Impatience and autarchy
The prophets of the end of the arts (Hegel was their most convincing, but most misunderstood, representative) were so confused by changes in the arts that, instead of approaching the dynamics of the process, they concentrated on the logical possibility that artistic practice is self-devouring and self-destructive. The initial end-of-the-arts prophecies were delivered during a time of relatively mild change in the status of the aesthetic appropriation of reality. Recent prophecies occurred in a very different context. It was only after World War I that aesthetic experiences really difficult to connect and integrate in an accepted explanation changed our notion and expectations of art. With the experience of disposable language, which the Dadaist movement submitted to a community already skeptical of language, came the experience of disposable art.
While literacy supplied a framework for (almost) consistent representations of values and norms, human practice at the border between literacy and a-literacy introduced and fostered inconsistency, believed to be the last resort of individual freedom. Eclecticism and consumption joined in this experience, since mixing without system or justification of any kind is like stating that everything is worth whatever people make of it, and therefore they want to have it. Re-evaluation of available art, good or bad, aesthetically relevant or kitsch, significant or insignificant, is part of this change. Once re-evaluation started, the processes of artmaking and aesthetic appropriation grew relatively disconnected. Where language, through literacy as a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct, energy, choice, and change. For as long as literacy maintained control and integration, viewers, irritated by conventions foreign to them, physically attacked works (such as Impressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practices different from those congruent to the practice of language and to the associated expectations of seeing.
Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Once the necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism was challenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency for which language is not well equipped, new forms of artistic appropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itself became possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. Walter Benjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "art in the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura, as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from the artifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not to the end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination to get rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material, technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal of artistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for the emancipation of artists and their work.
As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massive communication that supports interactive multimedia, and information integration through networks (adapted for pipelining data and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities. We are also subjected to new experiences-for instance, simultaneous transmission of art and interpretation, moreover the possibility to contribute our own interpretation, to become co-makers of whatever is presented to us through the very malleable digital media. Technology and change of aesthetic goals affect the scale of artistic experience, as well as the relation between artists and the world. Projects such as Walter de Maria's Lightening Field and Christo's Umbrella project (extended over California and Japan) are examples of both the change of scale and of new interpretation processes. They are also vivid proof that globality permeates art at each level. So does the sense of rapid change, the acknowledgment and fear of perishability, and the open-endedness of the practical experience of making art. I doubt that anyone could have captured this sense as well as the Web site on which millions of viewers could experience the wrapping and unwrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. Christo and Jeanne-Claude might remain the authors of record, but the event grew beyond the notion of authorship.
The artistic experience of the civilization of illiteracy is also characterized by impatience and autarchy. Things happen fast and relatively independent from one another. Artistic experiment always embodied characteristics of the practical experience of human self-constitution. From petroglyphic expression to the art of our age, this happens again and again, obviously in context-dependent forms. The Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists celebrated results of industriousness through mythological themes. Before that, religion dominated up to and through the Renaissance. In the context of African, Asian, and South American art, the forms were different, but the pragmatic stamp is faultlessly evident. No wonder that in the settled age of literacy, art had a structure similar to that of the practical experience of literate language, regardless of the richness of its forms. It even called for experimental settings reminiscent of industry, or of the university context, as we know from art history. And it was sanctioned on the same pragmatic criteria as any other literate experiment: success (it was useful), or failure (it was discarded). Accordingly, it implied sequential development and a rather settled succession of operations. As artistic experimentation took place in line with all other experiments characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, it even resulted in an industrial model based on modularity, which the Bauhaus enthusiastically promoted. A number of shops produced thousands of ready-made artistic objects with a clear goal in mind: value through usefulness, function over form, functionality as aesthetics at work. Artistic practice and appropriation were coordinated through the still literate language of the market.
Art in the civilization of illiteracy is less a matter of invention and discovery, as it was in the civilization of literacy, and more one of selection, framing, and endless variation. Since the end of the last century, artists started breaking away from some of the characteristics implicit in the literate experience, such as hierarchy, centralism, and nationalism. This is not a time for rules and laws, unless they are taken from the books of the past, relativized and integrated in the tools needed in artistic practice, made into underlying principles. Appropriation is not of the object, but of the method, process, and context. The tools of this civilization are endowed with the literacy required for certain partial experiences. Artists, instead of acquiring skills, are trained to master such tools. In his series of ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp anticipated much more than a style. He anticipated a new kind of artistic practice and a different interrelation among the individuals involved in producing-literally selecting from the infinite repertory of ready- mades and framing-and the individuals who appropriate the artifact for whatever reason (aesthetic satisfaction, status, investment, irrational drive to collect).
Today, artists are more dependent on others involved in the pragmatic framework of the time. This dependency is the result of the more integrated nature of human effort. Everything that is eventually built into the work, regardless of whether this work is an object, an action, or a process, results from other human practical experiences. The time of the artist's inventing his own pigments, making his own canvasses and frames, that is, the time of the artist's integral ownership and quasi- independence, was already over with the advent of industrial production. In the context of mediation and task distribution, new levels of dependencies are established and reflected in the work. Video art, photography, film, computer-based installations, and much of the computer music, interactive multimedia, and virtual art experiences are examples of such dependencies. Simultaneously they are examples of the new forms of conflict and tension that mark the artistic experience. Artistic freedom and self- determination are only apparent. The limits of the many elements involved in an artistic experience affect choice and artistic integrity. Free choice, a romantic notion, is a delusion under these new circumstances. There is no censorship on the Internet, but that does not make the medium totally free.
The forms of integration in the guise of new science and technology are probably less troublesome than integration through language. They are, however, much more constricting and restrictive because they derive from elements over which the artist has little, if any, control. The growth of non-verbal modes of human expression, communication, and interaction introduces elements of mediation. These can be seen as intermediaries, such as images to be integrated, sounds, political actions (a sit-in is the best known example) that are involved in the practical experience of art in all its phases. Formulation of aesthetic goals, in the form of video improvisations, diagrams, multimedia installations, computer-generated simulations, interpretation of an artwork (animation of a painting or sculpture, for example), and processes of meaning realization and valuation (represented by market transactions, insurance estimates, political relevance, ideological tendency, cultural significance) use mediating elements. None of Christo's elaborate and very comprehensive projects could have been carried through without such means. Keijo Yamamoto's widely celebrated virtual performance could not come into being without an understanding of all that it takes to establish a Worldwide Network Art.
Art, as a human experience, emphasizes its own transitory nature and becomes less permanent than in previous stages of artistic practice, but far more pervasive. Still, to qualify this process as mere democratization of the arts would be misleading. That supermarkets are full of meat, oranges, cheese, and all kinds of graphic signs should not be interpreted as the democratization of meat, oranges, cheese, or graphic signs. The majority of artists still strive for recognition. To the extent that their own recognition as different means that there are people who do not qualify for the same recognition and reward, there is no equality in the realm of art. On the other hand, the pressures of leveling and the iconoclastic component of artistic experience reduce the passion that drove artists in the past, or at least changes the focus of this passion. Although the artistic process has changed in line with other changes in the systematic domain of human experience in general, it still resists doing away with the terms for artistic recognition. The uncertainty (including that of recognition, but not limited to it) projected in the work qualifies it as an expression of individualism. The heuristic attempt to establish new patterns of human interaction through art reflects the uncertainty. To own art that is stored in units of information and in invisible processing instructions means something totally different from being in possession of unique artifacts embodied in matter, regardless of how much they are affected by the passing of time.