Two artists on the 2.0 site recently engaged in a brief discussion about how work is described and it got us, here at BlackFlash, thinking. Specifically, I’m referring to Colin Carney’s entry in the artist pages and David Pollock’s reaction to it. The issue underlying their exchange, and perhaps the larger issue behind artist statements and art research in general, is the role of research in art. To what extent is a “social sciences” dialogue being used in art-speak nowadays?

Being through the art school system myself, I remember the days of my MFA when my colleagues and I would scramble to put together our SSHRC grant applications. In case you don’t know, SSHRC stands for Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Funny that it should be offering funding to fine arts student, no? Evidently not. SSHRC grants are given to fine arts students as researchers. The caveat is that the student must show what sort of new research he/she is engaging in and what methodology he/she is using. I was not the only one at the time to be struck by the foreignness of the demands. Indeed, funding bodies create demands and artists, who often need money to make ambitious projects, attempt to deliver.

While this is an academic context that I’m citing here–SSHRC grants are there to fund your graduate studies–the people who are being educated in these programs go on to shape the future art community. Are these changes good or bad? Are they largely propelled by the decisions of funding bodies and society’s desire for an instrumental function in art, or is it also a part of art’s natural evolution that stems from a history of political art and social engagement? How do we begin to qualify art that takes as its premise social engagement–by ethics or aesthetics?

We’re hoping the BlackFlash community can share their ideas about their own travails in being an artist, in looking about art and in reading about art. What do you think?

In 1995 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron coined the phrase “The Californian Ideology” in an essay by the same title which provided a genealogy of the concept of the internet as a placeless and universalizing utopia: “This new faith has emerged from a bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley. Promoted in magazines, books, TV programmes, Web sites, newsgroups and Net conferences, the Californian Ideology promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” A lot of forces were at play in the mid-nineties, but Wired Magazine with editor Kevin Kelly were especially influential in promoting information technologies as emancipatory, limitless and beyond geography.

Although the internet has the power to build communities and bring together diverse geographic places, it has also emerged as a very local and geographically situated place. Geert Lovink has articulated this point nicely by highlighting statistical figures of internet use: in August 2008 China surpassed the United States in internet use, with users being overwhelmingly non-Californian – Asia has 578.5 million users, Europe has 384.5 million, North America has 248.2 million, and Latin America/Caribbean has 139.0 million. (For an excellent overview of a lecture Lovink gave in February 2009 at UC Irvine, see Liz Losh’s insightful “The Empirical Turn.”) Within these statistics, a Californian Ideology doesn’t hold up. It’s grown to be an incredibly diverse place linguistically, with highly localized and geographically situated practices.

As Lovink has humorously pointed out through a drawing from the webcomic xkcd, even our concepts of digital space are localized:

(Enlarge “Map of Online Communities” by xkcd)

Today our concept of the internet has more similarity to political balkanization of physical geography than universalizing dreams of VRML, for example.

(View Balkanization animation)

In terms of my own experiences, many things change with a change in physical location. This includes art scenes, and living in Southern California for the past six years has significantly impacted my work. Creating the work still consists of sitting down, building, soldering, and producing it, but the community that it enters into and circulates in is considerably different. It’s not the “Californian Ideology” that makes a difference, though: it’s the local that has the greatest impact.

Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Microphones, 2008; courtesy the artist; © Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Continuing on from your points about collaboration and co-authorship, Ellen, I’d like to extend these points to an institutional framework. I was recently reading an interview on the SFMOMA’s website, about their recent exhibition, The Art of Participation. In the interview, Rudolf Frieling, Curator of Media Arts says:

One thing that is really key to this whole project as an exhibition is that we want to explore what it could mean for the museum to be not just a container for artworks, but actually a producer, or a site of production. And we’ve been thinking about the practice of institutional critique many artists developed in the 70s and 80s which in part involved leaving institutional spaces and going into alternative spaces, and the way some contemporary artists work in different kinds of social space, perhaps educational spaces, blurring the distinctions between them. In a museum we normally have a clear distinction between what is gallery space, what is social space, and what is educational space, and this is something that many contemporary artists would certainly want to challenge.

What I think is interesting about this exhibition, and this quote in particular is that Frieling (speaking from within the institution), acknowledges the importance of the institutional critique that artists can bring, and talks of blurring distinctions, when by definintion, the museum can’t take the blurring of distinctions to its limit. It would undo the raison d’etre of museums to really let go of its power to categorise and legitimise. However, parallel things grow up around these forces and become part of a cultural conversation that musueums must engage in. There is an obvious parallel in publishing, in that web-powered print on demand as well as blogs and wikis force a conversation about access to audiences and freedom of expression. This very experiment we are taking part in acknowledges the impact the web has had, and will feed back into print, which will extend the power of what we say here, but still encapsulate it in the context of an online conversation.

I wonder if these small measures, such as blurring distinctions between exhibition space and education space in a museum, or blurring distinctions between what is blogged and what is printed, add up to something more? What is the art of participation, and are there particular things media art can demonstrate about participation that aren’t demonstrated elsewhere?