How emerging artists should deal with institutions

1. In the best of all possible worlds, institutions would try and figure out how to adapt to artistic practice.
   
   
2. It's evolutionary. This isn't ipso facto a bad thing, but
   
   • How long did it taken to build galleries that "fit" the largest abstract expressionist paintings? How long will it take to build galleries that truly take into account sound?
   
   
3. It remains a mystery
   
   • Sao Paulo Biennial in 2006. Despite the thematics, only two or three artists working with computer-based emerging media - YOUNG-HAE CHANG/HEAVY INDUSTRIES and Minerva Cuevas come to mind - and both presented work that is was basically single-channel video.¹
   • Ars Electronica, the granddaddy, not much so-called contemporary art.

4. It's a translation/language issue

   What you say: I'm a new media artist
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. You're a technophiliac who doesn't understand contemporary art.
   B. Maybe he can fix my email.
   C. It's not real art.
   
   What you say: The process is as important as the end product.
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. Has a hard time meeting deadlines.
   B. We'll have a page on the website that explains the process.
   C. It's not art.
   
   What you say: The work is only completed by the audience; it's participatory.
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. No quality control.
   B. It will drive our guards crazy, if the visitors can touch the art.
   C. It's not really art.
   
   What you say: It's research.
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. Still trying to figure out what to do.
   B. It's boring and academic.
   C. It's not really art.
   
   What you say: My work is open source.
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. I'll take two this month.
   B. Does that mean anybody can do it?
   C. It's not really art.
   
   What you say: It's online.
   
   
   A. That's cheap.
   B. No one will see it anyway, so why not.
   C. It's not really art.
   
   What you say: It's new and innovative.
   
   What they hear/think:
   
   
   A. THAT will burnish our image as a cutting edge organization.
   B. I bet we can get a ton of funding from some tech company, can't we?
   C. It's not really art

5. What is it that you do?

   As part of the forthcoming Superlight catalog for the 2nd 01SJ Biennial, I asked the artists in the biennial, "what is it that you do?" and this is an excerpt of what some of them said:

   Lynn Hershman Leeson
   "There is a historic blindness to works that are in the present, and this includes conceptual breadth as well as possibilities for materials. Yet the most relevant work breaks ground on both these elements. That we are technologically symbiotic and growing more so as connective nodes become the connective tissues of a kind of trans national and global hyper skin."

   Jennifer and Kevin McCoy
   "What we seem to do is to generate conversations that turn into activities. . . .This is why a lot of the work invokes a shorthand visual storytelling approach that ideally creates an expanded language for communication and reveals the modes and manners that language employs. We're obsessed with codes and genres and how even though they seem so easy to read, they evoke complicated memories, evade easy descriptions, and insist on their own specific stories whenever images are involved. Mediumness is very interesting to us because, for us, art has always been another word for experimentation, and experimentation is always based some where, in some "thing". But we don't have an allegiance to any medium, because the medium always follows the conversations and the images."

   Jane Marsching
   "So many people have written about collaboration, a word I've been thinking a lot about in my various projects, where I might have conversations with scientists, spend time in studios with artists or architects, hunch over a sewing machine with a kite expert, or imagine/construct events with a group of activist artists. Obviously these experiences, which I initiate or set in motion, are somehow outside of traditional adherence to a medium, but they are also quite different from many notions of collaboration. . . . My work is particularly indebted to a research focus, and as Stephen Wilson outlines in Information Arts, research is changing, as networked consumers become more savvy, their searches, queries, and comments driving research agendas and informing research results. Research no longer is practiced in insular labs, but spreads across disciplines and hierarchies. Responding to this phenomenon, which makes so much sense, I am interested in Pierre Huyghe's notion of an aesthetics of alliances, which to me translates to creating communities or nodes of interest in which parallel, connected, conversant practices overlap, and occassionally converge to create multiple products, be they art, academic research, scientific research, consumer products, or other cultural productions."

   Cory Arcangel
   "As for what it is that I do, well, it is the above, .... catch ideas as they fly by, write them down, say them out loud, pick a few, make them, and repeat."

   What I say: Wow!

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   1. See "Just Art": Contemporary Art After the Art Formerly Known As New Media