Olinda, Brazil, January 2011
“This is not photography, this is art”, he said, pointing to his photographic work. “No, because she told me you were a photographer”.
This was not art, and I was not a photographer.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe.*
Or, was I just being envious of his Artist status?
This troubled me.
In 1969 Theodor Ardorno starts his Aesthetic Theory by: “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore, not its inner life, not its relation to the world, not even its right to exist.”
Disputes about art are abundant throughout history. Why is it so? Is it in the nature of art to be controversial? Was Duchamp’s Fountain enough to put everything upside down? Is this was modern art is build on, a urinal? Could we see the urinal as being a loud fart in the middle of piano concerto? Everybody would then try to interpret the fart, would imitate it. A new movement would be born. Until we would have explore all the possible variations of fart. We would then be stuck, because, well, a fart is just a fart.
And Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, is just a urinal, nothing more. But it is regarded as a major achievement in art history. The ready made movement was born: you don’t have to do anything! It’s there, ready! Ready to be picked up an placed in a museum.
So were do you go from there? Well, it seems difficult to go anywhere. Conceptual art and postmodernist have been walking in circle for some time now. The Fountain was a gesture against art. It was anti-art, in the same way that the fart is anti-music. There is a movement in the UK, the Stuckists, that is anti-anti-art and wants to go back to the good old painting, walking full circle.
Maybe it would be time to acknowledge new ways of producing sens or emotion. Could it be time for a digital revolution in art? New technologies of information are transforming the world. It is a revolution that is changing the life of most. Art needs to follow. No, actually it should be ahead. But it isn’t.
Is it because of the difficulty for a gallery to sell, let’s say, some kind of computer game? You can’t have a limited edition, can you? But should art only be about money? Or is it because of a lack of work of quality in the digital world? Or the intrinsic obsolescence of the medium?
Could a program be Art? If there is one artist who managed to be a digital artist (he would probably refute the term, and any categorization for that matter), it has to be John Maeda. What struck me when I saw some of his work at the Riflemaker gallery, and his talk at the design museum in London in 2007, is how he was doing all he could to get away from technology. He was after the more classical stereotype of the artist: no more coding or nerdy geeky experimentations, but framed artwork in a gallery. And the talk was only about tofu and simplicity. (all right, there might have been a computer connected to “Second Life” in a corner, but that was about it.)
John Maeda is now president of the Rhode Island School of Design, probably not coding anymore. Can you still be an artist, and a programmer? Maeda example seems to say no.
prout*
*In French in the original text