Answer Me by Anri Sala at New Museum, New York
For this week’s reading, I found it interesting to compare curators’ perspectives on exhibiting digital art to my own experiences as a spectator.
I’ve observed the same thing as Boris Groys when he writes, in “Curating in the Post-Internet Age,” that “the audiences of contemporary art exhibitions are often local, while the exhibited art is often international. This means that contemporary art does not have a narrow, elitist view, but, on the contrary, a broader, universalist perspective.”
The Internet is global, and it’s at once a distinct place and placeless. As I’ve traveled throughout the years, I’ve observed the same artists showing up in every new media art exhibition. The ultra-modern aesthetic of each place, often designed by a starchitect, supersedes its local context. I’ve seen this described elsewhere as the Airbnb or WeWork aesthetic, where every urban space collapses into the same feeling. Perhaps these samey museum spaces are like the collapsed contexts of Twitter or Instagram where these same artists (more natively) display their work.
But Internet art in physical space holds my attention. I’m there to look at art, as opposed to the distractions of the Internet. I also find that the artworks that I enjoy most are site-specific spatial installations that mix new media with space and could not exist online. In “New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art,” Christiane Paul wrote that “video art is now presented less frequently on monitors and more often shown as projections or even elaborate installations, automatically lifting the context” (35). This kind of work succeeds when the artist has designed it specifically for the installation context, or thoughtfully transposed its original Internet context into physical space.
Groys further writes:
“Even if all data on the internet is globally accessible, in practice the internet leads not to the emergence of a universal public space but to a tribalization of the public. The reason for that is very simple. The internet reacts to the user’s questions, to the user’s clicks. The user finds on the internet only what he or she wants to find.”
This is true not only of art. I’ve written about filter bubbles earlier on this blog, and how they can shape thought and communities. There are certainly distinct spaces on the internet – Art Twitter, for example – shaped by who people choose to follow. At the same time, the Internet is centralizing into a few large social networks, like Twitter and Instagram. I see parallels between this centralization and the similar Airbnb aesthetic of large cities.
Paul asked in 2008 “whether Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (created by mini-societies that live outside social conventions) can be translated into “Cultural Autonomous Zones”-as online spaces of creative practice where established cultural and institutional contracts do not apply.” I disagree. There are rules of the Internet, just different ones, and they’re shaped by the social platforms we publish content on. I don’t think there’s ever such thing as a true autonomous zone.
As a sidenote, I found Groys’ assertion problematic: that irritation about globalized contemporary art exhibitions “is often the same kind of irritation that migration provokes today in Europe.” Migrants are far from the elite creative class of international artists. Sure, the world may be trending more xenophobic, but these are very different categories of people – one with much more privilege than the other.
References
Groys, Boris. “Curating in the Post-Internet Age.” e-flux journal, #94, Oct. 2018. https://www.e-flux.com/journal/94/219462/curating-in-the-post-internet-age/.
Paul, Christiane, editor. “New Media in the White Cube and Beyond: Curatorial Models for Digital Art.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.