museum as digital institution

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AAANZ Conference 2004: Present Pasts - Present Futures

Digital and new technologies, and art and art writing stream.

Can the museum become a digital institution?

George Petelin

all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet,

attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again....

Heinrich Heine (quoted in the introduction to Friedrich Nietzsches The Gay

Science)

I wish to examine and compare two significant phases in the history of image

making that have occurred in my time: the interternational avant-garde that

emerged during the mid 20th century and the phenomenon of net.art that

began towards the end of that century. This comparison will be in terms of

both the discursive links that generate their rationale and their relation to the

institution of the museum.

The mid 20th century Avantgarde can be characterised as having performed a

series of critiques of the premises that had underpinned Modernist art

practice. All of these were imbricated with the issue of arts autonomy, from

society, or from Life as it is often expressed, and internally, among the

different historical genres and media that formed the traditions of Western art

practice. I will briefly establish what these were, and then return to them in

relation to net.art.

The avant-gardes critiques, for the purpose of this paper, will be reduced to

just five: critique of the Subject, critique of the Object, critique of the Body,

critique of the Concept, and critique of the Museum.

The avant-gardes critique of the Subject can be located in Pop Arts

eradication of Abstract Expressionisms painterly signifiers of subjectivity for

example by Lichtenstein, and in the austere rebellion, against the spiritual

claims of artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, by Frank Stella,

Carl Andre, and Richard Serra. This critique results in an increasing

emphasis on the materiality of art. What you see becomes not just what you


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see but also what you can touch; what occupies three dimensions; what has

weight ; what even threatens you with its presence. Thus, Donald Judd

becomes the focus of debates concerning the illegitimacy of relief on the

grounds that it offends the autonomy, in the terms established by Clement

Greenberg, of both sculpture and painting.

This debate about Greenbergian autonomy, while it deflects the more

important consequence of this artthat of its challenging but always

ambivalent position regarding the autonomy of art from lifeI will argue

remains a defining characteristic of digital non-art (that later becomes

recognised as art) but also, I will argue that this practice, like the mid 20 th

century avant-garde, despite its materialist concerns, continues to engage

with the dialectic of the sublime.

Ironically, the objecthood of Minimalisms works that logically evolved out of

Greenbergian anti-illusionist principles, as Fried1 observed, results in a

theatricalitymakes one aware of the context and of the viewers presence.

This has both the effect of shattering the apparent self-sufficiency or

autonomy of the object and re-invoking the sublimebut now as a material

rather than as a spiritual experience. The Andre bricks can be tripped over,

the Serra wall could crash on its spectators, and Serras act of splashing

molten lead could certainly inflict mortal damage. The transience of human

existence in the face of infinity becomes immanent rather than merely

contemplated.

A second irony emerges out of the uniformity and anonymity of objects

employed non-representationally. As Robert Morris and Dan Flavin (and,

indeed, also Carl Andre) discovered, the object as module has no necessity

to be unique. However, it, or its replacements, can undergo countless

reconfigurations in the production of new, relocated or totally unprecedented,

works. This inherent implication of objecthood leads directly to the notion that

the Object may be redundant, and that the remaining art consists in

something immaterialalbeit now conceptual rather than spiritual. This, of

course, fused with late Vietnam War anti-commodity sentiments and

Duchampian notions of the non-retinal to give us various forms of post-

object art.


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The materialists rediscovery of a sublime, together with an organic view of

objects from within their ranks by artists such as Eva Hesse and Louise

Bourgeois, also allows the Body, particularly within various forms of

performance and event art, to be understood as the last stake when spirit and

object are no longer considered of consequence. An exploration of either the

limits of the body, or its genderisation, thus forms the focus of much

performance art. At the same time, performance and installation both tend

towards an independence from the Museum and hence integration with Life

a complete reversal of Kantian autonomy. The embracing of chance as a

principle that is out of the control of the institution within many avant-garde

practices is emblematic of this. In more recent times, art based on post-

humanist notions addresses the obsolescence of the body. What invariably

replaces the body in this discourse is technologyexplicitly, as in Stelarcs

work, or implicitly as in the anonymous, dispersed, and frequently automated

authorship of net.art. Mark Hansen even argues that, uniquely, digital art

results in a dissolution not just of the author but of the viewer2.

