By Rachel O’Reilly
Darren Tofts considered the 1990s history and present plight of media art in Australia,” in terms of individual artists, and access to and curatorial advocacy of media art work”. This presentation could be considered follow up commentary to Toft’s highly accessible and extremely timely book Interzone: Media Arts in Australia which addressed under-documented practices and a large gap in Australian art publishing (not only given the international renown of Australia’s media artists).
Tofts re-visited the 12 year old ‘Other Spaces’ report on emerging media art (Dickson) which officially registered media art’s “potentiality”, was focused on” media specificity”, attended to pressures on art galleries of the “interactive imperative”, and was yet “curiously cautious” about the acceptance and popularity of interactive art. Tofts suggests in 2009 not much has changed: the curatorial and conceptual place of new media art is “as important and tenuous today as it was then”. New institutions (Fed Square from 1992, Experimedia from 2003) as well as stalwart innovative orgs like ANAT, the Electronic Arts Foundation and DLux, were mentioned alongside specific exhibitions and symposiums of media art (mostly in Sydney and Melbourne), the work of theorists like McKenzie Wark, and publishing outlets e.g. FineArtForum (the work of Linda Carolli) – all of which took media art to exciting places here.
Tofts wants to know “what went wrong” after the 90s. Partly, he argued, the “diminution of attention is to be expected of any emerging art movement”, but Tofts also noted specific problems of flagrant relegation to the background. Mainstream and hugely influential old media art critics remained dismissive (e.g. Sebastian Smee); audiences had “interactivity fatigue”; artists couldn’t compete with “ifart mobile” (the commercial games and apps culture that formed around portable devices?) as well as other forms of” pedestrian cultural distraction” theorised by Wark; the dissolution of support from the Australia Council for the Arts significantly impacted…; and in “curatorial politics” there was a shift away from certain technological works now considered (and critiqued) “as a subgenre of the moving image”. (This final comment perhaps touches on not only the recent conversion of ACMI exhibition spaces, but also the work that video installation does in contemporary art museums and galleries to signify and translate a much more variegated contemporary media landscape).
The Melbourne-centric focus and computer-interactive specificity of media art in the Interzone publication has been already noted by some reviewers. While ineluctable partiality (and definitional restraint) is no gripe in itself (not here), I did want to consider that inevitable perspectivalism in the context of the passionately and articulately rendered national – or art historical – crisis presented. An acknowledgement of the transformation of the media landscape itself was missing (the under-participated explosion of online video, the expansion of software culture etc – media art exists here, and can’t do away with the screen incidentally). So were numerous practitioners and major events of ‘media art’ that have gone or stayed regional. Emergent experimental media/electronic art practices and platforms, such as those critically showcased at This Is Not Art (which has incidentally always mixed established and emerging artists to do away with some of these analytic fallacies of crisis and forgetting) continue, and characteristically (problematically, depending on the view) move on from making heritage claims. Curiously omitted too was the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane’s inauguration of an extremely lucrative Australian media art prize in 2009, offering significant opportunities and contemporary art-historical salience to both established and emerging ‘media art’ practitioners in a longer art and technology discourse.
Most at issue here was the use made of a 12 year old report of strategy and potentiality (‘Other Spaces’) to evidence present historical oversight; the trial of ‘now’ against the (genuine) rhetorics, optimism and desire of an emergent not yet? In Tofts’ own words elsewhere: “Interzone was designed to be a kind of policy speech to the Australian body politic to embrace media art as part of its national culture and not have it fade ignominiously into a minor footnote in the history of art in this country”. If policy doesn’t/can’t focalize or translate into history over time, then ‘policy speech’ (which might also be Tofts own modesty about criticality) will dialogue just as complexly with ‘what happens next’ as ‘Other Spaces’ did with the recent history that Tofts has documented. It is worth considering, politically that is, that cultures of potentiality deemed historically “over” may have also just done their first round of work, or shape-shifted. The fact that no actual artists, works or platforms generated after 2003 were mentioned during the querying of ‘what happens now’ fostered the suspicion of inattention. De-privileging this something that is always happening risks shutting off documented histories from critically productive dialogue about the ‘what’ of practice and support, criticism and historicization that happens now and next. Tofts’ temporal politics and historiographic instinct might perhaps be furthered opened out to these issues, and perhaps somewhat relieved by them. Or not. Regardless, despite a veritable downturn of a certain kind of media art practice, knowledge, and funding, I suspect that it’s far too early to be anxious about the continuity (perhaps transformation, variegation is better) of media and technology-interested practice, exhibition, criticism, in Australia. At risk of complacency, this view has precisely to do with the attentional work of people like Tofts and the agents, works and spaces of recent practice that he has documented as that precursor to a future present.