Graeme

Shanken makes an argument that even when New Media Art fails it often offers “new knowledge” of value to disciplines beyond it’s own. Thinking in terms of the 21st C new media landscape and post-studio, perhpas post-media practice; it seems that there isn’t room for dispute. There is value inherent in the “re-mixologists” conducting artistic practice between discourses both within and beyond the purview of “the art world(s).” University communities in the U.S. may be late to acknowledging this but the trend is already here.

Ed Shanken 2011 NMA vs. MCA

At the same time, I’m compelled to agree with Catherine David’s assertion (quoted) that “Much of what today’s artists produce with New Media is very boring,” but I must add that much of what today’s artists produce without New Media is equally boring. While MCA curators and theorists like Krauss, Bourriaud, David make all the usual criticisms of NMA’s “vacuous celebration of technology,” I agree with Domenico’s assertions that some of this work, even if it fails as art, may have “heralded a new development in knowledge” and that “The New Media Art world can potentially generate the energy that powers the other art worlds, giving their respective ‘ideas of art’ a radical evolution.” Moreover, I argue that there may be specific strategic and conceptual advantages to using emerging media in a metacritical way. In other words, if used cleverly, technological media may offer precisely the tools needed to reflect on the profound ways in which that very technology is deeply embedded in modes of knowledge production, perception, and interaction, and is thus inextricable from corresponding epistemological and ontological transformations. I believe that such a metacritical approach is operating in the best NMA (and the best digital humanities scholarship.) Rather than shunning technological media, this method may offer artists the most advantageous opportunities to comment on and participate in the social transformations taking place in digital culture, in order to, as Bourriaud implores, “inhabit the world in a better way.”

Brooding, solitary and usually male, the trope of “the artist in the studio” has existed in multiple iterations throughout the history of art. From Rembrandt’s workshop to the twentieth-century Parisian studios of Picasso, Braque and others, to Warhol’s Factory, the studio contains within it an evolving narrative, albeit one that remains focused on a specific physical site of artistic production. In a particularly damning critique of this romantic construct, Daniel Buren posited in a 1971 essay, “The Function of the Studio,” that the studio has a “simultaneously idealizing and ossifying function,”1 a state of “purgatory” that grants artists limited agency in the production and dissemination of their own work and culture at large. Buren’s essay is a concise example of the postmodern conception of “post-studio” practice—a practice cultivated by the likes of Robert Smithson, who came to reject the confines of the physical studio as a site of production in favor of the unconfined natural landscape, or by John Baldessari’s infamous “Post-Studio Art” class at CalArts, in which students were encouraged to “stop daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone”2 and embrace a wider framework for art production. The influence of these artists is clearly evident in a range of contemporary artistic practices that continue to question traditional modes of production and dissemination.
The legacy of “post-studio” art is amplified for artists working with digital forms and online environments. Generally these types of practices are less an overt negation of the “ossifying” element of the studio and more a reflection of how the digital has changed cultural production at large. What happens when the studio in question is simply a laptop in the artist’s kitchen or the local coffee shop? When the studio exists in a network space and is linked to countless other studios, shifting the studio experience from ossifying to dynamic? Or when the site of the studio is the same as that of exhibition and distribution?
– EXCERPT FROM “THE FUNCTION OF THE STUDIO (WHEN THE STUDIO IS A LAPTOP)” BY CAITLIN JONES IN ART LIES, ISSUE 67

This is what artits do well. In building new pathways across those landscapes of existing knowledge we bring into view new perspectives, challenge current thinking, offer new possibilities and the like. And this is done using a multitude of forms – visual, and otherwise. So if a theoretical framework provides a ‘landscape’ of existing terrains of knowledge, then a ‘conceptual’ framework of your design will offer a new way to see what others have done as you shape your own way of traveling to new places of knowledge and experience.

I’m in the process of formatting and uploading quite a few resources to the Teaching Resources section of the site – it’s been in hibernation for a few months while moving institutions. Send me an email on artpracticeasresearch@gmail.com and I’ll forward you a link where some material is temporarily housed.

Graeme