This is Rhizome Today for Monday, November 3, 2014.
Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at rhizome.org/today.
From what I can see, the contested term "postinternet" can be defined according to three distinct but overlapping methods:
1. Socio-historically, by looking at how the term has been used.
2. As an art historical movement, by arguing that postinternet art originated in a certain time and had shared conceptual approach or aesthetics.
3. Economically, by describing it as a market shift from a gallery- and magazine-dominated art market to a blog and Instagram-dominated one, and the effects of that shift.
Brian Droitcour, writing in Art in America, argued that "A sheaf of essays grappling with the meaning of 'Post-Internet' by tracing a genealogy from Olson onward would be inadequate to describe what Post-Internet has become: a term to market art." This is methodology #1 in disguise; while dismissing most efforts to track the usage of the term, he then makes a claim about its current usage.
Meanwhile, Ed Halter was even more totalizing in the November Artforum when he wrote that "the problematic term 'post-Internet' was used to brand and sell a wide variety of art production."
Kudos to Karen Archey for, in her introduction to last year's "Post-Net Aesthetics" panel, citing a specific quote from Matthew Slotover as evidence of the term's newfound market utility. Further kudos to Karen Archey for her Post Internet questionnaire, which adopted methodology #1 by actually asking people how they use the term, as a follow-up to her exhibition at Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, which adopted methodology #2 to define postinternet as a set of concerns.
If one adopts that method #1, and attempts to track usage, it becomes quickly obvious that while the term sort of flared up in different cities and in slightly different ways over the past five years (Chicago, Berlin, New York, LA, London, etc.), critics and historians have now become one of the most prominent groups using the term—usually somewhat monolithically, as a means for discussing and contesting the art of the last five/ten years. We've now made it at least as important as a term for making critical hay as it is for selling work, I think.
According to my own working definitions, and here I'm going with methodology #2, one of the central concerns in various moments connected with postinternet has been that we should understand all our gestures, "online" and "offline", as actions in a network that is mediated and administered by computers. This is a very broad concern, and I'd contend that the discourse around it has grown and fractured to the point that nothing like a "moment" will cohere around the term "postinternet" again.
So, I have been thinking a lot about the way we make that critical hay. If artists have put this idea into practice in many interesting ways, and in some cynical ways, I rarely see critics doing so; this includes myself. One of the exceptions would be Brian Droitcour's Yelp writing, postinternet art criticism at its best: it is writing that takes its networked context and effects very much into account.
If we take the lessons of postinternet really to heart, though, we have to think about not only Droitcour's Yelp review but also his article for Art in America as functioning within a network. I think Droitcour understands this, and he probably saw it as an opportunity for championing underrecognized, less commercial, truly online artistic practices within the art establishment.
While his commitment to off-axis practices is laudable, Droitcour's dismissal of postinternet might be more in line with establishment interests than he recognizes. We're in interesting times when art magazines with close ties to the industrial model of the art gallery seem to have such consistent cynicism about postinternet, while a hybrid platform like Rhizome is consistently much more optimistic. (May we live in interesting times.) To be blunt: What is the role of Artforum or Art in America at a time when a work's value is driven more by a noted content aggregator or Instagram feed than a print magazine? Does postinternet merely reinforce the logic of the art market, as Droitcour contends? Or is it a part of, and a response to, a new logic of the market?
From where I'm sitting, it seems the assertion that "postinternet is a marketing term" functions less well as an art historical claim than as a move against a shifting power structure in the art market. When that move is made, what gets lost is the diversity of practices, conversations, and contexts in which the word postinternet was useful, in some way.
In their review of Frieze Art Fair, aqnb described the setting of our recent conversation series "Do You Follow? Art in Circulation" in a way that offers a different view of what postinternet might have been. "The infrastructure inside is non-existent so there are port-a-potties downstairs and the salon where the complimentary beer and Smartwater flows freely is full of plants framed by the building's concrete structure. The sense of a space catering to the bottom-feeding art marked 'post-internet' couldn't be better realized."
As the discourses that were tenuously held together, at times, by the umbrella term "postinternet" now fracture and go their separate ways, I look forward to continuing to follow them, on the axis and off.