1. Introduction
In this essay, I address the best way in which one art institution—the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—has handled time-based media, from early video art to the latest forms of digital art. The Stedelijk, as the museum is thought domestically, makes an attention-grabbing case study for exploring the current status of latest media and digital art inside a museum context, as a end result of it not solely grapples with the same questions of digitally based mostly art as most other museums of recent and modern art but additionally has had a reputable historical past of amassing and exhibiting time-based media since the Nineteen Sixties and Nineteen Seventies. Focusing on ‘new media and digital art’ (the more up to date phrases for ‘time-based media’)1 in a museum such as the Stedelijk, with its renowned assortment and distinct exhibition historical past, permits us to debate the task of curating and collecting these new types of creative expression within the digital era more concretely.In the key literature on the challenges for contemporary and up to date art museums in regard to new media and digital art, the need for critical institutional reflection on current curatorial models and assortment policies have been stressed by many experts, such as Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook, and Christiane Paul. In “Challenges for a Ubiquitous Museum: from the White Cube to the Black Box and Beyond” (2008), Paul—the adjunct curator of new media arts on the Whitney Museum of American Art—stated that “there is little question that traditional museums must transform themselves if they want to accommodate new media art” (Paul 2008, p. 53). So, the place do museums of recent and contemporary art stand with respect to implementing modifications as of 2019?The Stedelijk’s history of time-based media started in 1974, when the museum appointed its first curator for the department of painting, sculpture, and video: Dorine Mignot (Figure 1).2 Mignot’s long-term place as curator of time-based media on the Stedelijk, from 1974 to 2006, heightened her expertise on time-based media within the visual arts whereas simultaneously bolstering the museum’s popularity on this area. Mignot started curating and amassing performance and video art within the mid-1970s but rapidly expanded her area of interest to multi-media installations in the Eighties and Nineties.A few years earlier than Mignot’s retirement, the Stedelijk was closed for almost a decade (from 2004 to the fall of 2012) as a end result of renovation of the historic building and the construction of a model new wing, but under the leadership of Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk from November 2014 to November 2017, an ambitious agenda was as soon as again set for curating and amassing new media and digital art (Figure 2). Ruf also appointed a model new curator for time-based media, Karen Archey—a prolific American critic and curator affiliated with post-internet art.3Introducing the Stedelijk as a case study, in this essay, I purpose to explore a few of the questions raised on this Special Issue on “Art Curation: Challenges in the Digital Age”, similar to the following: “Are ‘conventional’ or ‘old media’ curatorial approaches nonetheless relevant or necessary when curating digital art?”; “What are the problems involved in re-contextualizing and exhibiting pioneering artworks made in the 1960s and 1970s?”; and the umbrella question “What are [adequate] curatorial approaches regarding digital art?”4 I will start by sketching an overview of the Stedelijk’s historical past of timed-based media from the essential premise that the museum’s exhibition program and collection are interrelated and that curatorial strategies and collection coverage are shaped in tandem. This connection remains to be the same for a relative ‘new-comer’ such as digital art right now. That an exhibition program is linked to a museum’s collection coverage when evaluating new media and digital art in an art museum is confirmed by Beryl Graham and Sarah Book of their guide Rethinking Curating; Art after New Media, by which they declare that museums are “largely outlined by their collection, but many [have] but to start creating a set of recent media art” (Graham and Cook 2010, pp. 202–3). The Stedelijk does have a group coverage for brand new media and digital art (or ‘time-based media’, as the museum still calls this part of the collection), but issues and considerations stay concerning the connection between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ media (or ‘mediums’)5 and the dialogue between the gathering and exhibitions. All of this results in the slightly revised query: What are convincing approaches in regard to curating and accumulating digitally based art in a museum of modern and contemporary art, such because the Stedelijk, considering the persevering with interchange between the gathering and the exhibition program? 2. From Time-Based Media to Digital Art
