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CAITLIN JONES
M Y A RT W O R L D I S B I G G E R
T H A N Y O U R A RT W O R L D
THE DOMINANCE OF THE ART MARKET—
NOT TO MENTION THE ART OBJECT—IS BEING
CHALLENGED BY HACKERS, CODE WARRIORS,
AND ARTISTICALLY MOTIVATED NERDS
WHO PREFER NETWORKS, WEBSITES, AND $19.95
POSTER SALES TO GLITZY SHOWS AND ART-STAR FAME
DISCUSSED: Explosive HTML, documenta X,Viewing the Source,
Walker Evans, Fountain, Aura, PBS, Radical Software,
Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds
going to know what the project is—and
they’ve actually been able to see it [not just
a photo of it]. Which, for me, was the
whole point in the first place.
CAITLIN JONES:
Your work exists in
multiple formats: as an object and as
installation, but also as pure code
that you freely distribute over the
internet. Now that you’re starting to
sell work in the art market, what
does this multiplicity mean to a collector or an institution that buys it?
Is it something that you think about? Do you really care?
—From an unpublished interview between the
author and subject, July 6, 2005, Electronic
Arts Intermix, New York, N.Y.
I
n 1997, eighty years after Marcel Duchamp deposited a signed urinal at the New York Society
of Independent Artists and called it art, a number of artists who used the internet as their preferred medium were invited to participate in
documenta, a major art exhibition held every five years in
CORY ARCANGEL:
Not really. [Laughs] It just means it’s
better, right? That the work will exist in all these different worlds, that it is circulating in all these other forms—
and, especially valuable, it will be circulating on the
internet. So you know eight trillion more people are
3
Cory Arcangel and Paper Rad, Super Mario Movie, 2005.
Courtesy of the artists and Team Gallery.
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Kassel, Germany. Renowned for its
controversial subject matter and its
willingness to embrace new art
forms, documenta seemed an ideal
venue for what was then called
net.art. These net.artists—an international, ad hoc collective of web art
practitioners including Heath Bunting (UK), Vuk Cosic (Slovenia),
jodi.org (Netherlands), Olia Lialina
(Russia) and Alexei Shulgin (Russia)—were a community connected
only through online networks and
brief meetings at festivals.1
Politically and geographically
isolated from the mainstream contemporary art market, these artists,
particularly those from Eastern
Europe and Russia, also saw the internet as a practical way to expose
their work to a broad audience. In
his 1993 essay elucidating the
“utopian,” “revolutionary,” “equalizing,” “democratic” fervor inspired
by the emergence of the internet,
science fiction writer and internetera sage Bruce Sterling observed,
“Why do people want to be ‘on the
Internet?’ One of the main reasons
is simple freedom.The Internet is a
rare example of a true, modern,
functional anarchy. There is no
‘Internet Inc.’ There are no official
censors, no bosses, no board of
directors, no stockholders. In principle, any node can speak as a peer to
any other node, as long as it obeys
the rules of the TCP/IP protocols,
1 The term net.art was first used by Vuk Cosic,
who had organized an actual physical meeting
of these artists, who predominantly communicated via email, at a conference titled Net.art per
se. The name that came to identify the group
was apparently the result of a random computer glitch.
which are strictly technical, not
social or political.”2 Likewise, there
was no “Art World Inc.,” no galleries
or museums or collectors; no preconceived notions about what constituted art and no entrenched systems of validation. Like Duchamp’s
urinal, what would soon become
known as “web art” or “internet art”
and the broader moniker, “new
media art,” posed a challenge not
only to the arbitrary line between
art and nonart, but it also questioned the necessity of the institutions established to contain and
present art—namely, museums and
galleries—as well as the primacy of
the artist in the creative process.
One of the earliest examples of
web art was uploaded to the internet in 1994, when Heath Bunting
posted the number of every telephone booth in London’s Kings
Cross Station on his website (now
accessible at http://www.irational.
org/cybercafe/xrel.html). Bunting
asked visitors to his site to call the
numbers at random and engage
anyone who answered in conversation. Bunting’s “happening”—
which randomly connected hundreds of internet users to hundreds
of London commuters—was one
of the first creative demonstrations
of the number of people who
could be reached through the
internet, and the sort of grassroots
participation the internet might
engender. Olia Lialina’s 1996 work
My Boyfriend Came Back from the
War (http://www.teleportacia.org/
2
Sterling, Bruce.“A Short History of the Internet,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,
Feb. 1993.
