DRAFT OF A GALLERY WEBSITE “More interesting Internet ‘work’ will not just ‘exist’ on the Internet, but rely on the Internet for its existence.” (Lust, 2005) –We who live the post-internet era are used to meeting the original at half way. For us, Internet is more than just a handy source of necessary information, it’s a natural way to “consume visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.” (Benjamin, 1936) Walter Benjamin was writing about movies but now, almost eighty years later, also lectures, art journals, and art come from all over the world to be collectively experienced anytime and anywhere. Documentation is often more accessible than the real life. “Art world has shifted its interest away from the artwork and towards art documentation.” (Groys, 2002) Every gallery has a website. These gallery websites are usually the only window to see the real show. What is real and what is only an image? What is it like to experience art as images or documentation online? What if we take the quote above calling for more ‘interesting’ Internet for granted and browse through gallery websites seeing them through the eyes of Lust? I think that big part of them would look boring and uninteresting. Without reliance on the Internet as an individual medium, many of them use the same kind of language which is used in more traditional and conventional mediums like press releases and exhibition catalogues. Simple and plain photos of the exhibition accompanied with a text from the press release. An archive of past exhibitions documented the same way, along with artists biographies and basic gallery information. The only difference between different gallery websites is usually the graphic design. So, what can we expect from a gallery website? What is the role of it as an exhibition convention? How would the more interesting gallery website look like? What is the role of graphic designers here? 1 This is a shortened and translated version of my Ba-thesis to the department of graphic design in the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. Original is in Finnish and availeable on reguest. This is the starting point for this essay¹. Trying to answer these questions I suggest a new kind of a gallery website. A website which creates content relying on the Internet and its typical features, and functions as a platform for studying the Internet as an environment for showing art. Like the experiments made with exhibition catalogues for example, I try to point out new paths that could be followed and taken further. *** Within this essay, I state in the spirit of Joseph Kosuth, that all exhibition conventions (like gallery websites), should always bring something new to the exhibition. Conventions that just quote are not needed. Joseph Grigely describes exhibition conventions as prosthesis functioning like storytellers between individual art works as well as between artworks and the surrounding society. He states that, for example, the press release should not just quote the exhibition but rather puncture it. (Grigely, 2010) This is a matter of representation. How the works and the exhibition are translated into different medias such as posters, press releases, invitations, Facebook events, wall labels, audio guides, catalogues or a web sites for example. All of these have different purposes and qualities. What kind of content would the gallery website have if it would rely on the Internet for its existence? *** 2 According to Richard Howells these three features, multimedia, interactivity, and updatebility distinguish Internet from all other medias. (Howells, 2003) 3 This huge mass of information creates needs for searching, presenting, and evaluating this information. Art blogs are an example of this. For example vvork.com a very simply structured website where you can find images of visual art, and some video– and audio works. Works are usually linked from artists’ own or galleries websites and new ones are added daily. 4 Some are trying to reverse this development and slow down the Internet. Triple Canopy is a good example of this. They publish text based art journal online, and try to make it so that it would be in the favor of reading. They also have projects to bring together artists and the Internet in a new way. See for example: Shadow, Glare by Erin Shrieff in issue 9, and The Patio and the index by: Tan Lin in issue 14. Internet is mixing multiple medias, it’s interactive, updateable and capable of storaging almost infinite amount of information². This makes it different from any previous medias.³ “The future lies in digital files.” (Carr, 2010) “In the Post-Internet climate, it is assumed that the work of art lies equally in the version of the object one would encounter at a gallery or museum, the images and other representations disseminated through the Internet and print publications, bootleg images of the object or its representations, and variations on any of these as edited and recontextualized by any other author.” And as he continues, a single work of art is seen as a starting point, waiting to be manipulated into something new by an active user. (Vierkant, 2010) This is the ideology of an active web user or a web artist and it describes the mindset we wanted to take in creating more “interesting Internet”, but we think this could be generalized to consider the people looking at art world through the gallery web sites. The Internet has also its downsides. “Anything on the Internet is a fragment, provisional, pointing elsewhere. Nothing is finished.”Everything is available but only on demand. (Price, 2002) Nicholas Carr again, is worried about our ability to read and understand information. The content full of hyperlinks and flashing animations is restlessly trying to get our attention. This creates an environment where learning and digesting information is nearly impossible.⁴ (Carr, 2010) While short or well designed text based content can work, pictures, moving image, and sound are at home in the Internet. Images reveal everything at the first sight. Moving image and sound have usually a clearly defined and visible duration. They require less active and less participatory state of mind. Sound could be listened in the background. The key would be to create an entity with content that reflects these typical features of the Internet. *** How does this all relate to the gallery website? What kind of content should they have? What are actually its main purposes? In her graduate work, Miia Lehtola made a research about the subject in Finland. According to that the main purposes were documenting and archiving exhibitions, marketing, presenting gallery and showing the gallery space, to sell art, receive feedback, deliver information, and make international connections. (Lehtola, 2004) The Internet has also changed what we think and expect from a gallery or a museum. Mainly because of it, the visual identity has become important part of the overall museum or gallery image. (Rock, 