Page 25 - Cyberculture and New Media

16 ‘Until Something Else’ – A Theoretical Introduction
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experimentalise the photograph. It was Stieglitz, the epitome of the artist
artisan, who explored new media and confronted aesthetic and technical
matter with equal skill. And, likewise, a visionary attention to multiple
perspective was also valuable to Stieglitz, manifesting most momentously in
vigorous and clairvoyant sponsorship of the young Picasso, for whom he
organized the first solo exhibition, in 291, the legendary “Little Galleries of
the Photo-Secession” which Stieglitz and Edward Steichen opened in 1911.
With such foresight and foundations, one can view this perplexing question
of whither photography as art as a probe to Duchamp’s logic rather than as a
factual quest for authenticity that Stieglitz would in any case have by then
long resolved. And the probe proves fruitful, for Duchamp’s answer falls
neither in the class of affirmation nor of denial but, looking to the role of
artistic production within the continuity of historical process, presages what
has become increasingly consequential to art’s encirclements around medium
and materiality, namely that culture’s technological and industrial
affordances now provide the bulk of what defines the principal experiences,
events, and objects through which both contemporary art and the culture
industry articulate.
These encirclements, measurable in art’s evolution through
accelerating engagements with new technology and materials, are not isolated
cases; they are overlooked or relegated as secondary to art’s genuine
modernist concerns. But as an abundance of examples of what must now be
called cybercultural art, they appear in several moments and places, in the
geometric symmetries in the latticed sculptured of Naum Gabo and Antoine
Pevsner, Francisco Sobrino, and François Morellet, the magnetic sculpture of
Len Lye and Takis, the kinetic sculpture of George Rickey, the material
deconstructions of Jean Tinguely, the light dynamos of Heinz Mack,
recombinant revolutions of Nicolas Schöffer’s rotating objects and in the
utter industrial depersonalisation of the Minimalist aesthetic. The material
structure of these works expands and saturates expressive space to the point
where critique folds within the fabric of work, for it is through technological
proficiency that this kind of art is realized, and only through such technology
that its significance would be decoded. To appraise the full extent to which
such art functions as critique requires that critique itself migrate from a
system built up of rational formalism and categorical abstraction toward the
technological frame from which new media work is constructed and through
which it codifies itself. To ask, from such a cybercultural frame, what sense it
makes to view new media art through notions of flatness, to recall
Greenberg’s modernist norms for painting, is to prompt a backward glance all
the way to photography itself, and the critical difficulties that it imposed on
art’s received aesthetic paradigms. For, even with its glaring representational
characteristics, photography already embedded in itself a critique of culture
mediated through a mechanism of production and reproduction that was no