4
war/war.html) is considered a
major work from what she sardonically describes as the “heroic”
period of internet art. Making use
of the limits of early web browser
technology and HTML, Lialina
constructed a haunting work about
war and love that is both personal
and political. Starting with the line
“My boyfriend came back from the
war. After dinner they left us
alone,” viewers can click on the
black-and-white images and text,
navigating their own way through
the narrative via a system of multiplying frames.
Numerous loosely affiliated organizations began exploring the artistic and creative potential of the
web as early as 1991. Among them
was The THING, a bulletin board
service (BBS) or discussion list
focused on contemporary art and
cultural theory.3 Reveling in the
outsider status of internet art,
Wolfgang Staehle, an artist and
founder of The THING, stated in
an online interview with internet
art critic and theorist Tilman
Baumgaertel, “I thought it was
absurd to criticize the art distribution institutions within those same
institutions. That’s like simply rearranging the furniture… I think one
of the reasons The THING worked
was that the traditional art distribution network truly didn’t notice it
at all. There was also the thrill of
being able to feel like a small con3
Other virtual and social platforms, such as the
nettime mailing list and Rhizome.org, supported a growing community of artists, posting
emails and distributing digital artworks, enabling
an inspired output of thought and activity.
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spiratorial band.”
Which is not to say that these
artists subscribed to the utopian
visions cited by Sterling, whose
own writings express ambivalence
toward this prophecy. Even while
they recognized the freedoms of
working online, these artists, many
of whom came of age during the
Balkan crisis and the fall of Communism, still saw the web as a
potentially insidious forum (it was,
after all the brainchild of the
RAND Corporation and the Pentagon). Artist and writer Matthew
Fuller wrote to the “nettime” mailing list an indictment of the naïve
embrace of the internet as a revolutionary medium:
To: [email protected]
Subject: SPEW
From: Matthew Fuller
Date:Wed, 8 Nov 1995 23:00:39
A second in the life of the internet. Thousands of people across
the globe are indulging in furious bouts of lobotomized libidinal typing. Islamic astrologers, office bombers and terrorist
wannabes announce their glorious intentions to the world;
fuckers of vacuum cleaners are
exchanging tips on new models;
the private security firm Group
Four are checking up on U.K.
environmental activists via their
very own GreenNet account; statistics flagellants are giving it
some; and say this was a few
weeks before U.S. intervention in
Haiti according to Time magazine, we could see amongst the
leech fanciers and bridge players
whiling away the idle hours, CIA
PsyOps teams taking part in the
virtual community by sending
ominous email messages to some
members of Haiti’s oligarchy
who had personal computers.
Early works often reflected this
combination of fascination and distrust. In 1995, jodi.org (Joan
Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmas) created a work that purposely exposed
the underlying structure of the web
and the language (HTML) commonly used to code it. To further
explain: the menu bar of any web
browser offers a “View Source”
function, which enables the much
debated culture of openness that
allowed people to learn, share, or
steal (depending on whom you talk
to) any webpage and its content.
The artists’ “wwwwwwwww.jodi.
org” page appears as a black background studded with green, and
seemingly random, alphanumeric
code. Activate the “View Source”
function, however, and see that the
lines of code constitute an image—
a detailed diagram of a bomb.
D
espite their healthy suspicion of the internet (their
chosen display medium)
and their near-derision of galleries
and museum systems, some
net.artists and other non-net.artaffiliated artists working on the web
agreed to participate in the 1997
documenta (known as documenta X ).
The show promised to embrace the
web as both a didactic space (providing supporting material for the
5
artists working in painting, sculpture, and video), as well as a space
for the artists to create art specifically for the web. The curators
made the works accessible online
through the documenta website, but
the works were also physically
installed in what were referred to as
“office spaces” (as if the cubicle
context were the only one in which
people could relate to a computer),
in contrast to the neutral whitecube gallery spaces other artists in
the exhibition were offered.
And soon the collaboration between the art world and this conspiratorial band began, perhaps predictably, to sour. The curators
planned to remove the work from
the internet at the close of documenta X and download it to a purchasable CD-ROM—thus dooming projects predicated on theories
of total accessibility to a narrowly
accessible fate. In protest to what
was perceived as the curators’
inability to comprehend the essential nature of web art, Vuk Cosic,
exploiting the web’s potential for
“illegal copying,” cloned the entire
documenta X website and uploaded
it to a different server. Cosic’s site,
Documenta Done (1997), is still
available on a Slovenian art lab’s
website (http://www.ljudmila.org/
~vuk/dx), ensuring these works
continue to be accessible, free of
charge and without any institutional backing, eight years after the
close of documenta X.
