A De-cafinated Experience (of Net.Art)
Interview with Antonio Muntadas
It would be foolish to state there are no developments in net.art. The developments are simply more difficult to follow, as they are squeezed between a relatively rapid expansion of the net.art field (in what some would call a commercial way) and the growth of 'offical' recognition of net.art by 'high art' institutions. At the same time these two things also are developments in net.art, or they for sure produce them. We just need to think of Peter Weibel's last project, the decentralised net.art 'museum'. I spoke to a multimedia art veteran, Antonio Muntadas, about art in new media, net.art in particular, and recognition of artists.
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| Antonio Muntadas, "The File Room", a Real-Live Installation at the Chicago Institute for Arts and Design |
I understand that in your opinion the development of the net as a medium for artists can in some ways be compared to the way early video art developed, and that what happened in early photography can also teach us lessons regarding the development and perception of net.art. What do you mean when you say that the way net.art is presented is "maximalistic"?
Antonio Muntadas: Firstly: I would never connect my work to any specific medium. I hate the idea of artists being called 'video artists' or 'net.artists'. I define myself as an artist using different media. I see these days that somebody like Bruce Nauman is presented as a videoartist, which I think is an incredible manipulation. I would never want to see myself in a position producing works in a relationship with one single medium. I know that people strategically take advantage of using one medium or one style. I am against style, I am closer to discourse.
Regarding the internet analogy I would say that what happened with video and photography is what we can now distinguish as the way new media appear in the arts. These three relatively recent media are interesting to analyze. They are not, like painting, originally art media. Photography in its origin was more like visual anthropology, it was used for representation instead of previous media. Artists are a minority in the history of photography.
With Video the same thing happened: Television existed and video was commercially used in different ways. Some people then started to use video as an art medium. When the net appeared it was for the military, then it became academic and after a few years some artists started to see that there was a space they could use, connect to and activate.
I would like to refer to other artforms that are connected to this, like mail art and correspondence art. There were a lot of networks. I was participating in that period, in the seventies. You could see mail art being very strong and effective in Eastern Europe and South America, because there was the need to communicate information in places isolated by their political and geographical situation. There are some analogies between the appearance of media and what people experience in terms of networks or in terms of communication. What I see in the net is a space and a medium for specific projects, but I am sceptical, like I was sceptical with video, about certain utopian visions on how things could change. People have expectations about how the medium could change things socially and politically. This is why I mention maximalism. A realistic position is neither utopian nor catastrophic.
When video appeared in the art community, people used it as a means of self-expression, recording ephemeral events and also as an alternative to counter mass media, like in guerilla television. After years we now see that alternative television is staying marginal. There are still the three dominating networks in the United States: ABC, CBS and NBC, plus CNN, which appeared later. I think cable and community television have been using a lot of the models and prototypes of alternative television, which were afterwards absorbed by mainstream. A good example is MTV (their special effects, formats and construction) and most of the news broadcast channels: A lot of reporting on television has been taken from formats that individuals and independent groups made in the seventies. John Alpert's way of recording at DCTV, an independent group, was taken into mainstream by other interviewers.
With the internet it is the same. At least, there are some analogies, things never repeat themselves in the exact same way. Certain developments, certain kinds of expectations, interesting situations come up, but then the mechanisms of the industry, the political systems and economy, with a strong dominance of economics over politics, are if not destroying these expectations changing them, dissolving them, making them harmless. A de-cafinated experience of the expectations you had.
For the last ten years, the net has been seen as a new territory. How long it will be an open territory remains a question. At the moment people start to find ways to 'stretch' the medium. I think the imagination and perspectives of artists in this field are fine. Still a lot of work young people do in video is interesting as well though. A lot are repeating what others did before, but always in a different way. Sometimes the historical references and the informations related to a period are being changed or lost.
To see the Internet as the main alternative to television is questionable. When I talk about the ideas around the net being maximalistic, I mean that when you have seen the development of a new medium, you start to realise that a lot of the original expectations and hopes are far from its reality.
The medium also influences the way people observe or perceive work. A lot of net projects become very popular within the net, but nobody knows about them outside the net. This is fine. I don't think everything needs to be recorded for history in the same way. Every medium goes its own way. Video again has been a totally 'underground' medium in the seventies and eighties, and was repelled by the art system. Now it has been completely absorbed by the new generation of the nineties. Video has become part of the gallery system and the market.
