I'd like to thank Anthony for the opportunity to be a curatorial fellow with the Walter Phillips Gallery over the past year. It has been a remarkable opportunity to work in a beautiful space, with a dedicated and professional staff - Sylvie, Mimmo, Tim, Charlene, Ed, Mike, Mark and Katja - to co-curate Database Imaginary with Anthony and Sarah last November and now The Art Formerly Known As New Media with Sarah. Thank you.
We will not be talking about every work tonight. Sarah will discuss some of the curatorial strategies and goals we had for the show, and we are fortunate at this art history conference that we have artists here to talk about their own work: Michael Naimark, Sara Diamond, and Catherine Richards, in that order.
What I want to talk about very briefly is, essentially, the title of the show. The Art Formerly Known As New Media.
Doing a show on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Banff NEW MEDIA Institute, especially when it coincides with the departure of its illustrious director of a decade, and calling it The Art Formerly Known As New Media has the potential to be interpreted as a kind of nose thumbing. It is not. Similarly, given that the Walker Art Center and the Baltic Center for contemporary art have both terminated their new media programs - and with them, their new media curators - the show could be seen as a kind of throwing in of the towel. It is not.
As Charlie Gere put is so succinctly today, we know this soap opera: "Upstart art is misunderstood and then assimilated into the mainstream as 'just' contemporary art."
As Andreas Broeckman said, the artist formerly known as Prince is just a musician and the art formerly known as new media is just art.
But which is it? Recuperated art? Or just art? Or something else, as Edmond Couchot and Mark Hanson and many others argued today, an art with a difference?
This is where it gets tricky.
At the simplest level, The Art Formerly Known As New Media follows in a long line of exhibitions - at least 30 years old - which claim that it's not about the technology, it's about the art. True. Sara and I do believe that while the technology may be enabling, to the extent that it's only about an instrumentalization of those capabilities, it's probably not very interesting. As we say in our introduction, "All of the works in The Art Formerly Known As New Media challenge and exceed the terminology by which they have, at least initially, been categorized and theorized." That is always what compelling art does.
I should say that one of the hallmarks of the BNMI program, we feel, has been an insistence on questioning the larger social, political, economic contexts in which experimental art is produced.
But this doesn't fully explain why the art FORMERLY known as new media. Are we implying it's dead? It's over? I think not.
Perhaps one way to explain this is ZKM's 1999 exhibition, net_condition. One can praise or criticize the specifics of the show - and I have done both - but one of my main thoughts at the time was thank goodness. Now there doesn't have to be another net art show for a long time, and we can focus on topcis, thematics, individual artists that matter to us.
In a sense, after a decade - and much more if we go back to Cybernetic Serendipity - we don't have to do "new media" shows anymore. I want to curate shows that include both Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno's Annlee and Thomson & Craighead'sShort Films about Flying.
But isn't this exactly what Charlie was saying? SOME new media work is recuperated but not with any deep understanding of the art formerly known as new media as a field. A a field with difference that matters.
My argument, and I think Sarah shares this to a large degree, also parallels something that Charlie said - I'm sorry to be so agreebable; I'm usually not like that. I go back to Alain Minc and Simon Nora's study that was published in English as The Computerization of Society. In it they coined the term telematique, meaning the conjunction of telecommunications - the network and informatique - computers. They argued, in 1978, that this conjunction would change the world. And I think it's inarguable that it has. Including, if not the mainstream artworld, yet, art practice.
What I would argue is not that new media is now "deserving" of the status of "just" art, but that increasingly, much so-called contemporary art practice, even art practice that does not self-identify - or more likely actively shuns the label new media - is exhibiting the distinctive characteristics that many of today's speakers have carefully identified and theorized.
The art formerly known as new media, properly understand, may be, in fact, the best lens we have to understand so-called contemporary art, especially as we move forward from 1960 to 2005. This, for me, for instance, is the genius of the variable media initiative. Jon [Ippolito] and Alain [Depocas] and Caitlin [Jones] and Rick [Rinehart] and others used the art formerly known as new media as a springboard to better understand - and hence to better conservere and preserve - any art, especially so-called contemporary art.
One final note. At a recent conference at the Tate, where Christiane Paul, my favorite curator of the art formerly known as new media, gave her usual sparkling, succinct overview of the art formerly known as new media, I sort of tried this idea out on her as a question from the audience, suggesting that many of the distinctive characteristics she had identified about curating the art formerly known as new media, were applicable to many, if not all curators of so-called contemporary art. She rather curtly - the pain is still present, you can tell - suggested that I didnt' know what I was talking about; none of the curators she worked with understood what she was talking about.
I want to say here, when I have the floor, that I do understand. I really do. And I fell your pain Christiane. I'm not trying to be a pollyana about this, and I still believe that the art formerly known as new media is significantly distinctive, but I also think it is both accurate and tactical to say that art after new media is a new and better understanding of the art of our time.
That, I hope, is what this show is about, at least in part.