2006) The importance of visual identity means the importance of graphic design. Is the visual identity which actually defines the content in a gallery website? What is the role of a graphic designer here? Rather than the content, I believe it’s the visual identity that connects the virtual website to the physical gallery. Within the framework of a visual identity, the structure, layout, typography, and colour palette are applied to the gallery website. So, the visual identity could include ideas about how the gallery, the exhibitions, individual artworks, and artists are documented and shown. This framework, these limitations, requirements, or set of questions, can then create an environment where each exhibition can react differently and have different content, all within the same visual identity. *** What is the difference between the worldview of artists and one of technology? We think that these two perspectives can give two possible directions in creating more Internet relying and more “interesting” gallery websites. One focusing on abstract, or poetic, description and reflection, and the other on gathering more and more accurate information and data. 5 The examples I used in my thesis were: Vip Art Fair 1, Galerie West, CarryOn, two MoMA Interactive websites: Performance 7, Mirage by Joan Jonas, and Andy Warhol, Motion Pictures. Vip Art Fair is clearly trying to present the artworks as accurately as possible, trying to imitate the real life art fairs. The most interesting thing here was how the galleries had responded to the situation. Some had just images of the work from different angles and in different environments, some had more text, and some a video interview for example. MoMA Interactive -websites are good examples of more poetic ways of describing an exhibition and The Carry-On website something between. With a lot of different content. 6 This is typical for Internet companies like Google who which tries to bring or create a index or a representation of everything to the Internet. See for example their Art Project. 7 For example Marie-José Sondeijker, the gallerist from Galerie West, wrote me that the idea behind presenting different kind of content is to widen their audience. “Some people prefer to read a long essay, others prefer to watch a short documentation. Only in that way we can be sure to reach the a diverse audience. From art-student to museum director, from art-newbie to artists themselves.” 8 About critical design, see for example: Critical Design FAQ by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby (http://www.dunneandraby.co.uk/content/ bydandr/13/0), and Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice The Reader by: Magnus Ericson, Martin Frostner, Zak Kyes, Sara Teleman, Jonas Williamsson (Eds.), 2009, Berlin: Sternberg Press. The first turns its head away from the actual artworks. By describing things or thoughts around them, it gives a new view to the exhibition itself. It could describe a written piece with a video or a painting with an audio interview. It could rather describe something personal, than be transparent.⁵ It would try to create something totally new, to keep the artwork alive. The other direction again, is the total opposite. It would try to gather as much, and as accurate information about the artworks as possible.⁶ You might be able to zoom and see details you could not see with a naked eye, or you could see an event or performance well documented, like you were there. In other words, the exhibition and artworks are presented visually as realistically as possible. It would not be meaningful to divide gallery web pages into these two categories. Usually there are features from them both.⁷ Maybe this could be taken even further, and like Nabokov suggests for writing, the good gallery website could have both: the precision of poetry and the intuition of science (or technology). *** Traditionally graphic design is seen as problem solving. Giving an answer to the clients needs. But what if the gallerist or a curator can’t really define the problem or you don’t have a example or “cure” to start from? Who should create the new solutions? Who should lead the way? Internet and new media artists’ work offer good examples for inspiration, but I believe that a graphic designer with critical attitude⁸ could invent the important problems, and so form totally new solutions. By problems I mean the reasons and ways to represent exhibitions in the context of the Internet. By profession, graphic designers are experts in visual communication and I believe that we could create solutions that would not just be something new, cool, and interesting, but ones that could also work, be logical, usable, and understandable. For both, active Internet users and the general public. This type of new thinking and new websites can only evolve in collaboration with the gallerists, artists, curators, and graphic designers who work together with web developers and photographers. But essentially, good and open minded clients from the gallery side are needed to be ready to go into something new. And really, if you think about it, is there something to lose? References: Carr, Nicholas 2010 The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (, W. W. Norton) Grigely, Joseph, Obrist Hans Ulrich and Kyes, Zak 2010 Exhibition Prosthetics by Joseph Grigely. Lontoo: Bedford Press, and Berlin: Sternberg Press. Groys, Boris 2002 Art in the Age of Biopolitics: From Artwork to Art Documentation Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, pp 108-114 Howells, Richard 2003. Visual Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press Lehtola, Miia 2004. TAITEEN NÄYTTEILLEPANO WWW:SSÄ. https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/11981/URN_NBN_ fi_jyu-200537.pdf?sequence=1 Read 22.2.2011 Lust, 2005. Experiment in Sound. http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/experiment-in-sound Read 21.3.2011 Price, Seth 2002. Dispersion. http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion08.pdf Read 1.3.2011 Rock, Michael, 2006. Interview Michael Rock/Graphic Designer 2x4 New York, In: Hyland, Angus ja King Emily (ed.) 2006 Visual Identity and Branding for the Arts. London: Laurence King Publishing (pp. 27-31) Sondeijker, Marie-José 2011 VS: A couple of questions about your gallery’s internet page. An e-mail conversation with the gallerist of Galerie West. Vierkant, Artie 2010. The Image Object Post-Internet. http://jstchillin. org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_a4.pdf Read 20.12.2010 Mentioned Internetpages: VIP ART FAIR. http://vipartfair.com/ Read 29.1.2011 GALERIE WEST: Carry-On. http://www.galeriewest.nl/ exhibitions/10_09_David_Horvitz/press Read 20.12.2010 MOMA: performance 7, mirage by Joan jonas http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2009/joanjonas/ Read 20.12.2010 MOMA: Andy warhol, Motion Pictures http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2010/warhol/ Read 1.3.2011