I think the biggest problem net.artists encountered was that the quality of their work was (or sometimes is) simply denied. There is still unclarity about what art on the net exactly is. There is a 'younger' generation of artists that are working mostly on the net, that are sometimes also connecting it to the outside in different ways, like in performance, or like in extending their internet work into other media, fax, print, dance, sound or video, for instance. The internet is the basic essence. This I would call net.specific art or net.art (as long as we still need seperate names for art made in different media). The existence and quality of this art is questioned regularly in art criticism. It seems that the only way art criticism can overcome their distrust of art in computer networks is when it is made by established artists, who often have earned an 'art status' with work in other media. Their names give the medium 'credibility', but to me the work of early net.artists is much more interesting. Do you think this is something which needs to be discussed?
Antonio Muntadas: Two things here: Firstly, everyone should have their own experience, although previous references should be taken into consideration. Secondly, I don't want to take the position that one could identify an artist for good or bad by age. Every project should have an interest, intention and meaning.
Let me tell you what happened with video. People like Vasarelly, who worked with kinetic art, moving image, computer image, started to work with video in the sixties. Older generations that worked in video were saying: "What are these guys doing? They are doing painting, and transferring kinetic art to video." That is not the way these people were perceiving the medium and the use of the medium. The thing is that media do not have only one way to use them. This flexibility and pluralistic character of a medium is a good thing. Photography, television, video or the net could be pushed, and we can see outside the spectrum of the arts, how much it has been used there. I am for a new use and representation of media - to paint with photography, to film with video, etc.
It can be pushed?
Antonio Muntadas: The limits could be pushed outside of the artworld. Video is being used in documentary. Is documentary recognized as an artform? Video is being used as counter information. Is counter information being looked upon as an artform? For me it could be one. A Godard film could be an art piece. Early pioneers on television, Erny Kovaks in the USA for instance, or Averty in France, were exploring the medium in very singular ways. All depends on perception, intention and meaning.
Again I think it reflects the energy of a generation how they identify with a medium. growing up with a medium, they create an agressive but also protective situation within the medium. I think this is in a way reductive, because I don't think it is protecting the medium to say that it is only being used by a certain generation with their particular vocabulary. I think this would be a very microscopical view of a medium.
I am against ghetto's. Ghetto's have been produced in photography, they have been produced in video, and now they are produced in the internet. Ghetto's of people who are protecting a space and think: "We have the true vocabulary of a medium." versus others that are using it wrongly. The openness of a medium is very important. I say that because many of the discussions about a medium forget one factor: that it is also a question of time. Look at Documenta X, one of the most established artshows in the world. They had ten websites. You can agree or disagree with their choices of websites, but it was pretty much a spectrum of work. I am sure that among the young people there were some that had mixed feelings about taking part or not, because from the moment you are part of an established show, you are not 'underground' anymore. Then the people that are not chosen say: "That reflects a very established situation and the internet should never be part of Documenta." Or the contrary, the people that are at Documenta say: "Now I have recognition, but I am not sure how it is absorbed." These movements of absorption or recuperation of work by the establishment have always existed. Having websites at Documenta is already a symptom that this medium is producing projects and is starting to be recognized. I am not sure whether that's good or not...
I am sure it must be interesting for the rest of the art world to see that credibility is increasing by the more and more people who explore this medium. On the other hand however, this is bad. It is the first move to establish a history, and establish a catalogue, establish historification of a medium. Maybe ten people are in an exhibition, but maybe two hundred other projects are still out there that are even more interesting. Maybe the curator did not do his job properly. Maybe they simply don't know about other work. Maybe it were last minute decisions. What I want to say is that this reaffirms or confirms the fact that things are repeating. Not in the same way, but I already recognize strategies of a recuperation of the medium. That is why I take the position to not associate with any one medium.
Still there are artists who choose, who feel best with one specific medium. If their work is not recognized simply because the choice of the medium they work with is not being recognized as a medium one can make art with, they have a problem.
Antonio Muntadas: For how long, three months? Six years?
You say it is a question of time. Does that mean that art criticism should just hold back and wait, not criticize but show the artists' work? Create journalism instead of criticism?
Antonio Muntadas: No. A generation of artists needs to properly create a generation of people writing about it or analysing it. The same generation that produces the work should produce their own people to write about it. They should, if not display, but in a way theorize and contextualize the work in relationship to how work is produced. The people that are writing understand the medium, they know how to diffuse, to talk about, to criticize the work, because they know the medium. Critics of painting couldn't do an overview of an internet project, because most of them don't understand the medium. I would say that any previous media historically appearing needed to produce their own theory. I don't want to say this must be, I am not dogmatic. Sometimes it also needs time to have a distance. People who were part of a group only are able to take some distance and see things from a different perspective after a while. I would say this has nothing to do with the newness of a medium, it is because the work always needs to be thought about.
