Artists have always trained their sights on their surroundings. A
century ago, forward-looking artists surveyed the new industrial scene.
Today, many artists are responding to the Information-Age mediascape
enveloping us. To do so, they are appropriating mass media such as
billboards, advertising
posters, video, photography, and the Internet, together with traditional
mediums such as painting. Media art critiques the mass media,
advertising, and the new communications technologies that shape our
lives, as well as the related themes our media culture invokes, such as
censorship and celebrity. Through newsbriefs, commentary, and selected
links, the Media Channel's Media Arts section will showcase media
artworks by individuals and collectives.
As up to date as Media Art is, it already has a history: It has been
around since at least 1970, when artist Les Levine coined the term. The
most renowned media artists include Joseph Beuys, Border Art Workshop,
Lowell Darling, Gran Fury, the Guerrilla Girls, Jenny Holzer, Barbara
Kruger, Les Levine, Antonio Muntadas, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Krysztof Wodizcko,
and Alexei Shulgin, as well as videomakers such as Ant Farm, Douglas
Davis, Chip Lord, and Peter d'Agostino. Their media work ranges widely
in character and tone, from AIDS activists Gran Fury's agitprop street
posters to Lowell Darling's mediagenic 1980 campaign for Governor of
California, which featured the endorsement of then-incumbent governor
(and opponent) Jerry Brown.
Common to virtually all media artists is the desire to engage audiences
outside the conventional museum/gallery arena. Consider, for instance,
the work of Hocus Focus, a California duo that has imaginatively altered, or
"hacked," Apple computer's "Think Different" billboards. At 3 a.m. on a
summer night in 1998, the group affixed a new version of the Apple ad
featuring John and Yoko in bed to the wall of Manhattan's Dakota apartment building, where Ono lives. The group had blacked out the word
"different" in the tagline, leaving the admonition "Think," and added,
"IMAGINE LOVERS ARE NOT HUCKSTERS." Is this the work of artists?
Vandals? Or "culture jammers," whose interventions offer an acerbically
critical lens through which to view the corporate mass-communications
culture?
Ultimately, the question "Is it art?" is a diversion from more telling
or compelling questions about the mass media raised by such works. But,
like so many modern art-derived questions of the past century, this one
isn't likely to go away.
What will you see in the Media Channel's Media Art section?
The Media Art section isn't a conventional gallery, but a collection of
constantly changing links to media-arts events and news (Arts News), online media art and media art
resources (Gallery), the home of "The File Room", as well as "Perspectives", an area devoted to media art
commentary and criticism.
Many of today's media artworks utilize the interactive and
community-building capabilities of the Internet. Such interactivity
empowers viewers to participate in the creation of an artwork, which
might never be finished. In the Digital Age, the notion of authorship,
like so many once-stable concepts, is being redefined. Media
Channel regards art as another medium in the age of mass media. To
borrow a term from the German philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger, art
is part of the "consciousness industry," alongside the output of
Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the news industry. If you're interested
in the mass media, we're betting you'll be interested in the unique ways
media artists engage with crucial questions about our relationship to
the media environment.
