Visitors interact with my piece, Telepresent, at the opening of The Social Graph at Outpost. Image courtesy Cojo.
I figured the party couldn’t last forever. After reviews and mentions by the likes of the New York Times, Creator’s Project (in multiple languages), and and even a cover story in ARTnews, and after my essays bounced around the world (as did I), social media art is finally taking a beating. It’s about time.
Paddy Johnson, who has thrashed the likes of Tino Sehgal (“Fuck Tino Sehgal“), Banksy (and “his seemingly endless juvenile commentary on art“), Yinka Shonibare (“college level postcolonial critiques“), Vanessa Beecroft (“a raging attention seeking narcissist oblivious to her racist behavior“), Eva and Franco Mattes (“Hard to imagine a video that would piss me off more“) and the entire New Museum (“Committed Suicide With Banality“), has finally taken some time to attack my work, both in L Magazine and her popular art blog Art Fag City. In her usual colorful choice of words, she described it as “relentlessly banal” and “vacuous”, and she pegged me as a “consistent offender”.
Overall, Johnson and others spend a breathtaking number of paragraphs looking at work that supposedly lacks content or meaning. I’m not the type to enter social media spats, but even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to. Due to time zone differences between New York and here in Beijing, I’m rarely awake when the most heated discussions happen, and due to the Great Firewall, often I can’t even get onto Twitter or Disqus at all. So I apologize if I missed something that’s already been discussed. I appreciate those who’ve stepped in to speak about my work, and who’ve emailed and Skped with me to keep me updated.
Social Media Art: It’s Not About You, It Is About You
Twitter art criticism bums me out sometimes, but not for the reason you might think. I don’t mind being critiqued. I certainly welcome it, as it’s the only way I can grow an artist. But much Twitter art criticism is the result of light engagement with the work. Indeed, I suspect that you have to immerse yourself to truly understand social media art. The concept of the work and its documentation are important parts, but it’s not enough; there’s an experiential quality that just can’t be ignored.
Because he is not allowed to cross the Great Firewall and post on Twitter, Ai Weiwei's fans have been sending him postcards. Image courtesy Flickr user duyanpili on a Creative Commons License.
It’s part of the nature of social media in general. Those who just dip their toes in Twitter see a world of donut meals and late nights with He-Man. But then one day, if you remain open to it, you start to see friendships develop, with in-jokes and shared celebrations. You start to understand that the cumulative effect of social media, in isolation and/or in interaction with the real world, is what’s important. Using social media is like one long durational performance.
We face the same challenge with the art, which is why it can be easily misunderstood if only experienced on the surface. As Vartanian wrote, he “obsessively watched” one of Man Bartlett’s performances. Others have reported this same sense of being sucked in, of being captivated by what initially seemed to be a silly concept. (For the record, I recall Johnson spending some 15 seconds with Telepresent, while Vartanian, who defended it, spent at least 15 minutes [granted, he was the curator]).
Tuning in to a social media performance only briefly can be like critiquing one corner of a painting, one frame of a video art piece. Reviewing work based on third party accounts is even less effective. It takes time for the audience to truly understand what’s going on. It takes time to understand the nature of the interaction and how it supports or enhances the concept. Putting feathers on a mannequin sounds vapid, as does sharing a beer with someone via Skype during a gallery opening. But those in the moment often find themselves drawn to the art, responding to it in a visceral, emotional way.
This need for immersion places a high demand on artist and audience alike. And as William Powhida pointed out, it also makes for an awkward critical relationship. But we’re all grown-ups here, and I can certainly think of harsher evaluations of one’s work. The series of posts of posts between Vartanian and Johnson are a welcome critique amidst a sea of otherwise positive press. The former makes a particularly good point that social media artists should start engaging with and developing the technology more, while exploring the nature of the social graph. Johnson rightly notes that social media art needs more serious critical evaluation. It can’t all be smiles.
What should good social media art look like? I have a few ideas, as I’ve been trying to encourage other artists to enter the fray. I’ve written about a number of them in the column I started for Art21 and here on Hyperallergic. I’ve commissioned a few through my art collective, @Platea. Countless artists were named in Barbara Pollack’s terrific ARTnews survey. The bravest social media artist has yet to issue a new tweet. If you don’t like my work, check out theirs. And if you don’t like theirs, start producing your own.
An Open Challenge to Social Media Art Critics
Photoglam, presented at Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida's #class, in which I reimagined the I-was-there Facebook photo.
I want to defend my work, but I’m a little too close to the source. I do want to say that I aim always to be critical of my practice. Part of why I moved to China was to force myself to re-evaluated my work in an environment not entirely conducive to social media. Whether or not I’ve succeeded is up to my audience and to the critics and curators to decide.
But I do want to speak briefly about the driving force behind what I do. What inspires my art is the radical transformation in communications technology in the past century and a half. I seek to explore how communications technologies have altered the way we live and the way we relate to each other.
As Johnson writes, “This reality is made self evident every time I IM with an intern who’s sitting across a desk from me. I don’t need or want art to further illuminate that for me.” For someone as actively engaged with new technologies as the folks behind Art Fag City, it may be exceedingly obvious what’s happening day to day to our psyches and social relationships every time we click and tweet. But how often do most of us really think about why we so easily get sucked into new social media platforms and vent to 11,000 people what may seem like minor frustrations? How often do we think about why we’d rather IM with an intern than speak face to face?
If anything can be said about the rapid-fire series of posts and tweets in the last few weeks, it’s that social media haven’t just changed the way we approach art but the way we approach criticism. For apparently not even being worth a #follow, my work and that of others have been discussed in numerous blog posts, tweets and snarky anonymous comments already. Those who’ve written responses have had to write responses to responses, and so on. As Magda Sawon pointed out, “Social media also brings change to the of formerly unchallenged ‘critic’s voice’ as Paddy’s post gets immediate response from Hra[g], other commenters and artist, forcing her into ‘explaining herself.’”.
The Great Firewall: I willfully stepped inside the Wall to force myself to re-evaluate my work in a totally foreign social media environment.
So I’d like to issue an open challenge, social media style. If Paddy Johnson is going to challenge me, I’m going to challenge Paddy Johnson. I’m participating in a show coming up called Portal. It looks at some of these very issues of connectivity and social media and contemporary art practice. It will be my first original piece of work in 2011, ever since I moved behind the Great Firewall, which has been surprisingly effective at keeping my creativity at bay (it doesn’t just block sites; it slows the Internet down entirely).
I invite anyone interested in social media art to really engage with the work. Don’t worry about where you live: you’ll be able to experience the show both online and in person. Spend time with each artist’s work, get to know it beyond a cursory look. It needs to be experienced beyond simply reading the concept and looking at images.
Then, if you still don’t like it, all the more power to you. Write an angry blog post denouncing the work, but ground it in your own experience and engagement with the artists. Then hit the unfollow button and be done with it. Block us if you really despise the work.
I hope this series of posts and arguments and articles is all a tipping point, a call to action for more artists to start engaging with these media more critically and more creatively. Some artists have stepped up to the plate. Follow me on Twitter or Weibo. Follow my list of social media artists and suggest others for me to add. Engage with us and challenge us. That’s why we’re online. We need more, and we need more critical review.
I’ll end with thoughts that Stephen Truax posted recently:
What An waving and smiling from behind the camera, inciting Nate and Rose to wave and smile back, or Man walking through Port Authority (arguably the most soul-crushing building in all of New York) earnestly trying to engage people to interact with him represents to me — PERSONALLY — is the possibility of something new, and happy, and positive, might actually have the potential to be successful in the 2010s.
That sounds pretty cool. Let’s give it a shot.
