New Tools in the Academy: Barbarians at the Gate

Interestingly enough, if we look at photography's entrance into the Art Academy in the 1960's there are some striking parallels with the current position of electronic art. The 60's was a period that saw a dramatic increase in the number of universities offering photography programs, which was due to the large numbers of young students arriving on campus expecting to find courses in photography; a visual language which had potency for them because it was such a large part of their everyday lives. Within the Academy, photography was met with a significant amount of suspicion and derision. There was resistance to the machine-mediated aesthetic that photography represented, which was in direct opposition to traditional views on technical mastery and the trace of the artist. Photography was seen by many as the barbarian at the gates of the citadel.

Current digital tools are often treated with the same suspicion and disrespect (and fear). But digital technology is just another step in an evolution already begun by photography. What we learned from photography was the currency of the machine aesthetic as a language that could speak about the modern condition. What we have yet to learn from new electronic technology, at least in the typical art school, is the idea of the image not being tied to a physical presence.

But just as young people were behind the revolutionary spirit in the 60's, and photography courses sprang up from demand from the students, young students coming into college in the near future will have needs that most institutions are currently not prepared to meet. We don't need to be worried about the barbarians at the gate, but we'd better pay attention to the sixth graders in our local school.

Today's students are already arriving on campus having the same familiarity with computer technology as the students of the 60's had with the visual language of mass media. Furthermore, they seem to easily enter, and comfortably inhabit, a conceptual realm that has no physical equivalent. They often lack the anxiety one sees frequently in older artists, to ultimately extract the image from the virtual realm and give it physical existence. These students seem perfectly content to let the work reside in its original electronic form, provided this still allows access to an audience.

But often their interests don't find a comfortable fit on the bedrock of neat program categories that art schools are so frequently organized around. It has become increasingly common to see students whose interests encompass a mixture of image, text, and sound. But they are often forced to choose among the old tried and true areas like painting, sculpture, or photography. I imagine they must feel a bit like I do when flying on one of those long plane trips. No matter what the cabin steward says is being served for dinner, I know that my only real choice is between either chicken or beef.

This situation is further exacerbated by an almost universal bias in the visual arts towards the creation of art objects. Art as commodity is the life-blood of the contemporary gallery economy. Museums are founded on the premise of collecting objects that are rare and valuable. Art schools, because they feed these institutional mechanisms, naturally tend to produce young artists who subscribe to these same beliefs.

This prejudice is also common among artists using digital tools, particularly older artists trained in more traditional media (like myself). Most see the computer as merely a staging area for the production of their work, and assume that at some point the work will escape the confines of the screen; taking its rightful place in the world as an object, and not co-incidentally as a commodity.