Digital art has a historical past and even “media art histories”.6 In the essay “New Media Art and the Gallery within the Digital Age”, Charlie Gere reminds us of the intertwined histories of art, media, and expertise, which began within the postwar interval with developments in cybernetics and information concept (Gere 2004, additionally revealed in Paul 2008). The different arts respond to these new technological developments, and since the Nineteen Sixties, the intricate intersections of art and know-how have created a vigorous and productive creative local weather of new media art, together with video, slide, film, audio, and computer. Gene offers a quick survey of the creative explorations and pioneering exhibitions in the 1960s and Nineteen Seventies in the United States (US) and Europe—the fine-meshed network of which is additional disclosed in Mainstream Experimentalism (Higgins and Kahn 2012).The assortment history of time-based media at the Stedelijk began with television, video, and performance art in the 1960s and 1970s however continues up to right now with digitally primarily based, multi-media installations, internet art, and other types of (interactive) digital art. The museum’s collection of time-based media encompasses seven sorts: single-screen video, single-screen films, audio, slides, installations, computer and internet art, and performances and different choreographic initiatives. During the early life of this relatively younger collection, Mignot’s position was not exactly easy. This is obvious from the introductory essay within the catalog of Mignot’s pioneering show ‘The Luminous Image’ (1984), in which former director Edy de Wilde states: “The Stedelijk has paid common consideration to the medium of video, not as a result of the medium as such would be of any artistic significance [emphasis added], however because a selection of important artists have made use of it” (De Wilde 1984, p. 5)7—a disclaimer that he would in all probability by no means use for portray. De Wilde’s well-intended words do not level to an excellent dedication to time-based media, even when he supported video and efficiency art throughout his time at the Stedelijk. Yet, he was himself primarily interested in postwar portray. This is obvious not solely from the many masterpieces of European and American work that he secured for the museum but additionally from his farewell show ‘La Grande Parade’ (1984), which was a full-fledged homage to postwar painting, including the works that he acquired for the museum but excluding time-based media and other forms of experimental art. So, Mignot deserves full credit for resolutely advocating for time-based media for the Stedelijk, at a time when the gathering was nonetheless in its infancy. While the Stedelijk started accumulating film and video within the 1960s, because of groundbreaking exhibitions, similar to ‘Dyllaby’ (1962) and ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ (1969), the collection and exhibition program have been only enhanced and consolidated beneath Mignot. She started in 1975 by simply buying video tapes from artists such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, the latter of whom she provided his first European solo in 1978. This was adopted in the identical year by an exhibition of another pioneer of video art, Nam June Paik, to whom the Stedelijk owes its first, undisputed assortment highlighting time-based media: TV Buddha (1972) (Figure 3). Besides curating exhibitions, Mignot lobbied for a separate space for video. In her “proposal for a video-space” from 1980, saved within the Stedelijk’s archive, she explained her ultimate selection for the space beneath the central staircase of the museum, which certainly for years served because the formal house for displaying video art. “Upon nearer consideration”, Mignot wrote in the proposal, “this house is really probably the most appropriate, as a result of its closed character, its central location, and the waywardness of the space, which might hardly be destined for something else” (Mignot et al. 1980).In the Eighties, Mignot curated two exhibitions that had been picked up internationally: the abovementioned ‘The Luminous Image’ (1984), and ‘The Arts for Television’ (1987). The first present was groundbreaking in the sense that the taking part artists and the curator took new media out of the video tape sphere and expanded time-based media to multi-media installations. In Mignot’s words:
> Video has come to be acknowledged as one medium alongside many others and we’ve turn out to be accustomed to it as such. No rush on high-tech studios or obsessions about television transmission, however explorations in the course of the synthesis of a personal contact with the electronic medium. The exhibiting of that tendency is the essential aim of this exhibition. And on this we have chosen on video installations quite than video tape as a result of it’s precisely installations that express the tendency described above. (Mignot 1984, p. 10)
Installations of a few of the most important video artists at that time have been presented within the show, corresponding to Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović and Ulay, Tony Oursler, Bill Viola, Robert Wilson, and tons of others. The second exhibition, ‘The Arts for Television’, was nicely timed and traveled, for example, to the MoMA in New York, the place it was built-in into a survey exhibition and a video program associated to the different arts for television.eight Based on her research on the legacy of Mignot within the museum’s archives, present curator Karen Archey noted the following with respect to the television show:> The exhibition debuted on the Stedelijk in October 1984 and continued its tour through the rest of the ‘80s. It was a charged second: MTV’s launch in 1981 was changing the scope of tv, the support for artists working with public broadcast TV at stations such as Boston’s WGBH and New York’s WNET was drying up as cable debuted and television was changing into more and more corporatized. (Archey 2017)
