ART IN AMERICA ARTNEWS THE MAGAZINE ANTIQUES MODERN MAGAZINE NEWSLETTERS ART IN AMERICA GUIDE

AMH LLC

NEWS & FEATURES REVIEWS MAGAZINE NEWSLETTER SUBSCRIBE

MAGAZINE Oct 29, 2014

The Perils of Post-

Internet Art
by Brian Droitcour

Most people I know think “Post-Internet” is embarrassing to say out

loud. 1 But so is most of the language that’s used to write about
Digital image from contemporary art, and “Post-Internet” does the job of artspeak so
Kari Altmann’s project efficiently that people keep saying it, embarrassment be damned. The
“Hhellblauu,” 2008. “Post-” part conjures an aura of historical significance, the mantle of
the avant-garde; “Internet” supplies social relevance. Together they
lacquer art with an intellectual finish as thin as it is opaque.

The term has recently appeared in a variety of far-flung contexts: a talk

at Frieze Art Fair, a forum at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, a
panel at the College Art Association conference. Unlike “Neo-
Expressionism” or “Neo-Geo,” “Post-Internet” avoids anything
resembling a formal description of the work it refers to, alluding only to
a hazy contemporary condition and the idea of art being made in the
context of digital technology.

Marisa Olson, Gene McHugh, Artie Vierkant and a handful of other

writers have made good-faith efforts at describing how networked
technologies have changed artistic production in recent years and used
“Post-Internet” to summarize these developments. Olson, who has a
A D V E RT I S E M E N T strong claim to the term’s invention, situated the “Post-” not so much in
social history as in her own process as an artist: simply enough, after
using the Internet, she makes art. Participation in Internet culture,
Olson suggested, yields distinctive approaches to art-making. McHugh
was more interested in defining an epoch, one in which the Internet
stopped being the domain of programmers and hackers and became an
inseparable part of everyday life for people with no special interest in
or knowledge about computers. But the widespread use of “Post-
Internet” now obscures these writers’ work, displacing it with
artspeak’s murky mystique—a doom prescribed, I think, by the term’s
self-seriousness despite the good intentions with which it may have
once been used.

Whether people like it, hate it or feel indifferent toward it, they all seem
to know what “Post-Internet” means today but are unable to articulate it
with much precision. “I know it when I see it”—like porn, right? It’s
not a bad analogy, because Post-Internet art does to art what porn does
to sex—renders it lurid. The definition I’d like to propose underscores
this transactional sensibility: I know Post-Internet art when I see art
made for its own installation shots, or installation shots presented as
art. Post-Internet art is about creating objects that look good online:
photographed under bright lights in the gallery’s purifying white cube
(a double for the white field of the browser window that supports the
documentation), filtered for high contrast and colors that pop.

Supporters of Post-Internet art might say that it’s not the gallery that
really matters but the shot of the work there, like a shot staged in a
photographer’s studio. But staged photography often disguises the
shoot’s environment, or transforms it. Post-Internet art preserves the
white cube to leech off its prestige. The same supporters might also say
that Post-Internet art offers a critique of how images of art circulate
online in service of the art market. But unless the artist does something
to make the documentation strange and emphasize the difference
between the work’s presence online and its presence in the gallery (and
here I’m thinking of Vierkant’s smudged, tinted and distorted shots of
his “Image Objects,” 2011-ongoing) it’s hard for me to believe that
anything close to a critique is happening.

The Post-Internet art object looks good in a browser just as laundry

detergent looks good in a commercial. Detergent isn’t as stunning at a
laundromat, and neither does Post-Internet art shine in the gallery. It’s
boring to be around. It’s not really sculpture. It doesn’t activate space.
It’s often frontal, designed to preen for the camera’s lens. It’s an
assemblage of some sort, and there’s little excitement in the way
objects are placed together, and nothing is well made except for the
mass-market products in it. It’s the art of a cargo cult, made in awe at
the way brands thrive in networks.

