SFAQ_issue_sixteen

ERIC RODENBECK & QUENTIN HARDY
In conversation with ANDREW MCCLINTOCK
ERIC RODENBECK: The place we don’t want to go is bemoaning the lack of—like
there’s an easy conversation to have about how the net tycoons are not supporting
the arts, in the way that the Bentley Foundation does. I’m Interested in thinking about
how does this new generation of technologists, and how does the new sensibility in San
Francisco impact what’s happening in the arts?
QUENTIN HARDY: My training as a journalist should discourage me from thinking
in huge apocalyptic millennial terms. Stuff usually happens in increments. But it does
seem like right now technology is so strong and so pervasive that it is actually changing
our sensibilities about time and space to the point of changing human consciousness.
It has occasionally happened in the past, and every time the function and uses and
deployment of Art changes.
ER: How do we think about it as different from previous terms, because the train did
that, and the car did that, and the phone did that?
QH: None of those were trivial. In the 19 th century there was industrialization, new
habits of urban life, photography, mass media, and with electrification the transformation
of nighttime into day for the first time in human history, there were enormous
changes in life, in consciousness. You see dramatic changes in how art was made and
consumed as a result.
EH: So against the backdrop of radical technological change impacting cultural sensibility,
what’s different this time?
QH: One thing that happens is you get the great sweeping novels of society. You get
Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, the Russians -- there are numerous novels in Europe about
enormous complexities and changes in work and relations. They wrote dramas with
multiple characters, and they’re trying to depict a kind of travel guide, if you will, for a
new kind of society and a new kind of civilization that’s being created.
I think painting responded to technology as well. In some ways it reacted to the more
complex society with public murals and large canvases, but the job of painting also reacts
to technology itself. In part, that was because photography quickly took over the
job of depicting the real. Painters started to depict the real in the sense of depicting
consciousness, with Impressionism. Depicting emotion, taking an interior journey to
places the camera can’t go, such as perception and consciousness, which culminates
in Abstract Expressionism. Even before that, visual artists reacted to mass-produced
images, with everything from collage to pop art.
What doesn’t change is that art is in this longer dialogue with society going back hundreds
of years. The issue now becomes how artists will respond to a new technology
environment, and how they will shape it. But Eric, you’re trained in it, so I’m going to
let you run with the ball.
ER: In our own practice I’ve found that it’s easier to participate in the art world if
you’re not really participating in the art world. If that makes any sense. We’ve been
getting into galleries and participating in art conferences without calling ourselves specifically
artists or trying to sell to collectors or anything like that. So maybe this gets
back to the point that you and I were talking about the other day, where in the ‘80s it
was easier to do stuff and fun to do stuff because you never—
QH: There was no prospect of making money. That was kind of liberating. Maybe
we’re heading back to new ways.
ER: I’ve been in two gallery shows in the Museum of Modern Art and never intended
to be an artist or make any money off it, and I wouldn’t say that’s incidental because
it was very deliberate, we tried to make art that was provocative even though it was
outside of the gallery model - maybe the internet is something that lets you step aside
from all that, there isn’t any sense that you have to get into some academy or anything,
you can just make stuff.
QH: You can make stuff and you can publish stuff and you can share it openly. And
there’s almost a sensibility in the Internet that you should. That it should be given more
love and not money. Of course, that’s all been a means to what they call monetization
of other businesses.
Andrew McClintock: There are a lot of artists that have been making internet specific
work for over ten years who have started to shift towards making actual objects
now. They are linked into a system of demand for easy monetization of their work
by galleries. This is now called the post-net art movement which doesn’t really mean
anything but re-contextualizing of something that, in its natural state, wanted to exist
outside the realm of the art world.
QH: Art, like everything, does exist inside an economic structure, which is to say also
a cultural structure, and the structure we have is one largely of markets. And markets
on broad bases seem to thrive on abundance, where we shift huge commodities
around, but in many ways I think markets function on the basis of scarcity. What’s the
thing you can offer? What’s the thing that’s needed, that’s valuable, that people want?
And that really shifts as we move past the basic essentials of life, and you move up to
the scarce thing. In the 19 th century, with these Dickens novels, in some ways it helped
people understand a new and more complex world, even point to its wrongs and to
seek justice. Having it depicted for you, and he wrote to an audience very specifically,
where he’s telling them about this, and how there could be human happiness in that
world.
If you look more recently at a lot of conceptual work or even happenings and action
work—it was being caught up in trying to find human moments, to identify the human
actor creating the art, and often to have it disappear: part of the art’s point was that it
would go away, that it wouldn’t be durable, or encoded in some system.
Now, because of the Internet, there are a couple things I think that we should think
about. One is, as you say, the post-Internet movement, and the making of something
that very specifically isn’t digital. It has finger prints on it, it smells, it’s tactile, and
that’s a subset of what I think is a broader trend, which may or may not last, but the
scarce valuable thing in a digital world is authentic human moments. It’s being looked
in the eye, it’s feeling something, that is real, that will not seem duplicated. I think one
of the strong reactions we have right now to Google Glass is it kind of makes all the
world something that can be digitized, feels like, I should say, something that can make
all of the world digitized and permanent and searchable. And there’s a very vigorous
reaction against that in some ways. We want finite human moments that are private
to hold on to.
ER: My friend Kevin Slavin says that Google has facts and cities have secrets. We
should all still be able to have secrets - not necessarily in a private way, but not everything
dialed up. Honestly I can remember when iTunes first started up and there
was this idea of access when music went digital. There was this phrase that started
going around - that suddenly poseurs could have access to playlists that were neither
understood nor deserved.
QH: You don’t have to fight for much any more, or personally struggle to arrive at the
ownership of something - I think there may already be types of art where part of the
object is your struggle to create it.
ER: That’s interesting, when I came here from New York, that was something that I
had never heard anybody talk about before, how long they worked on a painting. It
always struck me as a totally Californian. Like lazy – like so what?
QH: Yeah welcome to the planet. Good work takes time–news flash.
ER: Right and who cares, but you’re saying, the act of the struggle of making -
QH: The documentation of it has become part of the art object. You can see it in
commercial products already. Etsy is useful because things have back-stories. And on
Kickstarter things have back stories. This is who I am, this is my passion, here’s why it
is my passion. Please endorse it with your money.
How much is San Francisco changing? Was San Francisco ever an easy place to be an
artist?
ER: Yes.
QH: It was?
ER: Well, there is this mythical moment that everyone is upset is gone, which was the
early ‘90s, I’m upset about it. I had a three-bedroom apartment on 22 nd and Folsom for
$850 a month, that was great, but that was the Mission, I never could afford to live on
the other side of Valencia Street.
Stamen Design, A map of the private network of “tech buses.” More info http://stamen.com/zero1