Do Handjobs And Twitter Go Hand-in-Hand?

by Paddy Johnson on July 12, 2011 · 30 comments Opinion

Kittie!

Welcome to this week’s hot topic of discussion on the art social media web: Does cheer leading required to build social networking communities make it harder for online writers to be critical? Sparked by William Powhida’s comments last week on the blog, the artist lamented about how social media can effect relationships and opinion. “Building networks requires a lot of ‘liking’ and positive affirmation. Critique, criticism, negativity, cynicism…not so much” He opined, continuing later, “perhaps the artist and critic should not be so engaged, so [much a] part of the community if it means we start to lose our ability to see clearly and have honest discussions without worrying about upsetting somebody or losing a few hundred followers.”

There’s probably some truth to this last statement, though I don’t think it’s worth losing much sleep over. True critics are usually so compelled to speak their mind that they can’t hold down other types of jobs. Certainly, I fall into that category, as do a few others. Yes, “like” “+1” and “favorite” skew towards positivity (probably for distribution and troll control purposes) but as Hrag Vartanian mentions, removing yourself from the medium doesn’t necessarily ensure better feedback. I for one find it useful to know the artist at least a little bit, if for no other reason than to remove some of art’s mystery. (There’s some disagreement about this — last year New York Times critic Ben Brantley lamented about how social media forces us to separate artists from their art, soiling its experience — but this assumes that artists have little valuable to say about their work.)

All this is to say that we’re now ready to take the kid gloves off and really talk about social media. It’s time to be critical. A good example of this is the ongoing discussion currently happening at Hyperallergic in which the value of An Xiao’s piece “The Artist is Kind of Present” and “Being Telepresent” are being discussed. An excerpt, from AFC’s Will Brand,

Okay, with sincere apologies to An Xiao – as Powhida says, it’s not you, it’s the work – “Being Telepresent” is not a good work of art.

In her post here, An states: “Since almost as early as the invention of the telephone, human beings have imagined the possibilities of video communication. How amazing would it be to see each other over the phone?”

Pretty amazing. Or, at least, it was pretty amazing when Bill Bartlett did it in 1979 using Slow-Scan TV technology, which was literally transmitted via phone ( http://1904.cc/timeline/tiki-i… ). Was it primitive? Sure. But it was two-way image transmission as art, and it was 21 years before “Being Telepresent”. What did we gain in those 21 years? Bandwidth (and frame rates) went up, software and hardware went from massively expensive to essentially free, infrastructure went from leasing a NASA satellite (as Bartlett did) to automatically connecting to the gallery’s broadband line – all of this occurred without needing any contribution from artists – and for An Xiao’s part, she put it at an opening. Okay.

I understand there’s a point in the development of this technology at which the avatar gets freaky real – drop “uncanny valley” here – and it’s totally like there’s another person there, and then there’s some issues around that that are sort of interesting. An Xiao’s work, however, does nothing to accelerate that process and nothing to cast it in a new light. Has she suddenly made the utopian say-hi-to-grandpa-in-France image of video teleconferencing into something politically troublesome? No. Has she looked beyond presently readily available features to interesting tools of a future society? No. Has she cast the conversation in such a way as to provide particular interest in talking to her, as opposed to talking to anybody else? No. There’s not even anything about art openings that would seem to be changed by An not being there in person, except that she gets rather less choice about whom to talk to.

Talking to people is nice. Talking to people who share interests with you, as one might expect to be the case when an artist talks to her opening-night audience, is especially nice. What else is nice? Handjobs. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily good art, because if they were I wouldn’t be a critic.

“Being Telepresent” needed to be something more.

Hopefully these will be the last words this blog has to say on this piece and “The Artist is Kind Of Present”, as they’ve already attracted more words than warranted.

Related: Some thoughts on criticism and the false exuberance of the Internet I wrote in an interview for Art Lies a while back.