But the heritage of todays technological art would not be complete without a

critique of Concept that, again dialectically, emerged out of conceptual art

itself. The attempts to engage with concepts directly, soon led to the

realisation that concepts are embedded in language, be it verbal or visual.

Concepts thus evaporate in the face of a material presenceculture.

Postmodernism as a historical art style with its self-conscious manipulation of

appropriated signifiers is a direct heir to this tradition, but net art with its

inherent dependence on computer languages is even more so. So again

there is an ambivalent consciousness of both the ethereal nature of

information and its dependence on material hardware and the conventions of

software.

While performance, installation, and some forms of conceptual art were all

initially intent on making the museum redundant, we now know that the

museum proved remarkably resilient. Art may have merged with life at its

edgesin instances such as Fluxus and the Situationistsbut it always crept

back to its institutional haven. The reason this occurred was that the museum

made itself indispensable to the economy of arts distribution, reception, and

exchange, each of which in turn underwrote arts production. Also, the


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museum acquired a flexibility that enabled it to absorb and commodify

critiques of itself. This flexibility is precisely due to the autonomy from real

life concerns in the Kantian tradition that the museum embodies and that

radical art had tried to escape.

However, as we know, that autonomy is regularly strained through what

Decter3 called the strategy of Critical Complicity and Complicit Criticality

between the museum and artiststogether with the dependence of the

museum on public funding. Attempts at government censorship, public

outrage, and media ridicule have in the main become replaced by a form of

bribery in terms of grants and funding priorities. The museum has adapted to

each avant-garde, but together with its governing constituency also sets rules

by which this adaptation takes place.

In another sense, the museum is a discursive framework that we carry around

with us, by means of which we identify both art and anti-art. Its existence

precedes our engagement with art and sets the parameters according to

which we apprehend it. The only things that escape these parameters are

things that are not considered art at all. The producers of non-art, as

opposed to anti-art, however, are still free to adopt some of the traditions of

art that circulate in our society. Thus you can idolise Duchamp and Fluxus for

their philosophies of life while working in business, science, or technology

and have no expectation that your work has anything to do with galleries. As

a participant in the 1998 Walker Art Centre and Rhizome sponsored listserv

on net.art Brian Molineaux observes Modernism is obviously more than an

art movement, having seeped into the very fabric of society.

David Ross ex-director of SFMOMA observes:

There are probably many people working within this space who don't necessarily

consider themselves artists because they don't want to l imit themselves and their

activity by a set of prejudices and pre-definitions of artistic practice.4

The producers of what has come to be called net.art were, at least initially,

like this. Their work contrasted with what many museum web sites promoted.

Director ofCultureNet DenmarkPia Vigh recalls that while museums started

to catch on to the Internet as an art medium in the last years of the nineties

and began to collect, commission and exhibit net-based artworks, most artists


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who interest them actually made their names outside the gallery-museum

matrix5.

And although Museums have begun the absorption process of net non-art,

they still mainly mediate physical art digitally or at best supplement physicalart with web-friendly products commissioned from established artists. In an

article titled Hacking Culture, presented at a Museums & the Web

Conference Vigh still laments, in 2002, that the popular understanding of

new media identifies it with the use of a computer for circulation and

exhibition, rather than production 6. This is not merely a misunderstanding,

however, because, as I will argue, there is an intrinsic interpenetration of

production and distribution, as well as of exchange and critical discourse,

crucial to understanding the significance of net.art.

