[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 50, Issue 15

[Simon Biggs]

Maybe I have been around too long ­ but I remember the various crises that
disciplines like painting and sculpture have experienced. In the 70¹s and
early 80¹s there was constant talk about the end of painting. A lot of
painters were worried whilst those artists who had chosen to work with
video, performance and other post-object strategies didn¹t think about it
much...until a bunch of Italian and German artists (many of whom had been
post-object artists themselves) started churning out paintings and getting a
lot of attention doing it. The art-world being the art-world (more concerned
with money and fashion than epistemology or ontology) jumped on the band
wagon and, lo and behold, post-object art was dead. Who had the crisis of
confidence now? Where was experimentalism to go?

When sculpture stepped off the plinth in the 1960¹s there was a similar
crisis.

In the 90¹s post-object art made a big come back, although the fact that
virtually all the work concerned was derivative and a pastiche can be left
to one side. Painting and sculpture were once more in crisis. In 2009 I am
not sure who is in crisis ­ perhaps everyone?

If digital art (media art, new media, whatever you want to call it) is in
the midst of an identity crisis then this could well be a sign that it is
finally maturing and joining these other disciplines, amongst the walking
wounded. Perhaps it is a rite of passage?

Personally I think there is something specific about digital art (although a
lot of what is often called digital art does not share this specificity and
is wrongly classified as a result). Digital art is that art which employs
computers and, in particular, directly and fundamentally engages the medium
as discrete and linguistic. No other medium allows this to happen. Poetry
comes close, especially that which is systems based and therefore places the
author in a particular (problematic) relation in the process of production.
Digital art is necessarily predicated on being OF a machine, a machine that
exists as language before it exists as anything else (it need not require
electricity or a keyboard ­ it is machine as idea, as in Turing). This is
what makes the artform distinct.

I have never had a problem with using the word digital to describe what I,
and others, do. However, I have often had a problem with the word art. Too
much baggage. I prefer to concern myself with epistemology and ontology
rather than money and fashion.

Regards

Simon


On 17/1/09 01:00, "empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au"
<empyre-request at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

> "Digital" is in every sense of the word a contemporary manifestation of
> difference, yet it is also becoming assimilated by the institution that is
> unable to completely be successful to say that digital is the same as any
> other field of art practice.  Consider this: we don't hear painting as a
> practice worrying about the fact that it is painting anymore... We don't
> hear sculpture denying its thingness... We don't hear conceptual art
> denying/celebrating itself as an idea...  Yet they are all different and are
> part of history according to the very names that make them identifiable as
> discourses within art practice and its history.



Simon Biggs
Research Professor
edinburgh college of art
s.biggs at eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk
www.eca.ac.uk/circle/

simon at littlepig.org.uk
www.littlepig.org.uk
AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk


Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201


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