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What is the logic, the need or the desire that pushes more and more artists to work outside the limits of their own discipline, defined by the notions of free reflexivity and pure aesthetics, incarnated by the gallery-magazine-museum-collection circuit, and haunted by the memory of the normative genres, painting and sculpture?
Pop art, conceptual art, body art, performance and video each marked a rupture of the disciplinary frame, already in the s. Yet now we are confronted with a new series of outbursts, under such names as net. The heterogeneous character of the list immediately suggests its application to all the domains where theory and practice meet.
In the artistic forms that result, one will always find remains of the old modernist tropism whereby art designates itself first of all, drawing the attention back to its own operations of expression, representation, metaphorization or deconstruction. But in the kind of work I want to discuss, there is something more at stake. We can approach it through the word that the Nettime project used to define its collective ambitions.
For the artists, theorists, media activists and programmers who inhabited that mailing list — one of the important vectors of net. This critique was to be carried out inside the network itself, using its languages and its technical tools and focusing on its characteristic objects, with the goal of influencing or even of directly shaping its development — but without refusing the possibilities of distribution outside this circuit.