The generally acknowledged father of net art, Slovenian Vuk Cosic, worked

as political activist and cultural manager, and studied archaeology, when in

1995 he made a website for a little festival he was associated with just to

see how it works7. (In some interviews he admits to have dabbled in collage

and land art before becoming a net artist, but he is essentially trained in

archaeology and still talks of completing his PhD in that discipline). In 1996, a

year later, he created Net art per se8, a site that outlined a manifesto for

net.art and involved a conference that invited a substantial core of the

personnel who have since become the leading lights of this genre. As Cosic

remembers:

That was pretty surprising for a lot of people. And I was very surprised that these guys at

this conference appreciated my work. And that's the beauty of all of this that developed

out of this conference. It's like me and Heath Bunting and Alexej Shulgin and Olia Lialina

and Jodi (a collaboration between European artists Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans)

had studios next to each other, where we could look at what the others were doing9.

This conference was entirely self-generated and resulted in an amazingly

fruitful professional relationship across national borders. Cosic frequently

compares his relation to his colleagues with that of Picasso and Braque and

that of the Italian and Russian Futurists. It usually goes like this, says Cosik:

Jodi do something new - and they are crazy, they are maniacs, they create

something new every other day - and they send the URL to me, and ask: What do


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you think about this? And there are collaborations over the net, too, and group

projects. We steal a lot from each other, in the sense that we take some parts of

codes, we admire each others tricks. Jodi are very interesting in their exploration of

technology, but Heath is magnificent in his social awareness and his glorious

egotism, or Alexej with his Russian temperament. Cyber-Majakowski, someone once

called him10.

This relationship is quite different from the jealously guarded creativity of

mainstream art, as Vigh observes:

Since net artists are not sufficiently economically supported through the

consumption of their work, net artists are not that concerned with copyright. The

basis for netart is an economy ofexchange. Pecuniary economy has been

introduced during the last two years but still exchange remains the most important.

This exchange is interlinked with the free software communitynet artists tend to

use free software and net artists that develop software tend to share this with the

netart community. Often source code is distributed in extensive friendship/colleague

networks or even publicly for download. Software developed by the free software

community is often protected by anti commercial licenses, for example by the

common GNU, General Public Use license. Net artists dealing with this exchange

are concerned about copyright only in the sense that the work stays free/part of the

exchange11

.

Although mostly committed to romantic notions of freedom, net.artists, like

other hacker communities, began by selective involvement and exchange.

Their websites were often distinguished by addresses such as

http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org orhttp://www.0100101110101101.org, that an

ordinary citizen would not come upon except by the most remote accident.

What is it, apart from their romantic role-play that characterises net.artists as

a latter-day avant-garde? They are patently heirs to conceptualism in that

their products are ephemeral and based on reconfiguration of often modular

components. And like advanced conceptualism their work is materialist in its

denial of subjectivity and embrace of cultural meaning specific to their

community. And although it treats the body as largely redundant, I will argue

that it continues to evoke the sublime. But, most important of all, it continues

to engage with Greenbergian notions of autonomy. What distinguishes it from
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/http://www.0100101110101101.org/http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/http://www.0100101110101101.org/


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other forms of web art is its concern for the intrinsic nature of its own medium

rather than the mediation of something extrinsic to it.

To recall Clement Greenbergs dictum:

the essence of modernism liesin the use of the characteristic methods of adiscipline to criticise the discipline itself.The task of self criticism became to

eliminate from the effects of each art any and every effect that might conceivably be

borrowed from or by the medium of any other art12.

How net.art is distinguished from other phenomena on the web is best

illustrated by the http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org site which requires some

programming savvy to be understood at all. When you first enter it, all you

see is rows of strokes and numbers and dismiss it as simply meaningless, buta programmer curious to investigate what might have gone wrong with the

source code to generate this gibberish would press the source button on

their browser to find not the expected rows of html code, but a visual diagram.

The code thus acts as the image and the picture acts as the code.

Synchro mailby Lisa Jevbratt13invites you to send an individual email totally

anonymously to a totally random destination and then graphically represents

the choices made. Thus it consists entirely of inherent functions of the

technology rather than mediate some extrinsic topic. Programming can play

even a more complex role in some net.art. Riot, Shredder, and Landfillby

potatoland.org, for instance, each provide alternative browser experiences

that radicallyor even traumaticallydisrupt the spatial metaphors of

normal websurfing sufficiently to make you fear for the survival of your data.

