Reflections on the Dawn of the Internet and Art
Correspondence from 2019 with CJ Stephens
Has the advent of the computer/social media/the info-sphere affected your practice in a positive or negative way? Both? How?
Here is my first great insight into computer culture;
“The thing about computers is that they save you a lot of time on work you would have never done.”
I will start by relating a memory of traveling across the border to Mexico for the first time in the 1980’s. I was at the place where you had to go to get your visa and temporary permit for your vehicle. These may have been the same place or two different places I don’t recall exactly but my experience was of being in a huge open building in the heat of summer with no air conditioning. Just fans and open doors and windows with perhaps hundreds of desks with typists all typing on typewriters making this overwhelming cacophony of noise – just the sound of the typewriters and the dust and the heat and paper and files stacked helter skelter on endless shelving. It was an amazing experience.
I thought to myself at that time that the level of bureaucracy and insistence on keeping documents which filled endless shelves in endless folders all kept in some sort of seemingly unruly fashion was a crisis that was approaching a stage of collapse. In a way this seemed a comfort because it meant there was a limit and no way for the government to have total control of information due to the impossibility of containing all of the information or being able to process it in any kind of meaningful way. The sheer amount of space and resources and labor involved to manage the documents and find them and make any sort of broad use of them from a ‘big data’ point of view was unsustainable over the long run. Mexico has still not computerized at that time, or for that matter invested in central air conditioning.
Fast forward to New York City and the gallery boom in Chelsea. Why Chelsea compared to Soho? Cheaper rent. Why? All of the buildings in the Chelsea area had been block after block full of storage for archives of records and documents for corporations and businesses.
But then came digitization, everyone converted to digital and all of the sudden over just a short time, all of those buildings full of all of those records being stored became useless, obsolete. All of the paper, I suppose, was destroyed or recycled. Leaving empty buildings, hence cheap gallery space (comparatively).
Enter the artist: before was ignorance, lack of connection and communication. All an artist knew before the internet was what he could directly experience in terms of the few art magazines, exhibitions he/she could experience and direct, usually localized friendships with kindred spirits if you could find them and the library if you had one – most were not dedicated too much in the way of art books unless it was a university library. Art books were very expensive to produce and to acquire. But the main thing, a complete lack of detail or sense of breadth. This was compounded by the old school institutional power structures and limits on access to the contemporary moment with most information being massaged by the gatekeepers and everyone’s reliance on them and the general assumption (created by them) that they were important and crucial and ‘in the know’ (if not in the now).
This is why, previously, art movements and groups were defined by art historians based on who knew who and who was primary and secondary based on proximity. Like today how scientists track a virus, ideas in the arts traveled the same way, person to person. With the internet the art virus travels instantaneously all over the world. Historians of the future will have a hard time using the old methods to figure out where any particular thing started except by tracking through the galleries but by the time ideas show up at the galleries it is greatly delayed from the time of inception.
I came of age in the late 70’s. Art life was tough and basically unreachable. One of my college profs told us; “If there is anything else in the world you can do besides be an artist, you should go do that.” Obviously, he was right since the failure rate for BFA grads is astronomical in terms of eking out a living from your artistic practice. But somehow, I kept going. “Onward through the fog.” (Made famous by the head shop Oat Willie’s of Austin starting in 1968. I was born in Austin, but I never lived there)
Now, while the internet is its own fog, it is also the light (or at least the light of your cell phone.) I immediately saw the revolutionary value of it when it came out and I got my first used 386 computer from my aikijutzu sensai when he upgraded to a 486 back in 1994. He had to show me how to turn it on since the switch was in the back for some reason. I thought that was an odd design choice, but what can you say: engineers. The internet mostly consisted of AOL and Compuserv in those early days and they were not too crazy about an independent internet beyond their infrastructures.
At the time everyone thought it was a craze like CB radio and that there was no way everybody in the country was going to figure out how to use a computer. But now look at us.
For the first years the internet was a construction zone as everyone figured out how to use a computer, set up an internet connection, buy domain names, build websites and understand the idea of key words, traffic and search engines.
So what has the computer, digitality and internet meant for me personally in that evolution culturally and artistically? That is a complex issue because my life span straddles the two worlds, life before and life during our current circumstance. We are in a tsunami of a magnitude we still cannot comprehend. This thing is so vast in scope and its influence so all-encompassing that we cannot wrap our collective mind around it. I think this is a good thing but makes it very difficult to navigate toward what we can see must be an unfathomable future looking back at only the last ten years. It is an unprecedented and rapidly developing historical period that future generations will always view as a complete mystery as to how such a leap could have happened in such a short period of time assuming civilization does not completely collapse for at least the next few hundred years.
Those under 30 just now don’t have any other version of the world to compare it to. So, it is already merely normal.
Oh yes, back to me personally… I can only say, and you might have figured it out by now, my experience has been completely positive. Frustrating but positive. I can see as much of the world as I am willing to ferret out. Before you had to look for knowledge, now you have to shield yourself from it. Any one person can only take in so much in any kind of meaningful way.
I use the computer and the internet to great advantage from communicating with my art dealers, art colleagues in a number of intertwining circles, to research, archiving, organizing, publishing, especially self-publishing using print on demand, developing my own catalog raisonne, getting my work out in the world to those interested. It goes on and on. I am still developing at the age of 63 with no horizons except the poverty of time. I think it is a very exciting time to be alive.
Do you think it is important to experience your work in physical proximity or is it just as "legible" to experience it fully on the web?
There is no relation between seeing handmade works of art in the first person compared to a digital image. However, I do take into account that almost everyone will never see my work firsthand. I also have the advantage as an artist of working in such a way that the general gist of my images can be seen and grasped through digital media. You miss out on a lot of the subtleties in the digital environment compared to the physical presence. With other works, the physical experience might be surprising in a good way. People have mentioned that the experience of seeing my work in person vastly exceeds their expectations compared to their assumptions based on only seeing the digital version.
Another insight for me is that an image can be manipulated to look a certain way digitally regardless of the physical manifestation of it. So, I do not worry about fidelity. I worry more about if a work looks as good as it can in the environment where one finds it, either good lighting and space for the physical experience, good color and contrast for the digital and sharpness for the publication version. They are as if three different works of art. Additionally, I think that the public has learned how to read a digital image more than they used to be able to do a few years ago and eventually we can assume that our digital experience now is still very primitive compared to ten or twenty years from now. By then we may not be able to distinguish the real from the digital experience.
The question is, however, will we, as a culture, as a society, have lost our ability to focus, to concentrate, to contemplate what we are experiencing. In our current state of attention deficit disorder? One has to wonder. But maybe this is just a phase or adjustment we all have to make together.
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Let me know what you think. Comment below.
Hi John, finally somebody leaving a comment! Thanks! Yes, all of us parents had to figure that out at the beginning. Parents still do.
That was a very compelling and well thought out piece, Cecil, thank you. It makes me think how sad i have been as my kids were growing up that they could practically build their sensory world around digital communication and media. Thankfully as they have gotten older they broke out of that cocoon (some) and I hope they will more. Elizabeth is a hands on painter and sculptor and Albert does application development so he's in the game so to speak but in his spare time he likes to build stuff. So all is not lost but it has been tough raising kids in the digital age, i am sure you can relate on some level, it's like the more i denied them the more they obsessed. Digital is a great convenience but it sure isn't the end all. It's like what do you do with it or what could you do really without it. Thanks again, sorry i rambled that's supposed to be your job.