When video developed into a dominant art in the 1990s, Mignot shifted course as quickly as once more and began focusing on shows with artists who were meanwhile canonized because the masters of video art, corresponding to Gary Hill (1993), Joan Jonas (1994), and Bill Viola (1998). ‘Bill Viola: A 25-year Survey’ (1997) was a blockbuster present curated by the artist and theater producer Peter Sellars for the Whitney Museum, which afterwards traveled to the Stedelijk (1998) (Figure 4). The importance of Mignot’s work for both the Stedelijk Museum and time-based media art was acknowledged within the Netherlands, together with by the artistic circles that had been on the forefront of experimenting with television, video, and efficiency art within the Netherlands, such as the De Appel Foundation and Montevideo. As Dutch video art critic Pauline Terreehorst recalls of this era: “The museums steered a somewhat prudent course in regard to video, aside from the Stedelijk Museum (…). The Stedelijk Museum was the one museum that developed an acquisition coverage, and often adopted the changes inside video art, presenting it in massive, crowd pulling exhibitions” (Terreehorst 1991, p. 65).The purpose to discuss Mignot’s tenure at size is that this very first curator of time-based media on the Stedelijk has not but obtained the eye that her significant contribution to the museum deserves. Mignot unfortunately did not have a farewell exhibition and catalog during which she might have proven and documented her steadfast work relating to time-based media over the span of three decades (as De Wilde did for painting in ‘La Grande Parade’), nor has a professional biography on her life and work been written.9 The accomplishments of other pioneering curators of recent media and digital art have equally not obtained proper important attention as of yet, especially not for the rationale that improvement of new media and digital art within the 1990s. “Art museums are largely defined by their collections”, as Graham and Cook state, however these collections in flip are largely determined by the curatorial visions and assortment policies of specific curators. “One obvious position performed by art museums”, Graham and Cook proceed, “is that of historization” (Graham and Cook 2010, p. 138). A well-researched anthology on necessary and groundbreaking new media curators and their exhibitions and curatorial fashions and approaches in Europe and the US (and possibly beyond) could be a welcome addition to the literature on new media and digital art in the context of museums of modern and modern art.Fast forward to November 2014, when Beatrix Ruf was appointed director of the Stedelijk Museum. Ruf’s directorial submit was overshadowed by her resignation a mere three years later due to the assumed battle of curiosity between her position as museum director and her activities as a private art advisor in her personal agency Currentmatters—all of which was declared unfounded by an impartial investigation by the town of Amsterdam in 2018.10 In her temporary tenure as director of the Stedelijk (from November 2014 to November 2017), Ruf achieved outstanding things for the museum, such because the acquisition of the Borgmann assortment and a new curatorial strategy to the permanent assortment in the so-called ‘Stedelijk Base’, developed by AMO architects Rem Koolhaas and Federico Martelli (Figure 5).‘The Base’ is part of a complete re-organization envisioned by Ruf for the whole of the Stedelijk Museum. The new spatial design is split into three items: ‘Stedelijk Base’ (the collection in the basement and the primary flooring of the new wing), ‘Stedelijk Turns’ (for short-term exhibitions based mostly on the gathering on the bottom flooring of the historic building), and ‘Stedelijk Now’, devoted to modern art (the first floor of the same building). Besides the experimental design by AMO for the Base, Ruf also laid the seeds for an innovative agenda for brand new media and digital art, especially within the ‘Stedelijk Now’ part. Because the museum was closed till 2012 and the primary director after the reopening, Ann Goldstein, centered more on conceptual art and its legacies (which have a powerful custom within the Netherlands), Ruf was the first director to methodically reply to digital developments in the visible arts. In the lifestyle magazine Deluxe of the Dutch newspaper NRC, Ruf offered her curatorial vision in 2015, including a listing of artists. On this listing have been a number of artists working with digital media, such as Ed Atkins and Seth Price, both of whom have been provided their first solo on the museum in 2015 and 2017, respectively. Ruf also gave solos to other—mostly ‘digital native’—artists through the progressive program ‘Stedelijk Contemporary’, such as Jon Rafman (2016), Avery Singer (2016), and Jordon Wolfson (2017). The one-year-long, prize-winning exhibition of Tino Seghal should be added to this list, even when his intimate choreographed conditions do not immediately handle ‘the digital’ however somewhat the diminished physicality of our mediated world, in the sense that he creates interactive environments and performances, where the public is drawn into quite a lot of ‘real-life’ bodily and sensorial experiences.11While one doesn’t necessarily need to agree