Another example, Carnivore by Alex Galloway and the Radical SoftwareGroup, is a surveillance tool for data networks. At the heart of the project,

their site explains,

is CarnivorePE, a software application that listens to all Internet traffic (email, web

surfing, etc.) on a specific local network. Next, CarnivorePE serves this data stream

over the net to an unlimited number of creative interfaces called "clients." The clients

are each designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various

ways.
http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/http://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/


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CarnivorePE is inspired by DCS1000, a piece of software used by the FBI to perform

electronic wiretaps14.

What results from this painstakingly programmed software, however, is not

security surveillance, but a continuous organically unfolding image that is a

real-time reflection of the very pulse of the web. The sinister aspect of this is

that the author admits that this software could actually be used for obtaining

data illegally. That the core software is capable of multiple uses is

demonstrated by the series of further artistic applications of it by other

prominent net.artists also linked to this site.

A considerable number of such sites both expose moral consequences of the

webs own nature and incorporate, once again, a sublime edge through some

form of digital terror. Most notable, were Biennale.py15a virus artwork by

0100101110101101.org released and sold as source code on t-shirts and on

CD-Roms at the 2001 Venice Biennale, and Forkbomb16, a code that

executes forked instructions that gradually use up the resources of a

computer until it crashes. Their intention to be art differs in degree but their

claim to be sublime consists in that both of them employ programming

considered amongst hackers to be as remarkably elegant as it is destructive.

But having identified that net.art participates in precisely the same dialectic

as did avant-gardism, what is different about it? The most significant

difference as I have already suggested, is net.arts capacity to be

simultaneously a site of production and of its own distribution and, in addition,

the ability, as David Ross puts it, to collapse the distinction between critical

dialogue and generative dialogue. Thus net.art makes, exhibits, and critiques

itself simultaneously.

As Pia Vigh observes, we are faced with the paradox that the Internet is the

perfect tool to bring down all hierarchy and bring art and culture directly to

the audience. Vigh is somewhat deferential to net.art under the

circumstances, judging that

Although net art does not need museums, one can still see how museums of

contemporary art need net art. Public museums of contemporary art are meant to cover

the whole field of contemporary art, and therefore they must necessarily also cover net


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art. If museums have to take net art seriously, they have to start with the already

established competencies and viable forums outside the museums. Museums that wish

to cover net art should join these forums. For the sake of the reputation of museums in

the net art environment, it is essential that they do not appear to be parasites or lusers -

mere users of net art who just download the resulting works of art without contributing totheir structural strengthening and the more process-oriented development17.

The net has developed numerous virtual institutions of its own that enable it

to filter, exhibit, archive, and debate its own production.

As Vigh observes.

One can point to private net art institutions such as Rhizome in USA

(http://rhizome.org/fresh/), ArtNet in Norway (http://kunst.kulturnett.no/artikkel.php?

navn=artnet), and Artnode (http://www.artnode.dk/) in Denmark, as well as mailing lists

such as nettime, which has grown on the Internet, as important disseminators of net art,

because they support dialogue with and about net art and the Internet. Unlike the

established art institution, these independent institutions are all a product of the Internet

focused on net art and the impact of the Internet on cultural and societal development.

Rhizome.org, is a non-profit organization founded in 1996 to provide an

online platform for the global new media art community. For ex-SFMOMA

director David Ross it replaced Echo (a more general subscription based NYbased online community) as well as reading all art magazines18. Despite its

influence, the nature of the net allows Rhizome to be a shoestring enterprise.

I discover, from its forum archives, that It's a guerrilla operation with no

money. It's three people running it (Rachel Green, Alex Galloway, Mark

Tribe). More recently, Russian net.artist Olia Lialina has set up

Teleportacia.org19 to publish, publicise, and, amazingly, market, her own

ephemeral and infinitely copyable works.