When compared to the work
of these artists, Duchamp’s “revolutionary” gesture of plunking a urinal in a gallery might appear, espe-
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Webpage and source code of wwwwwwwww.jodi.org.
cially at a century’s remove, like so
much pointless furniture rearranging. Once a blasphemous statement
against taste within the high church
of Art, Fountain has now assumed a
place in the art world as prestigious
as any painting by Picasso or
Matisse. A 1964 replica of Fountain
now sits on a pedestal at the Museum of Modern Art, and another
sold at auction for more than $1.7
million in 1999.4 If we follow the
logic of artists like Staehle, Duchamp’s critique of the system happened within the system—a urinal
is an object. It can be touched; it
can be signed; it can be purchased;
it can be owned. As a result,
Duchamp’s radical message was
4 Both of these Fountains were part of an edition of eight, cast according to the artist’s 1964
specifications.
6
easily co-opted and repossessed by
a world that values not only the
ratification and making of high
culture, but also the making of
money. Web artists who privilege
open-source systems have provided
perhaps the greatest historical challenge to the art world’s voracious
cultural and commercial impulses—in part because many web
artists straddle these systems (one
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closed, based on ownership,
authorship, and monetary value;
the other open, based on open
source systems, community, and, if
you will, “cultural value”), and are
deviously conversant in the languages of both—so much so that
they have managed to foil even the
attempted foilers, adding level of
ironic commentary to level of
ironic commentary and playfully
mocking any closed-system attempts at conferring value.
For example, in 1979, Sherrie
Levine rephotographed Walker
Evans’s iconic images from an exhibition catalogue and titled her series After Walker Evans. At the time
a powerful comment on notions of
authorship and originality, Levine’s
copyrighted photographs became
hot commodities in the market
while the original Evans photos
remained public domain and were
available to anyone who wants to
order them from the Library of
Congress. In 2001 the internet
artist Michael Mandiberg created
the website www.aftersherrie
levine.com (he also has www.after
walkerevans.com) in which he has
scanned the same images from the
Evans exhibition catalog and made
them freely available to download
and print. Each print comes with
its own certificate of authenticity
that the “owner” can print out and
sign. To quote Mandiberg himself,
“This is an explicit strategy to create a physical object with cultural
value but with little or no economic value.” All of which raises
the following questions: why
would an artist want to create a sys-
tem in which his art has no economic value? How does a system
outside the system become viable if
the main means of cultural and
financial viability (ownership) is
intentionally thwarted? Will the
revolutionary impulse seem watered-down if internet artists start
to work inside both the closed and
the open systems simultaneously?
And is it inevitable that one day
internet art will appear, to future
generations, like a lot of pointless
rearranging of furniture?
O U T E R S PA C E :
A THUMBNAIL
H I S T O RY O N
THE EMERGING FORCE
O F A U R A L E S S A RT
N
umerous projects and
artists through the years
have sought to shake up
the insularity and pomp of art
world conventions—with varying
degrees of effectiveness. Even more
than Duchamp’s Fountain, the invention of photography leveled a
profound and radical challenge to
the market systems of the art world.
“Earlier much futile thought had
been devoted to the question of
whether photography was art. The
primary question—whether the
very invention of photography had
transformed the entire nature of
art—was not raised.”5 This quote
comes from what is among the
most often cited writings in media
art history—“The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by the German philosopher
Walter Benjamin. In this essay, Benjamin uses the medium of photography to float his historic definition
of the essential nature of art—its
“aura.” 6 This aura, described as the
intangible quality that imbues the
object with its unique and original
character, becomes weakened by a
photograph’s capacity to be readily
and identically reproduced.
Despite its auralessness, photography has managed to achieve
great status in the art world, its aura
returning with the market designation of “vintage” prints, limited
editions, and inventive mounting
techniques—all attempts to render
the reproducible unreproducible.
Alfred Stieglitz, photographer and
founder of the famed photography
journal Camera Notes, opened
Gallery 291 (originally called The
Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession) on 5th Ave. in New York in
1905, one of the first art galleries in
North America to exhibit photography. Stieglitz played a central role
in raising the profile of photography in high-art circles while
remaining devoted to the qualities
of the medium that liberated it
from preciousness. He clearly stated
his feelings in a catalogue preface
to a later exhibition of his own
work: “My ideal is to achieve the
ability to produce numberless
6
5
Benjamin,Walter.“The Work of Art in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations.
