Episode 016: Tina Rivers Ryan

Show Notes

This week on the show we sit down with curator Tina Rivers Ryan – one of the preeminent curators mapping contemporary artistic practices engaged with the digital, and keeping the flame of digital art history alive. In this in-depth conversation we delve into Tina's evolution as a curator, and many of the particularities of curatoring digital art. As well, Tina is one of the few thinkers out there who is fluent in the art world and the crypto/NFT world, and in our discussion she offers an important message about how we all may be missing the bigger issue amdist the polarizing discourse around crpyto and art.

Links from the conversation with Tina:
> http://www.tinariversryan.com
> https://www.albrightknox.org
> Difference Machines: https://www.albrightknox.org/art/exhibitions/difference-machines-technology-and-identity-contemporary-art
> Tina's recent essay: Will the Artworld’s NFT Wars End in Utopia or Dystopia? https://artreview.com/will-the-artworld-nft-wars-end-in-utopia-or-dystopia/

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Ben: From Small Data Industries, this is Art and Obsolescence, I'm your host, Ben Fino-Radin and on this show, I chat with people that are shaping the past present and future of art and technology. This week on the show by popular demand from so many of you on Twitter. 

[00:00:15] Tina: My name is Tina Rivers Ryan and I am a curator, art historian and critic who works with digital art. 

[00:00:21] Ben: Tina is a brilliant curator currently at the Albright Knox in Buffalo and through her exhibition, making, writing, and public speaking over the past decade has been doing important work, not only to map contemporary artistic practices, engaging with media and in particular the digital, but also is one of the curators doing very important work to introduce the public, to the history of digital art, helping to bring to life practices, dating back to the sixties for the art viewing public of today. 

Tina is also one of the few folks who I think has done a very good job of parsing through the hype of the current moment digital art is having with the whole NFT thing. One of the few people who understands the ins and outs of the art world and the ins and outs of the crypto world and offers a pretty nuanced perspective as to what the bigger issues at play may be here. 

[00:01:12] Tina: There's something off on the horizon that is apocalyptic... 

[00:01:15] Ben: but if you came to hear about NFTs, you are going to have to sit down and eat your vegetables first, as we cover so much more in this very in-depth conversation. Now, before we gets started, if you're new here, welcome! You might notice something different about this podcast. There are no ads. Art and Obsolescence is fully listener supported so in order to sustainably fulfill my mission of equitably compensating artists that come on the show, I need your help. Tax deductible donations can be made through our fiscal sponsor, the New York Foundation for the Arts, by going to artandobsolescence.com/donate. Thanks for any help you can provide, friends is deeply appreciated and a huge thank you as always to those of you that have supported the show already. We have raised almost $2,000. Thanks this week to Sophie for your recent donation, it means all the world. And now without further delay, let's dive into my chat with Tina Rivers Ryan. 

[00:02:07] Tina: There's always been art in my life. I really can't remember a time without it. Going back to when I was in junior high, for example, I was completely obsessed with Gothic art and architecture. I think it's a function of basically being a little goth kid. I was mostly into literature though and then I really got into avant-garde film. My first love in terms of time-based media art really was avant-garde cinema. It was a really magical moment to grow up in the nineties in the sort of golden age of music videos, for example, I mean, I honestly think watching Chris Cunningham's music videos for, you know, Bjork or Aphex Twin, like really opened up my sense of the horizons of creativity and moving image. And then also this early moment of the internet when we all started torrenting obscure experimental and avant-garde films, and that was starting to become something that one could sort of find even if you didn't say live in New York city and have direct access to like the basement at Kim's video or something.

I guess it was also through art history because the very first class I took in art history was actually on surrealism. The subtitle of the class actually was like music, film, politics, literature, theater, or something like that. It specifically was framed as a course that was about surrealism as it manifested across the visual, literary, performing arts and also politics. So we watched so many surrealist films. Things by, you know, Man Ray, Maya Duran that also was a really important moment for me.

From there, I devoted my whole undergraduate education to learning more about the history of avant garde cinema. And that was actually what my undergraduate thesis was on, was on Bruce Conner, and structuralist film of the 1960s. So actually it was avant-garde experimental cinema that was my first love. And then, you know, as soon as I got to graduate school, it sort of quickly became about media art more broadly and about digital technology more broadly. And I think that a lot of that has to do with being not only a digital native, but also. How do I want to say this? Like, I can come out of the closet now. Right? Like I have a job. I'm a, I'm a grownup. I have a mortgage and a child. So I can say like, it came from rave culture. It came from being in this moment, we were allowed to find community and a form of utopian politics. That was all premised on, you know, quote unquote, better living through circuitry.

I never really thought that I would have the career in the arts that I have now. I don't know that I thought I would professionally work with art in the way that I do, I think I wanted to be an academic, but there was always like law school was potentially always on the back burner. 

When I was in college, I had a number of internships at a museum. So I interned at the ICA Boston at the New Museum in New York at PS1 MoMA in New York and some of those internships I was in a curatorial department and I was learning about curatorial work, like when I was at MoMA PS 1. And essentially I walked out of those experiences thinking this is not what I want to do. Right. And that was what I decided was it, this is not what I want to do. I don't want to be working in a museum in this capacity and I want to live a life of the mind and I'm going to be an academic and I'm going to teach and I'm going to do scholarship.

