I wonder how many people remember the Church of the Subgenius. It was around the time that the wave that crashed with The Industry Standard was just starting to form with Mondo 2000 that I coincidentally began to hear less and less about the Church, a mock religion that at once lampooned institutionalized salvation and provided both a mythology and a community for the disaffected. The Church is circumscribed by irony and cynicism, both of which are tied to a wearying lack of faith, yet it manages to avoid the emotional bitterness usually associated with such qualities. What it looks like with hindsight is that a lot of those alienated geeks found faith in the form of the tech revolution. “The very thing that’s made me feel outcast is hot, goddamn it, and I can make a lot of money at it too!” Like the prospectors in the previous century’s Gold Rush, many of them got wiped out.
Maybe they might have been “saved” from that fate if they had remembered one of the most compelling slogans of the Church of the Subgenius: pull the wool over your own eyes. It’s not possible to proclaim oneself an “artist” and not have a career. There is no question but of being a participant, of being complicit, and it may not even be a question of degree. Perhaps gaming is an instructive paradigm, after all. The artist must never lose sight of playing a role. We have had the avatars of Duchamp and Warhol, and now we have in the figure of Barney the corporate player – is there any other kind?
But is Matthew subverting his own paradigm? Is he pulling the wool over his own eyes? It’s the difference between a wholesale adopting or buying into a model and deconstructing it. The paradigm that I keep invoking in one form or another could be said to be on display in the work of artists like Alex Galloway and Cory Archangel, who quite literally hack video games. But that’s just it – it’s literal. Just as “interactivity” is its own message, so, too, is “hacking.” Marshall, can a particular piece carry a message beyond that of its medium? But what many artists forget is that a medium is not some monolithic edifice, but a set of codified procedures. What artist worthy of the name does not try to undermine the codified?
So in other words, I’m arguing for new procedures: new media. Maybe what at this moment seems inevitable has felt alienating to me because it too has already become codified and calcified, such that “new media” can indeed now be thought of as an it – another thing we have to get beyond, a Gordian Knot to slice through rather than gamely try to untangle. Maybe that’s why a lot of my recent projects have been so willfully low-tech. For Untitled (current events), my idea of interactivity was to offer a gigantic, antiquated U-matic video deck which I had modified to stop at random intervals when its tape is played, forcing the participant to choose whether or not to continue. The tape in question consisted of a collection of interviews in which people talked about the parenthetical of the title. I edited out all the details, leaving only generalities. For another recent piece, Retroactive Continuity, I used one of those old fashioned VHS decks to loop an old-fashioned credit roll in the gallery, with which I paired an opening reception performative action, the eminently low-tech (and archaic) practice of streaking.
Like the other piece, the form of the presentation seems the most germane to this essay, but it should be noted that the text of the video is a similarly specificity-drained series of imploring exhortations to “end the war.” CAN THE WAR JUST BE OVER NOW? I JUST WANT THE WAR TO BE OVER. CAN WE JUST END THE WAR PLEASE? DO YOU WANT TO END THE WAR?
I wonder, especially with this latter piece, if someone will dismiss me as an artist who plays around, as I once dismissed Vancouver artist Rodney Graham. But is Graham playing around, or “playing around” in quotes? I have come to think of my “video with streaking” piece as putting quotes around something that is already in quotes. What I was wearing on my (nonexistent) sleeve, in that piece, is my struggle with how to intervene in the programmatic when “intervention” has by now made a spectacle of itself. How can we intervene when there is no space conceivable outside the space of intervention?
I suppose what I’m saying is that using old media that was once new is like putting quotes around “new media,” rendering it … ““new media.”"
I like the way that looks on the page – aesthetically speaking, as it were. Yet at some point I suppose I will have to break out another set of quotation marks. Although by then maybe it will have already dissolved.
Or maybe I just won’t be asked to write about it anymore.
Gordon Winiemko / Some Thoughts About “New Media” in Quotes
other islands in this text-fed stream