English translation 1969, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich Inc. Schocken Books: New York, NY.
7
His dialogue isolates what he refers to as the
aura of art as “the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history
which it has experienced.”
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prints from each negative, prints all
significantly alive, yet indistinguishably alike, and to be able to circulate them at a price no higher than
that of a popular magazine or even
a daily paper.”7
A similar spirit of inclusion
sparked the advent of video art,
sixty years after Stieglitz first
opened the doors to Gallery 291.
In the mid-1960s, Sony debuted a
portable video camera, the Porta
Pak, enabling the cheap, simple, and
easy production of moving images.
Artists such as Nam June Paik,
Steina and Woody Vasulka, and Bill
Viola quickly gravitated toward
this newly accessible medium. In
addition to a technology, however,
these artists were also adopting an
ideology—they envisioned artist’s
television stations and independent
distribution networks, free from
the constraints of traditional broadcasting and art gallery systems. As
Bill Viola stated in a recent New
York Times article about the collection of video art, “The dream we
had was art that couldn’t be sold,
but broadcast on television.”
TV as a Creative Medium, a seminal 1969 exhibition of video art
held at the Howard Wise Gallery,
exposed the New York art world to
an approach that combined kinetic
sculpture, user interaction, and moving images. Nam June Paik’s 1963
piece Participation TV (previously
shown in Germany) featured a television monitor whose image viewers could modulate by speaking
7 Phillips, Christopher. “The Judgment Seat of
Photography.” October 22 (Fall 1982).
into a microphone wired to the
picture tube. Ira Schneider and
Frank Gillette’s Wipe Cycle (1969)
synthesized similar sculptural and
interactive elements. Nine televisions and a closed-circuit camera
displayed a revolving cycle of live
images (from the camera) and
broadcast television, making the
viewers (filmed as they emerged
from the elevator into the gallery)
as much a part of the video landscape as the images on their television sets. Despite the significant impact of his show,Wise felt limited by
the structures of the gallery system;
he closed his gallery in 1970 and in
an open letter to the art world
explained his reasons: “[Artists] are
focusing their energies on works of
such scope that these can only be
hinted at here in the Gallery, and
cannot be shown or realized here.
These artists are going out of the
Gallery into the environment, the
sky, the ocean, even outer space.”
In 1971,Wise established an organization that would come to epitomize this early era of video art
production—Electronic Arts Intermix. Wise articulated his vision for
EAI and the social and artistic
function of video, enthusiastically
predicting the transformation of
mainstream television:
The dinosaur may yet succumb
to the mouse. Many new developments augur well for the independent video-artist producer.
The new, light-weight, low-cost
portable can produce programs
of broadcast quality.Theoretically
at least, the producer is now
8
capable of producing programs
that may be broadcast, but actually the system remains closed to
him. New developments particularly pertinent to cable TV portend a plethora of new channels
and means of dissemination that
will offer new opportunities for
innovative programming, thus
enhancing the chances of the
artist to participate in the system.
Fueled by this same fervor, the
North American broadcast landscape (changed by the introduction
of cable TV, and the steady expansion of public access television and
the Public Broadcasting System
throughout the 1950s and ’60s)
devoted a significant amount of
resources to artists’ projects and
community-based programming. In
1969 WGBH in Boston commissioned a number of artists, including Paik, to create works for broadcast. The resulting program, The
Medium Is the Medium, is the earliest
example of the collaboration
between public television and the
emerging medium of video art.
From 1973 to 1984, WNET in
New York ran The TV Lab, which
provided the same access and support for the works of Viola, Gary
Hill, and Mary Lucier. In 1973,
with the help of both WGBH and
WNET, Paik created one of the
most famous video works of the
1970s, Global Groove, a montage of
commercial images, Korean folk
dancers, and footage of Allen Ginsberg playing the tamblas—prefaced
by a voice-over that forecasts:“This
is a glimpse of a video landscape of
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tomorrow, when you will be able to
switch to any TV station on the
earth, and TV Guide will be as fat as
the Manhattan telephone book.”8
Numerous artist and social collectives used video to promote social awareness and activism. Video
collectives and distribution centers
sprung up across North America:
Video Data Bank in Chicago, VTape in Toronto, and Ant Farm in
San Francisco are only a few examples of successful collective structures. (Europe had a similar movement.) Artists from two of these
active video collectives—the New
York–based Raindance Collective
and Videofreex—published the
journal Radical Software from 1970
to 1974 that supported a lively critical discourse about video’s potential as a social and artistic tool.
