Site / Non-Site / Website

Jason Hoelscher 2014 Anthology: The Art of Critique: Reimagining Art Criticism and the Art School Critique, edited by Stephen Knudsen, introduction by James Elkins, forthcoming from The University of Chicago Press SITE / NON-SITE / WEBSITE PRESENCE, ABSENCE AND INTERFACE IN THE ONLINE STUDIO CRITIQUE What you are really confronted with in a non-site is the absence of the site. It is a contraction rather than an expansion of scale. One is confronted with a very ponderous, weighty absence It just goes on constantly permuting itself into this endless doubling, so that you have the nonsite functioning as a mirror and the site doubling as a reflection. Existence becomes a doubtful thing. You are presented with a nonworld, or what I call a non-site. Robert Smithson, Interview, 19691 The virtualization of college education is upon us. Online university programs range from the simple posting of recorded lectures to full-blown distance-learning curricula; from mandatory scheduled chat sessions to asynchronous courses that accommodate the scheduling needs of students from time zones worldwide. With the latter approach it is possible that a student might go from freshman year to graduation without ever having real-time interaction with peers or instructors. While many fields of education would seem readily adaptable to a virtual learning environment, studio artone of the few areas of cultural endeavor that still involve working with hand-made objectsdoes not. This apparent incommensurability raises a number of conceptual issues that cut to the core of art itself, involving meaning, ambiguity, interpretation and evaluation. Further, if according to Robert Hughes art experienced through reproduction rather than the actual objectis like phone sex in comparison to real sex,2 what about the experience and critical reception of art in an online classroom? Having designed and taught a number of undergraduate and graduate-level online painting courses since 2007, I have firsthand experience of how vexing such questions can be. The theoretical implications of online art education are so far relatively unexplored. My approach will thus be prolegomenal: more analogical than analytic, more exploratory than explanatory. Further, because the topic is a large one to consider, I will focus on a particular set of philosophical issues that emerge from the status of the artwork submitted for virtual critique: first, art evaluated online is rarely created as an online work in and of itself, but is rather a virtual representation of an artwork that physically exists elsewhere; second, the viewers experience of the artwork, as well as the interaction between instructor, student and the students peers, occurs remotely, at a distance. The artwork, artist and viewers can thus be seen relative to one another as simultaneously present in one sense and absent in another.

Robert Smithson, Fragments of an Interview with P.A. Norvell, 1969, in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, edited by Jack Flam (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1996), 193. 2 Robert Hughes, Nothing if Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 5.
1

Site / Non-Site / Website

This in-between there, yet not there status creates a host of challenges for interpretation and critical evaluation. While art has always operated with a degree of interpretive ambiguity, the online studio course has the potential to up the ante considerably. By definition, visual art is made to be seen; how might it influence the artist if she or he knows that the artwork will be experienced by proxy, seen only at a step once removed? Might the expectations and critical framework of the artists peers and instructors be reconfigured as well? The implications of these concerns are larger than they first appear. As examples the apparently innocuous shifts from the atelier to the individual studio, or from the use of the paintpot to the highly portable paint tube, wrought long-term unpredictable and nonlinear changes in the condition of art and its interpretation. How will distance-based art instruction, predicated as it is on vicarious representation via telepresence, change artistic production and critical reception? The present essay will consider the hybridized, supplemental in/tangibility of the artwork under critique; the role of translation from physical to virtual modes of art; and the difficulty of establishing shared interpretive frameworks and experiential interfaces within what might be called the post-specific, post-locative critique. While I will primarily consider these topics in terms of painting, the considerations discussed herein are broad enough to apply to the virtual art critique in general. Supplemental Representation: Specific Media in a Non-Medium-Specific Framework The mirror functions as a heterotopia in the respect that it renders this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the looking glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since, in order to be perceived, it has to pass through this virtual point, which is over there. Michel Foucault, Heterotopias, 19673 In my experience, the primary complication of the online studio course arises from consideration of what the group gathers to critique. Or, to be more specific, the complication arises from what is precisely not there when the group does not gather for the critique. By that rather Zen k!an-like formulation I mean the lack of an art object in the traditional sense, and the fact that there is no particular gathering time for the critique: only rarely is more than one person in the online classroom environment at any given moment. While formats vary among schools, most online art courses share a few basic features. Foremost is a set of web pages that contain that weeks lecture content; depending on the course this content might range from open-source wikis or embedded videos of paint-mixing techniques, to densely footnoted text that articulates theoretical implications of facture and brushstroke. Most courses also contain discussion areas, in which students can answer questions posed by the instructor or discuss assigned readings. This is usually the most active part of the course, serving as a combined classroom and commons area. The discussion board is also where students submit project proposals, photos of work in progress, and images of completed artwork. Comments and interaction are usually done via text, though some courses make use of video teleconference programs like Skype or Adobe Connect. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces (Heterotopias), 1967, in Heterotopia and the City: Public Space in a Post-Civil Society, edited by Michiel Dahaene and Lieven de Cauter (London: Routledge, 2008), 17.
2
3

