[-empyre-] galleries & establishments

[Brandon Barr <barr@mail.rochester.edu>]

Valerie wrote:

> My second question (which has been postulated in recent museum exhibitions 
> at Whitney & SFMoma - and locally in Montreal with events such as the Web 
> section of the Biennale de Montréal) is how to make a transition of 
> presentation to a wider public through museum contexts etc. without 
> sabotaging the wonderful fluidity of production and presentation on the 
> Web? I know that some people have reacted strongly against "museum" 
> exhibitions - however, I also feel that Web artists wish to be a part of 
> the establishment. The reason I ask this question in part is because I am 
> curating an upcoming Web art exhibition at the Musée du Québec (Canada) 
> and these concerns have been raised both outside and inside the institution.

This is a difficult question, and mirrors the concerns that every field is 
facing in adapting old metaphors to a new medium.  Why should a website be 
a gallery or an issue or even a page, other than for navigational 
comfort?  Does relying on the metaphor of place automatically suggest a 
less public presentation--inward looking instead of "out there" where 
people are?

I don't know.

I'm interested in these questions lately as well, since I have been 
developing an online project that play with/against the institutional 
display of net.art.  It may serve well as an example in this discussion, so 
at the risk of looking like a self-promoter, I'll talk about it 
here.  The  Banner Art Collective (http://bannerart.org) collects, creates, 
and distributes net.art within the context of web advertising.  To that 
end, the site has a sort of gallery that displays collected work, but also 
give viewers HTML code that they can use in their own pages that will host 
a work on their own site.  The site, then, is a sort of clearing-house, but 
the works are intended to be viewed OUTSIDE the site, in the margins of 
others' sites.  Intriguingly, now the site itself is being presented within 
art festivals, and a gallery in Germany wants to incorporate it into a 
upcoming show.  So the site is moving away from the gallery and moving 
toward it at the same time.

I look forward to this discussion; it looks interesting!

Best,
Brandon Barr