with all of Ruf’s choices—the canon of digital art is still very a lot in flux—and one might criticize the dearth of a historic framework on the idea of which these choices had been made (all of those artists had been simply very much in vogue during Ruf’s tenure), there is not any doubt that she fully recognized that museums are, in Gere’s words, “profoundly affected” by technological developments, which “present explicit challenges to the art gallery as an institution” (Gere 2004). By exhibiting the work of the abovementioned digital artists, the Stedelijk convincingly addressed Claire Bishop’s criticism on digital art expressed in her essay ‘Digital Divide’ (2012):> So why do I really have a way that the appearance and content material of latest art have been curiously unresponsive to the whole upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution? While many artists use digital expertise, what number of actually confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter have an effect on via the digital? How many thematize this, or mirror deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?” (Bishop 2012)
In his large-screen video environments, produced with advanced digital technology, Atkins, as an example, questioned the way in which on-line existence intrudes upon our daily lives and due to this fact “alters” our expertise. Using avatars and other digital stand-ins, the artist made on-line cultures experienceable in exhibition areas (through life-size screens, the direct handle of the virtual personae, and so on.), from Facebook’s simple ‘thumbs-up’ feature to the complex and disturbing culture of trolling. In Ruf’s words: “With his work, Atkins explores the virtuality of our up to date visual world and its profound effect on the fact of our embodied lives. His high-definition videos and powerful sound-tracks tackle existential questions about how love, intercourse, death, and relationships are experienced within the face of digital abstraction”.12 In addition to this, the exhibition presented quite progressive installations during which new spatiotemporal relations linked to the complexity of on-line experiences had been being investigated through differently seized and grouped projection screens in a labyrinthine arrange. Wolfson was one other artist on Ruf’s list, who’s invested in the rising digitalization of tradition and society, especially robotization. In the Stedelijk, the artist presented two confronting animatronic sculptures, that is, a new kind of Hollywood- or amusement park-inspired moving sculpture, controlled and steered by robotics. Both of those robots—a feminine figure/porn star dancing in entrance of a mirror and a colorful boy hanging in heavy chains from the ceiling while continually being dropped onto and tossed around on the floor—interacted with the common public via face-recognition software program, which triggered every kind of bodily reactions, uncanny feelings, and sheer feelings in them (Figure 6). Canadian artist Jon Rafman also addressed today’s online world in participatory installations, similar to a synthetic bubble tub in which you could sit and loosen up whereas watching YouTube clips on loopy subcultures, all of which resonated with a young crowd who visited the museum in larger numbers than usual (Figure 7). According to Paul, partaking new audiences is “An important step in getting new media art out of its ghetto and integrating it into the artworld (…)” (Paul 2008, p. 66). She is especially referring to an audience who grew up with internet tradition: “The on-line, digital viewers for software, Internet, and game art principally consists of self-organizing communities of curiosity which are embedded in numerous ‘networked cultures’” (ibid.). Through revolutionary installations on the brink of on-line and offline worlds, which make online communities experienceable in the gallery house, Rafman succeeded in attracting fans of web cultures to the museum.From her first day on the Stedelijk, Ruf made a degree of bringing more feminine artists into the museum, each in the assortment and within the short-term exhibition program. Her first purchase for the gathering was the painting Zwei Lampe (1994) by the German artist Iza Genzken, adopted by a big retrospective of Genzken’s work titled ‘Mach dich Hubsch’ (2015–2016). Other solo exhibitions by feminine artists and photographers adopted, corresponding to Rineke Dijkstra, Nalini Malani, and Zanele Maholi. The feminine perspective was additionally prolonged into the digital area, the place one other outstanding solo was Avery Singer’s present with digital chiaroscuro work, titled ‘Scenes’ (2016) (Figure 8). Her digitally produced work, made in an exclusive palette of grey tones within the three-dimensional (3D) design software program program SketchUp, demonstrating that digital painting just isn’t only alive today due to ever-more sophisticated digital software and tools but also begins to create attention-grabbing relationships with the entire custom of contemporary portray. In ‘Love of Painting’, German critic Isabelle Graw identifies Singer’s work as nothing less than ‘network painting’ (a time period coined by David Joselit in 2009) and states her art-critical perception in “the fusion of the phrases ‘network’ and ‘painting’”, because it “does away as soon as and for all with the modernist perfect of a clearly delimitable sphere of pure painting” (Graw 2019, p. 265). Depicting social environments