The Art That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Wade Guyton

26 avril - 7 juin 2008

Galerie Chantal Crousel

10, rue Charlot 75003 Paris

March 15 - April 19, 2014

Domenico Quaranta

Beyond New Media Art free e-book or purchasable soft cover 290 pages,

ISBN 9781291376975

Published at Hyperallergic as

Wade Guyton and the Post-Media Question

http://hyperallergic.com/120790/wade-guyton-and-the-post-media-question/

All 10 paintings in the Crousel show are labled:

“untitled” (2014), 213.40 x 175.30 cm, Epson Ultrachrome inkjet on linen

Joseph Nechvatal

A backshift in the Parisian weather, from spring warm sun to cold gray, complimented

Wade Guyton’s opening of retro-titled “26 avril - 7 juin 2008” at Galerie Chantal Crousel

perfectly. His show’s emphasis on black and recent history set off a cascade of reflection

when related to Domenico Quaranta’s new history book Beyond New Media Art, a history

that is topical to Guyton specifically and to the art of the late 2000s, as much as it is to

the current contemporary art situation. It is very much in the present inclination to

formally re-evaluate contemporary art in terms of a developing post-media

understanding, where now it is already too late to talk about a New Media Art in our time

of post-convergence of every medium into digital territory (hence the relevance of the

term post-media).

“26 avril - 7 juin 2008” is a collection of ten of Guyton’s signature uniform, cool,

digitally produced, monotone, monotonous canvases, with black as the dominant hue

(one gray exception). As back in 2008, the gallery floor has been covered again with

plywood and painted a shiny black, bringing to his installation a sinister and icy

immersive aspect that I enjoyed. Ad Reinhardt’s series of identical black paintings (such

as those selected by Robert Storr at David Zwirner’s last year) sprang to mind, but just as

quickly melted away, for this show is less-than-adventurous, less than radical, less than

spiritually deep.

As if a classical master, Guyton reuses here the same digital file he used to make ten

black paintings in 2008 (shown at the same gallery), but this time (drum roll) on the Mac

OS X operating system (code name Lion) and the printer is now an Epson 9900, the

model that replaced the Epson 9600. And the ink is now UltraChrome with Vivid

Magenta Technology! Oh La La! Zoot Alors! Even so, with his show as new-and-

improved replication, I could not but sense that Guyton’s solemnly reductivist neo-

modern works “untitled” (2014) do not quite live up to the historic and technological

possibilities of our computer era.

Indeed, on entering the gallery for the opening, I quietly wondered; is this repetitious

activity the indication of a triumphant artist frozen in the headlights of success?

Regardless, I have admired the achievement Guyton has secured with his digital

paintings, and the great stride forward these paintings have made in taking digital art to a

whole other art world level by playing down connections to the deep history of new

media art and avoiding the category of digital art like the plague. I found his work at the

Venice Biennale “untitled” (2011) strikingly handsome, full of gray flair and bravado.

For me that work was a sure signal that the post-media condition had arrived with the

questioning of distinctions in which (perhaps) it no longer makes sense to distinguish

between art that uses computers and art that doesn’t. Thus it struck me as out-and-out

astonishing that Guyton does not appear anywhere in Domenico Quaranta’s Beyond New

Media Art, a book that recalls and explores the formation of that condition.

More the pity, for with the financial success of Guyton in the collector sector (his works

regularly sell for more than $1 million at auction and privately and an untitled Epson

UltraChrome inkjet on linen of 2005 established an auction record for the artist when it

sold for $2.4 million at Christie's New York in 2013) the artist, who just recently

exhibited massive and chilly digital paintings and a wood sculpture at Petzel Gallery,

proves Quaranta’s end point utterly.

