Peter Halley, a painter intimately associated with the 80s NeoGeo
school, is widely considered one of the most well-spoken artists of his
generation. His painting in the 80s infused the tropes and codes of
Minimalism, Constructivism, and Color Field painting with the
influential 80s theory of Baudrillard and Foucault. These paintings
often featured a "cell and conduit" system, foregrounding the dominance
of that cultural model.

A recent MOMA exhibition, "New Concepts in Printmaking 1: Peter Halley,"
was accompanied by a Web project made with nine digital images acquired
by the museum in 1996. While flow charts are a dominant spatial
structure for Halley's offline installation, the Web project features
(and is titled), exploding cells. "Exploding Cells" is the second online
project for the artist: his first being a project at The Thing, which
will soon be re-mounted at http://www.thing.net, in the editions
section.

Mark Tribe recently spoke with Peter Halley about the flow chart
paradigm, his Web project, and art in the 90s.

http://www.moma.org/webprojects/halley/index.html

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Peter Halley, On Line__________________________________

1. Digital Delivery –> Simulation

Mark Tribe: In your essay "On Line," you talked about digital media in
terms of linear circulations, or lines that circles back on themselves.
Now you're delivering your work to the museum on disks on which the data
is stored in exactly the way you describe–spirals. Any thoughts on
that?

Peter Halley: I do claim a certain premonition by using the term "on
line" in 1986. I don't know why I used the term. I wasn't trying to
encode the information for MOMA in a linear spiral, that's just the way
it's done. But in a way it does point to the inevitability of the trend
I identified in that essay.

MT: Was there any conceptual significance (as opposed to pragmatic
significance) to that digital mode of delivery (Zip disk)?

PH: I'd say that the distinction you're drawing between pragmatic and
conceptual significance is arbitrary. Pragmatics change conceptual
parameters; pragmatic decisions change the nature of content. On the
other hand, the mode of delivery does have a sort of conceptual beauty,
in that you can store the work in such a non-material form. So, in that
way it was conceptually elegant, but not revolutionary, except within
the very conservative realm of printmaking itself. The Zip disk doesn't
mean much to me except I like that you can put it on the shelf.

MT: Does this show exhibit any conceptual continuities/discontinuities
with your earlier work about simulation and networks?

PH: I wrote a lot about the idea of simulation and still think it's a
huge issue in our culture, but I am ambivalent as to whether my work was
about simulation (that is, the simulation of previous paintings). I
think my work was closer to the idea of the hyperrealisation of previous
paintings.

I was also very concerned with Baudrillard's idea of the primacy of the
"model." In terms of the spatial transactions in our society, the model
is the cell and conduit configuration. People have criticized that as a
totalizing vision. But I see it as an intellectual construct–I was
proposing it, not claiming it in an absolutist way.

2. The MOMA Installation: Flow Charts and their Content

[Note: In the MOMA installation, two large diagrams were featured
prominently on the longest wall of the space opposite the door.]

PH: What I've been involved with in the 90s is how this spatial system
has become so prevalent in our intellectual life, in academia, and in
the organization of bureaucracies. Since the 80s, I have been obsessed
with how flow charts have become increasingly omnipresent in various
intellectual fields.

The print on the left is a logic diagram, found in a computer science
library, and then redrawn. In the late 20th century we map logic or
reason or artificial intelligence in that same block-and-line
configuration that is characteristic of cells and conduits.

The print on the right maps human behavior in the same way. A computer
only accepts information in certain forms, and that has had a profound
effect on the human sciences; this psychology diagram is a good example
of that. Jean-Francois Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition"
differentiates between knowledge and information in the computer age.
The flowcharts are really about knowledge being turned into information,
because of the hegemony of the computer.

3. Real Space and Web Space: the Gallery Installation and the Web
Project

MT: In the Web project, you provide line compositions and color
pallettes. It's a bit like a coloring book. Back in the 19th century,
there was a raging debate among members of the French Academy: Ingres
represented line, Delacroix represented color. I don't suppose this
particular historical subtext entered into your thought process, but are
there other issues of line versus color that are relevant to the Web
project?

PH: Yes, to all my work! All I do is color-in stuff. That's the way I
work: I make line drawings on the computer and then color them in with
paint. For me, the composition always precedes color.

For the Web project, I set up the matrix and the person has certain
choices within it. It's also based on a Jasper Johns print edition from
the mid-sixties, in which there was a line drawing of a target, and a
little box of water colors. It was a kit.

Another factor for the Web project was my skepticism about the notion of
"interactivity" on the computer. Most decisions are choices between two
paths; binary decisions are the only possible ones with computers. So I
wanted to do something in which the choices were very mechanistic.

4. Changes in the Art World

MT: Do you see the so-called "new media" as representing a paradigm
shift in the way art is made, thought, and institutionalized? Put
simply, is new media art really new?

PH: During the 80s, there was a certain amount of ideological fighting
as to which art was good. In the 90s there is extraordinary consensus as
to who the important artists are: Matthew Barney, Kiki Smith, Damien
Hirst, and three or four others. There is no counter-movement.

But a pressing question is how can new media consolidate itself through
institutions and develop a financial base?

It is very difficult because the stuff does not fit into the traditional
sociological reasons why people collect art. Art collectors are very
fetishistic. For them, art has to be an object, and has to have that
special "there's only three of these in the world" kind of feeling. It
is a challenge to produce a different kind of support base so that new
media gets more than 15 minutes of attention.

MT: If postmodern art, exemplified by the art of the 80s, were defined
as a problem of repetition in terms of its relation to the past, is new
media art something else (i.e. not postmodern)?

My problem with the 90s was that in the 80s, at least a few artists were
talking about appropriation, a relation to the past that was different
from influence. Influence acknowledges the legitimacy of history (taking
history as a Hegelian progression). Appropriation was one way around
that, since it imagined a different relation between the two, a relation
more neutral than critical.

I read all the new American video and performance art as specifically
influenced by the art of the 70s, except nobody wants to say that. Nor
do they acknowledge the counter-cultural element originally present in
the 70s. So, I think it's a problem for these artists that their only
relation with previous art is one of influence. But nobody talks about
it.

But, the Web for me has very different possibilities. There are no
rules. It's like when newspapers were invented–in the late 18th
century. Everything we consider today to be a newspaper, did not exist
as such.

MT: Do you see yourself as having any role in the world of new media
art, perhaps as someone who makes the transition from traditional media
and provides a set of links or threads that connect two spaces?

PH: In my own work I am trying to take a Pop art approach: direct, not
fancy, simplistic. I don't want my work to be techy or pretentious. I'm
not moving into this "wonderful" new world. I just do something dumb and
clunky and see what happens.