|
Sjoukje van der Meulen I
Or at least some contemplation and reflection on the part of art criticism as regards its parameters and methods? Though a great deal has changed in recent years in art and literature, art criticism seems to have remained immune to any semblance of alteration or renewal. Art criticism is rarely the topic of provocative statements, let alone that it subjects itself or art in general to thorough reconsideration. While art proclaims vitality, dynamism and an imperfect quality, analyses addressing the reasons for using impermanent materials and the preference for formless and unemphatic works of art have yet to be conducted. And while language is being challenged to construct non-linear links between stories, words and sentences and is introducing other manners of reading, art criticism is adhering to its traditional text-oriented practice. Despite widely praised experimental artists, despite celebrated literary experiments, and despite its spirit that is by nature critical, attentive and analytical, art criticism has gradually dozed off.
II In addition to art and art evaluation, art criticism has traditionally set great store by its own medium - language. Various issues of art journals devoted to art criticism have made that much clear, such as the theme issue of the Dutch Museum Journal published in 1986 on the occasion of the symposium Schrijven zij als Mandarijnen (They Write Like Mandarins). Paul Groot has formulated that connectedness with language most radically in the sincere conviction that art criticism ought to be able to survive even without art. According to him, the critic is not there to explain the work of art, but to share his secrets; by deluging the work of art with words and thoughts, in the end it disappears and the critical language can take "the initiative." In the work of other authors, similar reflections upon the relation between art and language are also voiced. Stuart Morgan for one sees the art critic as a translator, someone who literally translates something from one language to another, all the while demonstrating the healthy tendency to colour the descriptions with his own interpretation, and not hesitating to leave any form of rhetoric untouched to make his point - a romantic, traditional conception.
The digitalization of text, image and sound has fundamentally altered the alphabet. In addition to letters, the alphabet, once the exclusive territory of language, now also consists of images and sounds. The new digital language that has emerged, the language of bits, implies that image, text and sound are on an equal footing, and has far-reaching repercussions for the interaction with all information. Image and text for example are growing closer, what with image becoming text and text image. The art critic no longer has to confine himself to the text, he can also construct his discourse in images. The image is not used as an illustration but as an argument, as a meta-story laced into the text. The new alphabet of image, text and sound consists of signs in which information is translated into bits, and words and sentences are created by a link between those signs so that, on the basis of the interface, a multi-medial hypertext is created. Hypertext is a method - a kind of electronic variant of the intertext of Roland Barthes - to arrange information, with words singled out in texts and expanded, so that more information is "opened," associating past the specific word or paragraph. These "hot words" make connections with other words, with images, a text or a file. They are connections without a clear structure, without a hierarchy,
About a year ago, there was a discussion in the Dutch weekly Vrij Nederland about the importance of hypertext. Two of the people who took part in the discussion were Dirk van Weelden, who had also been invited to the last symposium on art criticism in the Van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven in 1991, and Willem Velthoven, editor-in-chief of Mediamatic. Based on Cervantes' novel Don Quixote, Van Weelden illustrated the use of hypertext. Profuse information and references in the book enable the reader to arbitrarily consult all kinds of documentation - a history book, a book about knights or about the Spanish language. Thus hypertext bears a resemblance to a reading method that is centuries old, but is now being technically perfected. The principle of electronic hypertext reverts, or so Van Weelden holds, to a form of reading that constructs a network between all kinds of topics and is thus topographic rather than linear, within which the reader navigates. In the same magazine a week later, Willem Velthoven went one step further in an article provocatively entitled Socrates was wrong. In Benjamin's footsteps, using the latest technical instruments the contemporary author will conceive of text as a collection of "samples" that leads to the development of a new aesthetics and will be accompanied by far-reaching changes in consciousness. What these changes are to precisely signify as far as the mind of man is concerned is something Van Velthoven prefers to leave open, but he allows no doubt to remain about one thing: the phenomenon of hypertext will make the meaning and aesthetics of art increasingly dependent upon the context. He is probably not referring to the context in itself, but primarily to the variability of the context. IV Art absorbs these new developments considerably more rapidly than art criticism.
|
| READ ON | READ ON |