I really, you know, at the ripe age of 22 had completely figured this all out about myself and it took me 11 years to figure out I couldn't have been more wrong. I went through graduate school, you know, fully intending to become a professor. Once I was starting to wind down my dissertation, which was on the emergence of digital art in the 1960s, in sort of conjunction with the emergence of video art and in dialogue with op and kinetic arts are talking basically about this really, um, rich moment in the 1960s, where you have artists working with, you know, durational art, and then eventually media as well. I started applying for academic positions and interviewed at a couple places. And then, essentially wound up with a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which was great cause I didn't have to move. I could just stay in New York, which is where I was doing my graduate studies. And the way the fellowship was set up, it was loosely defined so that half the time you would be doing your own research to complete your dissertation and then the other half of the time you'd be working for the department and assisting, you know, a curator to whom you were assigned with their research projects. And so I started working at the MET a couple of days a week in the modern and contemporary department and doing things like writing acquisition reports. So anytime the museum's going to you know, buy something or sometimes even if it's just being gifted, a report needs to get written that basically outlines, the significance of this particular work relative to the artists. Oeuvre or relative to the field of contemporary art, if you're at a place like the met, you know, relative to the entire history essentially of like artistic production. Somebody has to do all that. To answer those questions, but always bringing it back closely to the work and offering a kind of close reading of how the work itself is generating meaning and all of that becomes a kind of template for the didactic materials that would be used in a wall label, for example. 

So I found out that I actually rather enjoyed that kind of writing. Here I was working on a dissertation project, which, you know, is taking me years to research and write and, often involved me you know, engaging with a lot of theory and sort of getting away from some of the objects. In contrast, I had this opportunity to really deeply engage with specific works of art and, then to write about them and to try to make meaning out of them. And, you know, these are just sort of like short-term projects and I, I loved it. And then I started doing more curatorial work for the department. I started assisting on some exhibitions thinking about rehanging the collection, becoming aware a little bit more about the goings on behind the scenes and, um, I thought, you know what, there's a certain aspect of this work that really appeals to me. That actually makes me happy. I'm not an introverted person. I'm an extroverted person. And I like thinking through ideas out loud with other people and I like working collaboratively and I started to think, well, wait, maybe, you know, being an academic is not necessarily, what's going to make me happy. I mean, I also like the timescale, right? That you get to work on projects that take three or four years, not like seven to eleven years, which is normally what an academic book takes from start to finish. And so then there was an opportunity when my fellowship ended to join the department as a curatorial researcher and so I did that and I worked at that for a couple of years, basically assisting curators on the organization of some major exhibitions and getting a better handle on what it's like to, to not just produce scholarship as a scholar, writing an essay. Although I did that too, but also thinking about creating the context for the production of scholarship, right? Like logistically organizing exhibitions, inviting people to be part of a catalog, collaborating with your colleagues and education, and communications, you know, and. Beyond, and just sort of thinking about curatorial work as actually, you know, not being unrelated to academic work, just sort of manifesting in a different way, right? You work with objects and you're making arguments, but you know, now you're working with objects in space and you're working within the productive constraints of an exhibition budget and an exhibition calendar and, the physical space of the gallery. Right. And the limitations it has in terms of your square footage, et cetera. So I don't know, there was something creative about working with art in that way, that sort of scratched an itch that I didn't know that I had, like, you know, like to be an exhibition coordinator, it's like, you're, an academic in some ways. You're producing knowledge and scholarship and you're making an argument and you're doing research. Some of it archival, some of it looking at the objects, some of it talking to the artists. But you're also kind of like an interior designer and you're also kind of like a filmmaker, like you're, you're structuring a journey for somebody, right. From start to finish, you have to think in four dimensions. And yeah I just really love that. Like I love making beautiful shows and I never would have anticipated that, you know, 10 years ago, how much pleasure it would give me to walk into a room and to know that like you can walk in and have this like profound and moving encounter with aesthetic objects that, you know, derives not simply from the objects themselves, but how they've been brought into dialogue with each other in space.