stuffed with references to art history and the art world, Singer’s work is certainly primarily based not on an summary idiom however on what Graw further describes as “a net of social relationships” (ibid., p. 266).The reason to debate these exhibitions on digital and associated art on the Stedelijk intimately is as a result of Ruf’s brief tenure was eclipsed by the abovementioned drama surrounding her resignation, which was adopted by an institutional crisis at the museum. In the start of 2019, an announcement was launched stating that each parties have been prepared to “leave the previous behind”, that means that Ruf does not return to the museum. The newly appointed director, Rein Wolfs, will begin his position at the Stedelijk in December 2019. Due to this unsettling course of occasions, Ruf’s substantial contributions to the museum have not been sufficiently reflected upon in the art press, not to mention digested by the Dutch art world and past. Ruf’s innovative approach to new media and digital art alone demonstrates the very bold program that she had in thoughts for the years to come. Young artists got ample space to present their experimental work, which unmistakably belongs to the digital age. Ruf additionally acquired works by most of these artists for the Stedelijk’s collection, similar to three artworks by Atkins and a large-scale portray set up by Singer. The Stedelijk’s collection and exhibition program had briefly ‘gone digital’ because of Ruf’s forward-looking advocacy for digital art, strengthened by an active acquisition coverage. The latter was boosted even further in 2016 via a collaboration with the Museum of the Image (MOTI), with which the Stedelijk purchased a substantial assortment of 17 digital art initiatives related to the internet, from Net.art in the Nineteen Nineties (Vuk Ćosić, JODI) to Net Art 2.0 (Rafaël Rozendaal, Olia Lialina), and ‘post-internet’ art (Constant Dullaart, Jon Rafman).thirteen three. Collecting and Exhibiting New Media and Digital Art
This short tour through the historical past of recent media and digital art on the Stedelijk brings me back to my question as to tips on how to curate and acquire digital art, contemplating that the collection and the exhibition program are in an ongoing dialogue with each other. Ruf acknowledged this universal trait of museums of recent and contemporary art when she redesigned the museum according to the tripartite design mannequin of ‘Stedelijk Base’, ‘Stedelijk Now’, and ‘Stedelijk Turns’. The first two have already been mentioned above: ‘Stedelijk Base’ focuses on the Stedelijk’s permanent collection (collection highlights, art historic canon) within the basement and the primary floor of the new wing, whereas the second refers to numerous short-term exhibitions with contemporary artists or designers, which occur on the primary ground of the historic constructing. ‘Stedelijk Turns’ hovers in between the two, because it consists of temporary exhibitions (or ‘turns’) primarily based on the permanent collection (rarely exhibited works, surprising themes, new curatorial approaches, and so on.) and is situated on the ground ground of the old building, sandwiched between the basement of the brand new wing and the first ground of the historic part.
My temporary historic account indicates that, as of 2019, the Stedelijk is able to mounting exhibitions of digitally based art, whether web art, database art, or installations produced with superior digital technology—it has the in-house technical employees and ever-expanding know-how. The collection and exhibition program relating to new media and digital art have also notably developed in recent times. To present these exhibitions and shows of latest media and digital art, the museum makes use far more regularly of black bins as an alternative of white spaces. Besides the gathering of objects and the exhibitions mentioned above, extra has been carried out over time, corresponding to reveals by different curators of the museum or by guest curators, during which new media or digital art play a role, similar to ‘Wild Walls’ in 1995 (Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen and Leontine Coelewij), the Warhol exhibition completely devoted to the artist’s time-based art in 2006 (guest curator Eva Meyer-Hermann), ‘Deep Screen: Art in Digital Culture’ (guest curator Andreas Broeckmann), or the big video set up exhibition of Aernout Mik in 2016 (Mik and Coelewij), to mention just a few. There have additionally been fascinating exhibitions with new digital types of (graphic) design, such as ‘TYPE/Dynamics’ of the Dutch design collective Lust (2014), ‘Using Type’ on Philippe Apeloig (2016), by curator Carolien Glazenburg, the popular exhibition ‘Coded Nature’ of Studio Drift (2018), co-curated by Ingeborg de Roode and Pao-Lien Dije, and the show on Metahaven in 2019, curated by Karen Archey. There is in fact the ever-expanding collection of new media and digital art, with historical video and efficiency art from the Sixties and Nineteen Seventies, multi-media installations from the 1980s and Nineteen Nineties, hybrid art forms which have emerged because the Nineties, and digital art from the primary decade of the 21st century onward, which have more and more been bought in collaboration with other Dutch museums. Four artworks by Hito Steyerl, for example, had been collectively acquired by the Stedelijk and the Van Abbemuseum soon after Beatrix Ruf’s appointment in 2014.