Post-Internet art is in love with advertising, like a lot of art since

Warhol, but it’s the obsession with art-world power systems—as
represented by the installation shot—that irks me the most about it.
After a century that has witnessed art in newspapers, art on the radio,
art in the mail, art on television and art on the Internet, here’s a self-
styled avant-garde that’s all about putting art back in the rarefied space
of the gallery, even as it purports to offer profound insights about how a
vast, non-hierarchical communications network is altering our lives.

A sheaf of essays grappling with the meaning of “Post-Internet” by

tracing a genealogy from Olson onward would be inadequate to
describe what Post-Internet has become: a term to market art. This isn’t
entirely novel, of course. Dealers and critics have long embraced handy
labels that help them promote art, terms designed to appeal to
art history as an argument for the importance of a particular artist. As a
means of skirting this process, I’ll try to offer not an account of what
the term means to an idealistic subculture of artists, but an alternate
genealogy that reflects how “Post-Internet” is actually used today.

David Robbins was a popular teacher at the School of the Art Institute
of Chicago (SAIC) until his retirement a few years ago, attracting
students with ideas about audience engagement and the possibility of a
“conceptual art for the masses,” which he called “high entertainment.”
He collected these thoughts in an “online book” of that title, published
in 2009. For Robbins, art is an area of cultural activity distinguished by
systemic self-reference; if entertainment appeals directly to its
audience, Art (his capital “A”) is a “satellite,” receiving signals from
individual artists and beaming them back to viewers, who can receive
them only if their perceptual faculties are properly attuned. That is,
audiences for Art have to be looped in to the self-referential game, a
process that has traditionally required trips to art institutions and formal
schooling. Robbins uses the term “platforming” to describe how artists
can disrupt this model, reaching receptive viewers put off by the high
barriers to entry into the institutional art world. He names the gallery as
one platform, but includes it on a list among the radio show, the TV
variety show, the magazine and “a certain kind of website (YouTube,
Flickr, MySpace . . .).”

Though Robbins is optimistic about the possibilities the Internet gives

to artists to reach new audiences, he is not usually credited as a theorist
of digital aesthetics. Still, his work may be important for understanding
Post-Internet art’s relationship to its audience. His ideas are in Post-
Internet art, albeit in a twisted form. Post-Internet art preserves
Robbins’s assumptions about art’s essentially self-referential nature
while eschewing his embrace of populist entertainment. Post-Internet
art operates on a mass platform but doubles down on precisely those
qualities that Robbins found objectionable, including: “visual art’s
fixation on the complex issues surrounding representation, visual art’s
obsession with articulated interplay between form and content, visual
art’s propensity for criticality [and] visual art’s narrow historicity.” If
Post-Internet art has any of the directness and generosity that Robbins
associated with “high entertainment,” it’s in its appeal to hipness, its
instant adoption by the cool kids.

Robbins is also important for understanding Post-Internet art because

his students are among its most ardent supporters. SAIC graduate
Forrest Nash is the founder of Contemporary Art Daily, a site that
publishes installation shots of gallery and museum exhibitions most
likely to appeal to the tastes of the in-crowd. Not long after starting the
site, Nash co-organized an exhibition titled “Mirrors,” presented in
January 2010 at Reference Art Gallery in Richmond, Va. Visitors to
Reference didn’t see any sculptures, prints or paintings. The white
room was empty except for a computer monitor on a pedestal, where
viewers could browse images of a virtual gallery and digitally rendered
works in it. Later that year came “Exhibition One at Chrystal Gallery,”
an online show organized by Berlin-based artist Timur Si-Qin,
featuring six artists who created 3-D virtual objects for Si-Qin’s digital
space. All the contributions looked like the glossy Minimalist
sculptures you might see at New York galleries like Pace or Matthew
Marks, except for the installation by Kari Altmann—a huge, misshapen
obsidian orb floating impossibly in a darkened room.

“Chrystal Gallery” showed more polish and software skill than

“Mirrors,” which had a flippant, punk attitude, with anime stills and
plain text presented as wall pieces in a digitally generated white cube.
But the choice to simulate the gallery environment in both projects
marked a shift away from previous group endeavors in online art, such
as Nastynets, a “surf club” founded in 2006 where members (including
Olson) shared found images on a collective blog, or Harm van den
Dorpel’s “Club Internet” (2008), which reimagined the group show as a
series of one-page works in a browser, which were deleted after a
month.