Site / Non-Site / Website

Already, such a circumstance poses a direct challenge to the traditional lets grab some chairs and look at the art mode of the in-person, on-ground critique. In a typical online critique the students have a specified range of days during which they must upload images of their completed projects and leave comments on each others work. This asynchronous format is more a rule than an exception: though it varies among schools, many, if not most, online art courses are explicitly designed to prevent the need for synchronized meetings, in order to better attract and serve a potentially worldwide student body. From the start, then, the distance-learning critique has a complex relationship with both space and time. Submission guidelines generally mandate at least three photos of each artwork: a straighton, frontal image; a detail photo, often taken from the side in raking light; and an image showing the work next to a universally recognizable object like a light switch, in order to show scale. These images are typically submitted in standardized, widely recognized file formats such as jpegs, with corollary textual material submitted as pdf files attached to discussion posts. This raises at least two questions: first, what differentiates one jpeg or pdf from any other jpeg or pdf? Second, what critique strategies are necessary when the focus of consideration is not the work itself but rather an encoded representation of the work? Though formatted no differently than any other jpeg, the file under consideration is presented for critique as an artwork and, in order for the online course to work, must be evaluated as such. But what, precisely, is submitted in such a circumstance? Do referent and reference combine into a sort of systemic, transmedial diptych, a fusion of painting + record-ofpainting? Does one component take precedence over the other? Further, if the file is evaluated as an artwork itself, in what way does it occupy an alternate techno/ontological status from other similarly encoded digital files that are not considered art? If as per Immanuel Kant the apprehension and understanding of an experience relies on a combination of the intuition and imagination, the virtual artwork raises interesting concerns about these very questions. For Kant the imagination of the viewer prompts a category of something seen before: in this case the category of paintings. Against the larger category of painting itself, the intuition is analogous to the raw sensory intake, a specific inputa painting being perceived at that momentwhich is then contextualized as part of the category to which it belongs. In other words, though we might not have seen a particular painting before, we are still able to recognize it as a painting due to a synthesis of intuition and imagination that collapses the manifold of possibilities into a particular instance: The first thing that is given to us is appearance, which, if it is combined with consciousness, is called perception. But since every appearance contains a manifold, thus different perceptions are encountered dispersed and separate in the mind, a combination of them, which they cannot have in sense itself, is therefore necessary. There is thus an active faculty of the synthesis of this manifold in us, which we call imagination, and whose action exercised immediately upon perceptions I call apprehension. For the imagination is to bring the manifold of intuition into an image; it must therefore antecedently take up the impressions into its activity, i.e., apprehend them.4 Kants writings on apprehension, perception and judgment, notoriously difficult to begin with, are complicated further when applied to the online studio artwork. First, the image perceived on Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated and edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1781/1998), 238-239.
3
4