Speaking to a new generation of art
makers, Radical Software, which published authors such as Gene Youngblood and Buckminster Fuller, covered a range of topics including art
theory, equipment reviews, political
and social commentary, and userfriendly tips on how to install a
video production studio in the back
of your Volkswagen bus.9
Not only did the medium of
video pose a philosophical provocation to the structures that contained art; like photography, it challenged the supremacy of these
institutions built on ideas of what
was original and unique.10 Also
threatened by irrelevance was the
8 Global Groove and many of the works from this
period are available at Electronic Arts Intermix.
9 The entire run of Radical Software is available
online at www.radicalsoftware.org.
much savored and romanticized
notion of artistic genius. New
media made a potential artist of
any person wielding a video camera. So if the aura of the art
object was challenged by these
technical innovations, so too was
the cultural aura of the artist, a
threat that created another stumbling block to the acceptance of
these media by critics and hallowed
institutions.11
But the ever practical art world
gallery system fought to negotiate
its own relationship with the
emerging medium. In 1972–73
Leo Castelli and Sonnabend (two
of New York’s most successful
commercial galleries) joined forces
to distribute video art (at this point
referred to as “artist videotapes,” an
implicit categorization indicating
they were the dalliances of artists
10
A technical aside: a work of video art is simply a video signal on a tape. Early analog video
technology is termed lossy—meaning that with
every successive copy there is a noticeable
degradation in quality. Analog technologies still
had some claim to the construction of an original—the photograph has the negative, from
which successive prints are made, and video has
a master copy, from which further copies are
struck. The negative and the master thus have
more value than their offspring. Digital video
formats released by Sony in the 1990s changed
this condition completely, as they allowed for
perfect reproduction. Video is now simply a
piece of code—a string of ones and zeros that,
unlike its analog parent, is wholly duplicable.
Enabling the production of infinite clones with
no discernible value hierarchy thus renders original a meaningless term.
11 As though to intensify this anxiety, every
Apple computer now arrives in its box with
editing software already installed, inviting users
to create and share their own work. In a move to
either reestablish the myth of the heroic artist or
forever grind it into the democratizing muck of
the equal opportunity media age, esteemed New
York gallery owner Jeffery Deitch is currently at
work on a reality TV show called Art Star.
9
like Bruce Nauman, John Baldessari, and Richard Serra, who
were otherwise making more “serious” Conceptual work). Soon the
limited editions and certificates
created to facilitate the commodification of photography and Conceptual art were also employed for
video. Other attempts to recoup
object value loss included artists
signing VHS tapes and DVDs, a
practice almost quaint in its dogged
application of art world conventions to new media practices.
Eventually—in response to the
pressures of the galleries, the pressures of the marketplace, the
pressures of the entrenched sense
of validation offered by museums
and collectors, or merely the natural evolution of a grassroots movement into the mainstream—Video
Art begat Video Installation. Inevitably with this begetting (an
embrace of the very strictures Wise
rejected in 1970 after curating TV
as Creative Medium), some of the
exuberance of video’s open access
became overshadowed; given an
installation’s multiple projections
and complicated sculptural elements, video needed a gallery or
museum context in order to be
viewed. Subsequently, video artists
working today aren’t using video
as their medium because they want
to be free from the constraints of
the market system; they use video
because it’s a prevalent tool as
viable as any other art commodity.
Despite its initially confounding
presence, contemporary video art
is currently enjoying massive success, though not in the ways envi-
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sioned by Wise and his contemporaries. As David Ross, longtime
curator of video art and onetime
director of both the Whitney and
the SFMOMA, said, “As Allen
Kaprow has termed it, artists were
producing old wine in new bottles.” Ross also points out a slightly more defeatist reason for why
the broad vision of video art was
never realized: “Let’s not forget
that most video art was incredibly
boring, dreadfully underproduced,
if intentionally or not, as if in a way
to reframe Andy Warhol’s Empire
as an action drama, which in a
way it was.”12
Electronic Arts Intermix, initially founded as an antidote to the
gallery system, today enjoys a fruitful relationship with these institutions while still providing affordable access and support to a broader
community of artists and collectors.And although the dinosaur did
not necessarily succumb to the
mouse in the ways envisioned by
Wise and his contemporaries, thirty years later the internet has occupied the void left by the promise of
television.
from college really because my
parents sold their house in Buffalo. I didn’t really come to New
York to be an artist; it was more
like I got here and then I found
out what a gallery really was, and
so then I thought, “Well, I make
videos; I should contact some of
these gallery people.” And that’s
what I did, and so the whole
thing was more of an accident.
