A Dan Graham essay on his magazine work, and a Jeff Wall note on the distinction between pictures which are either on or off (lightboxes; projections) or always on (gelatin silver prints; drawings; paintings) gets me thinking about how this particular historical moment (digital cameras; lightjet printers; the Web) differs from past historical moments. Graham observed that, in the late 1960s, an artwork was only accepted as an artwork if it was written about and reproduced in an art magazine. This led him to logically conclude that physical art objects had become an intermediate step in the legitimation-as-art process. Graham experimented by making printed texts and photocollages which were themselves art objects, thereby "dematerializing" the physical art object.

Web publication seems to me to differ from art magazine publication. In the 1960s, publications like Artforum and Artsmagazine shaped and directed taste. These magazines derived their authority from the quality of their contributors' judgements and their crititical up-to-dateness. A young artist living, in, say, Vancouver or some similar cultural backwater in 1968 or 1969 could learn a great deal from an Artforum subscription, including that art was not only made in cultural capitals like New York, Paris, or London, but could realistically and validly be made anywhere....even, say, in Vancouver!

Contrast this with the current state of affairs, in which glossy publications like Art News and Canadian Art act as interpreters of art for readers who hypothetically require the magazines' intercession in order to understand and appreciate art. In the late 1960s, the audience for magazines like Artforum was mainly composed of other artists. The contemporary audience for magazines like Art News is far more nebulous to me. Who are these magazines aimed at? Probably collectors, lazy folks who need constant reassurance about their purchases. No artist in my circle takes Art News' or Canadian Art's pronouncements seriously. How could they, given the hostility these publications routinely display toward intellectual complexity and the neccessity of judgement-making?

Contemporary art magazines no longer fufill the gatekeeper role they once filled in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Web, by contrast, is an open door into a building containing an infinite number of rooms. Most of what is in those rooms is, by definition, of pretty low quality, but that's not always neccessarily so. The quality of each room's content will depend on each proprietor's skill and judgement, the seriousness they bring to the conceptualization, execution, and presentation of their work. It seems, too, that there is no prohibition against simultaneously creating work and critiquing, contextualizing, or analyzing it. So that the work and its exegesis and/or commentary are no longer separate ("art object" in the gallery; reproduction and "criticism" of the work in the art magazine or printed catalogue) but side-by-side, a process that reveals previously unconsidered aspects of each element's other.
- posted by cjb @ 10:03 AM