Blogging. The New American Scrapbook or Disastrous Moral Compromise

[This is the thingy for contemporary design]

During the lecture I was attending several hours ago, part of a film was shown on the Nine Evenings performances that took place in the sixties. The most notable part of this was Steve Paxton’s hands, which are like two birds panicking in their cage at the first sight of a cat. An evolution in gesturing.

Beyond the flailing digits I found a remarkable consistency between art/technology in the sixties and current practices of today. Past and present are both characterized by an unfaltering exploration of new media. And most striking is that the work being done by Rauschenburg, Stella, Paxton, etc. would not have seemed out of place today. Despite differences in technology the end results have a marked similarity. FM instead of bluetooth. Incandescents rather than of LEDs. Why is it that satisfaction in the creation of a “new” work seems to lie in exactly the same place it did almost fifty years ago? Primary motivation remains a fanatical exploration of technology. And newly introduced technologies lead effortlessly towards hardware-centric works. Results remain similar.

I would be off-base in this generalization were I not to admit that changes are afoot (or perhaps “at hand” as Paxton might prefer). And have been for a bit. Because, the constancy in this exploratory new media over the last half century has been accompanied by inconsistent access to the technology. It would not be possible for all of us to tour scientific facilities like Irwin. But, right now, and over the course of the last couple of years a drastic change has occurred in accessibility. Coding has become simpler, hardware easier to manipulate, and most importantly things are cheap to the point of drawing materials. Cheaper than printmaking, painting (at least fancy painting), sculpture, and about anything else associated with the field of fine art. God knows its certainly cheaper than photography. And when this is accompanied by, say, the internet, it becomes remarkably easy to establish a wide base of interested persons.

This brings up a point from the lecture that the film accompanied... Dana Plautz, relating her own experiences, felt that many artists working with new media were, in a sense, isolationists. Disinclined to admit the influences at play within their own work. Like the reluctant fathers on Maury who worry that one or all of their children might have come from someone else’s “seed”. And so, using a rather crude metaphor, the internet when combined with cheap hardware has created an environment where everyone is contaminating everyone else’s work. And that seems like the best place for everyone to be in order to move on past this whole technology as motive thing.