 In 2018, I got to go see the show Programmed that was presented at the Whitney Museum, curated by Christiane Paul and a team of other people. And you know, that exhibition was about sort of intertwining the history of conceptual art and video art and digital art. And as a student of the history of digital art, writing about the first generation of people to make art using computers in the 1960s. A lot of the works that I've written about, I've never actually been able to see in person. I only know them through reproduction because those works were not valued, or because they have been lost. They, you know, obsolesce or in many cases because they are essentially designs and if you have like a plotter design, that's manifested on a piece of paper at a certain point, that piece of paper starts to seem secondary and then the artwork itself is just sort of the design. And so when you see it in reproduction in a book, it's like, oh, well, you've seen it, right. I'm a big believer in the materiality of digital. I always say, like, until we learn how to beam information past our sensory apparatus, directly into the brain, you still have to encounter digital art through your sensorium, which means digital art is still material, right? Like you have to interface with it through hardware and software, or at least, through some sort of physical output. And so I do think that it's important to see digital art in person, even just something like, the aspect ratio or, the resolution or the luminosity. Even if you're talking about screen-based works, the size of the screen makes a huge difference. I think a lot when I'm curating about, am I going to use the 55 inch or the 65 inch or the 75 inch, right? What is the appropriate sort of scale for this work relative to my body? And so when I went to see the show programmed, I saw, printed on paper an early plotter print out by the artist, Charles Csuri, who is one of the sort of pioneers of digital art called Sine Curve Man. It's from 1965 I think the Whitney's print out might be from like 67. So it was actually acquired by the Whitney it's in the Whitney's collection. And it's basically like a digital line drawing of a man's face and then he did something very simple you know, every point is plotted on an X, Y axis and he applied a sine curve to the Y coordinates, which introduced a kind of distortion, vertically through this guy's face. And I was so moved to see it in person to feel the patina of age on that paper, which had yellowed, you know, to feel the materiality of it. And the scale of it, hung on the wall, sort of like life size. And when I looked at it, I had the most profound experience. I've never felt that way, seeing it as a tiny reproduction in a book or a magazine. It's like a very frequently reproduced image. It's very famous it won the annual contest of computers and automation for digital art. That was sort of the first time that the word computer art was ever used back in, I think 63. I'm an elder millennial, I remember life just before computers and the internet became something that were popularly accessible in school, in the workplace. I sort of looked at this image and I thought, this is an image of what it is like to have the coordinates of who you are, the coordinates of your life disrupted by the introduction of digital technology. It was a kind of existential image to me that spoke very profoundly to what it felt like to come of age in the nineties, in the age of like hackers and the matrix and all the sort of like popular culture. This is what that felt like. And then of course, I mean, I think if you're not of that age, you can still say that more broadly. It's actually a very powerful image of existential angst of the idea that we are all constantly coming into being that we are not static stable people, but that, you know, we are always becoming right. And so this sort of vibrating figure really represented that to me, as well as a sort of like universal theme of man's struggle, with nature and with technology, right? And this, kind of like mutually constituent of relationship where man and technology are making each other, this idea that using tools using technology is actually what makes us human. It's what allowed everything that we think of as being human to sort of come into being so the mutual invocation of man and machine existential anxiety, My life is a millennial. Like I looked at this one stupid print on paper, right. That like everyone else would just walking past and I saw all of that and I think about that a lot now, you know, as I like curate digital artworks for people, I want people to see how much this art can offer them too. 

[00:15:45] Ben: I think a lot of folks have some kind of understanding of what a curator does, we've talked about on the podcast before, you know, whether it's selecting what gets collected or what goes into an exhibition, but I guess, the thousand foot view for you, what is the job of a curator?

[00:16:01] Tina: I was just listening to your episode with Chistiane Paul, who you know, is like legend, the inspiration for everything that I do and I really think she covered so much of what I would want to say. So just a shout out, everyone who's listening to this episode. If you haven't listened to that episode, you should just go back and listen for sure.

Fundamentally I think a curator is basically somebody who is responsible for the art. Is responsible to the art in a way. So thinking in an institutional context, for example, everyone works together in order to achieve the mission, which is to collect, conserve and exhibit the most important art of our times, right. Or at least that's our mission as a modern and contemporary art museum. I can't do what I do without the advancement department doing the fundraising for it. So it's a team. But in terms of the day-to-day operations of caring for the art that falls on the curatorial team. And of course, I'm not talking about the material care for the artwork, because that falls on their registrars and the art handlers and conservators. But sort of keeping the flame of the art, like caring for its spirit, I guess in a way. So thinking about how to provide a context for those artworks that allows them to be seen in the best light that tells new stories about them that argues their relevance to new audiences.

I almost think of us as, it's going to be so corny, but almost like the priests of art or something like we are there to serve the art and the artists who make the art and keep the flame alive. So in a very philosophical sense, right. That's what I sort of think that we're doing in a very practical sense day to day, I basically send emails all day long. That is my job. I am a traffic cop for emails. I receive information and then I redirect it to the appropriate party. I facilitate all of the communication between artists and galleries, art handlers and conservators and registrars and budget people, and the facilities team who have to build the walls that the art gets hung on. I basically am just coordinating amongst all of the internal parties in order to get the art actually on the wall or safely in the vault. Not to mention the education department and the publication department who are, you know, basically our closest collaborators.

So, you know, it's reading and writing and then collaborating. Working with objects, being the other, like hugely, distinctive part of this is that you have responsibility for stewarding that work into the future. So that future generations can benefit from it. Like you're protecting that work for posterity. And that means like literally, you know, coordinating with conservators registrars, et cetera, to make sure that we understand what state that work of art should be in and needs to be in and how to make sure that it's stored correctly and all of that. But it also means you know, protecting its legacy by creating information and knowledge around that work, that then gets passed down to future generations who will look back at our internal records and what we wrote about the work of art in its own time, in order to help them better understand how that work of art originally functioned and was received and circulated.