Things are going faster. The speed of photography, or the speed of video, or the speed of the internet: everything becomes faster and faster. Take somebody like Robert Frank, an important artist. He is about seventy years old. This guy did the most important photography work in film and video as a photographer. When is he recognized? He spent fifty years of his life without recognition, besides maybe one early work. He is one of the major contributors to the art world of the last years. Now within three months everybody wants to be super recognized, super established. To be established is the worst thing for work. I always like to be not very visible. You keep working, you have the possibility of producing new work, you have the possibility of your work being more presented. It is not a question of making a lot of money, you don't want to have a lot of success, you don't want a lot of visibility, just enough. You should not lose your independence, because in the moment these things happen, you are totally swallowed. You are hype and what happens after hype? Not being hype. I think it is important to keep at a level at which work can be developed, done an discussed. But establishment and success: I don't think that helps at all.
How important are the time and distance aspects in your work?
Antonio Muntadas: All my work takes a long time to develop. One project took ten years, another seven, another three. The first internet project (the File Room) started as a project idea in '92. The carpet project (the Cee Project) took me nine years.
Time is very important for me. Spontaneity can be good for certain things, but sometimes it needs distance to have a perspective. It depends on the context you are working in. If you work in Brazil it is a different process of working than in Canada or in Holland. Cultural contexts cause different ways of perceiving time, and different senses of time. We analyse everything at the same sense of speed and the same sense of time: I think we are really destroying cultural identities this way. The project takes the time that it needs. You can always say: "You have one month to do a project", but maybe it requires more.
Is maybe every artist at some point in his career or working life concerned with the art market? The system that he has to deal with, the social network he has to function in? Is that maybe also how we can see your "Between the Frames" project? Maybe in the eighties when the artmarket was so incredibly strong and focussed on money, commodity art arising, it became more urgent to explore this aspect in your work?
Antonio Muntadas: I think we are all participants in the market. Everybody. Even the people that are total outsiders. Whether I am an insider or an outsider depends on how a situation is perceived. It depends on how people analyse it, it depends on the kind of work. By the fact that we live and exist makes us part of the market. We live in a structure totally depending on economy. Even the most marginal person is part of the market by defection, by making the choice of being an outsider or not.
I don't think there is any artist that is not participating in the market. The market exists and is necesary, like we also need a museum or a gallery or a critic. It is a historical construction that exists because of these needs. The eighties, and maybe other periods as well, had a certain kind of constituency. These roles and that situation of the market became too much to endure. It had a lot of repercussion on how roles transformed, on power and money. I think there is a lot of continuity of this in the nineties, but there is a clear reaction of many people as well though, because the economy is changing too.
"Between the Frames", like others works I have done, has personal and public aspects and reasons to be made. In the case of "The Fileroom" the trigger is very clear: it is the result and reaction against a censorship case, a previous project titled "TVE: Primer Intento". A project about Spanish television. They commissioned it, and I worked on the project for three years, but: they never broadcasted it. It was a work about the Spanish TV, about 40 years of Spanish recent history, a 'memory piece'. I had access to the archives of the Spanish TV and I also had access to film places related to the past and present of the TVE, at that moment the only official station. At that time I was already living in the US and I remembered Spanish television from when I was a kid. It was part of my past and my native countries' background, I was very frustrated they did not broadcast the work. It was made for a specific context and audience, the Spanish audience. So this work was one of the first we put in "The Fileroom", as a personal situation and as a public fact.
Censorship is much more subtle now. It changed shape. Before they destroyed books or cut films, now they are using different strategies. Some years ago technical quality was a reason, a justification, to refuse something. They can also say for instance something has no commercial value. You are then left with the question: "Is this censorship?" People that apply censorship are more subtle because they are much more aware of the media and their implications.
"Between the Frames" was an exploration of a specific period, the 80's. I was reacting to that moment, but also to my own work. Zooming in and zooming out. At a certain moment when you are exploring a large subject in the context you are working in, which in my case was the art world, you can talk about a very very large media landscape. So why not zoom into the art ystem itself. After working on this project for ten years I don't want to talk about the art system for a while. Maybe in some years I will do a continuation of that project, interviewing the museum guards, as another kind of participants....
The File Room Biography Antonio Muntadas
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