Book Review

Abstract

Reviewed by: Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito Heather Ecker (bio) Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito The MIT Press, 2014 Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito were once traditional museum curators, engrained with strategies for preservation that are core practices at most art museums. These measures include environmental controls, chemical-free storage, limited handling, judicious cleaning, and limited exposure to light. With tolerances refined over decades, these techniques are employed to enable the exhibition of unique exemplars of visual art in the present, and to preserve them for the future. Ippolito’s disappointment with such measures to save the work of modern artists such as Eva Hesse, who experimented with unusual, often industrial materials, is the platform upon which this work rests. Ippolito argues that the ideas and materials of artists are not to blame for these failures, but rather artists’ strategies and those of the museums that preserve their work. Similarly, works of art in new media (computer-based) require new approaches for creation, collecting, cataloguing, and preservation. Ippolito contrasts Hesse’s one-off constructions in plastic resin and latex rubber—now brittle, discolored, and practically unexhibitable—with the wall drawings of her friend Sol LeWitt, comprising instructions for filling a vertical, white surface of any scale with markings according to a prescriptive recipe. LeWitt’s early works of this kind can be recreated afresh in any context or age and to any scale, without the participation of the artist, who is, indeed, now deceased, though the work continues to be made. LeWitt’s innovation was not material—these works called for traditional implements: pencils, crayons, ink, paint, crayon, a ruler, a compass. His breakthrough was tactical: he supplied an idea for others to execute that would always yield a relatively similar result without a requirement of a cartoon or absolute plan. This kind of work is dynamic and does not require museum conservation methods for its stability or actualization. It can be created without the artist’s presence—or even approbation under some circumstances—and still be recognized as an integral expression of his concept. The gesture is similar to the performance of music according to a score but without attachment to a particular instrument or musician. Granted, LeWitt also worked in other media, creating pieces whose survival is now probably best insured by normative conservation approaches, while Hesse also made works [End Page 98] that have remained physically stable. The point of the comparison, as Rinehart also argues, is that works in new media are by their nature performative rather than constative, and this quality unhinges them from traditional approaches to both museum descriptive cataloguing and conservation strategies; to survive, these new works must mutate and evolve, and as a result, they cannot be categorically positioned according to present standard criteria. Their aesthetic is subject to the original concept but also to its variations as rendered by technologically advancing computers into the future. Ippolito and Rinehart argue that the survival of new media depends on its variability of presentation, both within the museums context and externally. Variability can depend upon the actualization of a set of instructions to recreate a work, LeWitt-like, or it can be expressed by work presented in various media at once—for example, a plugged-in and unplugged version—or it can demand the skills of programmers to create emulating environments, where a program designed for a previous or different operating system can still be made to run. Despite crackdowns by corporate copyright holders, emulators have been developed spontaneously and successfully by enthusiasts in the gaming communities to insure the communal playability of early video games. Ippolito and Rinehart applaud the crowd-sourcing model where multiple skills within communities can be leveraged to share a resourceful outcome publicly. It seems almost innate to the nature of computer-based art that ethical positions would relax with regard to shared authorship, interaction, and invitations to add-on and transform, paralleling the thinking of early art collectives like Fluxus. Such attitudes are rare, however, among most artists who work in two- and three-dimensional media, and the market has insisted...