The unique thing about being a curator who's particularly interested in media art and Christiane, Paul talked about this in her interview with you, but I just can't underscore it enough is that you have a sort of unique degree of responsibility for that work of art for its presentation and conservation. Because variable media works they're not these sort of static, stable things, right? They have lifespans, they obsolesce, they are context dependent, they're contingent upon different technical and also social systems. It's just an extra layer of difficulty. And that is actually what I enjoy about it is having those very philosophical questions with somebody like, you know, our intake form when we acquire works of time-based media, like most institutions now we have these questionnaires, which were sort of pioneered by the Guggenheim back in the day. These like 15 page questionnaire that basically allows us to get into the nitty gritty, like. You know, we see that in this installation photo of this work, you can see the power cords, the power cords are white. Is it significant to you that the power cords are white or in the future if we can not access white power cords, could we use other power cords, please list all the colors of power cords you would not want? It's like that level of philosophical, uh, conversation about the degree to which the technology itself is fundamental rather than incidental to the work of art is like, it is how, I get to sort of satisfy a very academic part of my brain.

 Fundamentally, I still think that I'm teaching with objects. I'm making arguments now in space, I'm juxtaposing things, I'm telling stories. I'm helping people understand the art better through the physical presentation of objects and I'm helping, obviously, you know, this is also to say helping them understand themselves better, helping them understand the world better and each other better. Right. Not just, you know, teaching a kind of art historical narrative. So yeah, it's just, you know, getting to work with the objects themselves. It's a lot of fun, you know, it's just, it's a lot of fun. It's the most fun. 

[00:21:18] Ben: You know, something that I'm struck by is for a curator that has a PhD, you strike me as very accessible. You know, I think that PhD curators have gotten a bad rap and there has been criticism that the trend of academic curators has made exhibitions and work inaccessible to the general public in some ways. But your approach just seems so the opposite of that, not that it doesn't have depth of course, but you just seem so engaged with the teaching and, the accessibility of it. Where does that come from? 

[00:21:54] Tina: That's really, really generous of you to say. I mean, I come from a family of teachers. My great grandmother was a teacher. My mom, you know, is a teacher. Something that, another one of my mentors said to me, my first year of graduate school, actually, when I was debating like, oh, you know, I really, you know, sort of always thought I would go to law school and do human rights law and, you know, do like first amendment stuff and like help write constitutions to ensure civil rights. And like I had all of these very noble ideas and I said, but I love this art stuff. And I love looking at it. And I think I'm kind of good at talking to people about it. And, you know, she said, you just have to think about sort of maximizing your talents. Right. And I had to face the fact that, like, I don't think I would make a very good lawyer actually and there are a lot of people who make excellent lawyers, but I sort of have a talent and part of it is that I've worked very hard to cultivate this talent and part of it is that I don't know where it comes from, but, at facilitating the public's interaction with works of art and acting as a kind of translator. So yeah, I mean, that's really, my life's work is to sort of, again, I see it as facilitating those encounters. So it's not so much like I'm this, repository of knowledge that needs to get downloaded. Right. And because I don't actually believe that the meaning of a work of art lies in the sort of data of like, well, you know, how old was the artist when they made it, or where were they living or who bought this painting? You know, for me, what's important about a work of art and this is hotly debated in art history. The word formalism for a long time was like the F word knew you weren't supposed to say it, but fundamentally I'm a formalist. And, you know, there were wars that were fought in the field of art history about formalism versus social art history, where you bring in more sort of cultural context in order to explicate the work, versus other methods, structuralism post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, visual studies, with its own sort of perspective thinking about, paradigms of visuality and also thinking about popular visual culture and how artworks circulate within that. Anyway, just to say, I'm of a generation after those wars were fought, where we basically think, okay, well, all of that is in my toolkit. Like I don't have to pick, right? So to me, I'm not a formalist to the exclusion of those other modes of thinking about and through art. But I do think at the end of the day, the art object is primary and what's most important about the work of art is the way that it makes ideas concrete, the way that it allows people to express something that could not be expressed in any other way, right? Or to pose questions or to imagine alternative futures or whatever it is that the artist is doing. And sometimes it could just be about beauty, right?

The, you know, the aesthetics, of form that they're exploring something. And my greatest joy is, and I'm sounding so romantic, but I guess I kind of am right I already like copped to being a goth in like junior high. My greatest joy is helping people. Have more meaningful encounters with works of art because they better understand the response they're having to it. Right? So you walk into a room, you see a work of art and you're like, ah, I hate it. Or eh think it's really beautiful or eh love it and to me, the magic actually comes when you start to analyze that. And I know people think of analysis as being like the opposite of magic and romance. But to me, when you understand that, oh, it was the way in which this artist composed the world, like the fact that they were playing with the internal scale or the fact that they use triangles as the basis of this composition or the fact that, you see this particular color palette, unlocking that for me is what's magical. Right? And it just makes you have a more profound relationship with that object. So that's what I really love doing is just facilitating that.