When the artists behind “Mirrors” and “Chrystal Gallery” finished art
school and moved on to other institutions, they produced work for
brick-and-mortar galleries that would have looked good in those virtual
ones. In the spring of 2012, Agatha Wara, then an MFA student at Bard
College’s Center for Curatorial Studies, organized an exhibition at
Bard’s Hessel Museum of works by Si-Qin and Katja Novitskova. Si-
Qin showed a series of Nike bags strung from pillars by straps extended
to their maximum length, along with two identical diptychs of a blonde
model’s beautiful face, cut along the vertical axis to emphasize slight
asymmetries. Novitskova showed cardboard cutouts like the ones seen
in stores, but instead of portraying celebrities or junk-food mascots they
depicted tropical birds and jungle creatures, as well as a couple of
anonymous black people. This weirdly racist touch seems even more
odious if you’re familiar with the intellectual context constructed
around Post-Internet art in Si-Qin’s neo-Darwinian writings that use
evolutionary biology to justify both eugenics and Nike’s popularity.
Among his essays is “Stock Photography as Evolutionary Attractor”
(2013), which describes the social and cultural specificities of modern
capitalism as the natural order of things—an appeal to the absolute
beauty of money, power and porcelain-skinned women.

But there was one good thing that came of the show. Wara invited DIS
—the collective behind an eponymous online magazine that treats art as
a lifestyle brand and fashion photography as a form of Conceptual art—
to organize a photo shoot at the museum. Social ties and creative
collaborations have connected DIS to Post-Internet art. Si-Qin even
published his essay on stock photography in their magazine. Post-
Internet art ordinarily purges its white cubes of people, preferring to
use passively predictable plants as a representation of life. (Sad-looking
ferns have become a Post-Internet stylistic trope.) But DIS, in keeping
with its lifestyle magazine mission, is constantly asking how humans
contort to fit, or fail to fit, the values of fluid image economies,
especially in the fashion industry. In one exemplary picture from DIS’s
series shot at Hessel, “Competing Images: Art vs. People” (2012), a
racially diverse group of people line up beside Novitskova’s cardboard
cutout of a black man, the flatness of which catches only a glare of the
light that illuminates the real volume of the bodies nearby. In another
image, an empty Nike bag dangles by its long shoulder strap while a
scruffy man stares downward, weighed down by a few loaded bags of
his own.

There’s a promise of broad social commentary in the term “Post-

Internet,” but as “Competing Images” demonstrates, it takes real people
to bring this implicit commentary to life. Without an external impurity
like the human body, Post-Internet defaults to an art about the
presentation of art, playing to the art-world audience’s familiarity with
the gallery as a medium or environment for art, as well as with the
conventions of presenting promotional materials online.

Rachel de Joode’s “The Hole and the Lump,” a 2013 exhibition at

Interstate Projects in Bushwick, typified this problem. The exhibition
seemed extrapolated from a one-liner about photographic reproduction.
De Joode made a series of sculptures in pulled terra-cotta, stretching
and spinning the putty, which took on the imprints of the artist’s hands.
These objects didn’t appear in the gallery, but images of them were
printed on thin sheets of wood and mounted on pedestals that were
actually shallow “facades” affixed to metal stands. Walking around the
flimsy plinths, which were arranged in rows to suggest a sense of depth
that each lacked alone, I felt like I was an intruder on a stage set that
would be photographed and rephotographed as soon as I got out of the
way.

Consuming Post-Internet art most often means browsing artists’

websites, which may be the optimal space for encountering the work. I
recently came across an installation shot of Hhellblauu (2008-12), a
work by Kari Altmann that I’d previously seen installed in a group
show at Envoy Enterprises on the Lower East Side in the summer of
2010. In the gallery it looked like nothing—a dingy wading pool filled
with water, where some prints of the Paramount logo and other found
images on chunky foamcore floated about and piled up at the periphery.
It did nearly nothing to attract my attention when I saw it in the gallery;
it was just an inexpertly assembled installation by an artist who made
more compelling work online. But when I saw the documentation I did
a double take. The colors in the image—especially the sky blue named
in the title—were intensely vibrant compared to the dull ones I
remembered. The water in the pool seemed to create a viscous distance
between the floating prints and the base upon which the pool rested, a
platform that had looked flat when I saw it in person. In short, this bad
installation suddenly looked like a good one, thanks to the way the lens
of the camera and the lights worked on the materials when Altmann
took the photo.

