Keeping together’ Prague and San Francisco: networking in 1960s art

2021

Two recent book projects capture the politics of interpreting American art during the Cold War: the two volume Hot Art, Cold War which anthologizes European critical responses to post-World War II American art and Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War that considers the way covert American funding supported a global network of publishing and exhibition ventures. Gerald Laing's painting Souvenir (of the Cuban Missile Crisis Oct 16-28 1962) from 1962-while not mentioned in either project-can introduce the ideological stakes of art interpretation during the Cold War period. 1 Painting on angled wooden slats, the British Pop artist created an image that changed as the viewer moved in front of it. Walking to one side, viewers see the US President John Kennedy; if they then walk over to the other, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev appears. Viewers who stick to a straight-on position-the standard way of looking at art on a wallencounter a scrambled, abstract image.

This paper argues for the utility of examining the various objects and events that were produced by Fluxus artists in the sixties and seventies as nodes in a network, rather than as autonomous objects of aesthetic contemplation. It reveals Fluxus performances and objects as interventions within the emerging culture of informationalism and that Fluxus deployed these network phenomena within the context of an emerging post-critical practice founded on construction rather than negation. It argues that, as an oppositional organization, Fluxus is best understood as an avant-garde manifestation in which the negative practice of institutional critique is displaced in favor of direct network transformation. https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/symploke/v023/23.1-2.rothman.pdf

Every artistic approach throughout history has formed its own language and reshaped the object of art. As for contemporary art, it was technology that determined its orientation: the computer, intermediary spaces, mass communication tools and the Internet have become the new media for many artists working today. It is clear that the digital perspective presents new and powerful sources Essay

2018

Modern and ConteMporary artists' networks. an inquiry into digital History of art and architecture editors Ljiljana kolešnik and sanja Horvatinčić Zagreb, 2018 This book is the result of the research conducted within the project ARTNET (IP-201311/6270) supported by the Croatian Science Foundation. Contents Ljiljana kolešnik On Digital Art History: The Objectives and the Results of the Project ARTNET Case stUdies irena kraševac, petra Šlosel Networking of Central European Artists' Associations via Exhibitions. The Slovenian Art Association, Czech Mánes and Polish Sztuka in Zagreb in the Early 20th Century dalibor prančević Between Art Nouveau and the Avant-Garde: The Personal (Ego) Network of Ivan Meštrović and the Map of Critical Reception of His Work during the 1910s tamara Bjažić klarin, nikola Bojić CIAM Network Visualisation-Detecting Ideological Ruptures in the CIAM Discourse Ljiljana kolešnik The Transition of New Tendencies from Neo-Avant-Garde Subculture to Institutional Mainstream Culture. An Example of Network Analysis sanja Horvatinčić Between Creativity and Pragmatism: Structural Network Analysis and Quantitative Survey of Federal Competitions for Yugoslav Monuments and Memorial Complexes (1955-1980

2016

What really happened in the 90’s? Well, we learned the art of collecting frequent flyer miles, travelling to peripheries in search of the new.1 Nordic Art Review Today’s fight for modernity is being waged in the same terms as yesterday’s, barring the fact that the avant-garde has stopped patrolling like some scout, the troop having come to a cautious standstill around a bivouac of certainties (biuoac de certitudes). Art was intended to prepare and announce a future world; today it is modelling possible universes.2

The unmistakable interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art continues to provoke investigations of categorisation. Use of the term ‘new media’ as a way of defining an area of creative practice is in itself problematic; it refers to a huge variety of art-making techniques without clarifying their differences. Although the incorporation of technology into new media works is significant, there are various ways in which such integration is achieved. The development of distributive networks of information, as well as earlier developments within the industrial realm of mechanical reproduction, has affected attitudes towards art-making and its procedures of production; in so doing, new creative practices have emerged. The recent combination of scientific innovation and artistic production into works like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Subtitled Public marks a new form of art-making that is separate from the past in many ways. Yet whilst such collaboration is materially innovative, the concepts driving new media works often operate as a development of more established art historical discourse, theories and practice. This dissertation investigates the often overlooked connections between new media art and its history in Minimalist and dematerialised practice (from the 1960s to present day). And in so doing, the networks on which both social and artistic form are produced can also be recognised.