Site / Non-Site / Website

the screen is categorized by the viewers imagination as a jpeg; second, that category must in some way be neutralized so that the interpretation of the image is rerouted in a way that causes the viewers intuition and imagination to synthesize and categorize the image as an artwork instead. Such questions might not pose much of a problem on their own. After all, our contemporary understanding of 1960s conceptual art is based largely on documentation of longgone, intangible artworks. For that matter, we can easily evaluate a photographic image taken with a digital camera, because the original is digital from the start. What complicates the online painting critique is the fact that in most cases the virtual submission, while presented for evaluation as the artwork itself, also refers to a physical work of art that exists elsewhere. Everyone in the course knows of this double-status of the file submission; its an open secret that the work being critiqued is a stand-in. Interestingly, however, this fact is rarely brought up. Like shouting out a reminder of the fictional status of a character during a movies most dramatic scene, the aesthetic status of the stand-in goes unremarked during the critique, so as not to undermine the willing suspension of disbelief required to learn and to progress in the virtual classroom. The digital file format as work of art could thus be considered as an aestheticized fetish, what Victor Burgin, paraphrasing Freud, called, the fetishism of presence [based in] disavowal that splitting between knowledge and belief which takes the characteristic form, I know very well, but nevertheless5 Like a food critic reviewing a menu instead of a meal, students and instructor are asked to train their critical faculties on something not fully, sensorially present. This makes the situation sound rather negative, though that isnt necessarily the case. As with much contemporary art, ones epistemic mindset, whether one agrees to the terms of admission, can play an important role. With the experience of Marcel Duchamps readymades, for example, an a priori decision of whether art manifests beauty or whether it manifests intent will determine whether you accept a readymade as a work of art. In the case of the online critique the participants have made their choice in advance, whether conscious of the implications or not. By the act of enrolling, the student has agreed that the critical consideration of a jpeg as a valid work of art is within the bounds of aesthetic, ontological, and epistemological acceptability. A pragmatic decision, made perhaps due to geographic, financial, or scheduling considerations, therefore creates an implicit affiliation with a complex of ideas regarding the presence and absence of culturally- and technologically-encoded aesthetic artifacts. To give the student artwork its proper due thus requires a hybrid approach, a critique predicated on awareness of the simultaneous tangibility and intangibility of the work under consideration. A way to manage this is to consider the submitted jpeg artwork as what Jacques Derrida called a supplementa kind of self-sufficient, secondary reference to something not present, for example the written transcript of a speech. In words applicable to the ontological ambiguity of the online artwork, Derrida wrote of the supplement that its addition comes to make up for a deficiency, it comes to compensate for a

Victor Burgin, The Absence of Presence: Conceptualism and Postmodernisms, in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 48.
4

Site / Non-Site / Website

primordial nonself-presence.6 Like the virtual art submission, the supplement is always ambiguous, existing in an in-between state of undecidability and reflexivity. Both a primary thing itself and a secondary reference to something else, the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance which takes-(the)-place something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy.7 The supplement is thus more than simply a secondary record of something else: it stands in for, enhances, is informed by, and eventually comes to replace that to which it refers. While the original referentthe speech or paintingmay have the power of presence, this presence is not accessible anywhere other than in the specific time or space in which it occurs. If you miss the talk or cannot travel to the artists studio then youre out of luck. The supplement, on the other hand, whether a transcript or a jpeg, makes up for the spatiotemporal limitations of the speech or painting by virtually distributing its presence in terms of location and duration. The online artwork thus occupies an intermediate position: while created and structured as the static interface of an individual painting, it also exists as a dynamic, readily transmittable form of digital communication. Though questionable to some not initiated in the online critique, over time the supplement becomes the primaryand validreferent itself, as the original is overlooked due to its inaccessible, situational specificity. This process has long been active in culture at large. For example, people routinely claim to have been moved by art they have never seen in person; further, once later viewed firsthand, the original is then inevitably compared to the long-familiar photo reference. Similarly, art school instructors, whether on-ground or online, often suggest that students research specific artists, knowing full well that such research will likely consist of an online image search rather than a trip to the museum. The online studio class can perhaps be seen as an acute manifestation of the increasing cultural acceptance of virtuality and once-removed experience. If that is indeed the case, a crucial distinction is that while such issues are considered secondary to general culture (when such issues are considered at all), virtualization and supplementarity are not only unavoidable within, but in many ways actually constitute, the environment of the online critique. More than just a fetish object or second-rate reference to something else, then, the digital art submission can thus be productively and provocatively critiqued through the framework of supplementarity, a stand-in that acquires an independent status: originary object and digital reference become bound together in a series of systemic feedback relationships between mutual replacement, enhancement, and serial recontextualization. Perhaps it is this, the complex system of reciprocity between referent and reference, which becomes the object of critique. The Task of the Intermodal Translator Translation is a mode. To comprehend it as mode one must go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserls Theory of Signs, translated by David B. Allison and Newton Garver (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 87. 7 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967/1997), 144-145. Italics and extra characters in original.
5
6