Given this increasing collection and intensified exhibition program concerning digital art and design, what are the challenges and obstacles that remain, if any? While the Stedelijk has finally ‘gone digital’ beneath Ruf, she did not have time to consolidate this new strategy or combine it to the fullest in the new spatial design. Time-based art is clearly underrepresented in the permanent collection, which may be shortly illustrated by two examples: first by the presentation of conceptual art and second by the added sections on digital art. Conceptual art, as said, has an incredibly attention-grabbing historical past in the Netherlands, especially associated to the Stedelijk in the Sixties and 1970s, which is acknowledged internationally. During this time, the Stedelijk carved out an area for itself on the worldwide scene and established itself as one of many defining institutions for contemporary art in Europe. Dutch conceptual art had an important function on this narrative, because the MoMA show ‘In and Out of Amsterdam’ (2009) on conceptual art developments within the Netherlands confirmed. Moreover, Wim Beeren’s controversial exhibition ‘Op Losse Schroeven’ (1969), which is a milestone exhibition within the history of conceptual art, has achieved almost cult standing. Works from the museum’s rich assortment from this era, together with the vast collection of video tapes, nonetheless, are confined to a bland facet house of the Base (Figure 9). Loops of signature movies of Dutch conceptual artists, such as Jan Dibbets and Marinus Boezem, are proven subsequent to their worldwide counterparts on four small monitors in a user-unfriendly program, alongside rudiments of necessary historic installations, such because the mannequin of the seminal staircase intervention by Ger van Elk. Perhaps the thought is that we have to be happy that conceptual art gets house in the Base at all. Or that, on this method, at least the video and television collection can be seen by patient conceptual art lovers? This curatorial model, in the spirit of Mignot’s video programs under the staircase, might have been the most effective available answer to the restricted area allotted to this controversial yet heroic time in the Stedelijk’s historical past but is way from an imaginative curatorial strategy to conceptual art. Radical conceptual art videos are rather put in a straightjacket to fit into a museum assortment presentation, thereby shedding much of their artistic drive. Conceptual art has a detailed connection with new media art from the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies, and its innovative concepts on (immaterial) artwork and art documentation, together with the event of recent exhibitions and communication models that intersect with new media culture, system theories, and software program programming, have had a huge formative affect on digital art in the Nineties and beyond. However, no connection is established within the Base between (historical) conceptual art and new media and digital art.While the times when media art was hidden under the staircase might be over, digital art from the Nineteen Nineties is equally put in a small transition house within the Base upstairs—a kind of stroll by way of to the cinema theater. Here, internet art is offered in a fantastically executed yet simple design on high-quality horizontal laptop screens (one next to the other, similar to the video tapes on the screens downstairs) and opposite to a cluster of postmodern chairs and other unrelated design objects. In 2008, Christiane Paul concluded that the presentation of web art challenges the museum or gallery space probably the most (Paul 2008, p. 57). However, she provides many alternative curatorial choices for exhibiting different sorts of internet art, similar to presentation in an interactive set up primarily based on superior interfaces; a computer on which internet art initiatives could be visited and explored individually; and large-screen projections. Symptomatic of the unimaginative approach of the Stedelijk to internet art is the presentation of an internet art project by Rafaël Rozendaal titled ‘Abstract Browsing, 16.03.08 (Reddit)’ (2016) (Figure 10). The work is part of a sequence of paintings, in which a layering of ‘abstract windows’, typical of the underlying structure of the web, are printed out and woven into, a canvas, with which Rozendaal attracts an analogue between pixels on a pc display screen and weaving patterns—machine-made and man-made artworks. Rozendaal is an artist who declares the internet as his canvas, and on its website, the Stedelijk acknowledges that Rozendaal is inspired by modern painters, such as Malevich and Mondrian—the artistic dialogue with the latter is in fact hard to overlook, because the internet artist provides us a digital upgrade of Mondrian’s summary logic on the net. Despite this apparent response to, and emulation of, models of modernist painting, Rozendaal’s superbly woven canvas (or wall tapestry) is squeezed into the identical space with web screens and design objects, on the useless inches of the white wall, subsequent to the door opening to the programmatically extra important space of the Base for postmodernist art. Evidently, the museum has to make robust choices as to which artworks from its 90,000-item assortment to exhibit in the permanent assortment, however the curatorial strategy in the direction of new media and digital art is evident sufficient: this a half of the gathering just isn’t truly seen or treated as an ‘artistic equal’ to other kinds of collections, especially painting and sculpture.Yet, the Stedelijk does discover new creative ways to accommodate new media and digital art in different spaces. In the doorway lobby of the brand new wing, for instance, a digital display screen hangs from the ceiling between the bookshop and the seating area (Figure 11). On the aspect of the seating nook, ‘old’ and ‘new’ video tapes are shown in infinite loops throughout the opening hours, with work from main video artists, such as Bruce