Miami Presentation

The relationship between new media and the present creative landscape in which we create is that new media's aesthetics are not based on avant-garde or absolute models, but are based on possibility, opportunity, function, malleability, cloning, variation, animation and collaboration. New Media allows the artist to move all studio gestures into print and community both locale and global. New media provides the possibility of combining opposites simultaneously allowing an art work to exist as object and to be communicated as image. A work can be both original and an infinite copy. The image is never finished and can always be updated, recontextualized, reconsidered and reproduced. New media is marked by the ability to move between ideas and aesthetics. It is this ability to change, morph, communicate and collaborate that should be the conceptual/philosophical difference between past aesthetic development and the shifting target of the present.

This seemingly endless world of possibilities is all to often constricted by the very technology that creates its possibilities. The digital dark room, scanning, appropriation, transparent collage, and the easy access to typography provide a redundant set of well experienced visual possibilities for the artist and viewer. The digital aesthetic is marked by montage, appropriation, surrealism and the hybrid relating of painterly surface and digital image/text. What can easily be lost for the artist and the viewer in the maze of quick visual choices, endless variation, and the passion to turn the slickly printed digital image into art object is content. In attempting to bridge the gap between high art and commercial speak digital image making loses its conceptual power and direction leaving the artist to all to often loudly broadcast nothing of substance.

An image created in photoshop to become a photographic positive for transfer to a print matrix is momentarily stepping off the train, reaching a stopping point in the journey of digital possibility. A stopping point which may intersect in time and place with traditional print aesthetics. The image is not confined to one stop, in fact the train metaphor is too simple, the digital image defies the laws of physics; it can be in more than one place at one time. The image exist in multiple forms, with multiple possible uses. With each momentary stop the image is influenced by new aesthetic possibilities: paint, sculpture, western, eastern, popular or classical, each aesthetic perspective is no more than a lens for momentarily viewing and reconsidering the image.

If I start with a simple figure drawing on a sheet of notebook paper, the image when scanned can be resized and reworked to become collage material for a mixed media painting. The images become a thumbnail on a web site, a photographic positive transferred to an etching plate a litho stone or silkscreen. During a community art project the image is again re-configured and printed out and installed as a billboard. It becomes an exhibition announcement, a birthday card, or an Absolute Vodka ad. The digital life of the image insures its existence as resource, information, data, common chatter, animation, extruded sculptural form, commercial, community or art communication. New media is not bound by traditional aesthetics, but is brain culture, a synapse of possibilities and functions.

But is this line of thinking just a technical insight, another technical discussion? Or can it be a path into more critical aesthetic social and cultural issues concerning art ?

He takes an extreme modernist position, one in which the artists is autonomous from society, and art has no social function; Art communicates nothing except arts own existance;

Baudrillard, the contemporary French philosopher has said since everything has been done we are all inferior imitations. The maximum in intensity lies behind us the minimum in passion and intellectual inspiration lies before us.

This is a deconstructionist belief in which little is to be done. Art becomes a subversive act of tearing asunder personal and commercial culture. The artist dispassionately hovers above the ashes of Modernism {hix}

The artist's business requires an involvement in almost everything. and David Hammons says "the art audience is the worst audience in the world. Its overly educated, its conservative, its out to criticize not to understand, and it never has any fun. Why should I spend my time playing to that audience? The street audience is much more human, and their opinion is from the heart" Beuys reflects, "Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of our senile social system that continues to totter along the death line.

Lucy Lippard Carol Becker and Susie Gablik have developed a reconstructive concept which is complimentary to deconstruction. and offers a way out of nihilism. They pursue a relationship between art and individual artist which is based on social responsibility. They propose that intellectual freedom is not to be found in modernist alienation from society but will be rediscovered as artist work within society.

The writer Milan Kundera poses this image:

Once the great artist of the avant-garde were striding down the road toward the front, they walked with purpose and confidence, but in time a new generation of artists found themselves in a town square and their was no road forward no direction to go, so they milled around waiting for the gallery and museum owners to tell them which past discovery was to be rediscovered and become the momentary trend.