 

{ 30 comments }

Movaco July 12, 2011 at 9:46 pm

Really interesting profile of Jaron Lanier in the New Yorker touches on some of this stuff. Worth a read.

Anonymous July 13, 2011 at 4:50 am

Also pretty much the same discussion of twitter-related art over at Artwrit : http://bit.ly/msSUgk

sally July 13, 2011 at 1:30 pm

Panofsky! wow. I’d think Aby Warburg would be a lot more useful in this context.

Will Brand July 13, 2011 at 2:09 pm

Eh. So we’re post-art history because artists are getting made through SEO? I don’t buy it. Pepi doesn’t place much faith in the elitism of art, which is both a central trait of the field and a reflection of the continuing need people feel to historicize things in a manual, personal, analogue way. We conceive of art as a game of dominos, in which the conditions for inclusion and success mostly have to do with how well something fits into the game already in progress. If there’s a more anarchic, traffic-based system out there, its cultural products are a long way from being called ‘art’ in a way any but the broadest of art historians would need to recognize.

Also, I don’t get how Pepi can write this without acknowledging the separate, earlier emergence of a class of professional image mass distributors with TV – could one not have written the same essay with ‘network TV producers’ in place of ‘the algorithm’? – or, more practically, Cory Arcangel’s enormously successful Kurt Cobain suicide letter piece ( http://rhizome.org/editorial/2010/apr/9/punk-rock-101-2006-cory-arcangel/ ), which would seem to be one of the few extant examples of this sort of work (there have been plenty of other, earlier artists using SEO as a medium that I could name, but I’m on my phone in the tub).

Lastly, the idea of mentioning RSS in the same breath as Twitter or Google’s search algorithm is nuts. It’s like explaining the development of agribusiness through railroads, subsidies, and also, uh, forks. I’m not sure how one could bring RSS into this discussion while also understanding what RSS is.

Will Brand July 13, 2011 at 2:15 pm

Just to clarify that last point: RSS is a data storage format. It happens to be involved in proliferating things on the internet, but it can’t do anything on its own – it’s just data, sitting there, without the possibility of adding instructions or anything approaching what one might call an “algorithm”.

sally July 13, 2011 at 3:47 pm

Good point about TV, Will. There’s plenty of other examples too. The contemporary media environment is hard to parse historically, not
because it represents some kind of technologically deterministic
revolution in the way we digest art, but because it is contemporary.
It’s always hard to see the forest for the trees. That’s why historians
typically deal with the past, and leave the present up to curators, critics and theorists. One thing that’s changing (for the better, in my opinion) is that some of those boundaries are starting to blur. That’s partly because Panofsky’s pseudo-science is pretty much discredited. Contemporary art historians tend to accept their own subjectivity as part of the practice.

Contemporary art historians are contending with the material presence of artworks as agents embedded in cultural contexts. In fact, that’s the paradox that most art historians have wrestled with since art history was invented – you have an artifact in front of you, operating aesthetically in your present, temporal experience, and your job is to figure out how to imagine its aesthetic properties as embedded in cultural contexts lived by others. Panofsky thought he had it nailed, that his methodology could resolve the paradox – but he didn’t. Contemporary art historians who embrace the paradox (like George Didi-Huberman, or Keith Moxey, or Margaret Iverson, or Barbara Maria Stafford) are doing exciting, relevant work about how to conjoin aesthetics & social conditions. Notably, a lot of people are turning to Warburg instead of Panofsky, because he had a way of laterally connecting images across cultural/historical contexts. To totally oversimplify: Panofsky’s process was linear and Warburg’s was networked.

Sorry for the nerdy wig out on JillSacco’s link. I know its a tangent. I personally think art history is fascinating, but the topic under discussion here is criticism. It’s a good idea not to totally conflate the two, even though they are mutually implicated in one another.