Nauman and Douglas Gordon, to lesser-known works from the timed-based media collection, similar to ‘Man and Dog’ (2002) by Dutch artist Pauline Oltheten or unfamiliar video tapes of internationally acknowledged artists, corresponding to Martha Rosler’s ‘Flower Fields’ (1975). The different facet of the same screen, on the bookshop side—which may also be considered via the glass curtain wall from outside of the museum—is used as a billboard for glimpses of the everlasting assortment or ads of present exhibitions. The double-sided display screen also can turn into a stage set for a VJ efficiency at an opening evening. Altogether a display screen for multi-purpose display, which perfectly matches the shifting functions of the doorway zone of the building, is a modest first step and hands-on strategy to the query of ‘re-contextualizing and exhibiting pioneering artworks made within the Sixties and 1970s’.In the picket cinema theater on the primary ground of the new wing, films and video from the time-based media collection are repeatedly projected onto a film display screen. However, the question remains if these traditional screens (whether the billboard in the principle hall or the cinema on the first floor), and this particular mode of projecting digital art are sufficient for the digital era, which authors corresponding to Peter Weibel and Lev Manovich have characterized because the “post-media age”. In his e-book Between Film, Video, and the Digital, Jihoon Kim extra specifically describes this post-media condition as “[A] state of affairs by which digital applied sciences function an setting during which techniques and aesthetic features of a media are dislocated from its medium-specific boundaries and turn out to be more and more hybridized with these of different media” (Kim 2016b, p. 15). Because there are many methods in which contemporary digital art cuts throughout media, genres, and platforms, more daring curatorial approaches for model spanking new media and digital art seem referred to as for in a recent art museum such as the Stedelijk. Following the instance of SFMOMA within the early 2000s, a good and constructive next step could presumably be to take new media and digital art out of the spatial niches and the cinema theater format and allot some everlasting gallery areas for exhibiting new and revolutionary art varieties from the collection till the museum has discovered the position and place of recent media and digital art in that assortment. four. Conclusions
One conclusion of this essay is that the Stedelijk has had a thought-provoking exhibition program regarding new media and digital art in recent years but that this program doesn’t translate as of yet right into a convincing curatorial imaginative and prescient for the collection as a complete: the everlasting collection doesn’t treat new media on the same footing as conventional art types, and there may be little dialogue between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media. These kinds of issues aren’t specific to the Stedelijk, but somewhat pose a seamless problem to the whole museum field, as a end result of exhibiting and accumulating new media and digital art require new insurance policies and approaches, a well-equipped technical division, and new historic narratives for the collection. In addition, museums need more cross-departmental communication and networking to integrate new media and digital art into the museum as a complete, from the gallery spaces to the public programming and from the library and the net site to different online areas. “New media art”, as Graham and Cook (2010, p. 94) put it, “can push the boundaries not only between curatorial departments, but additionally between all departments of an institution”. This is an institutional route that the Stedelijk has actually taken since 2010, especially in terms of linking exhibitions with the public program of lectures, performances, discussions, and symposia, including the particular Friday evenings when temporary new media and digital art occasions additionally play a job.14Another attainable route for the museum could be to reevaluate ‘Stedelijk Turns’ (if the museum layout of ‘Base’, ‘Turns’, and ‘Now’ shall be stored by the next director) from the angle of new media and digital art, because these flexible collection-based exhibitions are capable of kind attention-grabbing hyperlinks between the exhibitions and the collection, together with new media. This curatorial method to ‘Stedelijk Turns’ might go in two instructions. One the one hand, it could strengthen the hyperlink between the momentary exhibitions and the gathering. For instance, from May to October 2019 the museum is internet hosting the exhibition of Walid Raad, ‘Let’s be trustworthy, the climate helped’. The Stedelijk has a considerable amount of post-media art in its assortment that intersects with Raad’s theme of basically questioning the porous borders of actuality, fiction, and history within the context of warfare (the Lebanese civil warfare in Raad’s case), corresponding to Aernout Mik’s ‘Raw Footage’ (on the Yugoslavian war) or Juul Hondius’ ‘Brilliant Punitive Raids’ (Israeli–Palestinian conflict). All of these artists use documentary means and reconstruct occasions on partially fictive, partially evidence-based photographs in order to interrogate the complexities of the whole thought of ‘truth’ at present. These artists are all concerned about the standing and proliferation of the (mediated) image within the digital age and investigating political conditions and modern occasions by way of new inventive strategies toward images and what Jihoon Kim phrases ‘hybrid shifting images’: “an array of impure picture forms characterized by the interrelation of the material, technical, and aesthetic elements of transferring image media—namely movie, video, and the digital” (Kim 2016a, p. 3). The documentary approaches of those artists characterize a certain creative pattern in up to date art, which is properly represented in the time-based media collection of the