“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more. No one can win against kipple, except temporarily and maybe in one spot …”
- Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Bastard child of video art and net art; egalitarian in its accessibility; pop in its sensibility; dadaist in its nihilistic bricolage; simultaneously making sense of the accumulation of sensory detritus in our Internet age and encouraging said accumulation. Youtube!
(Um so I herd u liek mudkipz).
Like its predecessors, this thing I call Youtube was in large part propelled by the increased accessibility and proliferation of art-making tools (i.e. your cell phone). And like the feminist video artists of the 1970s, or the “happening” performance artists of the 60s, this new internetworked cadre of cultural producers has been posed as an “intervention” into the art establishment, challenging old and inborn prejudices related to the question of what is culturally valuable. That the old guard has bristled at the ‘Tube’s cultural incursions into the realm of the “tasteful” serves only to reinforce Internet’s prankster legitimacy.
One of the forefathers of the genre is Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who has made key contributions to the aesthetics of cyberlandia in both critical and artistic forms. See, e.g., his essay: “The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier (or the Chicano interneta)“; his San Francisco-based collective: La Pocha Nostra.
Gómez-Peña’s videos juxtapose the mythic and traditional with the popular & high-tech, playing with the uncanny feeling of the alien (harhar) in both. According to La Pocha’s manifesto, the collective exists, in part, to challenge the “endemic lack of funds and access” available to “artists of color.” In light of this declaration, the choice of Youtube as a format can be seen as one creative attempt to mobilize mass distribution in lieu of elite access. Simultaneously, it echoes the video art tradition of challenging dominant media forms by critically performing through them. The venue for crap commercial media is ultimately an empowering medium; indeed, la Pocha refers to itself as a “virtual maquiladora.”
The work of later-gen “net artists” has focused primarily on providing commentary on the medium itself. By contrasting lo-fi with hi-tech, net art evokes the slippery feeling of constantly impending obsolescence that the frenetic pace of technological progress has imposed on consumer society. In Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Movie (2005) (below), the irony of juxtaposing existential drama (“highbrow”) with a popular Nintendo video game (“lowbrow) is heightened when the work is simultaneously projected into fancy gallery space and uploaded onto Youtube. Aura, schmaura.
Arcangel created Super Mario Movie, like Naptime (2004?) (below), by hacking old Nintendo game cartridges. In this way, his work recycles technological bric-a-brac that has been converted to trash by the steady march of Nintendo –> Playstation –> Xbox –> Wii –>. The net art fixation on hacks and bugs also serves to highlight the ongoing disintegration of our technology by exposing the internal crap of our information systems and exploiting the vulnerabilities of our digital prostheses.
In a recent piece, Arcangel assembled a multitude of existing Youtube videos of cats playing the piano such that together, they play Schoenberg’s Drei Klavierstücke. Arcangel’s collage-cover of Drei Klavierstucke is an absurdist reflection on Internet memetics (and of the weird power that cats have vis-a-vis the meme…) At the same time, his work was featured on Cute Overload, a very popular website sincerely devoted to the task of distributing cute pictures of animals. So much for the fifth wall.
In the most ancient regions of Tlön, the duplication of lost objects is not infrequent. Two persons look for a pencil; the first finds it and says nothing; the second finds a second pencil, no less real, but closer to his expectations. These secondary objects are called hronir …
The methodical fabrication of hronir (says the Eleventh Volume) has performed prodigious services for archaeologists. It has made possible the interrogation and even the modification of the past, which is now no less plastic and docile than the future.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
It would be a mistake to write off videos like Arcangel’s Drei Klavierstucke as mere lulz. To do so would preclude much-needed reflection on how we are to deal with the sheer amount of moving-image crap we have absorbed — by choice or by osmosis. (For example, this author counts at least 25 cute kitten videos stored in her brain for immediate recall.) What aesthetic value might we derive from this internalized crap (if any), and how can we exorcise it, in the alternative?
Komar & Melamid, "People's Choice: Denmark's Most Wanted" (1997)
Youtube is not the first vessel for artistic commentary on our jointly accumulated cultural flotsam and jetsam. Traces of this imperative can be found in dadaist collages; in Andy Warhol’s screenprints; in Komar & Melamid’s painted representations of popular consumer will. Our “Youtube problem” is a rearticulation of our “TV problem”, of our “movie problem”, of our “print advertising problem” — of our “mechanically reproduced culture” problem.
Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (1919) (collage)
Song Dong, "Waste Not" (2005) (installation)
It makes sense, then, that crit-theory-friendly refugees from media studies departments have been received with open arms by at least some corners of the art establishment. Rhizome, for example, is a comprehensive database of net and new media art based out of the New Museum for Contemporary Art in New York, which regularly shows emerging new media arts.
Less predictable was the Sundance Festival’s selection of M.dot.Strange‘s animated Youtube feature We are the Strange as a short film entry in 2007. It really defies description, so the trailer will have to suffice:
Yet despite these crossovers, and in spite of artist-maintained “channels” and blogs, a divide persists between what may be considered “fine art” and the performance pieces of major Youtube mainstays. Chris Crocker, for example, is a “Youtube celebrity” best known for h/er Leave Britney Alone diatribe. Yet for years prior to that video s/he had been a successful uploader for a massive underground fanbase.
Although Crocker’s work vigorously interrogates dynamics of race, gender, class, geography, and sexuality through the same tactics as Gómez-Peña, Martha Rosler, or (perhaps most analogously) Jonathan Couette, it has yet to be featured in the Whitney Biennial or handed a Cannes wreath. In other words, it still awaits extraction from the cybercultural landfill — whether by curatorial “intervention” or by the random force of our collective whim.
Crocker started h/er Youtube career as an openly gay, home-schooled teenager growing up in a conservative Tennessee town. In this insular world, Crocker’s evolving online persona drew from influences as varied as Betty Crocker, black gay chat lines, h/er grandmother, and Britney Spears. Crocker has said of Spears: “She’s done more for me than my own parents have. She’s been like a mother to me … in a long-distance way.” In turn, Youtube has responded to Crocker’s imitation with its own: “people of different ages and races have posted response videos in which they gamely try to do Chris’s monologue themselves . . . A number of these imitators are black, creating an odd, post-race, parallel YouTube universe in which black imitates gay-white imitating black.” In this parallel Youtube universe, the art and absurdity of everyday performance is not cheapened by Top-40 influences; nor does impression render identity unoriginal. To the contrary, the assumption (and repetition) of what is otherwise crap becomes an exercise in self-ownership: a triumph against barriers of social marginalization, geography, and violence. Perhaps it is not an exorcist we need for all this kipple, but a shaman.
Curiously, the hronir of second and third degree – the hronir derived from another hron, those derived from the hron of a hron – exaggerate the aberrations of the initial one; those of fifth degree are almost uniform; those of ninth degree become confused with those of the second; in those of the eleventh there is a purity of line not found in the original. The process is cyclical: the hron of the twelfth degree begins to fall off in quality. Stranger and more pure than any hron is, at times, the ur: the object produced through suggestion, educed by hope.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
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