Heath Bunting: Wired or Tired?

In the December issue of Wired magazine we find amidst the pre-Christmas
consumer spectacle of seductive scanners, professional sports watches,
expensive liquors and scantily clad savy female computer nerds, a
seductive spectacle of another shape. The current offering is a glossy
close up of the smirking bearded face of Heath Bunting, net.artist from
London, and one of the founders of the international net.art movement.

Bunting is best known amongst the digirati for his intended subversive
actions and attacks on corporate and consumer culture. Attacking
professionalism of all kinds, he was quickly scooped up by the very
professional Catherine David for last summer's Documenta X, the
prestigious international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. In a manner
astonishingly akin to Documenta X, with its redundant revisits to 70s
conceptual art, Bunting's naive stance revealed his ignorance of hard
lessons learned 20 years ago by less inexcusably innocent precursors.
Had he been paying attention, he could have learned sooner that there is
no outside in corporate consumer culture or more importantly, that
"outside" is just another target market. Well this December,
dec97@irational.org has apparently learned with a vengeance; He has
recently accepted a paid position as Senior Computer Artist at the Banff
Centre, in Canada. The logical next step, geographically and
ideologically, will be Senior computer consultant at Microsoft.

From the pages of Wired Magazine, we gaze at Bunting's face, a
tastefully consumable icon floating against a white background. As
Artist of the Hour, he appears ironic, cool and rebellious, gazing at
the reader knowingly, eyes narrowed, lips pursed–as if to suggest that
his subversion could somehow transcend the lifestyles magazine he is now
decorating. But what exactly is being subverted, or more precisely, what
are we being sold?

In Wired Magazine, the hot new item of consumption these days is the
subversive artist. Hot Wired and Wired have taken on the badly needed
position in the US as patrons of the digital arts. They have been more
friendly and inviting to digital arts than the art world ever has been.
There has been much theorizing of the relationship of the margins to the
center particularly from the net as a marginal, suburban strip mall, in
relation to the art world's urban center market place. Yet much of this
theorizing comes from a passive relationship to the digital media upon
which the theorists and artists are commenting. This was not the case
previously with Bunting, although with this latest transgression, or
rather absorption, we see how quickly one can be seduced to the sell
out. Demo or die!

Wired, unscrupulous entrepreneurs that they are, have taken to heart
their forefather lessons, Phillip Morris and Saatchi and Saatchi, to
name only two of the most licentious. They fully understand just how
useful a public relations device the arts can be.

Bunting, "Sage of Subversion," we are instructed with no apparent tongue
in cheek, is "fucking with commodities." Easier said than done, coming
from a magazine that has already taken home the prize for glorifying the
wild wild west of free market computer economics. Cool and radical in
its approach to consumption, why not invite Bunting to play act two to
patron saint Marshall McLuhan: another clever Commonwealth citizen with
a palpable sound bite?

No less ludicrous is the additional label Wired ascribes to Bunting,
"Michelangelo of the Digital age." In an age of post-mechanical
simulation, the notion of the hand in art is no longer nostalgic, it is
positively reactionary. To proclaim the possibility of a masterly mark
of the digital age is a suggestion seeping with egotism and nostalgia
for masterpieces whose poverty have been unmasked ever since that
fateful day in 1917 when the patron saint of contemporary art signed a
mass produced urinal.

The cultural loop–from subversion to assimilation to
absorption–revisits net art quicker, smoother and more quietly than
ever before. The ride begins with net production and distribution and
ends as hard copy pages spouting computer consumption and
techno-utopianism. Bunting becomes a complicit pawn in Wired magazine's
naughty boy game of–ever so gently–slapping the hand that feeds it.

And finally we must ask the sad but obvious question. What is Bunting
subverting? The answer is perhaps the greatest irony of all. He is, we
are informed by Wired, "wreaking havoc on corporate Web sites" and
"overturning capitalistic ideals." Anyone searching for Adidas and Nike
is given a pointer to the competitors site. So in essence, Bunting's
"subversion" is to participate in free market economics, in ending
monopolies and giving business to the competitors. Capitalism 101
anyone? Cheques for tuition may be sent via