But the focus of Quaranta’s book is broader than that. It begins by telling the history of

the gap between the mainstream curatorial contemporary art world and the so-called new

media art world. This little known history is the crux of this pertinently revised, updated

version of an earlier 2010 book that Quaranta published in Italian, Media, New Media,

Postmedia. Through it Quaranta contributed a bit to the heated debate outside of Italy

concerning the majority of powerful contemporary art historians and curators’ ignoring

(in what seemed like a hyper allergic reaction) of new media and digital art per say, and

their enforced taboo against artists who address our era of digital technology head-on.

In an art world that seemingly accepts absolutely any hybridity, any material, any

theoretical model, any remediation, any critical inspection, and any aesthetic approach at

all - the extent of which Jed Perl in Magicians & Charlatans deems a condition of irony

drenched, laisser-faire aesthetics (page 15) - the peculiar question of the rejection of

anything raises eyebrows of concern. What peculiar and dastardly sort of luddite fuckery

is at work here? And how can it be eradicated in the new Guyton era; an era in which

digital media is powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural

organization of the real world?

This problem is an oddity that has baffled me for over two decades, but now seems to be

waning with the success of Guyton, and Quaranta’s book advances that wane but without

mentioning the name Guyton. Quaranta makes the point that within a post-media art

world, so called technology-based - or new media - art (digital-based art now is more

accurate to our times) has slipped back sideways into the acceptable means of creating

art, provided it does not (1) mention by name the technological or digital, (2) describe

itself as technological or digital, or (3) lovingly point at anything outside itself that is

overtly technological or digital. In other words, technological or digital connected art,

such as Guyton’s, is now acceptable to select art editors, curators and critics so long as it

is an art that dare not speak its name.

This taboo became evident with Nicolas Bourriaud’s out-of-hand rejection of digital art

on the panel that Edward Shanken, author of Art and Electronic Media, conducted at the

2010 Basel Art Fair. This rejection struck me as perversely odd, as Bourriaud often

defends his metaphoric references to networks and computer culture as inspirations for

his own curatorial work, while refusing the actuality of computers in art. This, what

might at first assumed to be an anomalous event of unwarranted tactical minorization of

art and technology within a technological society has been the dominant trend, and has

also been quietly analyzed by Shanken, grappling with this seemingly irrational historical

breach between mainstream contemporary art and media art.

We saw this situation pointed out again last year around Claire Bishop’s essay in

Artforum and I whimpered about it regarding David Joselit’s After Art. These and further

technophobic persuasions of powerful people within the art institutions of the digital age

convinced Quaranta to rewrite his 2010 book and release this extensive, very

understandable and attention-grabbing book in English, only a few months ago.

Quaranta essentially concludes that the first wave of acceptance of new media in the art

world around the early 2000s waned due to a combination of hubris and blatant self-

interest. The self-interest came in the form of often technology-related corporate

sponsorship. The hubris came from those making overly revolutionary and

technologically determined evaluations by way of claims to superiority based on the

wonder of technological newness alone. But the major, systemic and deep failure was

that of the critical and curatorial art communities, with their failure to take an informed

and even-handed interest in art that uses technology. And this is what has changed just in

the last three years, a change that started with the Whitney retrospective of the work of

Cory Arcangel, curated by Christiane Paul, author of the seminal book Digital Art, soon

followed by some concentrated coverage in Artforum and elsewhere. Unfortunately,

Quaranta’s book basically winds up here; pointing at a hopeful convergent new

authenticity that is conceptually perverse: where now we can accept so-called new media

(or digital media) in art so long as it does not speak its name. Regrettably, Quaranta

misses the best evidence for his thesis with his exclusion of Mr. Wade Guyton.

Nevertheless, I genuinely suggest a discrete viewing of the bleak, backsliding and

dispassionate Guyton show proceeded by the hushed downloading of Quaranta’s account

of an almost secret anti-history that occurred in the dark over the last twenty years. The

two together demonstrate that seldom has the art world converged solidly with

developments in new media. Quaranta’s book explains the why nots and the so whats, of

that anti-history while Guyton’s digital paintings point us ahead to a post-media fusion

that is curative and incontrovertible, given the proliferation of ubiquitous computation,

while remaining oh so very shy.