Stedelijk. Mobilizing this collection for thematic, aesthetic, technological, and conceptual hyperlinks with a central exhibition might help close the hole between the exhibition program and the media and digital art assortment over time.On the other hand, linkages between the historical time-based media assortment of video and performance art and the modern exhibition program associated to new media and digital art might be strengthened within the context of Stedelijk Turns. Ed Atkins, for instance, obtained a blockbuster show without much historic context, even when his work triggers every kind of attention-grabbing dialogues with the historic assortment of time-based media of the museum, such as the work of Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman. Atkins, in any case, is not an isolated genius who reinvents art history. In his spatiotemporal installations, created with the most recent digital means, he’s responding to the video installations of his predecessors. In the chapter “Installing time” of her e-book Screens, Kate Mondloch cites an attention-grabbing assertion of Daniel Birnbaum, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm: “Installing time is a matter of selecting the best spatial model, essentially the most enough ‘schematism’, allowing the interpretation of temporal properties into space” (Mondloch 2010, p. 40). In his solo on the Stedelijk, Ed Atkins confirmed himself to be a grasp choreography of spatiotemporal experiences by way of his layered design of differently sized screens throughout the space—large screens, a quantity of small screens, obliquely placed screens, screens instantly on the ground, basic double screens, etc. Together these progressive installations created new spatiotemporal experiences for the spectator, which are indebted to Bruce Nauman’s ‘Live-Taped Video Corridor’ (1970) and other historic video installations of Nauman, Gary Hill, and Bill Viola. However, Atkins’ installations additionally intersect with of a range of multi-media installations created because the late 1990s by artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Tacita Dean, and Sam Taylor Wood, which understandably serve as case studies in Mondloch’s book.Mobilizing ‘Stedelijk Turns’ extra actively to handle the gaps between the collection and the exhibition program is a strategy to convey them nearer collectively in a dynamic and interactive method and to begin to rethink the everlasting collection or “Base” from the angle of media historical past on a better mental degree than simply adding a video program or web site right here and there within the everlasting assortment. The culture and society of the twentieth and twenty first centuries require a reflective and critical strategy in the path of the more and more technologized world by which we live. Or, as Gere (2004) quotes cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen, “a place of resistance to” and a “contemplation outside” of “the effects of accelerating technical processes”.This would come with a crucial reflection on the omitted artworks on this media historical narrative, particularly in regards to the beginnings of the digital developments in the 1990s, which, judging from the video and new media exhibitions in that essential decade, were not likely picked up or totally acknowledged by Mignot.15 Internet art and other ‘avant-gardist’ digital art occurred in the niches of the Dutch art world, in new media festivals (ISEA and Ars Electronica), various areas (Transmediale), and media labs (V2). Walter Benjamin already realized that the first decade of a new technology is commonly essentially the most fascinating, as a result of there’s an explosion of inventiveness—a time of experimenting, imagining, and envisioning the creative potential of that new expertise. The Stedelijk missed the boat on this foundational decade and due to this fact has a gap in its assortment relating to the cradle of digital art, even after the acquisition with MOTI of a key assortment of web art.In the above line of argumentation, the Stedelijk has served as a case examine to research questions corresponding to whether old media curatorial approaches are nonetheless relevant when curating digital art; how we will reconsider early media art history in the face of the present, and which curatorial decisions or steps this could contain. What are significant curatorial approaches regarding digital art, if the arrival of ‘the digital’ is also put in historic context? My position all through this essay has been that the answers to those important questions must be discovered within particular museum contexts—the state of affairs of Eye Filmmuseum (another major museum in Amsterdam, which has fairly a dynamic exhibition agenda for movie, video, and digital art installations), for example, is completely different than that of the Stedelijk. As the museum of the shifting picture, Eye can often be more daring, dynamic, and imaginative in its curatorial approaches than the Stedelijk, as a outcome of it is much less burdened by a famend assortment and history. A comparative strategy, nevertheless, has not been the methodological strategy of this paper, which rather traces the greatest way in which one museum—with a track record of openness to inventive innovation and experimentation—has responded to the ever-increasing digitalization of the arts and tradition and its consequences for museums of recent and contemporary art. Museums with bigger budgets than the Stedelijk, corresponding to MoMA and the Tate Modern, can “transform themselves” (Paul) more rapidly to the institutional wants of new media and digital art, though it must be added that the Whitney Museum and a bunch of smaller institutions, similar to SFMoMA, the Walker Art Center, and Eyebeam, have paved the greatest way via their comparatively early embrace of new media and digital art. Now, in 2019, museums and other art establishments share the duty to show and tackle the increasing impact of technological tradition on the humanities, tradition, and society at large.