CJ: How did you make contacts?
CA: Right when I got here
I went to a video game and
music night that was at a tiny little gallery in Chinatown. And
I just went there and said “I do
this—I would like to have a
show.” And the curator said,
“Bring by your portfolio,” and
I did, and she gave me a show.
And then I slowly learned
about other places and other galleries. But I honestly didn’t know
what a New York gallery was
until I came here.
CJ: But you guys [Cory and his
collaborators BEIGE—Paul B.
Davis, Joseph Beuckman, and
Joseph Bonn] were making art in
college, right?
Well, I moved
to New York after graduating
CA: Yeah, but not with any real
artistic intent—we were just
screwing off and then putting
things on the internet. The contemporary art world was no part
of the dialogue. We had a record
label that we created through the
internet, and so everything else
went up there, too. The “art” just
came when I moved to New York.
12 From a lecture by David Ross at San Jose
State University, 1999.
On the day of our interview,
the twenty-seven-year-old Cory
T H E B I RT H O F T H E N E T
A RT I S T: N E T A RT
FOR SALE
CAITLIN JONES: Did you ever
think, “I’m going to move to
New York and be an artist?”
CORY ARCANGEL:
10
Arcangel, a self-described nerd in
both body and spirit, wears a
“Codewarrior” T-shirt and a blazer with a Netscape logo embroidered on the lapel. Super Mario
Clouds (2002), his hack of the
iconic Nintendo game Super Mario
Bros., has garnered him a great deal
of attention from art collectors,
websurfers, and gaming enthusiasts
alike. By removing the computer
chip from the game cartridge,
Arcangel is able to reprogram the
original Mario code and then reinsert it into the original cartridge.
The result of this intervention is a
minimalist game environment—
no iconic Mario figure in red coveralls, no coin-generating brick
blocks, and no poisonous mushrooms—all that remains are the
puffy white clouds gently drifting
across a clear blue sky.
Super Mario Clouds can be seen
in a number of environments. In
the gallery, it exists as an installation—the Nintendo computer, the
actual hacked game cartridge that
supports the code, and multiple
projectors that beam the moving
image onto the surrounding walls.
What makes Super Mario Clouds
different from your average
Whitney Biennial video installation, however, is that fact that it also
thrives in an online “home brew”
computer culture—composed of
an assortment of gamers and hackers devoted to the open-source
methods of software development
and creativity. These people—Arcangel is one of them—are happy to
discuss and share, among other
things, software modifications, the
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latest video game emulators, and
ways to hack into the Domino’s
Pizza delivery system. While you
can buy Super Mario Clouds13 from
the Team gallery in Chelsea for
thousands of dollars, you can also
go to Arcangel’s website (http://
www.beigerecords.com/cory/21c/
21c.html) and download a copy to
run on your own computer. Better
yet, you can study the step-by-step
instructions to learn how to make
your own version:
lda #DELAYSCROLL
sta $21
lda #NTShow
sta $22
lda #SCROLL
sta $24
I only modify the program chip,
and I leave the graphic chip from
the original game intact.Therefore
since I do not touch the graphics
from the original cartridge, the
clouds you see are the actual factory soldered clouds that come on
the Mario cartridge. There is no
generation loss, and no “copying”
because I did not even have to
make a copy. Wasss up.
Enabled by Arcangel’s “help
files,” other artists have remade Super Mario Clouds into, among other
things, a Game Boy version, a
screen saver, and a DVD. Arcangel
himself, who despite his seemingly
13
Super Mario Clouds was an edition of five, and
every piece has been sold.
antitraditionalist bent wanted to
“make things people could hang
on their wall,” printed a large edition of Clouds posters that he sold
through his website for $19.95.
While many artists made art on
the web as a deliberate stand against art commodification, others,
like Arcangel, have embraced the
commercial opportunities offered
by the web. In the ten years since
its creation, net.art member Lialina’s My Boyfriend Came Back from
the War has grown into a much
larger entity, which she now calls
The Last Real Net Art Museum
(http://myboyfr iendcameback
fromth.ewar.ru). Like the multiple
variations based on Arcangel’s Super
Mario Clouds, The Last Real Net Art
Museum is a collection of works by
other artists based on Lialina’s original—a series of paintings, a T-shirt,
a video game, a PowerPoint presentation, a blog, and numerous
other iterations are now linked to
My Boyfriend. Lialina et al’s Last
Real Net Art Museum, like Arcangel’s, straddles the line between
ephemeral and object, between
open and closed systems.