Site / Non-Site / Website

Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, 19238 In addition to raising questions of reference and referent, the virtual painting submission also forces changes in the critical evaluation of form and content. If it is fair to say that an artwork in a physical space distributes form and content into its local environmentor more precisely, distributes content bound to form into its local environmentthen the online expression of an artwork is a non-localizable distribution of content without the infrastructure of a specific form. Neither paint on canvas nor charcoal on paper, the virtual painting is first and foremost an arrangement of pixels. These pixels appear as they do only through deep-level algorithmic processes that are invisibly negotiated between software and hardware: the pixel arrangements that manifest an online artwork are thus transitory organizations that arise from specifically articulated mathematical relationships within the topological flux of networks. The online artwork therefore emerges from a form of technologically mediated, disrupted process: not artist > brush > canvas > critique space > viewer, but rather artist > brush > canvas > photograph > upload > software > algorithm > network > download > algorithm > monitor > viewer. Here, even the most traditional still-life painting undergoes a degree of epistemological processing and resituation that makes Moholy-Nagys remote-ordered Telephone Paintings seem straightforward in comparison. Rendering an effective critical judgment of such an artwork can be difficult; there is a learning curve in adjusting to the lack of a kinesthetic relationship between body and art. Rather than proprioceptively grounding viewer and artwork in a multisensory space, beholden to mass and gravity at a specific moment in time, the online artwork places the viewer in relation to a screen, whether hand-held, desk-mounted or otherwise. The works nonconceptual content, the residual traces of the artists body and activity, is thus largely neutralized when seen online.9 Among other effects, this negation of bodily awareness foregrounds the sense of sight at the expense of the other senses. By privileging eyesight above all others, the online artwork recalls what Caroline Jones calls the Greenberg effect, the partitioning and bureaucratization of the senses.10 However, where Greenbergs partitioning of the senses was enforceable by little more than discursive dictate, in the case of the online artwork the sensory partitioning is inescapable, enforced as it is by the limitations of current screen-based interfaces. This digital privileging of sight is also accompanied by an equalization of surface, aura and space. As the conduit for an endless stream of jpegs and online activity in general, the screen levels out differences between works of art, making critical evaluation all the more difficult. For example, regardless of the degree of painterly facture, all works are smooth when viewed on a monitor. While it is possible to represent texture, actual tactile qualities are subsumed by the material flatness of the screen: what was once an indexical signifier becomes an iconic representation of an indexical signifier. While this is a nuanced distinction to be sure, this factor is crucial when it comes to the interpretation and critique of an artwork. Like judging a symphony based only on its musical Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, 1923, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 70. 9 For more on the nonconceptual content of painting, see Andrew Inkpin, The Nonconceptual Content of Painting, 2010, in Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, vol. 2, 2010. 10 Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenbergs Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (University of Chicago Press, 2005), xxii-xxiii.
6
8

