Chris's analysis here is completely reasonable. New media art is not nor has
it ever been an art movement, in the sense that cubism, surrealism or
expressionism were. It's practice is too diverse with practitioners coming
at the manifold media involved from many different ideological and
philosophical positions. There is not sufficient coherence in the general
area of new media art for it to be regarded as a movement and it can be
argued that this a prerequisite for an avantgarde to form. Net art, or web
based art, or networked art, or whatever you want to call the work that
artists do who use the internet, is as diverse as the general area of new
media art and thus the same arguments likely apply to it as well.

Net.art is however a special case. It is now generally agreed what net.art
was and who was involved with it and that there was enough commonality
between the protagonists for their practice as a whole to be regarded as an
artistic movement. Thus it is possible that this group could constitute an
avantgarde. However, just because net.art can be identified as a coherent
enough body of practice to represent a movement it does not follow that is
is an avantgarde as well. I think that question is still up for debate.

A case could also be made for the area known as e-poetry or digital poetics
as being a movement. This is an interesting area of practice as it is as
much concerned with literature and textual practices as it is with the
visual arts. This convergence not only of specific media but also specific
disciplines might suggest that this area of practice is even more
differentiated than net.art was. The practitioners who have come to be
identified with this area of practice have done so in a self-conscious
manner (although I imagine to begin with they were not aware of this
happening; it was more a case of discovering at a certain point that there
was a community out there and yes, I would like to join it please - if
you'll have me). To some degree the digital poetics "movement" temporally
overlaps with net.art, certainly as concerns the practice of the early
adopters and practitioners in the field. However, unlike net.art digital
poetics is still going strong and is possibly at its peak in interest right
about now. The recent Tate Modern events run by John Cayley (a key
practitioner and theorist in the area) are evidence of enhanced interest in
such work, as was the Poeisis events run in Berlin a couple of years ago.
However, I would question whether this group of practitioners and associated
theorists represent an avantgarde either.

I fear that Mark Tribe's appropriation of the term "avantgarde" is driven
more by a desire to take on the romantic (and very marketable) mantle the
notion of the avantgarde confers and as such is contrived. It can be argued
(indeed, it often has been) that in a post-modernist context the notion of
the avantgarde is not plausible. As a concept the avantgarde was always
employed retrospectively to describe an area of practice and a group of
practitioners who all had a shared agenda more or less amounting to an
ideology. I don't think that this is really possible in the pluralist
culture we now live in. Thus I fear that Mark has done his thesis a
disservice by seeking to contextualise it in the manner he has.

That said, I have not read the book yet either and will reserve judgement
until then. My expectation is that it is going to be generally a good book,
as Mark is intelligent and articulate and he "was there".

Regards

Simon 


On 05.11.06 00:00, Chris Byrne wrote:

> Net.art, according to Mark's own criteria of "self-definition" and "a =20=
> 
> common set of artistic strategies and concerns", could be claimed as =20
> an avant-garde. However the remaining criteria form a rather shaky =20
> foundation for the thesis: applying these, one might equally state =20
> that printmaking, artists' books, or sculpture are avant-garde =20
> "movements". The focus on a single decade starting in 1994 is =20
> somewhat strange, historicising a term which clearly still has some =20
> currency.


Simon Biggs

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Research Professor, Edinburgh College of Art

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