In fact, when Lialina launched
Art Teleportacia (http://art.tele
portacia.org) in 1998—what she
called The First Real Net Art
Gallery—her goal was to sell net art.
The first exhibition, Miniatures of the
Heroic Period, consisted of a single
page: self-consciously artspeaky
descriptions of the works, and price
tags ranging from $1,000 to $2,000
were affixed to objects consisting
solely of code and a domain name,
and could be viewed for no cost by
11
anyone with a computer and an internet connection. In an interview
with Baumgaertel, Lialina denied
internet art isn’t a commodity:
“I personally have never said in any
interview or presentation that the
internet is my long-awaited freedom from the art institutions.”14 Her
assumption was that the marketplace would provide her with at
least one person for whom the idea
of owning something would outweigh the fact that he didn’t need to
own it to see it, and that his possession would continue to be public
even after the private sale. Although
arguably tongue-in-cheek, Lialina’s
web gallery questioned the possibility of distribution and reception of
works lacking physical attributes,
and gauged the reaction of a net
culture that directly opposed the art
market.The lack of reaction, on the
part of the net.art scene as well as
that of the market, answers those
questions. Although a few articles
were written about this disinterest
(one in the NewYork Times and a few
in media art magazines and online
journals), its discussion raised about
as few hackles as it sold artworks.15
While the late 1990s and early
’00s found museums around the
world rushing to acquire internet
art for their collections (including
the Guggenheim, the Tate, the
Walker, and the Whitney), the
14 Tilman
Baumgaertel’s site, http://www.thing.
de/tilman/tilman.htm, links to these interviews
and many other of his projects and writings.
15 Actually Lialina sold her own work If You
Want to Clean Your Screen (1998) to the web
design and art collective Entropy8Zuper!
(images of the transaction can be seen at
http://art.teleportacia.org/office/clients).
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enthusiasm proved short-lived.The
dot-com bust, combined with
market indifference, resulted in a
dramatic cooling-off, with a number of the new media curators and
programs actually dropped from
major institutions altogether.16 This
reversal could have indicated a
larger dismissal on the part of the
closed art world, in which art on
the internet is still regarded as
hype, derivative, and part of a
boom. Writer Isabelle Graw leveled similar charges in her attack
on web art, published in the highly respected conceptual art magazine Texte zur Kunst in 1998.
Baumgaertel responded to Graw
with the article “Mafia Versus
Mafia: About Tribal Wars Between
Conceptual Art and Net Art,” in
which he stated, “The high-art
view of net art which is formulated here ignores one of its genuine
qualities: namely the notion that
everybody can be an artist on the
internet—if they have a computer,
a modem, and internet access, that
is. To reduce the large number of
very different projects and works
to “net art as such,” and then trash
it, is a very dubious enterprise.”17
But “net art per se” suffered a
number of major blows from the
institutionalized art world.
Even so, a number of New York
galleries—including bitforms and
16
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minn.,
boasted a world-renowned and vanguard new
media art department under the curatorial direction of Steve Dietz. In 2003, the Walker dropped
the department, the renowned curator, and his staff
from their program, citing budgetary constraints.
17 Telepolis, 14.04.1999 http://www.heise.de/
tp/r4/artikel/3/3362/1.html
Postmasters Gallery—persist in trying to sell network-based art to the
consumer market.18 Tom Vanderbilt’s article “The King of Digital
Art,” a profile about bitforms
owner Steven Sacks, which appeared in September’s Wired magazine, celebrates Sacks’s ambition to
“turn high-tech into a hot commodity,” while asking “whether
Americans are ready to hang
screens on their wall that don’t get
HBO.” Regardless, just as with the
development of the more objectoriented “video installation,” so too
with the new media art installation
as artists figure out how to engage
these two conflicting streams of
production. While some might see
this gentrification as yet another
watering-down of a revolutionary
impulse, the work of artists like
Arcangel and Lialina point to
another possibility: that the best
position by which to critique the
closed system is by incorporating it
into a more open practice.
The promise of commercial and
institutional success, however, is bittersweet to some. In a recent email
to curator Sarah Cook, Cosic wrote
about the launch of his new art
project, File Extinguisher (fileextinguisher.com), at London’s Institute of Contemporary Art, and
18 Which raises the question: who are these collectors? Some of them are the same ones who
had the foresight to buy the work of Cindy
Sherman when the rest of the art world thought
there would be no market for contemporary
photography; others are involved in the technology industry and are comfortable with
immateriality and ephemerality of digital technology in general, and the notion of hanging a
screen on a wall to display software art does not
seem at all incongruous to them.
