NOTE
- Christopher Pinney Photos of the Gods (London: Reaktion 2004) 2.
NOTE
- Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987) 9.
- Stephen quotes from Burn's contribution to the 1988 Sydney Biennale catalogue.
- Language may have been the court of première instance for Burn and his cohort, but it moved in on the space of his art in concert with other media systems—such as photocopying in Xerox Books (c.1969), the tape recorder of Soft-Tape (1966) or indeed the art PR system exploited in his curatorial involvement with the show “Conceptual Art and Conceptual Aspects” (New York Cultural Center, 1970). In fact, given the breadth of Burn's engagements with non-traditional media and information systems, he should fairly hold a prominent place in histories of Australian media art, which, as far as I know, he does not. In her chapters on this period (“Soft-Tape/Hard Talk” and “New York Art Strike”), Stephen does not dwell on the contemporaneous developments in media art and the art and technology movement. But her account suggests a certain kinship, albeit a complicated one, between the experimental ethos of early new media art and conceptualism's fixation on process.
NOTE
- T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (NH: Yale UP, 1999) 2–3.
- Christopher Wiik, interview with author, London, 29 June 2006. The exhibition provoked much public debate after an extraordinary review by Simon Jenkins who wrote: “Go at once. Take a young person to see the Modernism show at the V&A and feel fear. It is the most terrifying exhibition I have seen, because it is politics disguised as art. It opens with a word that says it all—utopia—and ends with an unspoken lie, that this nihilist ideology became merely a style and is no longer a threat.” The Guardian, 7 April, 2006.
- For a critique of these exhibitions at MoMA, NY, see Franco Moretti, “MoMA 2000: The Capitulation,” New Left Review 4 (Jul-Aug, 2000) 98–102.
- For these themes in an Australian context, see the review of Isobel Crombie, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Peleus P/National Gallen of Victoria, 2004) in last issue of ANZJA, “South,” 6.2 2005 & 7.1 2006.
NOTES
- Munster critiques Katherine Havles's notion of embodiment insofar as it rests on assumptions of formulations of code-body relations. Hayles features prominently in this book, even as her name is misspelt on one occasion—an instance, perhaps, of an unexpected “differential.”
- For this history, in the Australian context, see Darren Tofts's recent book Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Sydney: Thames & Hudson, 2005).
- Two obvious but uncited parallels to Munster's projects are Angela Ndalianis's Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004) and Mark Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2004). Hansen's Bergsonian notion of the bodily “enframing” of digital data echoes Munster's claim that “Digital bodies engage incorporeally with the informatic universe…” (18)
- Munster refers to Mitchell Whitelaw, who has argued that “the range of practices to come under the umbrella of digital art is now so diverse, and the digital as a category is so mundane, that the art is done a disservice by being grouped in such a way.” (151)