via Rhizome:
By Brian Droitcour
on Wednesday, November 19th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Image: 386DX performance at Hellenic American Union, Athens, 2000. (Photo by Jenny Marketou)Alexei Shulgin's pioneering works in internet art are collected on his site easylife.org, but many of the links there are empty or obsolete; one called Insanity Notification
sends visitors to a site indicating that Shulgin went insane at an
unidentified point in the past. It has been more than five years since
Shulgin left the online environment to focus on the production of
tangible, marketable objects. His collaboration with Aristarkh
Chernyshev began in 2003, and two years later the artists founded Electroboutique
a gallery-slash-gadget shop selling distorting screens and other
high-tech toys. Shulgin and Chernyshev called it "Media Art 2.0," and
wrote a manifesto saying the plug-and-play nature of their new work
liberated them from a "media art ghetto," adding that their
manipulation of familiar screen-based interfaces contained a nugge! t
of
criticality. Their work was recently featured in "Criti Pop",
an exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (along with
interactive installations that Chernyshev made in collaboration with
Vladislav Efimov). - Brian Droitcour
Your recent exhibition was called "CritiPop." Could you explain where this label came from, and what it means?
We spent a long time thinking about what to call the exhibition.
Media Art 2.0 no longer fit. We had moved away from media art and no
longer wanted to be associated with it. Eventually, we singled out the
most important feature uniting the works: critical communication
contained in a popular form, with shiny plastic, bright colors,
primitive interactivity, a resemblance to consumer goods, glowing LED
screens and so on. Thus, "CritiPop" was born. Its effect is akin to
that of advertising or propaganda: vivid, universally recognizable
images that conceal a subliminal message.
There is a striking amount of texts and manifestos accompanying
"CritiPop." Are you concerned that the critical component of your work
won't be read without them?
Almost all these texts were written in the years preceding
"CritiPop," for exhibitions in our gallery. So, it was natural to
include them. But basically you're right. We had to introduce the
viewer to the context, because our works are easy to read on the
superficial level of real-time, eye-candy effects, brightly polished
plastic and impressive animation.
Image: Installation view at Moscow Museum of Modern Art. (Photo by Anton Akimov)Moscow critics often frame the history of Russian art after
perestroika around artists like Oleg Kulik and Anatoly Osmolovsky, who
worked with actions and other ephemeral forms of art during the chaotic
1990s and turned to object-based practice during the relative stability
of the Putin administration. Your career follows a similar trajectory.
Do you think this is a fairly accurate description of what happened?
Why did you abandon net.art and begin to produce objects in
collaboration with Aristarkh Chernyshev?
I think there are similarities here, but also significant
differences. Unlike Kulik or Osmolovsky, who always worked on the
territory of institutionalized contemporary art, I was working on the
internet, which in the 1990s was an open zone for experimentation. I
had become disgusted with the world of museums and galleries, where I
spent quite some time in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, thanks to
perestroika and the boom for Soviet art. I even decided to stop being
an artist for a while.
The term net.art came later. In the mid-1990s you could make art on
the internet without getting stuck in a particular context. The
internet itself was the context. Eventually even net.art was
institutionalized. But it did not create its own economy; only JODI
could survive as internet artists, thanks to the generous grant system
in the Netherlands. But net.art disappeared simply because the internet
developed. As soon as a large number of people obtained access to the
internet, net.art became meaningless. It dissolved in the mass of blogs
and platforms. You could say that net.art invented and investigated
methods and technologies used in Web 2.0.
Image: Alexei Shulgin, Natalie Bookchin, Blank+Jeron, Introduction to Net Art, 1994-1999In the early 2000s I saw some creative potential in software art,
which could be called the heir to net.art, and organized with Olga
Goriunova four Read.me festivals, as well as the repository Runme.org
(along with Amy Alexander and Alex McLean), which is active to this
day. While working on Read.me, I noticed that software art was
following the same path to demise as net.art -- it was gradually
becoming absorbed by media culture and new IT products, by digital
banality. That was when I began to work with Aristarkh Chernyshev. Our
first project, in 2003, was Super-i Real Virtuality Goggles . But that wasn't my first material project after net.art. In 1998 I made 386 DX, the singing computer, and I've given 100 concerts around the world with it.
Web 2.0 marked the end of net.art, as it had to compete with the
glut of ideas published on Livejournal and other sites like it, and
thus introduced a crisis of originality. Moreover, the inability of
political activism to affect policy -- the main shock here was the U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq -- cast doubts on its reasons for
existence. That brings us to the mid-2000s. With the strategies of the
1990s facing a crisis, we created Electroboutique as a laboratory for
studying new strategies in art. We wanted to create media works that
were plug-and-play and zero-maintenance. Furthermore, we wanted to
distance ourselves from media activism, which had hit a dead end. Since
art equals consumption in the conditions of the unipolar capitalist
world, we decided to make a commercial object. We put protest and
critique in its body. That's how we arrived at our style, which we
called commercial protest. Then we added exciting shapes and sound. And
that's how we got CritiPop.
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