September 28, 1997

RANDOM TUMBLINGS
email to Digicult

I've put the complete interview I did with Tom Watson for @NY in the Hypomnemata. He just sent me a few broad questions and I replied. He did a good job but there was more to my ramblings, including a plea for the kind of facility Jeff is building in Williamsburg.

http://artnetweb.com/iola/journal/092397.html

Commodity fetishism lives:

I sold a small piece to someone yesterday and it got me thinking about possibilities we might be overlooking in terms of introducing people to digital art.

The piece was something that's been hanging around the artnetweb storefront for a year, a round canvas with an Epicurian image from Herculaneum I've used for a long time. I'd done it for no other reason than I wanted to give form to an idea I had about circularity. No one ever mentioned it until I "framed" it as an art work that could be owned, simply by saying it was for sale.

The person who bought it liked a painting of mine that is hanging in the lobby of the New School but didn't associate the name on the label with me until a week ago. She said she assumed it was by someone famous, not someone she would possibly know. That lead to a conversation about how the work I was doing in 1992/3 was an instinctive attempt on my part to come to terms with the digital. She, like most people, thought in terms of "computer art" and photoshop -- certainly not paint and canvas.

I'd been thinking about the show currently at Postmasters and the correstpondence between the Mac Classics and Devon Dikeou's work (very smart, Tamas, even if that wasn't your intention). Five years ago I would have seen Dikeou's work as a clever commentary on the art world. Now I see it as a clever commentary on hypertext and networking and that is partly because of the Mac exhibit, and partly because of my general frame of mind these days as opposed to five years ago.

I've been getting in touch with old art contacts to get them to come down and look at old work, something they loathe to do. They want something new! fresh! and cutting edge! but of course in a form that is easily transportable and viewable that doesn't have to be plugged in.

I tell them they can only understand the new stuff by investing in what came before it and didn't "get". We have a role of educators and that means starting out with what your student understands with objects they can manipulate. I'm particularly interested in how thinking, my own especially, is changing because of the onslaught of the the Internet. We should find ways to be an influence on the granular level. We should think in terms of education.

Sunday morning horror:

I open the New York Times Magazine special issue on new technology and see a full-page picture of Red Burns by Catherine Opie, an article by Laurie Anderson and illustrations by Vito Acconci and Gary Hill. I have nothing against Catherine, Laurie, Vito and Gary -- I have loads against Red -- but the fact is this is the image of new technology and none of us are there.

Rob