To her credit, Altmann includes poorly lit amateur shots of Hhellblauu

on her site alongside the dazzlingly professional ones, mixing both with
her collection of images that track the use of sky blue across contexts.
She maintains an archive of these images and solicits submissions of
more examples from her viewers, who send in stock imagery,
commercial photography, logos and anonymous artistic creations.
Altmann shares some concerns and visual tropes with Post-Internet art
but in my mind she sheds the “Post-.” The way she equates installation
photography with other image genres reminds me of the definition of
Net art given by critic Josephine Bosma in her book Nettitudes (2011):
art that can be present in several places simultaneously, that links its
audience to other Internet cultures, “that is created from an awareness
of, or deep involvement in, a world transformed and affected by
elaborate technical ensembles.”

Bosma’s definition of Net art—which rejects medium specificity, the

idea that Net art only happens in a browser—is rather close to the
definitions of Post-Internet art found in the writings of Olson and
McHugh. But her emphatic disinterest in the art world’s institutions
puts her far from what Post-Internet art has become. Bosma is an
impassioned advocate of engagement in online communities, and the
Net art she champions is never going to set auction records or adorn the
homes of top collectors. Post-Internet art, by contrast, is wholly
compatible with art markets and art-world detachment—an “over it”
attitude signaled by “Post-.” When Robbins writes about the Internet in
High Entertainment he describes our time as “post-analog,” which is an
easier label to accept. Not much new is happening with analog
technology. But the Internet is always changing. The Internet of five
years ago was so unlike what it is now, to say nothing of the Internet
before social media, or the Internet of 20 years ago, or the Internet
before the World Wide Web. And yet Post-Internet artists seem to have
a clear idea of what the Internet is: a tool for promoting their work.
Post-Internet art flaunts a cheap savvy about image distribution and the
role of documentation in the making of an art career. (It’s worth noting
that Post-Internet artists are still young, and the venues and locations
I’ve mentioned—Bushwick, Chicago, the depths of downtown
Manhattan and upstate New York—are still in the art world’s near-
periphery.) If the big media companies get their way and Congress fails
to pass net neutrality legislation preserving access for ordinary users,
then the rest us of may also feel like we have an idea of what the
Internet was, and wonder what might come next. But until then, Post-
Internet art reflects an Internet where the only change worth thinking
about is the extent of an installation shot’s reach.

NEWS
Reviewing American
Fine Arts, Co.
by Editors
Colin de Land’s gallery American
Fine Arts, Co. had an outsize
presence in the art world of the
1980s and ’90s. A.i.A. published
nearly thirty reviews of AFA
exhibitions by writers including
Holland Cotter, Lisa Liebmann,
and Jerry Saltz. READ MORE
Related posts
NEWS
Reviewing Pat
Hearn Gallery
by Editors
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s,
Pat Hearn operated one of the
most innovative galleries in New
York, promoting artists such as
George Condo and Tishan Hsu to
Mary Heilmann and Renée Green.
Highlights from our review
coverage. READ MORE
MAGAZINES
Subcultural Treasures
by Brian Droitcour
In the early 1990s, Blake spotted
the ascent of identity art and
began to seek out ways to work
around it. READ MORE
Newsletter
Receive insider information from the art world every
week.
NEWS
When the Headset
Comes Off: VR at
Museums in 2017
by Desi Gonzalez
The promise is that we’ll be
subsumed into a Matrix-like
dreamland, but in the context of
an exhibition, at least, these
virtual worlds can’t escape their
awkward juxtaposition with the
real one. READ MORE
CONTACT US ADVERTISE TERMS OF USE PRIVACY POLICY SUBSCRIBE BACK ISSUES

ftr
© 2019 ArtNews Media, LLC. All Rights Reserved.