Sorry, I haven't posted in awhile, but I figured that using that as a starting sentence -- and statement of fact -- it may get picked up by Cory Arcangel's blog-searching algorithm for his personal re-blogging blog Sorry I Haven't Posted. Arcangel, a Brooklyn artist known mostly for his web art, created SiHP as an archive of darkly humorous apologetic internet failures. However, here, it serves as a prime, initial example of the meme -- in its most specific, OED definition -- as a piece of art or New Media Art.
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| this is img. 1 |
The Meme, an idea now most associated with awkward penguins, Maru et al., le bfs and le gfs, specific, high-volume tumblrs, and the now dated demotivational poster, finds its modern origination from the notorious evolutionary biologist, Ethology theorist, and author Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene (1976). Dawkins' original idea for the meme (img. 1) was the dissemination and evolution of ideas as that copying genetic recombination and replication, the more powerful the gene (the idea) the more replicated and transported it would be in successive generations. These days we read that as the more connecting and relevant, often comical, the meme is, the more popular and viral the meme may be. Much like art reflecting its present, the meme reflects our present(s), and the clearer that reflection may be, the more we are likely to connect with it and popularize it. Also, for the sake of academia, the meme shares the same ancestral inception that much poured-over and exhausted art history does: ancient Greece, through the philosophical term mimēma, or simply mimesis -- the act of imitation or copying. Which, not coincidentally, is one of the most poignant art historical narratives at present.
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| Wade Guyton, Portikus Show |
Most recently, one of the bigger names -- approaching blue chip status -- in the art world is Wade Guyton, much due to the 2007 MoMA exhibition What is Painting? Contemporary Art from the Collection. Guyton, born in Indiana and a University of Tennessee grad, watched his father paint when he could, mesmerized not only by the romance of painting and art, but the labor involved. That labor influenced Guyton the most, pushing him in search of the least labor intensive production of art possible.Today, Guyton's paintings are made not with the brush, scalpel, or even squeegee, but an Epsom UltraChrome or Stylus Pro Ink-Jet printer, printed on canvas or panel, causing the printer to make stochastic drips and other errors when printing. This is due to its inability to print efficiently on coarse surfaces, bringing to the equation a system of aleatorics, a popular theme in recent art history.
John Yau, the formidable critic at Hyperallergic and arts editor of the The Brooklyn Rail, recently wrote the following in a review of Wade Guyton: OS - the mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum (until January 13th):
At the same time, his incredibly productive lack of creativity fits right into the by now familiar and even petrified art historical narrative that claims that de-skilling, appropriation, and post-Duchampian/post-studio practice are the only games in town, that everything else is a failure not worth considering.*
Yau, writing about the possible reasons why Guyton has become a favorite and fits into the narratives of popular museums and art-history, again brings up the theory of de-skilling in art (read: the modes of production becoming less complex, streamlined and closer to mechanization). He relates Guyton as the natural successor, in terms of producing art and appropriating images, to Andy Warhol who often quipped that he wished he was a machine, completely androgynous. The meme, as a simple format of appropriated starting image or text and predetermined relations of thought -- as well as its complete redundancy and serial production -- is the most mechanized, streamlined piece of visual arts the internet has thus provided.
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Wolfgang Tillmans, Tukan,
2010, digital C-print |
It is de-skilling and the ascendancy of ink-jet printing that lend initial validation to the meme. This ascendancy, a recent featured article in Artforum's 50th Anniversary issue between Editor-in-chief Michelle Kuo and German artist Wolfgang Tillmans (Sept, 2012), is only the most telling example that new media is ensconcing itself deep into the folds of art history and should (1) not just be more talked about and fleshed out, but (2) should be considered a legitimate field of study for more visual arts programs around the country. It is this semi-validation that ink-jet painting has gained ground, and by that gain gives leverage to the idea of memes as art.
In 1939, Walter Benjamin wrote "comfort isolates." The comfort of convenience, but also the comfort in conformity, is what draws us to a meme -- the convenience of the idea comes to us as we are most comfortable, at the computer, and in that isolation we find we relate and laugh at the same ideas a person in Brasil has. But, Benjamin continues, "on the other hand, it brings those enjoying it closer to mechanization." The finality of this idea follows:
The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in
common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of
many steps. This development is taking place in many areas. One case
in point is the telephone, where the lifting of a receiver has taken the
place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank the
older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting,
pressing, and the like, the “snapping” of the photographer has had the
greatest consequences. A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an
event for an unlimited period of time. The camera gave the moment a
posthumous shock, as it were. Haptic experiences of this kind were
joined by optic ones, such as are supplied by the advertising pages of a
newspaper or the traffic of a big city. (1939)**
The touch of the finger, with just a few, quick clicks, now suffices to affix virtual images in the minds of millions around the world, depending on its level of communication and popularity -- the goal of any piece of art.
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| A mechanized meme |
* - John Yau in Hyperallergic
** - Walter Benjamin, "On some Motifs in Baudelaire." Benjamin made these comments vis-à-vis film in a manner also relevant to Warhol. (Foster, October, 2010)
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