This incestuous simultaneity inherent in the medium results both in its

strengths and its Achilles heel: the only thing that net.art cannot provide for

itself is objective external validation. Although it has generated its own

virtual institutions, by virtue of their medium, these are as suspect as the

hoax site reproductions that are its trademark. It is impossible to gauge which

iteration of an interview, or version of history, or attribution of authorship, or

physical location is genuine. So while peer support within the net community

helps establish credentials, ultimately there is a temptation to seek flattery
http://www.rhizome.org/http://www.rhizome.org/


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and perhaps profit from outside.

Museum accreditation, however, is tied to its exhibition of the work, which for

net.art remains problematic. Vigh argues that

Most often a museums approach to net art is to view net art merely as the cultural

heritage of tomorrow. Which of course is true! Yet net art cannot be fixed in time.

Works of net art cannot be institutionalised as autonomous art objects isolated from the

context of the Internet, because they relate to the artistic idioms and discourse of the

Internet. It is dynamic art, the significance of which arises out of the encounter between

the artwork, the audience, and the context...20

Moreover, the extent of the phenomenon cannot be understated. As one

curator finds

There are no fanfares, no fireworks, no ticket booth at the entrance. Just scores of

pages, spawning like mushrooms, scattered like snowflakes all over the Web21.

Despite these difficulties, Museum recognition for the pioneers of this

practice has come about rapidly over the past few years. Museums such as

the Walker in Indianapolis, the Whitney22, the Tate23, the SFMOMA24, The Dia

Foundation25, and, in Australia, The National Gallery of Victoria26 have all

established sections on their web site dealing with the net.art phenomenon.

Within the ranks of net.artists there remains an ambivalence about this. Tom

Bell writing to the Poetics of Internet art/activism section of Walker Art

Centres Shock of the ViewListserv discovers that

Apparently I dont have enough money and computing power to get to the Whitney

past the ad. I think the takeover by commercialism and costly technology and

software is one of the things artists might address rather than succumbing27.

Valry Grancher, a digital and conceptual artist who, out of apparent

frustration with the corruption of net.art has returned to painting, laments:

I would say that I always perceived internet as a dynamic process, a network space

where nothing may be freezed. Internet is dealing with new concept of time and

space, and is defining on another way human identity and phenomenolgy. Net art is

a process. This media has evolved from 1998 until today to a huge market where we

cannot find any TAZ (Hakim Bey like on 1994 when net art was conceived! The web

and internet is today a space where branding icons are bringing a new kind of


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consumerism (the hyperconsumerism) where also language may be commercialized

("google adwords", C. Bruno), a new kind of 'pop' with its visual signs, logo, VIP and

so on, so on...

Like Vuk Cosik (the father of net art) is saying, NET ART IS DEAD ! it is dead

because the context where net art was produced doesn't exist anymore...28

The pioneers of net.art appear to have anticipated this at least since 1999, as

Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgins site titled Introduction to net.art 1994-

199929indicates. Here they identify net.arts beginnings as the ultimate

modernism promising 0% compromise and, after listing its various forms of

intervention, announce that net.art is undertaking major transformations as a

result of its newfound status and institutional recognition and admit that this

materialisation signals its demise. They then make an ironic but remarkablyaccurate list of the career strategies necessary to be a successful modernist

artist. However, they conclude, optimistically in terms of avant-garde values,

with a Utopian appendix (after net.art) that suggests that the insurgence is

not over, just ready to shift arenas. This is consonant with the theory of

Temporary Autonomous Zones30 promoted by underground theorist known

as Hakim Bey, who is a kind of cult guru of hackers, and who among other

strategies sets his Guy Debord-like ideas to heavy-metal music31. In a

nutshell, he argues that revolution is unproductive because it invariably

results in conservative backlash and that, instead, radicals should enjoy

themselves through guerrilla skirmishes on ever-shifting territories and take

advantage of whatever benefits they can gain.

