DMCT Week 15

The state of contemporary art is the result of decades of the reconfiguring of the definition of art. Artists like Stelarc, Orlan, and Kenneth Feingold rely on various changes and paradigm shifts engaged by artists decades (or sometimes centuries) earlier. How then, do the theories applied to contemporary art apply to these previous artistic innovators? This post examines how previous artists' work can be seen through the theoretical lenses of contemporary society, and exposes how new theories of society can help explain previous pieces of art.

In class we discussed the role of Cubism as an early example of hyper-text. Picasso (and Braque) take an image, cut it up, and then reassemble into a new reality on the canvas. This does sound like hyper text in many ways (the referential nature of the image), but it more properly sounds like Derrida's notion of deconstruction. By breaking the image down into its constituent parts, Cubists deconstructed reality and realism and reassembled the image in the light of contemporary notions of industry and modernity. Does then this deconstruction indicate something about hypertext? Is hyper text inherently deconstructive by nature, and if so, what does this mean for our current understanding about the nature of information online?

After class, Mark and I were discussing the role of Jackson Pollock in the development of hyper text. Mark argued that perhaps Pollock was portraying the increasingly erratic yet organized images that seem to look like what we now call networks. However, was Pollock envisioning these networks as sources of information? Not really. Instead, Pollock was channelling the shifts in the artistic marketplace and reflecting these shifts in his art. He recognizes shifts in societal thinking and paradigms and these changes are represented in the drastic changes of his art. His "networks" of paint drippings come to indicate a changing relationship between society, reality and art.

Pollock represents a strange time in the world of art history. He is at the tail end of modernism, but is not fully post-modern in many sense. That role is taken up by Andy Warhol. In our discussion, I called Warhol (and more specifically his workshop) a rhizomatic artistic entity. Deleuze and Guattarri argue that contemporary information and society as a whole should not be seen as a tree, but as a rhizome with many entry points and multiple sources of origin and completion. Warhol's workshop is a perfect representation of this concept. Warhol could even be cut out of his workshop, and it would continue producing art. His art was also spread across multiple platforms (paint, music, television, film). Like the rhizome, the Warhol workshop was horizontally stretched across media and maintained a multitude of origins. Warhols work continues to interest us today for this very reason. It tells us something about current society (a rhizome) through the art.