Site / Non-Site / Website

score, we evaluate not the subjective potential of an expressionistic brushstroke, but rather a representation of the subjective potential of an expressionistic brushstroke, which activates in our minds the concept expressionism. This is an example of what Kant called a hypotyposis, the presentation of a symbol to the intuition of a perceiver, whose imagination must then flesh out the details. Related to Kants previously described relationship between the intuition and imagination, the function of such a presentation is thus to afford a means of reinvoking the concepts according to the imaginations law of association [using] either words or visible (algebraic or even mimetic) signs, simply as expressions for concepts.11 Similarly, when it comes to spatial signification, whether the object of critique is a realist painting or a hard-edge abstract painting, the picture space of the artworks gets leveled out: aesthetico-ideological pictorial distinctions are smoothed out in the backlit, RGB glow of the monitor or touchscreen. Whether Renaissance perspectival space or late-modernist opticality, it no longer matters: it is now all screen-space. The online critique must also negotiate issues of artistic aura and authenticity. It is difficult to convey an aura, arising as it does from an artworks presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be,12 when the work is a manifestation of digital code, replicable and potentially distributable to computers worldwide. If as per Benjamin the ritual, totemic aura of an artwork depreciates when its reproduction meets its beholder halfway, the situation is no doubt complicated further when that beholder is in a distinctly atypical place and time for an art experience, such as while wearing pajamas and having logged in during breakfast. These conditions, the object of online critique as virtual fetish vs. hybridized supplement; the privileging of eyesight at the expense of kinesthetic apprehension; and the distributive equalization of aura, authenticity and picture space force a new approach to the studio critique. How might we go about formulating these new approaches? The ontologization of the art object, a term used to describe the video documentation of a performance art piece, may be of particular relevance here. Like a paintings conversion from studio object to self-representational online supplement, when performance art is concretized for reference beyond the time and location of the performance itself it undergoes a reconfiguration from a direct, 1-to-1 relationship to a diffused, many-to-many system of relationships. Consider the fact that although the majority of those who write about historically influential performance art have not experienced those works in person, both the field and its critical evaluation appear to be thriving. Peggy Phelan has written extensively of the ontology of performance, having stated, Performances only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.13 While this may be true of the transformation of performance from action to artifact, is it necessarily true of the transformation from analog Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, translated by James Creed Meredith, edited and revised by Nicholas Walker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1790/2007), 179. Italics and parenthetical insertion in original. 12 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ibid, 220. 13 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York, Routledge, 1993), 146.
7
11

Site / Non-Site / Website

physical painting to pixel-based painting? In the case of painting the conversion would seem less extreme, being not so much an intermodal translation from action to artifact but rather a translation from one type of artifact (culturally encoded object) to another (technologically encoded file format). A middle ground between artifact and reconfiguration via ontologization may be found in the performativity of the digital file itself. Boris Groys, writing of the differences in manifestation each time a jpeg file is opened, examines some implications of the allographic replicability of the digital image: [Looking] at digital images we are also confronted every time with a new event of visualization of invisible data A digital image, to be seen, should not be merely exhibited but staged, performed. Here the image begins to function analogously to a piece of music, whose score, as is generally known, is not identical to the musical piece Thus one can say that digitalization turns the visual arts into a performing art.14 The ontologization of performance art, as per Phelan, may indeed be a violation of the integrity of the performance. As we have considered above, however, the digitalization of a painted artwork is not asor at least not as thoroughlyproblematic, being a translation of a painted image into a pixelated image. This digitalization creates an image file; each time this image file is opened, whether on the same computer or another, it forces what Groys calls a performance of the digital file, thus completing the conversion of the autographic, hand-created object to an allographic, serially re-creatable work based on software code. This sequence of events and reconfigurations brings us back to Jacques Derrida. Derridas notion of the iterability and performativity of speech describes the capability of an utterance, here the artwork as image file, to operate in different contexts and to make something happen within those contexts: What holds for the receiver holds also, for the same reasons, for the sender or the producer. To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a sort of machine which is productive in turn, and which my future disappearance will not, in principle, hinder in its functioning, offering things and itself to be read and to be rewritten.15 Perhaps it is here that a framework for critical evaluation of the online artwork can be found. The fusion of performative modes creates a situation in which the online work can be critiqued as more than just a stand-in. Ontologization combined with iterabilitythe capacity of a communication to maintain coherence in different contextsallows for the distribution of the artwork from the artists studio to the distant viewers in a virtual critique. Next, algorithmic performativity converts the binary-encoded image file to an image self-similar enough to be apprehensible by a range of remotely situated critique participants. Lastly, supplementarity and linguistic performativity allow the activated image file to communicate itself as an artwork, to be critiqued according to its own criteria as an aesthetic thing in and of itself. Meaning-Specificity and Online Presence vs. Absence Traditionally, mass-communications research has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity Boris Groys, From Image to Image File and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization, 2006, in Art Power (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 85. 15 Jacques Derrida, Speech Event Context, 1972, translated by Samuel Weber and Jeffrey Mehlman, in Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 8.
8
14

