'Pastiching' the modernist avant-garde: a postmodern strategy

Sensing the limitations of contemporary art on the web, a number of
artists have created sites which incorporate more sophisticated
strategies which fall under the nevertheless modernist rubric of
formalism. It is both productive and ironic that these sites turn to a
specific historical manifestation of modernism as an escape avenue. The
strategy of formal sites involves the exploration of the HTTP protocol,
HTML, and browser specific features as a unique medium in a Greenbergian
sense:

"The avant-garde poet or artist tries in effect to imitate God by
creating something valid solely on its own terms in the way nature
itself is valid, in the way a landscape-not a picture- is aesthetically
valid; something is given, increate, independent of meanings, similars,
or originals. Content is to be dissolved so completely into form that
the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to
anything not itself…

"In turning his attention away from subject-matter or common experience,
the poet or artist turns it upon the medium of his own craft… These
themselves become the subject matter of art and literature." (Clement
Greenberg "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", p. 23, italics mine)

Such sites, via the formal exploration of the www as medium, may employ
a feature of the web such as navigation via hypertext (which was
designed to clearly and quickly provide management of and access to
information), and repurpose it to instead obscure navigation inside of
hypertext spaces where the information is no longer contextualized as
information. Such a strategy may force the viewer to navigate through
non-obvious or even totally random links which lead to further
abstractions.

Other features common to formal sites include user interface tricks
(fake buttons and menus as examples), use and repurpose of data from
outside the site elsewhere on the web, the redisposition of data into
alternate MIME types (Example: parsing the data of a JPEG and presenting
it as gibberish text instead of an image), improperly sized images to
form abstract visuals, secret messages, hidden meanings, (sometimes in
the form of the meta-structure of the site yet obscured by the opacity
involved in navigating or viewing it), and the alternate, extended,
'wrong' or 'creative' use of HTML or browser features to achieve
unexplored effects in ways which were not intended in HTML or by browser
design. Stated far too simply but conveniently: web formalism is the use
of the web for the web's sake. The most important of such sites seems to
be jodi (jodi.org is a web project by Heemskerk and Paesmans).

The application of this art-of-the-web strategy is dependent
nevertheless on a closely related modernist conception. This dependency
is the discourse of the avant-garde, where it is the artist's role to
drive the medium, conquer new aesthetic territory and open his/her
audience to new experiences. The only difference between this and the
strategy of the avant-garde in painting is one of media. Whereas one can
view historical examples of avant-garde painting as simulacra on the
web, formal art of the web reuses the strategy of avant-gardist painting
via implementation of a variety of web protocols and techniques. But,
implemented as they are in the web context of art systems on life
support, the return of the avant-garde in its of-the-web manifestation
serves as a marker delineating a division between the application of
habit and the application of ideas. In this sense, web formalism is not
a reification of the modernist subject, but rather an oppositional and
strategic pastiche of a modernist conceptual framework intended to
self-referentially conquer a living territory.

But as with many things postmodern, this strategy could be easily
subsumed and reincorporated. It is reasonable to assert that just as the
avant-garde in painting was eventually deflated by minimalism and short
circuited by the closed loops of post-modernist appropriation, so too
will web-formalism enter into the socio-cultural circuitry of art and be
imitated to death, reappearing on life support as deterrence machinery.
Jodi, for example, is very important in terms of repositioning the web
as a medium, but there are already signs of it taking its place in art
history through art institutions. In the end it may be easily reabsorbed
as a brilliant example of art to be imitated endlessly. This may in
small part be due to its debt to the modernist avant-garde. Whatever the
case may be, it is clear that the real achievement of web formalism is
to refocus art practice on the www as conceptually based.