by Anne-Marie Boisvert
From the outset, the title chosen for this Magazine suggests the dual, troubled and troubling nature, the inherent duality, of Web art; its outline — often unanticipated — fleetingly appears and disappears on our screens, for the sake of pure enjoyment, or for that of the exploit itself, as confrontation, or by political or social conviction, as critique, among other things, of what the Web is fast becoming: less a space for encounter and exchange than simply a reflection of commercial globalization.
Thus, British artist Heath Bunting calls himself an "artivist" (this term, among others, cited by James Flint in "Telegraph", p: 1), obviously a conflation of the words "artist" and "activist". He's not alone; his works/actions are often the result of team effort or of a parallel undertaking with other "artivists" gathered, since 1994, under the title, "net.art": Rachel Baker, Alexei Shulgin, Olia Lialina, Vuk Cosic, Pit Schultz, Andreas Broeckmann, Dirk Paesmans and Joan Heemskerk (the last two working together by the name of JODI). Their projects, whether solo or group, originate from "virtual centres", the major ones being CERN, birthplace of the "World Wide Web", the Moscow WWWart Centre, the Ljudmila Media Lab and "jodi.org", in Barcelona (cf. Mark Nixon, World Art Magazine, irational.org — Heath Bunting, p:5). At Irational.org, one such "virtual centre", one can find the list of works/actions by Heath Bunting and Rachel Baker (and a few other artists). Other names worth mentioning are American artists, Mark Napier and Natalie Bookchin (who produced collaborative works with Alexei Shulgin, such as "Introduction to net.art", commented in the "Web Works" section of this issue, and in "Before and After"), and Canadian artist Sheila Urbanoski (known for, among other productions, her appropriation/subversion of pornographic sites).
In spite of the differences in their work, these "artivists" have two major points in common. The first is humour — whether it be savage, ironic, or simply playful. According to the French philosopher, Henri Bergson, author of a now classic study of comedy, "society naturally fosters organization, structures, an order that insures and strengthens stability, but is perpetually threatened by sclerosis. Laughter is the cure for this sclerosis." (Tournier, summarizing Bergson's theory in Le vent Paraclet, p:196.)
The other point they have in common is the way in which they use the arsenal of the Web's technological resources to subvert and turn them against themselves, or against what the Web as reflection and product of society is becoming (or has already become) — a gigantic shopping mall. A critique of technology is therefore central in these works — "Our work is obviously a struggle against ‘high tech’." (Tilman Baumgärtel, Telepolis, "Interview with JODI", p:4) —, and inseparable from a socio-political critique of power relationships (between producer and receiver) on the Web.
The battle is brought into the computer itself. JODI, for instance, emphasizes the Web's intrusion (from a public space) into each computer (a private space) by establishing a power struggle with the surfer, seemingly arranging to "crash" the latter's machine with works such as OSS.JODI (where small windows frantically appear and disappear as soon as one clicks onto the site, which also highlights the transience of the medium), putting the surfer in a panic, in which he loses his (apparent) mastery of the machine and of navigational choices (his "right", for instance, to go back, to hop to another site, or to exit the digital highway) — in vain does he look for a way of escaping the invasion (solution: shut down and reboot…). "Artivists" sometimes choose a "low tech" approach, as Alexei Shulgin does, performing "concerts" of intentionally outmoded equipment (386s). Similarly, Vuk Cosic subverts the levels of language on the Web and the easy fascination of the colourful, attractive and realistic appearances made possible by cutting edge applications, by using a "basic" language, like ASCII, to produce "porn images" (images where the contour of the "body" remains abstract, and another kind of "power struggle" is played out on the spectator's voyeuristic and frustrated desire to consume the spectacle and his pleasure). One notices in all these works a certain rejection of the visual, a desire to keep close to language, the origin of the medium. The work of Sheila Urbanoski (cf. the interview with the artist, by Sylvie Parent, in the current issue of Magazine) overtly plays the same sadomasochistic power game with the surfer, drawing him into a "false" porn site with "real" images "borrowed" from "real" sites, to then not only frustrate her "victim" of his anticipated pleasure (presenting him, for instance, with images of prehistoric women, or excerpts from feminist texts), but, "still worse", going as far as to break the tacit contract of anonymity that constitutes the major appeal of the Web (and the reason for its success, remarks Sheila, in the interview) by threatening to reveal the visitor's identity.
For its part, Heath Bunting's work harbours several aspects: a constant is his will to establish a crossover and juncture between the "street", or everyday, local space, and the Web, the "deterritorized", global non-place, leaving his mark (one should note that Bunting is also a graffiti artist) on the search engines so as to appear at the top of search results (a technique honed — again! — by porn site webmasters), to "subvert" for his own benefit, that is, for the benefit of his critical and humorous discourse, the public's interest in commercial sites — such as Adidas and Nike —, thwarted, interchanged, or modified, like the site the big pharmaceutical firm, Glaxo, whose employees, after the performance of his "art", were asked to donate their pets to the company for vivisection — to the dismay of Glaxo, who took the artist to court until he took down his "fake" site. Often, however, Bunting involves the public in a more active and positive manner, producing true places/moments of encounter (like the first cybercafés). Bunting's work, and that of the "artivists" in general, is centred above all on the question of (re)creating space/time, in as much as it helps create "links" (Web links, links that bind, links that retrace), playing on a set of conceptual polarities: local/global; author(creator)/reader(spectator); word/language; here-and-now/elsewhere; speed/slowness; high tech/low tech; individual/community (corporation); appearance/disappearance; visibility/invisibility (the question of anonymity, but also the refusal of being identified, "appropriated", institutionalized by the world of art and commerce, (cf. Mark Nixon, "World Art Magazine", p:6)). The links create works/actions, which constitute traces that Bunting insists must, along with other "artivist" work from net.art, remain modifiable, a great advantage of Web art, also emphasized by JODI, precisely being that works may be regularly modified, displaced, made to appear and disappear, or on the contrary, left to "ex-ist" in cyberspace forever (cf. Telepolis, Interview with JODI, p:4).
