A response to Joseph Nechvatal.

Joseph Nechvatal's analysis of the roots of a certain aspect of art and
technology, traced back through the Bauhaus, was lucid and well
researched…but only uncovers part of the picture. Like most things,
art and technology, cyber culture, digital art, media art, whatever you
want to call it, has a pluralistic history. The fact that there is no
agreed name or terminology for such artistic practice itself suggests a
plural and multi-faceted thing.

I remember being struck, when visiting the Bauhaus Weimar as a guest
lecturer some years ago, by the feeling of the place. As an artist who
was initially greatly influenced by the Bauhaus ideals of Gropius,
Kandinsky, Nagy, etc, when I first entered the building I felt very
confused. Excited to be in such an historically loaded place, humbled by
what had gone before there, somewhat deflated by what I found…it was
quite cathartic. Once inside, walking up the main spiral stairs to what
would be my class studio (the same studio that Klee had regularly taught
in) I passed by a faded fresco by Oskar Schlemmer on the wall. It looked
so amateur really, not at all heroic (as Joseph suggested in his piece,
the Bauhaus never managed to realise its own aims). It reminded me of
living on a commune in the early 70's, where we painted bad
collaborative murals on our walls (bad because we were unskilled artists
to say the least, and generally off our faces which didn't help much
either). The same sense of innocence, hope, self-belief and optimism
saturated this quite modest building in Weimar (I couldn't tell about
the drugs).

In many ways this gave the place, and the idea of the Bauhaus itself, a
human and personal scale. It became easier to imagine how it must have
been there, 75 years before, and how the Gropius ideal had evolved as a
discourse between real people from quite modest beginnings. This also
caused one to reflect on how Modernism (the Bauhaus being recognised as
both a source and a pinnacle of that "ideology") has today come to be
seen as a monolithic and monocultural edifice that only the anarchic
pluralism of Post-Modernism was able to knock down to size.

But somehow this narrative that Post-Modernism sells itself (not unlike
the myths that Modernism sold itself previously) that big bad Modernism
was stopped dead in its tracks by the many little pluralistic David's of
Post-Modernism with their sparkling inter-textualities not only rings
false but also appears to do little more than repeat the rather sad
failures of Modernism itself (just as the crumbling and discoloured
stucco on the Bauhaus itself was rather sad - although that has all be
charmingly restored for Weimar's year as European City of Culture and is
all now very "20th Centurye olde worlde").

Do I sound sarcastic? I guess I do. As a kid I was inspired by the
rhetoric of Modernism, whether it was the mantra of a better life for
all through clean minimalistic architecture or the belief that the
United Nations and its arms like UNESCO would transform the world into a
rainbow of cultures living in a harmony of equality. I mean, is it wrong
to have thought these were quite nice ideas? But of course all that
failed. But, lucky us, Post-Modernism offered a way out of this sticky
mess, something that could at least redeem us intellectually and allow
us (that is, the accolytes of Po-Mo) to appear in a better light, where
the horrors of the 20th Century could be catalogued and described with
personal impunity.

OK, this is a very personal take on this fairytale, and perhaps
inappropriate to a public forum such as Rhizome. But I imagine that many
people share this experience, especially those of a certain age. The
thing is that history is made by people and the results of what they do
(OK, history can be and mean many things) and the development of art and
technology, as suggested above, has many histories (many of which are
still current).

There is the line that can be seen running through the work of the
kineticists and much of the work emerging from the "new democracies" of
the 60's (Brasil, Argentina, India, etc). Here I am thinking of an
artist such as Jesus Raphael Soto (who is headlined here in London,
alongside Gabo and Duchamp, in the kinetic art show currently on at the
Hayward Gallery) whose work so well represented the optimism of the 60's
in these "emerging" cultures.

There is another line, perhaps less the vector-like certainty of the
kineticists but although wobbly still a line, described by Rauschenberg,
Cage, Tudor and the Nine Evenings scene.

Another line is found on the West Coast with Whitney, Belson, etc, and
yet others in Europe (both East - the Russian kineticists - and West -
Op Art).

And there are numerous others…

What I am trying to suggest here is that the engagement of technology by
artists, although it has often been ideologically driven, has just as
often not been. That any attempt to historicise the many kinds of
practice in this area (in the old sense of "to historicise", which I
understand means to establish a single and hegemonic interpretation of
events) is to lose sight of the rich and diverse dynamics of such work
and to do a diservice to both the artists and us the viewers.

I am not suggesting that Joseph was attempting to do this, not at
all…just wishing to suggest a context for what he wrote so well.