Site / Non-Site / Website

sender/message/receiver But it is also possible (and useful) to think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction. Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, 197316 In previous sections we considered macroscale issues that arise from the critique of a digital file format presented as art. If the hybrid there/not there supplementarity of the online artwork poses challenges at a categorical level, what about at the level of the individual work? In this regard, it may be helpful to view the relationship between original and digital representation in terms of the relationship between speech and writing. In Of Grammatology, Derrida famously deconstructed the idea of phonocentrism, the privileging of the act of speech over the act of writing. A core aspect of phonocentric thought is that speech has a presence, an immediacy; the written word is considered secondary, a mere transcription of an utterance. It doesnt take much of a conceptual leap to correlate this with a students painting, present in a studio, and its online digital submission. While writing is able to record and transmit information across time (or for that matter across a digital network), a phonocentric reliance on the speakers presence, or an analogous reliance on the physical presence of an artwork, creates a problem in that the restitution of presence by language dispenses with passage through the world. 17 In other words, by relying on direct presence, speech is available only in the specific place and time that it is spoken. Like the digital critique submission in relation to the physical painting, writing thus has a supplemental relationship to the directness of speech. Derrida went further to show that writing, capable as it is of being experienced in the absence of its writer, opens up interpretive gaps that must be filled by the reader. Similarly, in the online critique we are forced by circumstance to critique the artwork without the direct presence of the artist. That said, there is a form of presence, still, in emails, images and discussion posts. In many ways the online critique operates via a fusion of presence and absence as mediated through technological telepresence. When applied to the multi-user feedback loop of the virtual critique, the potential for aesthetic information distortion runs high; such a state of reciprocal absence is one in which meaning quite easily becomes detached from its carrier. Like the childhood game of telephone, in which the phrasing and content of a message drifts as players whisper it to each other around a circle, the participants in an online critique experience cascading information loss, meaning distortion, misunderstandings and translation breakdowns. These phenomena are in essence amplified versions of those seen in everyday online communication. The conversational nuances of email or discussion posts are pretty lowresolution when compared to face-to-face interaction, hence the need for such textual accoutrements as parenthetical insertions, over-explicatory paragraphs, and emoticons. This

Stuart Hall, Encoding/Decoding, 1973, in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, ed. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe and Paul Willis (London: Routledge, 1980), 117. 17 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967/1997), 153-54. Italics in original.
9