JMUSS July 13, 2011 at 6:04 am

Well said! Now I’m off to get a handjob…

Jeff Musser

A Blade of Grass July 13, 2011 at 1:38 pm

When everything is “liked,” everything is flat. It’s hard to see any one artist clearly. Conversely, critical attention can be quite distinctive, deep, illuminating. After this week’s back and forth, I have a new relationship with these artists that’s much stronger and more engaged than any amount of liking, retweeting or similar easy endorsements.

I will be driven to see upcoming shows by An Xiao and Man Bartlett in particular because their work was used by Paddy and Hrag to plug me into a set of ideas about social media and art that is larger than their work. You can’t get that kind of interest through cheerleading.

–Deborah Fisher

Will Brand July 13, 2011 at 3:00 pm

I liked this comment and immediately felt self-conscious about it.

Anonymous July 13, 2011 at 6:25 pm

I wrote some things below, but in retrospect, I think the most important thing to know here is that handjobs really aren’t that great. That’s such a non-committal way to say that you like someone and it’s usually just a one-way street. Blowjobs would be better. A high-five would also suffice.

What I really wanted to say is that Powhida’s comments about the positive feedback model of Twitter are so good. It’s like that near-death blow Claire Bishop put to relational aesthetics when she said that the works just weren’t antagonistic enough. Hopefully, with that pro move, we can stop talking about Twitter art for a moment and then think and write about what makes good art good and bad art bad.

One type of bad art: anything that proposes it’s art based on some loosely woven model of interactivity. I think that’s one of the main issues Paddy has with Twitter art. Interactive art claims to inspire a move away from spectacle culture and produce something that can be direct and immediate.  The problem with this is that interactivity and communication have become marketable, commodified spectacles with this Twitplusbooksterlinkedspace that’s now just overwhelming.

A Blade of Grass July 14, 2011 at 11:17 am

I like the 

sally July 13, 2011 at 4:32 pm

reddit is the exemplary model where there are both upvotes and downvotes. Things that aren’t “liked” by the hive mind can be actively driven out of sight. It’s a pretty great model for allowing thousands of people to participate simultaneously in a forum, but instead of critique you get oblivion and majority taste prevails. Its pretty ruthless, which is fun (I spend a LOT of time on reddit for mindless entertainment), but there’s an intellectual loss when reflective dialogue is displaced by the impulsive, instant gratification of button clicking.

Michael Pepi July 13, 2011 at 10:16 pm

Test

sally July 14, 2011 at 12:56 am

Michael, come back! It would be great to hear from you.

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 1:05 am

I didn’t think the essay JillSacco linked to conflated art criticism and art history.
Maybe I missed something.

But more to the nerdy and enjoyable wig out  -  Panofsky’s work depends on Warburg’s “iconology” ideas no? Whose ideas did Warburg develop? Lamprecht’s? That is a traceable historical lineage.

Maybe as you say, Warburg’s methodology is lateral or networked but if you really look at it Panofsky’s methodological process is tiered or stacked isn’t it, rather than strictly linear?

sally July 14, 2011 at 2:23 pm

Yeah, the linear/network thing is too easy, you are right about that. Not only is Panofsky more complicated, but Warburg isn’t strictly networked – he’s just one guy, after all. And yes, Panofsky worked with Warburg’s ideas, but according to Didi-Huberman he somewhat willfully recast them to fit his own model, leaving out the bits that problematize methodological objectivity. DH says “…the history of art invented by Aby Warburg combines, in its fundamental concept Natchleben: ‘afterlife’ or ‘survival’ — precisely the powers to adhere and to haunt that inhere in all images,”(Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, p.xxii)
and that Panofsky could not tolerate this concept.
I don’t know about Warburg’s inspirations…thanks for the tip on Lamprecht.

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 3:14 pm

But Panofsky’s final methodological tier nevertheless IS a sort of discursive space where all the iconographical detective work meets with some kind of subjective inference or logic if not downright judgment. It does call for some kind of speculation as to what is the meaning of the work of art even if he doesn’t go so far as to tolerate ghosts. As such, I’m not sure why it would be less applicable as an old timer art history application than Warburg.