As for like the bad rap that PhDs have gotten, I don't actually think that PhDs are the source of most of the bad writing that we find happening in the contemporary art space. Like many people have probably heard this term International Art English, which was the subject of an essay in, the online publication, triple canopy. I don't know that it's actually coming exclusively or even mostly from academics and academic art historians. I think that there has definitely been a trend obviously in contemporary art over the last thirty years more. I mean, you can really go back all the way to the 1960s where there's this emergence of an entire critical apparatus around contemporary art, where artists start getting MFA degrees and professionalizing, and start writing about their art people like Donald Judd and Robert Morris. That there has been this sort of buildup of this entire, like system, right, of discourse around art. But I don't think the discourse is the problem. I think what we just need to keep in mind is who is your audience at all times, and to understand that certain kinds of art writing are only for certain kinds of audiences. And then to always think about what your objective is. And I think that what a lot of people misunderstand when they talk to the public about art is that they think they have to dumb it down. That there's, I think a profoundly condescending idea that, oh, you have to simplify things for the public, but I don't think that's true. It's like one of my like sacred beliefs actually is that that's not true.

It is incumbent upon the person who is entrusted with the role of being a curator or an educator to make these more abstract concepts or interpretations intelligible. When people basically, pander and just say, okay, well with the public, we're just give you guys something easy. Because you can't handle anything more than that. And it's like, no, if you're not able to make difficult ideas or difficult work relevant to the lives of a broader public. And if you're not able to make that work intelligible and help bring them closer to it, then you need to step aside for somebody who can. 

[00:27:54] Ben: So you're now at the Albright Knox, which shout out to upstate New York as a fellow upstate New Yorker. I'm curious if you could share a bit about, what it's been like for the last four years at the AK, you know, did they have a curator that specialized in time-based media before you arrived? 

[00:28:12] Tina: I'm actually not a curator of time-based media or digital art at the AK we don't have those designations, so we're not broken into sort of departments or fields like that. So we're just curators. We don't have particular sort of fiefdoms or purviews. So, the very first show I curated at the AK actually was a works on paper show that was mostly like drawings and prints and photographs. So we all do it all. It's just that my particular academic interest because of what my doctoral dissertation was on and because of all the criticism I've been writing for basically a decade now where I almost exclusively write about exhibitions of digital art or artists who are making work with digital art that just happens to be my own interest.

But I do like paintings too, actually like my busman's holidays is like I just immediately, if I'm on vacation and I'm in a major encyclopedic museum, all I want to go do is like, look at 17th century paintings. Right? Like I actually really love other kinds of art too. Last week I was just lecturing about Rembrandt. Yeah, so we don't have those sort of, um, distinctions, but, um, the curator in charge of the collection, Holly Hughes actually has been organizing video art exhibitions since before some of your listeners were born, I'm going to guess, she's been at the AK something like 20 years now and we've had a number of amazing time-based media shows over the years. We had a show called Video Sphere, which was an early survey of artists making time-based media art. We had another show more recently that was just before my time called screenplay. Life in an animated world from 2015, which was all about animation in contemporary art, understood in a very sort of broad way, everything from like Harun Farocki, Cory Arcangel, and beyond. The institution itself has a very interesting history of working with media art. In fact, it's sort of in our DNA. I like to point out that, back in 1910 we had what was either the first or if not, literally the first then one of the very first exhibitions in any American museum of photography as a fine art. It was curated by Alfred Stieglitz. So sort of embracing new media, if you will, thinking about photography not a new technology by 1910, but still a new artistic medium, right, one that hadn't yet been fully integrated into the practice of contemporary art.

We've been sort of at that for a long time and of course, Buffalo has this incredible history with media arts. The very first department for media study at any American university was founded here in Buffalo, in the 1970s at the University of Buffalo. That sort of nomenclature is significant because when Marshall McLuhan put media theory on the map in the sixties, it's not that you're studying cinema or photography or, you know, some sort of very specific technical format you're studying media itself. You're studying the sort of more global idea of how artists are expressing themselves through media technologies. And so, there's an amazing history here back in the seventies, we had all these amazing artists teaching here. People like Tony Conrad and Hollis Frampton, and Paul Sharits and, Peter Weibel who would go on to become the founding director of ZKM the center for art and media in Karlsruhe in Germany. So just an amazing media arts scene and we still have one to, this day. I mean, there's so many great local organizations. Like the Squeaky Wheel film and media arts center founded in the eighties, has an amazing history and regularly brings out fantastic artists for residencies and exhibitions. There's hall walls, there's the new BICA the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art. I mean, there's all of these great organizations that are either exclusively devoted to media or like to feature media art as part of their programming. So I've been here for four years and how has it been? It's been a little nuts, the first year was, sort of thrown in on the deep end. I curated something like half a dozen shows in my first year and a half or two years. And we just had a lot of programming to sort of catch up on. And then I assisted our chief curator, Kathleen Chaffey with her survey of the work of Tony Conrad. Who's an incredible artist who I've been obsessed with for a very long time. Actually the first day on the job, she essentially sat me down and she's like, okay. So, you know, one of the things we are going to be doing is we have the show of Tony Conrad coming up. I did mention that right? And I looked at her and I just burst out laughing. My graduate school advisor, Brandon Joseph literally wrote the book on Tony Conrad. You know, and being a lover of avant-garde cinema, Tony made a very, very famous film, back in the sixties called the flicker. I've been looking at Tony's art, you know, for 15 years at that point. And I was like, no, you did not mention that our like first major project here would be the Tony Conrad retrospective, but amazing. So that, and then I bought a house and then had a baby, so it's been, it's been a very eventful four years. Oh, and then a global pandemic. Right. Did I mention that part? 