16

Site / Non-Site / Website

raises an interesting question: must the virtual artwork, in order to enhance its communicability, be hyped up and over-articulated as well? 18 Like the idea of the digital art object as fetish, this begins to sound negative, as if relegating online studio classes to second-rate status. Indeed, it likely is a liability if one conducts an online critique according to standards of presence and denotative clarity. However, similar to the reframing of the fetish as supplement, the interpretational ambiguity of the online critique can also be reconsidered as an opportunity. For example, in addition to providing cogent examples of supplementarity, iterability, performativity, absence and presence, the online studio critique can also be seen as an exemplification of the writerly text, as described by Roland Barthes. In his essay From Work to Text, Barthes began his discussion of the writerly text by differentiating the work, described as a Newtonian, classically defined, traditional, interpretively assertive aesthetic object, from the text, an Einsteinian, contingent, propositional aesthetic object. Whereas a work is an autonomous, finished thing unto itself, a text is more open, a contingent process that engages in a relativistic relationship between writer, reader, and observer (or, for our purposes, the artist, online viewer and critique facilitator). Consider the hybridized absent/present and performative qualities of the relationship between physical art object and supplemental, binary-coded online artwork, in terms of Barthes distinctions between work and text: [The] work can be seen [whereas] the text is a process of demonstration the work can be held in the hand, the text is held in language, only exists in a moment of discourse the Text is experienced only in an activity of production What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.19 Having differentiated work from text, Barthes breaks the text itself into two additional categories, the readerly text and the writerly text. The readerly text is one in which the reader can passively locate ready-made meaning. Simple and direct, the readerly text requires little effort other than to sit back and take in meaning; think of a paperback thriller one might read during a lazy day at the beach. The writerly text, on the other hand, demands that the reader participate in the creation of meaning, not simply as a consumer of the text but a co-producer as well. Think here of a complex painting or work of literature that leaves room for interpretation, depending not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers.20 The writerly text thus has a performative aspect, an unfinalizability that emerges during a process of contingent co-creation. Perhaps the online artwork can be critiqued as an example of a writerly text, as an ongoing aesthetic object open to interpretation and engaged in a contingent relationship between artist, artifact, audience and critic. That said, however, there is a crucial distinction to be made: as far as I can ascertain, Barthes wrote about relatively direct relationships between text and reader, which differs considerably from the once-removed quality of the virtual supplement. The

Thanks are due to theorist and curator Leonie Bradbury for making this point in a conversation during the formative stages of this paper, as well as for extensive feedback throughout. 19 Roland Barthes, From Work to Text, 1971, in Barthes, Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 157. Italics and parentheses in original. 20 Barthes. 159. Italics in original.
10

18

Site / Non-Site / Website

object of the virtual critique is simultaneously an online text in itself and a representation of a different text. This virtual signification of the once-removed writerly text suggests the possibility of reframing the notion of hypertext, the conceptual foundation of todays interlinked World Wide Web. As originally defined in 1965 by computer researcher Ted Nelson, hypertext is a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not be conveniently represented on paper,21 (or perhaps, on canvas). Critiqued through this framework, the online art submission can be considered as not just a writerly text but rather a writerly hypertext, a techno/ontologically augmented and interconnected signification system that depends on a distributed, intertextual relationship between artist and viewer for the participatory, performative co-creation of once-removed artistic signification. The model of a writerly hypertext matches the complex state of reflexive, supplemental representation of the online artwork. Physical artworks in a studio create a framework of representation grounded in a steady, tangible, recognizable thing. On the other hand, arising within the gaps created by the distance component of distance-learning, the supplemental online artwork is a node within a hyperlinked network of distributed representations, creating a spectrum of meaning that emerges from the interplay of performativity and writerly, interpretive ambiguity. Post-Specific [The] fact that all forms of information and communication can now be translated into binary coding with a single system signals more precisely the end of an era. The specificity of [art], the relation between its material base and its poetics, dissolves while other relations, intertextual and cross-media, begin to emerge. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 200622 Today, most art submitted for online studio critique is not explicitly made for an online environment, being supplemental records of tangible art forms like painting, drawing and sculpture. Further, online programs are for the moment still relatively rare, making up only a small percentage of studio art courses worldwide. Within a few years, however, such programs will likely be quite common, and incoming students will have come of age in an era when the virtual art degree is no longer unusual. What happens when an online artwork becomes a norm rather than an exception? Will the physical work of art, expensive to make and bulky to exhibit, parallel the deterritorializing media migration from vinyl LPs to digital mp3 music files? Analogous to current questions regarding online aura and presence, mp3s were initially criticized as lacking the warmth of sound produced by physical, analog recording formats. Within a few years, however, musicians were mixing their music specifically for the frequency range of mp3s, and today only audiophiles recall that there was ever a controversy in the first place. Theodore Nelson, A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate, 1965, in Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort, editors, The New Media Reader (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003), 144. 22 Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 18.
11
21

