The Internationalization of Autonomous Art.

A story about paranoia

The full text is available in Swedish at CRAC in Context.

You have heard the rumors, and you can put two and two together. Paranoia, technical optimism, or the desire to be the first onto what's new - the arrival of global art has been anticipated with enthusiasm and fear. Multicultural invasion or "standard" homogenized gallery art? What were we thinking? After a short period of euphoria and speculation we are overcome by ennui, and blas» journalists speak with nostalgic indulgence about the faith they place in the globalization of international contemporary art.

...."So, why is it desirable to create art communities on the internet in the first place? Should the autonomous institutional art that saw the light of day in Europe in the second half of th e 16th century be spread all over the world like some kind of contemporary art? Is that our net specific art discourse?

If Internet is international in its ability to disseminate information, then the weight of international art rests on a globalized international art theory. The discourse that circulates within professional circles is seen in the language of critic's, artist's, art historian's and other participants in the construction of art's canon. The network character of the globalization process is apparent. Its economic side consists of transnational digitally mediated capitalism combined with job sharing. Cultural globalization is a more active awareness of the cultures of the world, globally mediated. The concept originated and was popularized in the 1980's. That is also when elephants of language were published like Longman Dictionary of the English Language (1984), Oxford English Dictionary (1989) and The Oxford Dictionary of New Words which did not come out until 1991. Symptomatically one refers to the 60's media guru McLuhan (1911-1980 - where there is now the possibility of canonization posthumously), optimistic, prophetic and technically deterministic. McLuhan never paid any attention to the ARPA Net of the 1960's, part of Internets military past, like a remnent from the Cold War; todays theoreticians and artists are vastly interested in this part of history. Perhaps McLuhan was influenced by the military tension of his time in his quest to unite technology with humanistics. He came no further than TV.

The importance of postmodern theory for globalization and net art can hardly be overestimated: semiotics; elite culture sequestering mass culture, questions of originator and viewer; the study of modernism as a cultural expression for an historic configuration of material relationships. Many intellectuals maintain that modernism is highly specific for different cultures. Compare how modernism is problematized by, i.e. Lyotard, by Hal Foster in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983) and The Return of the Real (1996), and by Brian Wallis, Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (1984), with questions of modernism in NÀstor Garcia Canclini and Gerardo Mosquera in Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (1995) and Kwame Anthony Appiah, "Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?" (1991). In spite of this, modernism represents values like anglo-eurocentrism, androcentrism, purity of the arts, the claim to universal\global truths, etc. - values that postmodernism transgresses. A word like glokal serves as an example for how postmodernistic storytelling on a local level and McLuhan's global community, interplay as attributes to new, media based art. The result is a kind of stenography visualizing how mediated markers like towns, names, visual traditions and the similar effects of migration, communication, and economy circulate in the western globalized institutional concept of art. The only non-local tendency in art is actually the concept of art itself that is seldom seriously questioned. See Daniel Birnbaum's articles in Dagens Nyheter late fall 1998 for an introduction to the word glokal in Sweden. Naturally, all art is local even if some circulate and are interpreted more readily than others.

Internet, with its explosive expansion since 1994\95 is a potential global room for art projects and discussions about phenomena like art. The net makes it possible to clearly see how the konnotations of transnationality and the totality in "the globalization media" are maintained.

Actual changes in the arts due to technical development are probably more difficult to describe. Networks for international co-operation always presume a physical meeting, even if information and communication is managed by e-mail. Networks for international studios Res Artis WWW.RESARTIS.ORG and the artist organization World Wide Web Artists' Consortiu Artis www.resartis.org are working examples of this. And there are countless round-the-world travel diaries, both fictive and non-fictive, that have been done to investigate how representation and communication meet in traveling as an experience. One example is: by MoMA'S video curator Barbara London and technician F.D.P. Henryz where they looked for web-art in China. The theoretical spinoff effects are even more apparent. What do you say about words like desire machines, war machines with there own runaway logics, or dromolgy?"

"...Critical Arts Ensemble are eminent representatives for that branch of the internet culture that lives on the cyberpunk idiom with underground connotations and resistance rhetoric fighting large corporations and the state. Free access for everyone, free access to information, and anti-commercialism. Where is there room for art? Free net art for everyone? The romantic artist is dead, but out of the ashes the equally romantic hacker is born."

Translation by Melinda Bergman