This series of oppositions expresses the dichotomy signified in the title "Create/Destroy", it impels and "works" it. However, the pair of concepts serving as basis for, and crossing over, all others is that of "virtualization/actualization". Why? Because — as I pointed out in the article on hyperfiction in the previous issue (No. 9) of the magazine — the digital phenomenon, and the Web in particular, have actualized the promises "text" to an extent to which its theoreticians (such as Roland Barthes and his fellows) could only dream of until now (having been able only to mark out "some" text, fragments of text, here and there, in certain works). Yet, what are these promises, if not the hope of realizing the potentialities of language as such? And how are they accomplished, if not as the actualization of virtuality — language being, as grammarians have shown, a virtual system of signs that speech (or writing) actualizes in specific linguistic occurrences?
The works/actions of the artivists of net.art must be considered "textual" in this sense, because (1) their formal aspect depends on programming languages to exist, and (2) even their non-verbal elements, such as images (Sheila Urbanoski's porn images, for instance), are inscribed in the linguistic flux — for these works, as we have seen in a few examples, are essentially critical, and utopian as well (in that they aim to intervene, to act on the world, even to change it).
ART AS WEAPON

Cultural resistance takes two roads: the formal protest of an art that rejects long integrated social and artistic forms, and finds new forms of refusal; art in which the protest itself is a theme of the work. However, in recent artistic practice, characterized by its "impurity" (according to Guy Scarpetta, in his work by the same name), the two paths meet.
"Post-modern" art distinguishes itself from modern art, which favoured the first path over the second by seeking to achieve and express the ideal of a pure essence for each art form, that is, to exemplify in each work the definition of the art to which it belongs. In short, as goal and justification of its existence, and as a litmus test of its legitimacy and value, modern art has aimed (1) to be self-defining, at the level of the (art) object; (2) to stress intentionality, from the point of view of the relationship between the subject (the artist) toward such an object: since Dada and Surrealism and the "scandalous" demonstration by Marcel Duchamp, turning a urinal (among other found objects) into a "work of art", the art object is simply designated as such, is simply itself, no longer representation or reproduction (of the real, or of classic, canonical art), but intention and discourse. Thus (3), in its effects on the public, the work of art no longer constitutes an object of contemplation or recognition; it proposes (or imposes) the reception of a discourse, which, whether understood or not, acts upon the public: the work has become the equivalent of an "intervention", an "inter-action" — a performance.
Recent practices, said to be "post-modern", have questioned and ended a purification and rarefaction whose own logic could not help but lead to the "death of art" (just as we've had the "death of the novel" and the "death of cinema"); post-modernism isn't a nostalgic regression, however: the lessons of modernism haven't been forgotten, and contemporary art continues to centre its work around the three modernist preoccupations, already mentioned: (1) self-referentiality; (2) intentionality; (3) performance (the notion of art as action) — the greatest difference with modernist credo being that the "impure" nature of post-modern works authorizes them to introduce elements that deform and politicize (1), (2) and (3). To the pure, self-reflecting mirror that was the modern work (forming a microcosm closed onto itself within a world/discourse closed onto itself…), the post-modern work appears as the parodic mirror of a baroque carnival, that ends shattered in pieces. The mix of genres and media, multi-disciplinarity, references to and citations of history, art history, popular culture, the reappropriations, decontextualizations and recontextualizations, the return of figurative art, the taking up of political, social and sexual preoccupations, questioning values, permanence, authenticity, and the commodification of art, etc., are all now the "rule".
In this context, what is to be made of the "Create/destroy" imperative of Web art? Here also, the two paths meet: (1) formal critique/revolt + (2) critique/revolt within the work — and (3) their association, permitting the work and the artist to carry this critique/revolt into the world of art and into society. Web art is therefore a "post-modern" art.
Anne-Marie Boisvert
Translation: Ron Ross
References:
John Austin, Quand dire c'est faire, Seuil, Paris, (1962), 1970 pour l'édition française.
Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, PUF, Paris, 1968.
Pascal Engel, "Comprendre un langage et suivre une règle", in Philosophie, automne 1985, no 8, Éd. De Minuit, Paris, pp: 45-64.
William Gibson, Entrevue dans Hour, Education+technology Special, Hiver 2000, p:21.
Lucien Goldmann, La création culturelle dans la société moderne, Gonthier, Médiations, Paris, 1971.
Pierre Lévy, Qu'est-ce que le virtuel?, Éditions la Découverte, coll.
Sciences et société, Paris, 1995.
Guy Scarpetta, "Réflexions post-moderne", in L'Infini, printemps 1983, no 2, Éd. Denoël, Paris, pp: 119-128.
Michel Tournier, Le Vent paraclet, Gallimard,. Coll. Folio, Paris, 1977.