Site / Non-Site / Website

Could the same thing happen with fine art? Once artists begin to create primarily for the screen, how will arts critical evaluation be differentiated from the experience of other inherently screen-based fields like websites or animation? At the root of these issues is a transition from medium and post-medium to intermedium. Grounded in physical form then uploaded to class in digital form, such art is complicated by its relationship between source and reference. As online education becomes commonplace, younger students will likely begin to create works definable as artwork but not definable in terms of specific media; these works will occupy spaces between media and mode, allowing for a different level of dialogue between artwork and viewer, and between artist and critique participants. At this point the digital artwork is no longer a supplement or facsimile of something else, but simply the work of art itself: many of the ontological and epistemological questions explored in this paper will disappear. A positive outcome of this would be the creation of wholly new kinds of art; a negative outcome would be that art becomes just another form of entertainment, another set of images in a sea of online images. If, as Arthur Danto claimed, Warhols Brillo Box was important for the way it broke down the distinctions between art and life,23 it nonetheless retained art status by being shown in the context of a gallery or museum. Seen online, however, a jpeg of a Warhol Brillo Box is difficult to distinguish from a jpeg of an actual Brillo box. Contemporary artists like Andrew Kuo and Cory Arcangel explore similar issues, and their work too is more often than not shown in fine art contexts. Once such work relies more exclusively on online creation, distribution and apprehension, however, it will change considerably: a modified videogame shown in an art gallery may be a provocative gesture, but when seen purely online it runs the risk of being nothing more than just another video game, however quirky. If online art is indeed destined to operate both intermedially and transmodally, through interrelationships rather than through categorization and exclusion, the work of art will truly come into its own only when it functions openly as a relational field between other fields, negotiating, translating and equalizing the various sets of internally consistent rules that each medium establishes for itself. Such work will require a new set of standards for critical evaluation, in which the viewer is not simply an evaluator but also a co-creator and end-user. For this to happen, the way art is experienced will likely be reconfigured; to return to a music analogy, in only a few decades music has gone from something listened to at a concert or at home with a bulky turntable to something we can carry around in our pockets. This change is more than just technological, and in fact alters our bodily and experiential relationships to the music itself. Todays art and critique interfaces, while interactive to a degree, are essentially variations of a printed page shown on a television screen; trapped behind glass, this familiarity constrains the exploratory potential of both the artwork and of its critical evaluation. Future modes of art apprehension, such as wearable portals or augmented reality everyware interfaces, will radically change not just the creative process but its critical reception as well. Just as earlier painterly interface shiftsfrom the Renaissance picture plane as window to the Modernist picture plane as surfacedemanded new critical approaches, so too will new technology and distribution interfaces.

Arthur Danto, After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 35.
12

23

Site / Non-Site / Website

One likely outcome will be the transition of the art critique from a denotative mode grounded within a locatable, hierarchic structure to a connotative mode that emerges from a decentralized, post-locative network of contributing viewpoints. For a generation more comfortable texting than talking, the online format makes some participants more bold and willing to speak up than might otherwise be the case during an in-person critique. Similarly, like all online interactions the virtual critique is recordable and hence retrievable for repeat viewing, or for copying-and-pasting for future usenot to mention for mashing-up and for remixing; once this hybridized im/permanence is taken into account, students seem to take more time formulating and articulating their thoughts than they might in the off-the-cuff nature of the unrecorded, real-time critique. We might paraphrase Lawrence Lessig and define these changes in critique mode as a shift from the read/only critique to the read/write critique.24 The challenge will be to ensure that such a contingent model operates with a kind of dynamic equilibrium, being stable enough to offer worthwhile feedback while open and fluid enough to keep pace with emerging modes of artistic creation and reception.

For more on the distinctions between top-down, passive read/only culture and distributed, interactive read/write culture, see Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008), 28.
13

24