But your comments reflect on Paddy’s issue w/ twitter – in order to acquire historical patina or afterlife the work of art has to have a life of it’s own. A twitter life, seems too incredibly spurious – this is the age of postmechanical reproduction where  jpegs  and mpegs and flash moments on twitter are so fugitive they necessarily lack the endurance to behave auratically. And no amount of declaring their interactivity can make it so.

sally July 14, 2011 at 4:04 pm

hm. funny. I was thinking about the resurfacing of memes and the persistence of content through ongoing insidery cross-referencing.

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 4:47 pm

“the resurfacing of memes and the persistence of content through ongoing insidery cross-referencing”

Over an incredibly short period of time, in which the artist’s (sort of) presence does what – supersedes the work itself?

sally July 14, 2011 at 5:06 pm

not necessarily that short… often the artifacts linger and the riffing continues. For instance, the piece that Paddy doesn’t want us to discuss anymore, “Being Telepresent,” is loaded with all the (ad naseum) online processing of “The Artist is Present”
that went on last year. Those
damn images are still very much present in my head, easily
accessible online
, and definitely inform the way I think about An Xiao’s project.

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 5:29 pm

Don’t the mimema, the things “riffed”and “referenced” and then “resurfacing” require time to accumulate as iconography/iconology? How would the Nachleben concept apply when works like M. Abramovic’s and An Xiao’s  are more or less contemporaneously?

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 5:31 pm

Fuff. Should read  “are occurring  more or less contemporaneously?”

sally July 14, 2011 at 5:58 pm

a few things:

Quick silly answer: a year is a long time in internet-land, and that speaks to the problem of historicizing the present.

But your excellent question is about the historical concept of Nachleben, which is not intentional referencing on the part of the artist so much as images haunting the cultural imagination and emerging as if unbidden. Does the stoic Marina, in profile look a little like Whistler’s mother? Or does she bring to mind Michelangelo’s Pieta? Do the crying, adulatory faces look a little like Saint Theresa? I dunno. I’m not invested enough in that work to really dig in and make a case for it, but those images pop into my head right away when I start to ponder. Also, An Xiao’s piece reminds me of Miranda July, making sure the audience feels their own presence as strongly as they feel the artist’s, through the medium of video. There isn’t an enduring object or image, but there is a material experience that lingers through discourse. Now that we’ve got conceptual art digested art historically, can we maybe think of Nachleben as haunting concepts and experiences, rather than just visual images?

J@simpleposie July 14, 2011 at 7:11 pm

With regard to the quick silly answer – the issue is being critical in the present. History is always back there, piling up, ready to be sorted. Hindsight. To me, there seems an immense problem, not just on the internet but also in contemporary museums, the problem of needing to seem historically valid in the now.

If you think the stoic Marina looks like Whistler’s Mother and Marina did not intend for you to draw that conclusion, have you then experienced an unbidden haunting emergence? I don’t think so. You thought comparatively. You consulted other iconography with which you are familiar.

“Now that we’ve got conceptual art digested art historically?” No one  suggested Warburg’s iconological Nachleben idea is just visual images.

 Anyway, digressing badly. Sorry all.

Lorna Mills July 15, 2011 at 2:21 pm

Sally & j frighten me.

Anonymous July 15, 2011 at 2:43 pm

I like pretentious conversations as much – or more – than anyone else with an advanced degree, but their nit-picky comments have become totes ridic. 

sally July 14, 2011 at 5:08 pm

ugh. the link

Will Brand July 14, 2011 at 5:18 pm

Yeah, Disqus doesn’t play nice with HTML. URLs automatically become links, though, so I edited your previous comment to just have the URL.

Lorna Mills July 15, 2011 at 4:15 pm

They aren’t pretending.

J@simpleposie July 15, 2011 at 11:51 pm

Well, it’s not like both of us didn’t apologize both before AND after becoming *totes ridic*…

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