Cory Arcangel and Hanne Mugaas’s “Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)”

by | Apr 13, 2009 | Writing | 5 comments

One last piece of Images festival blogging detritus as this year’s edition comes to a close:

L.M. and Sally McKay have written an interesting review/critique of one of the last Live events of the festival, a co-presentation with Pleasure Dome of a ‘collaborative’ (scare quotes to be explained shortly) performance by Cory Arcangel and curator Hanne Mugaas called Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)

Still from Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) version 2.0 at Art in General, 2008

I identify with a lot of the points they make, including wishing the presentation followed through on its promise to define the internet, then art on the internet and the relationship between the two, and that it was more structured and concise and less “fly by the seat of your pants and hope you’re charming enough to pull it off”. But I actually wasn’t all that disappointed by the performance. I thought a lot of the clips the artist-curator chose were hilarious (I hadn’t seen many of them before, I should admit straight away) and that there were a few phenomena–such as the online exhibition of the bichon frisé in art or the strange way that YouTube seems to produce people who have the same name as famous artists who also share similar characteristics to them, such as a teenage Dan Graham who cynically rambles in stream-of-consciousness sentences–that did manage to comment on the way the internet has changed our relationship to art, even in spite of the sometimes annoying presentation style.

Sally’s point that the ‘collaboration’ was really a one-sided affair, with poor Mugaas stuck in the control booth the whole evening and only occasionally participating by Gmail chat, is definitely well taken, however. One of the interesting things the internet has faciliated is co-creations by artists, curators and all sorts of other folks that may not have been (physically) possible in the past, but the interactions between Arcangel and Mugaas in this performance were sort of like a casual conference call gone horribly wrong.

Andy Paterson also critiqued the performance on his Images blog for similar reasons. His post can be found here.

Update:
Terence Dick has now joined the debate, firmly on the side of “that performance was a waste of time,” on Akimblog and I am having the unnerving experience of being in complete agreement with Timothy Comeau after facing off against him quite firmly over the Mammalian Diving Reflex debacle (I believe he called something I wrote “one of the stupidest things [he]’d ever read”). Just goes to show there’s no accounting for personal (aesthetic) taste.

5 Comments

  1. Lorna
    Lorna on April 16, 2009 at 3:17 pm

    Screw you gabby! I work so hard at writing the stupidest things anyone will ever read, and you just go and toss one off effortlessly.

    Reply
  2. Gabby
    Gabby on April 16, 2009 at 3:30 pm

    That stupidest thing someone had ever read was the product of a whole year of grad school, L.M. There was all kinds of effort, including a lot of battling through Derrida, that informed that sentence. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Leah Sandals
    Leah Sandals on April 17, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    Obv, Derrida is a way stupid dude… mebbe the root of the whole problem?
    Smartly yrs, Leah

    Reply
  4. Leah Sandals
    Leah Sandals on April 17, 2009 at 3:57 pm

    Sorry, “smartly” was s’posed to be in quotation marks.

    Reply
  5. Jeremy Bailey
    Jeremy Bailey on May 12, 2009 at 8:52 am

    The reason the performance was “by the seat of your pants” is why it was good. Cory was artfully mirroring the amateur aesthetics of the internet and the pathos of electronic collaboration. That also sums up his entire practice as one of the most relevant artists alive today. It’s probably one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.

    Reply

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