[00:33:01] Ben: You recently opened a major exhibition at the AK, tell us a bit about the show.

[00:33:05] Tina: The show's called Difference Machines: Technology and Identity and Contemporary Art, which is a lot of words. We thought very carefully about what we wanted to say about the show in the title. So I'm going to unpack it really quickly. So I co-curated it with Paul Vanouse who is based here in Buffalo, but who's sort of a legendary experimental media artist who's been making work since the nineties. You know, his career began working with basically interactive cinema. Using digital technologies to make interactive cinema and then quickly, sort of fell into bio art and now operates the center that he founded at UB called Coalesce the Center for Biological Art, which brings in artists to do residencies and experiment with the biological sciences as an artistic medium. So super fascinating stuff. I'd known about him essentially since I was in college and he's, just an amazing guy and was so happy to, to meet him when I moved to Buffalo and become friends. And so for the past, almost like two years now, we've been working on this exhibition together. So the show is essentially about the way that technology and specifically digital technology is shaping how we understand identity. And a lot of exhibitions have focused on this, thinking about it in terms of the personal. So thinking about oh, selfies and how we express our individual identities. But Paul and I, especially in the wake of all the conversations that we're having about structural racism in America, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the sort of push for greater equity for marginalized communities, we really wanted to focus on the structural conditions, right? So not how do I express my personal identity, but how our identities like class and gender and race and ability or disability, how are they articulated and how do we relate to these categories and how are these categories, changing because of digital technologies for better and for worse. Both of us are very allergic to this rhetoric, this idea that, oh, well, technology is neutral or, technology will make identity irrelevant. Like neither of us believe that both of us believe very profoundly that, identity is not just appearance. It's not just something you can leave behind by hopping into the metaverse. That identity is basically the product of the history of your relationships with the world and with other people and so you carry it with you always, it actually like becomes the context or the framework for how you experience reality. And that digital technologies are intersecting with that now in really important ways. Right? So on the one hand, it's allowing communities who maybe never had the resources before to archive their histories, to find each other to network, to tell their stories in a positive way. It's affording them those opportunities and that's super important.

But on the other hand, digital technologies, as we now know, and I feel like there's a news story, essentially every day that emerges, they are also creating the conditions for the perpetuation of stereotypes for basically the technological encoding of systemic bias. And this has knock on effects in every aspect of our society, right? So the grades that you get, the medical treatment you're offered in a hospital the sentences that you're offered by a judge at sentencing, all of these aspects of our lives now are being are being influenced essentially by algorithms and databases and so as we start to have a conversation in society about the role that technology plays in systemic inequality, we wanted to show how artists have actually been talking about this for 30 years and have been at the forefront of this conversation and to try to think about what art can bring to that conversation that can't be offered by other fields.

Like we've have the New York times essays. We have the books that have been written that are super important. Many by women scholars of color. So I'm thinking, you know, about their work and how important it is, but also thinking, what can the arts add, right? And specifically artists who are coming from marginalized communities, like how can they help their own communities and also audiences more broadly understand some of this stuff through aesthetics on a sort of more personal level or a more subjective level or a more emotional level, right. How can they connect with some of these problems in a kind of visceral way. So the show includes 17 artists, 19 works of art going back to the early nineties, and that title Difference, Machines, Technology, and Identity and Contemporary Art. So difference machines is kind of a bit of a joke. I don't know that anybody is really going to get it, but it made me and Paul happy, so that's what matters. And we think it's like evocative of the idea, even if you don't get the reference. So Charles Babbage, you know, back in the 19th century, developed machines, he called difference engines. And these were the antecedents of modern computers, right? And there are many other people who also contributed theoretically to the development of the modern computer, including Ada Lovelace and I don't want to erase the work that she did, but, Charles Babbage had these, sort of mechanical calculating and so we were thinking, you know, well, computers are sort of originally envisioned or proto computers were envisioned as machines for calculating the differences between numbers, but today, computers are being used to calculate the differences between us, right? These databases and algorithms that track our identities for example in the expansion of digital surveillance.

And then we very specifically said that the show is about technology and identity in contemporary art, because the term digital art is such a fraught term. It's a term that most artists don't even want to be associated with, I think that this might be changing generationally, but for a long time, it was the case that, you know, artists wanted to be seen as artists or as contemporary artists and not to be placed in a kind of silo of being quote unquote digital artists, like over in a corner, you know, in a very dark corner that was, you know, light locked for video projection. Right. And so this is something I actually talk about a lot is the importance of creating space for digital art in institutions like literally creating space. That has the appropriate environmental conditions for seeing digital art. Like you don't want to be looking at a painting and having sound from a video art piece, interrupting your experience and similarly, you don't want the light on that painting interrupting your experience of a monitor based or projection work, right? In a sense, you kind of need some physical distance in order for media art to really be seen in the best light. Pardon the pun. But on the other hand, what happens then is that you silo it off, right? You create parallel narrative and in fact, digital art, is very much a part of contemporary art. There is nothing more contemporary than technology, and like all art it is not just about the technology and how the technology is used. It's also about creating an aesthetic experience and so if you sort of silo it off, you allow people to see it more as technology and less as art. So it's tough, you know, you just have to constantly negotiate between these two things. But anyway, so we didn't want to say it was a digital art survey, but functionally that's kind of what it is. Right. It's a survey of artists who use digital technologies to explore the impact of digital technologies on. How we live our lives today in the sense of how we understand and relate to our identities. And when you walk in the show, it was very important to us that you don't just see a whole bunch of monitors on the wall. That whatever stereotypes you might have in your mind about what digital art is, if you even have any, if you have any preconceived notion.

