I am theoretically committed to challenging master narratives.
At the same time I am also committed to rewriting the canon - that grand
scheme of our collective field - to reflect the importance of technology
throughout the history of art, thereby forcing a critical reconsideration
and recontextualization of artists, artworks, art-making practices,
and historical narratives that previously have been excluded, marginalized,
or not understood to their fullest potential.
In confronting
this dilemma, I have more questions than answers, but I hope that the
following considerations will at least help demarcate some of the critical
issues that surround this problematic enterprise, with respect to both
the particularities of contemporary art involving emerging technologies
and the more general concern of including the study of technology as
central to the history of art. I'll begin by sharing some of my thoughts
on these questions with respect to art and art history after 1900, which
I shall expand with more detailed examples drawn from my own work in
the field.
I. How can artists,
critics, curators, and historians begin to demonstrate, exhibit, and
write the neglected history of art with respect to technology?
Although we
may agree to differing degrees about the extent to which the history
of art involving emerging technology has been neglected, and may disagree
on our definitions of "art" and "technology" for
that matter, it will be important that the extant literature on the
subject, broadly construed, be the subject of systematic historiographical
study. Only by taking account of the field such as it exists can we
comprehend our own foundations, understand the reception of its scholarship
at various places and moments, and gain perspective on its place within
larger historiographical concerns. I believe that rediscovering and
reinserting the best examples of the literature in our field into larger
critical discourses (and closely examining its detractors) will lend
credibility to our enterprise.
II. Why exactly
would we want to?
Although challenges
to master-narratives and grand schemes constitute a valuable corrective
to naturalized discursive strategies and methodological models, the
problem of defining a data-set remains. Discourse depends on and necessitates
that we agree that we have something to talk about. We may disagree
vehemently about certain objects, methods, and goals but there must
be some common ground. Canons provide precisely that common ground,
a shared database of generally accepted objects, actors, and moments
that cohere by virtue of their participation in the construction of
an evolving discourse. In order to be part of the discussion, those
objects, actors, and moments must be admitted to the canon by its gatekeepers.
The primary gatekeepers are art critics, art historians, curators, dealers,
and collectors and the institutions they represent: e.g. journals, the
academy, museums, commercial galleries, auction houses, and private
and institutional investors. Practically speaking, a canon can be only
so large, so for each work newly admitted to it, another must be removed.
These sorts of judgments cannot be separated from ideological agendas,
professional ambitions, and financial investments. Support for and acceptance
of them requires strenuous and subtle negotiation in order to make a
case that compels other gatekeepers to concur. For the more gates an
object, actor, or moment succeeds in passing through, the more canonical
it becomes.
The canon of
art history has been shaken up dramatically over the last forty years,
particularly by reconstructions mounted in the names of Marxism, feminism,
multiculturalism, and post-structuralism. When I was in college, for
example, the then-current edition of Janson's History of Art still did
not include any women. But the canon has proven to be extremely flexible
and resilient. Its existence and status do not appear seriously threatened,
in part because challenges to it primarily have focused on remedying
exclusions rather than on dismantling the fundamental structures of
power endemic to it. In other words, canon-busting may have an important
place in art historiography, but while Donald Preziosi and others figure
out just what that means for the rest of us, I'm going to take the attitude
of: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. In order for the historical role
of technology in art-making to be recognized by the field, its monuments
must be admitted to the canon and the study of technology as a hermeneutic
method must be acknowledged along with our standard methodological tool-kit.
There is so much basic research to be done in our field that getting
hung up on issues of canonical deconstruction would be counter-productive.
As artists and intellectuals working in this area we have a responsibility
to our subject to become involved in the process of negotiation and
gatekeeping that will enable our specialized field to gain canonical
status, or whatever will replace it. Clearly if we don't do it, no one
will.
III. Methodological
Examples in My Own Work
1. Telematic
Embrace
In my introduction (ninety-four pages) to Telematic Embrace: Visionary
Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness, a collection of essays
from 1965-2000 by Roy Ascott, I attempted to contextualize the artist's
work as a practitioner, theorist, and teacher within the history of
art, the history of technology, and intellectual history. It was of
primary importance to me that my text be fundamentally grounded in the
history of art in order to locate Ascott's work within a continuity
of aesthetic strategies employed in experimental art in the 20th century.
For example, I framed Ascott's cybernetic work from the 1960s in the
context of expressionistic tendencies ranging from Cezanne to Jackson
Pollock, vitalist and constructivist tendencies in British artists from
Moore to Pasmore and Nicholson, the use of alleatory techniques and
a process-oriented approach to art-making by Arp, Duchamp, and Cage,
and the interactive aspects of kinetic art and happenings. I considered
Ascott's work with telematic art in the context of these constituents
of cybernetic art, plus mail art, situationism, performance, artists'
use of telecommunications, interactive video, and other experimental
streams.
It was also
important to me to stress that the historicization of ideas often fails
to credit artistic developments because the languages of art are neither
as literal nor widely spoken as the languages of science or literature.
My research made clear that ideas emerge simultaneously in various fields.