12
the changed climate for web art.“It
was different when work used to
appear as attachments to Heath or
as links for jodi or as follow-ups to
mail with Alexei. It was about collective discovery and glorious, nearly amorous, rivalry. This time I felt
like some career artist running
blindly hoping that the noise is the
fast lane and not the whistles of the
crowd…. Something like that
(sorry for going poetic).”
Cosic, who has participated in
such elite art world standbys as the
Venice Biennale and the Vienna
Kunsthalle, also issues this mea
culpa: “I am not only attacking
some abstract artworld setup I was
born into but also spelling out the
mistake I have very much helped
propagate with my own actions.To
me, it is not enough to notice this
shift from community to audience,
but I also need to share the guilt.
This is one important dimension;
maybe it’s some ancient Euro-jewish thing…”
Of course, it’s not just the market that instigates this commodification; new media artists want to
earn a living, and many, like video
installation artists before them, are
moving toward the two- or three(or six-) pronged approach to art
making—the website for free, and
the installation or objects for sale.
While closed systems offer obvious
benefits, open systems offer the
arguable benefit of exposing more
people to more product. Couldn’t
the goal be, as Arcangel suggests at
the top of this essay, to create something whose online accessibility
lends it an intangible value? New
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Page 13
media art’s growing
pains resemble those of
photography, video, and
Duchamp’s urinal, and
expose the ambivalent
underbelly of all revolutionary art movements: the shameful
compulsion to be accepted into the commercial market to prove
an artist’s success.
to have a 19.95$ poster on
their wall. i guess i’m in
the third category.
rudytardy (4:59:19 PM):
yeah, i had a kid order the
poster using his dad’s credit card. that’s awesome!
rudytardy (4:59:32 PM):
he was 14 or something
I
n mid-September,
Cory
Arcangel
uploaded to his
website the file for
another one of his Nintendo-based works, Japanese Driving Game
(2005), a racing-game Cory Arcangel/BEIGE, Super Mario Clouds, 2002. Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery.
environment with all
making limited edition silkcars and obstacles removed and just
screens… they would end up unthe road in front of you—the ultisold under my bed
mate road-trip movie. As he did
with Clouds, Arcangel’s offering
rudytardy (4:55:02 PM): so i
“for a limited time only” a run of
figured, well, as long as i am
Japanese Driving Game posters for
gonna make then, i should make
$19.95 apiece.
them so people can have them…
CtlnJns (4:51:03 PM): so, i
notice you have posters for sale
again.
rudytardy (4:51:47 PM): i made
500!
CtlnJns (4:52:23 PM): what was
the reason you started making
those again? is it it because you
want your friends to be able to
“own” an original cory arcangel?
rudytardy (4:54:29 PM): yeah,
well at the time i wanted to try
to make something for people's
walls, and i had had terrible luck
rudytardy (4:55:17 PM): 19.95$
seems like a good way to go…
rudytardy (4:55:30 PM): plus,
my internet audience is totally
different from my art audience
CtlnJns (4:57:59 PM): so then,
there’s the market that will pay
thousands of dollars for something. then there’s this other
audience that wants to screw
around and make it themselves,
and maybe there’s a third audience, that doesn’t really want to
make their own mario clouds or
japanese drving game, but wants
13
Arcangel’s decidedly
casual approach to art
making is enhanced by
a long history of intense
negotiations between
the object, the market,
and the creative impulse
in general. With technology often serving as
the catalyst for expansion, our conceptions of
art will continue to be
challenged. As in the past, thanks to
urinals, photographs, and videos, so
too will the internet create more
space within and without the art
world for work to be produced and
received. Still, what might be the
most radical subversion of the dominant art-world economy yet is this
emergence of a multiplicity of
economies, with art for free, for
barter, or for sale—as long as your
dad will let you charge $19.95 to
his credit card. ✯
In recognition of the collaborative process
of my writing, the thoughts and ideas
articulated are the result of conversations
and lectures of friends and colleagues
including but not limited to: Kris Cohen,
Sarah Cook, Alison Craighead, Steve
Dietz, John G. Hanhardt, Jon Ippolito,
Heidi Julavits, Christiane Paul, Keith
Romer, and Maria-Christina Villasenor.