Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after the New Media (London: MIT Press, 2010) 354 pp., $34.95.
Hegel noted in his Ästhetik that "art had worked itself out" and was being displaced by rational inquiry, a continent drift from sense to sensibility that began during his time and has accelerated in ours. Soon after, with the development of photography, followed by the Zoetrope in 1834 and Eadweard Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope, the first movie player, in 1879, image-making was thoroughly embedded in machines.
Such variance of the fine arts developed incrementally until the 1960s, when what we might now call "New Media" began appearing with a vengeance as artists like Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell picked up video and the Fluxus group undertook a variety of multiple-media performances.
Today the types of New Media already on the ever-expanding list are so numerous as to make one dizzy: Motion Graphics, Bio-art, Information Art, Net Art, Systems Art, Glitch Art, Hacktivism, Robotic Art, GPS Tracking, and others. How does one gather it all together?
In Rethinking Curating, the learned authors Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, both from the University of Sunderland, rankle at the term New Media, but will not offer a substitute. They do try out "Turing-land," inspired of course by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, and they fancy "post-media."
In any case, we are encouraged to "use verbs of behavior rather than nouns of medium." This verb-not-noun notion appeared in Buckminster Fuller’s poem God Is a Verb, published by the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, and indeed the authors continue Fuller’s notions of interactivity and dynamic systems, producing their own Whole Earth Catalog for curators.
Rethinking Curating contains an exhausting compilation of New Media art, ranging from Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s telematic 2001 Body Moves, where a computer produces images in response to spectator activity, to Andreja Kuluncic’s 2001 Distributive Justice (with multiple co-authors), an internet game and exhibition that arises from a web-based voting system.
Also included are historical works. The chapter "Time," for instance, features the 1968 chess match between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage wherein the chessboard was wired to generate a musical composition based upon their chess moves -- the sound of strategy, so to speak.
What role might a curator play in these interactive programs? Graham and Cook suggest that he or she "act as the gracious host between the artwork and the audience -- provide a platform." This strikes me as a little thin, like holding a sort of art-world Tupperware party. In the chapter "Other Modes of Curating," the authors note a problem at art festivals, which can show "a tendency to treat media artists as if they were immaterial themselves," which cultivates a "financial volunteerism" on the part of artists, who are expected to pony up the costs of their project themselves.
Other nuts-and-bolts advice is given in chapters such as "The Embedded Curator," "The Adjunct Curator" and "The Independent Curator." The job continues on the authors’ website, CRUMB, a giddy acronym for Curating Resource for Upstart Media Bliss, designed to air these issues as they develop.
One issue has been that of quality, as Steven Dietz pointed out ten years ago (he wrote the foreword for this volume), it’s not what it looks like but what it does. Today, with all manner of digital art in our contemporary museums, it’s hard to follow an argument that it is unsightly. Still, this book presumes to discover a critical framework for judging New Media art, in part through its own history.
Rethinking Curating is the latest issue from MIT Press’ Leonardo series, which is designed to be a think tank for areas of knowledge that are under rapid-fire development, especially those showing a convergence of disciplines like New Media. And indeed, the book is both a teacher’s aid and a scholarly document, with a bibliography that runs to an impressive 35 pages.
As a sculptor, I admit that my previous interest in New Media art has been only casual. This book opened my eyes to the vastness of behaviors in Turingland, and I can see it becoming part of a standard syllabus for museum studies.
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