Debate on associated listservs exposes two sets of attitudes regarding

whether the territory is yet ready to be vacated. As Rachel Greene, an editor

ofRhizome and now author of this years definitive book on Internet art by

Thames and Hudson32, sums up:

Artivist Heath Bunting laid down two strategies: for those interested in getting work into

galleries and museums, these artists need to understand the marketing machines of the

art world and (perhaps) build on them. Those who came to the network because

they were interested in avoiding these systems, as Bunting did, should

build their own economies and structures. One artist who has done so is

Russian Olia Lialina, who showed her new gallery space -->http://art.teleportacia.org.

Those who have (naive) monolithic contempt for the academy, the museum,
http://art.teleportacia.org./http://art.teleportacia.org./http://art.teleportacia.org./


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etc. are missing out. Guaranteed, there are people in these places who might be

interested in their work. Teach collectors, potential sponsors and art world thought

leaders about new media art. How to get them interested? Infiltrate mainstream

journalism and media, organize events and shows. Just do it. If you believe those with

money and power have built a mall, build a new one. Or assimilate into the system andconstruct from there33.

P.S. she advises, and if you sell out, don't sell cheap. Nietzsches

eternal return conceded, Modernist idealism is certainly not quite

what it used to be!

George Petelin, Senior Lecturer (Art Theory),

Queensland College of Art, Griffith University

NOTES


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1Michael Fried,Art and objecthood : essays and reviews Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998.

2 Mark. B. N. Hansen, New philosophy for new media, Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Mass, 2004.

3 Joshua Decter, De-Coding the Museum, Flash Art, Vol XXIII, Nov.-Dec., 1990, No. 155, pp. 140-142.

4 David Ross,Art and the Age of the Digita, 1999, http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/ross.html

5 Pia Vigh, Museums & the Web Conference 2002, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.html

6

Pia Vigh, Museums & the Web Conference 2002, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.html7 http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9709/msg00053.html

8http://www.nomemory.org/webpaint/data/text2.htm

9 www.ljudmila.org/nettime/

10 www.ljudmila.org/nettime/


12 Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting1960, http://www.sharecom.ca/greenberg/modernism.html

13http://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/syncro_mail/unconscious_collective/

14http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore/

15

http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/biennale_py/16 http://www.runme.org/project/+forkbomb/


18 David Ross,Art and the Age of the Digital1999, http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/ross.html

19 http:// teleportacia.org


21 Lee Hsin Hsin 1998 http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/lin/lin_paper.html#Web%20Art

22http://www.whitney.org/exhibition/2kb/internet.html

23 http://www.tate.org.uk/netart

24 http://010101.sfmoma.org/

25 http://www.diacenter.org/webproj/index.html

26 http://www.acmi.net.au/2004/

27http://209.32.200.27:8080/~shock

28 http://www.nomemory.org/webpaint/data/text2.htm

29http://www.easylife.org/netart

30 http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz3.html#labelTAZ31 http://www.roadkill.com/MDB/album.phtml/20118

32 Rachel Greene, Internet Art, Thames & Hudson, London 2004.

33http://209.32.200.27:8080/~shock
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://www.nomemory.org/webpaint/data/text2.htmhttp://www.nomemory.org/webpaint/data/text2.htmhttp://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/syncro_mail/unconscious_collective/http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore/http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/lin/lin_paper.html#Web%20Arthttp://209.32.200.27:8080/~shockhttp://www.easylife.org/netarthttp://209.32.200.27:8080/~shockhttp://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://www.nomemory.org/webpaint/data/text2.htmhttp://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/speakers/index.htmlhttp://128.111.69.4/~jevbratt/syncro_mail/unconscious_collective/http://www.rhizome.org/carnivore/http://www.archimuse.com/mw98/papers/lin/lin_paper.html#Web%20Arthttp://209.32.200.27:8080/~shockhttp://www.easylife.org/netarthttp://209.32.200.27:8080/~shock

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