You know, I worry that people think that digital artists like cold or that it's just sort of boring or monotonous it's like screen after screen. And so we wanted to show that, digital art is actually something much bigger than that, that it encompasses 3d printed sculptures, that it encompasses online games that it encompasses software based works, that it encompasses, works of art that are on an internet browser, that it also encompasses, digital prints, of digitally made photographs, also digital animation. You know, we've got a work by Skawennati in the show. That's a 20 minute movie she made in Second Life, but then we also have photographs by Sean Fader that are printed like photographs and have actual frames on them, like they're actual real works of art quote unquote. So basically showing the potential for digital art. The rich diversity of how it manifests physically and materially. And also the rich diversity in terms of the sort of phenomenological experience of the works, right? The temporality of them, the scale of them, and also the emotional or effective, impact that they have on us. Right? Some of these works are funny. Some of them are really sad. Some of them leave people angry. It's a kind of manifesto, not only about this idea of technology and identity, but also about the possibilities of what digital can do in contemporary art. It closes January 16th so I'm very glad that we're doing this interview now, in case we have anyone who is a procrastinator and wants to come up and see it, You know, at some point around the holidays, you've got until January 16th, 

[00:42:19] Ben: So Tina, the time has come. We're going to talk about NFTs.

[00:42:24] Tina: Oh boy. 

[00:42:25] Ben: You're one of the few people who understands both what's going on in the NFT space and the art world. The topic is obviously very polarizing, I see a lot of, I think in some cases of willful misunderstanding and misinformation on both quote-unquote sides, you know, folks from the art world, willfully misunderstanding some aspects of crypto and folks on the crypto side, willfully misunderstanding, or demonizing the art world establishment. What do you think that the art world misunderstands about what's going on with NFT and crypto.

[00:43:04] Tina: Yeah. I think. And I know that there might be some people from the crypto space who if they're listening to this are going to be like, well, you know, it's pretty hypocritical for you to be complaining about this. Cause I know I've definitely made my position clear. I do not like crypto. Crypto art is a whole nother question, but I actually just do not like crypto, like I don't like cryptocurrencies. So that drives a lot of my animus. It has actually very little to do with the art. That's another debate but anyway I think that on both sides, we've seen a real lack of generosity. There's been a lot of straw man arguments, and there's been a lot of what about ism? And what I'm trying to do is to carve out a space that's not quite in the middle, like I don't see myself as a centrist per se, but I do see myself as somebody who is pro nuance. If you're going to attack something, at least attack it on grounds that are actually justifiable that are actually based in reality. Like let's not just like, you know, make up things.

One thing I've sort of been harping on most recently is that on one level, it seems like we're having a debate about power and about power over the art market and power over art history and you know, who gets to make the cannon. We're also having a debate kind of about aesthetics and, is this stuff called quote unquote crypto art actually like interesting as art. And in my mind, all of these debates kind of, I don't want to say they miss the point because they're debates that do need to happen, you know, for example, I think a lot of crypto art doesn't want to be seen as art with a capital a, I don't think crypto art wants to be collected by museums or archived, for the future.

So when you point out that like, oh, well this isn't museum quality work, or, oh, you know, you're not thinking about the conservation of these assets. That's not really a fair critique, right. Because it didn't ever say that it wanted to do any of those things. The problem of course, is when you do have a muddying of the waters and when you do have people who are saying, yes, I know that this is a cartoon of whatever, but it should be in the art history textbooks. And it's like, okay, well then whose criteria though, because we're the ones who write the art history textbooks, and so if you want to write the art history textbooks, that's like a slightly different conversation, right? Like we need to think about who's writing those cannons, and whose values they're representing in the formation of those canons.

So all these conversations are happening and that's fine, but in a sense, I'm standing here and I feel like Cassandra a little bit, from ancient Greek mythology because like, I can see everybody's squabbling, but really what I see is above everyone's head on the horizon is this mushroom cloud, or an exploding volcano, there's something off on the horizon that is like apocalyptic that I can see unfolding that will make all of these debates completely irrelevant in a way, or at least feel like art world, crypto art world in-fighting. And that is this idea that a lot of blockchain proponents have that we are transitioning to something called web three, which is not going to be like a pure web three. It's a bit of a fiction anyway, cause it will be still cobbled together, I think with a lot of elements of web two. But this idea that we are going to be moving into a future in which everything will be decentralized, all transactions will be on chain that you won't even read an article on the internet without it going through the blockchain. And that all money will basically become cryptocurrency. And I guess what I'm trying to say to the art world is that the stakes of what we're talking about now are so much bigger than art.