Becker Lippard and Gablik see another possibility in this scene where the artists mill around long enough to become part of the community and their relationship to the community has more value than just historical aesthetic economic and critical value In short the way out is to create art that is foremost about relationships and secondly about aesthetic, commodity and objects.

At Yale in 1975, I was taught that every act, every gesture of the hand and wrist were significant in determining the meaning and truthfulness of the drawing I was working on. I learned that scale was a signifier, the size and relationships of an image had consequences in determining aesthetic content. The 90- foot-long Al Held painting or the quarantined space of a Joseph Cornell, had a quality of sacred determination.

Now I can sit in front of my screen and create an image 3 inches by 12 inches and have it printed out billboard size. Pour paint with the click of a mouse, have an unlimited pallet, or could have the image turned into a three-dimensional form and extruded as sculpture. Change is instantaneous and can be determined by use rather than not aesthetic philosophy.

Can past aesthetic concerns be imported into digital image making? Printmaking painting Provide an art surface for digital images in an attempt to separate the digitally printed art image from the commercial. The painting and print are they now reduced to digital communication. Are they replacing the object? The art work hanging in a museum is physical and to understand its communication it needs to be experienced in place. The hidden qualities of an etching or painting can only be experienced in going out and seeing the original. Some have said that all digital work looks alike the reality is that all etchings look alike to a great degree the difference is that to see an etching or drawing the viewer has to go to the gallery or museum to experience the qualities of the work. With digital images, they are transported into our public space they seek us out. we live in a sea of these images and it becomes impossible and perhaps unnecessary to separate the commercial from the art object.

The opportunities for the artist using digital and new media should go beyond the technical, they are foremost conceptual changes determining the meaning and context of the image. for instance I can choose the audience to see and interact with my work. I can choose to have my images displayed to galleries and artists by placing my work on the American print alliance Web site or I could just as easily have my work placed on the web site of Shalom Village geriatric center in Overland park kansas. On the ApA web site the work is artistic product at village Shalom the work is to be used as intellectual stimulation for the elderly residence community. With village Shalom I can set up an interactive conversation recording and responding to the residents insights and comments. It is the same art work but through the use of New Media it is able to takes on significantly different functions. To me this is more than technology it is one fulfillment of the reconstructive ideas posed by Hammons, Becker, Gablik and Lippard.

What of the value of the original? What of aesthetics? What of the individual working alone in their studio? What of craft?

The values of the original has since been forever replaced by the "Culture of the Copy". We live in the culture of the drag queen, where truth is a charade either subtle, campy, flamboyant and changeable. Most of the childhood absolutes of my white middle class generation have been capsized by the waves of cultural difference. We live and create in the world of malleable proto-truths. We live between truths, between opposites in an oxymoron soup. New media is both a technology and a manner of creative thinking that allows for the movement between proto-truths, between aesthetic ideals. It is all turned up side down and aesthetics are merrily tolls and the new media technology is a means of visionary thinking.

Facts of Fictions is an ongoing and evolving work dealing with memory and creativity. For the past ten years I have been working on this sequential series of etchings. I use a narrow range of the possibilities etching offers; drawing and scraping and printing the plate with only black ink on gray BFK paper. I begin by drawing on a 24"X36" zinc plate, pulling only single impressions, and continuing to physically work the plates surface till it can no longer sustain touch or be printed. I then begin a new plate and continue the investigation. Over the past 10 years I have produced more than 50 unique images. I hope to continue this process for the rest of my life.

I use the process of etchings to create a physical memory, the plate becomes a memory surface. Memory establishes a since of self and purpose with out the need for politicized, contemporary aesthetic or linear story content. The plate speak in a highly articulate voice on the nature of creativity. It documents change, flow, and deterioration. The work may have many levels of communication I am most interested in creativity as content and recording the flow of my vision over decades.