And the cross-fertilization of these ideas demands that an underlying
context already exist in order for seeds from one field to germinate
in another. In the case of Ascott's work, cybernetics could be applied
to the problems of art only because there already was a significant
history of artistic experimentation with process, systems, and interactive
forms. Cybernetics then, provided a formalized, scientific method to
approach what artists (and others) had already been doing. As an example,
I showed how Ascott's Change Painting, 1959 could be interpreted on
the basis of cybernetic principles, yet its creation predated his awareness
of cybernetics.
Related to the
question of how ideas become historicized is the role of artists' writings
in theorizing a field. In this regard, Ascott's writings exemplify how
innovative artists often establish the theoretical foundations of their
practice long before critics, curators, and historians begin to incorporate
those artists' artwork (and rarely with acknowledgment of their writing)
into their own discursive contexts. Over and above that claim, it was
important to emphasize that Ascott's writings, like those of artists
associated with conceptual art, such as Joseph Kosuth and Art &
Language, not only theorized his practice, but were an integral part
of it.
[Note: the following
is in outline form and shall be more fully developed in subsequent drafts
of this paper.]
2. Art in the
Information Age: Reading and Interpreting Exhibitions and Literature
Gemini Rising,
Moon in Apollo… (ISEA, 1997)
"9 evenings," "Machine," "Cybernetic Serendipity,"
"A&T," "Software"
Why intense dedication of resources to joining at this time?
Tech out of control; military-industrial complex;
Ideology "create more human environ," war, ecology, space
race, PR
The House That Jack Built..(Consc. Reframed, 1998)
Software as metaphor for art, "grin without the cat," demat,
info proc., conceptual art
Art in the Information Age (1999, SIGGRAPH)
Why rigid cat. distinctions betw art & tech and conceptual art?
o Formally dissimilar (?) but many ideational similarities, esp. systems,
info
o ex. Burnham, Software drew parallel; "Index" as manual hypertext
system
Why artists corralled, excluded? Ex. Haacke, Ascott
Why art & tech shunned? conceptual art valorized? $, fashion, social
Why Burnham ignored by Harrison, Krauss, etc.:
Indeed, Burnham was light-years ahead of Charles Harrison who, in the
mid-1960s was writing about dreary British formalist sculpture and Rosalind
Krauss who, at that time, was writing about Cubism. Their studious omissions
of Burnham's work in their later reflections on conceptual art, modern
sculpture, and art historical methodology is itself worthy of serious
study, but I'm digressing…
Methodological
Conclusion:
Correspondences shared by two tendencies offer grounds for rethinking
their relationship as part of larger social transformations from machine
age to information age of post-industrial society.
' Only by attending to specific characteristics of technological changes
can such insights emerge.
3. Art and Electronic
Media
My current book
project, an illustrated survey of electronic art, has raised a number
of difficult questions about how to historicize the use of electronic
media in and as art, which I'll attempt to address more or less sequentially.
1. How might various subgenres and modes of art inquiry within art and
electronic media be classified and categorized?
2. What role do particular media or technical innovations play in defining
these histories, as opposed to aesthetic or art historical continuities?
3. How effective are still images at conveying works of art in a field
that is marked by time-based, interactive, and collaborative media?
In conceptualizing this volume, I could have elected to organize material
chronologically or by specific medium. I was opposed to a chronology
because it will fail to show how similar media and/or similar concepts
have been used at varied moments. I was opposed to a medium-based scheme
for a few reasons: 1) it would foreground technological apparatus as
the driving force behind the work, a message I definitely did not want
the book to convey; and 2) it would fail to show how related conceptual
and thematic issues have been addressed by artists using varied media.
The ability to show these sorts of continuities was my top priority,
so I elected to organize the book thematically, despite the difficulty
of defining themes that are internally coherent and meaningful. As thematic
categories do not admit of hard and fast distinctions, there are many
works that could have fit comfortably in two or more sections, though
ideally, in the end, the contents of each section will create a unity
that makes sense together. Another difficulty has been selecting works
that fairly represent the diversity of the field by decade, gender,
nationality, and so on. Given limitations on space and number of illustrations,
I also had to confront the difficult choice of determining how many
works fairly represent the work of a pioneer, like Paik, with a career
spanning five decades, compared to an artist working with electronics
for under ten years. As mentioned earlier in my discussion of canonical
revision, for each additional illustration allotted to a pioneer, one
less artist could be included in the volume. On the subject of illustrations,
it is clear that static media are extremely limited in their ability
to represent the significant durational and interactive transformations
that characterize time-based art, which comprises a substantial portion
of the program. To address this issue, some recent volumes, including
New Screen Media, include a CD or DVD containing multimedia content
that offers readers a better sense of these dimensions. I decided that
long after the CD's and DVD's wear out and/or become obsolete, the color
plates will keep on working. I applaud those who secure funding, procure,
organize, and execute multimedia resources but I wonder what percentage
of CDS and DVDS actually ever see the inside of a drive - and for those
that do, for how long?
Finally, I would
like to ask:
IV. What might a new canon that takes this as a central concern consist
of?
I am deeply
interested in discussing this issue, however, given its speculative
nature, the question must remain a rhetorical one for the moment. This
sort of quandary may be more efficiently addressed by a group than by
a single individual. Collectively, our efforts will hopefully constitute
the answer. But I think we need to first determine what our goals are.
I hope that the questions I've raised and my preliminary reflections
on them will help set the stage for further discussion.