The art world is always like the last to adopt new technologies. You know, getting the art world to like, think about, I don't know, online sales or server storage or, even like websites, you know, like it's sort of like behind the times, usually when it comes to the adoption of new technologies, but for the first time the art world is being given the responsibility or being forced into the position of having the responsibility of actually beta testing, a new technology, right? NFTs are the sort of like avant-garde of blockchain. Blockchain has been around for over a decade, but you couldn't really do much with it until basically the creation of NFTs and a market for NFTs. And now we have a use case. And the consequences of this, like if blockchain is widely adopted if cryptocurrencies are widely adopted, extend far beyond art, right? Like we're talking about something that has the ability to compromise, economies on a global scale. I mean, we're talking about something that has the ability to even destabilize nation states. We're talking about something that is going to profoundly disrupt politics. I mean, we already thought super PACS were bad. Wait until you find out about the funneling of money through blockchain, completely outside of any regulatory mechanisms. So if I have seemed a little shrill or panicked all year, It has not been because, oh my God, I think cartoon monkeys are stupid. I would have rolled my eyes and that would have been the end of it. I see a lot of bad art all the time. Bad art doesn't scare me. Bad art doesn't keep me up at night. Crypto does. So that is what I would like the art world to understand. In addition to the fact that, they need to be a little bit generous and understanding of the fact that we are living in really dire times, we're living through a global pandemic and on top of that, we already had extreme economic inequality. And so we, I think, need to be a little bit generous when it comes to how other people are able to pay their rent and pay their medical bills. And I've said from the very beginning, I judge no individual artist for making NFTs or selling NFTs. You know how they choose to make money is their business. I would never judge an artist for selling with one gallery versus another.

I'm here to talk about the art and I'm here to support the artist and how they conduct their business shouldn't be any of my business, frankly. So I think the art world just needs to be like slightly more generous to the artists who are in this space and not make it personal. I've really tried to keep the conversation focused on systemic issues. If there are artists who are getting involved with NFTs, some of them, yes, we can say they do not need the money. Right. And you all know who I'm thinking of, but there've been some very big names who have gotten into the NFT space and it's not exactly like they're struggling to pay their rent. But for many of them, you know, it is sort of transformative. And I want to acknowledge that and I don't want to diminish that. My beef is, is that this system is not as democratic or as fair as it could be or should be and I'm hoping that we can find an even better one. Right? So when I critique the possibilities that are being offered, everyone comes at me with anecdotes, like, well, my friend or my cousin or my daughter's college roommate, you know, has been able to make so much money and I'm like, that's great. That's good for them. I'm so happy. And the problem is though, is that just because anybody can make money it doesn't mean everybody can. I heard this analogy that it's sort of like a game of musical chairs. At any point, any given person might be able to get a chair, but at the end of the day, not everyone gets a chair, right? We're not really talking about a system that is a real substitute, for example, a robust social safety net for a universal, basic income for universal health care. That is what I think we need to sort of be focusing on. And if artists are attracted to what many people have sort of condemned as being like casino gambling, or like hyper capitalist speculative market, we need to understand that it's precisely because inequality has been so bad that people have been left without other choices. So I'm not here to condemn any individual artists. I think we need to just keep our eyes on the sort of systemic problem. What can we as the art world do to address that? Actually it's what we need as a society needs to do it's much bigger than what the art world can do, but at least within the art world, we can amplify the work of artists who are thinking about, privileging, not the values of individualism, these sort of like capitalist values of like, well, at least I can get my bag. But think about privileging, communitarian values. How can we create a system in which we basically have a greater redistribution rather than concentration of wealth. So again the art world also needs to understand what the stakes of the conversation really are, which is much bigger than just like, I don't like this crypto, or I don't like this, cartoon monkey. 

 In terms of what crypto folks might misunderstand about the art world? Well, there's, quite a number of things because frankly, a lot of people coming to this space are not coming from even the world of let's say contemporary digital art. Which used to always be seen as sort of peripheral to mainstream contemporary art, and now seems actually completely central compared to this new crypto thing that, has made digital art look mainstream in comparison. One thing that I've been trying to sort of emphasize is that what the crypto space calls gatekeeping is not always necessarily an evil thing and it's certainly not always emerging from a place of bad intention. There is a sense that curators, institutions are elitist and that galleries are middlemen and that we need to abolish all of this gatekeeping, right and allow a truly sort of democratic, artistic culture and market to emerge. I'm like sympathetic to that impulse. What I disagree with is the means, right? And I think that what's getting lost in that conversation or the baby that's getting thrown out in the bath water is that some of those intermediaries, are basically put in place for the protection of the artists. And again, I mean, I'm like, so hesitant to even say anything, I try to be so careful to always qualify everything I'm saying, because I think people rush, you know, to say, oh, well, you're just defending galleries. And look, I'll be the first to admit there are predatory dealers out there. Okay. I'll be the first to admit that galleries taking a standard 50% of sales and then enshrining, resale rights in their contracts is something that needs to get addressed and re-evaluated, you know? The fact that we have a huge lack of diversity in the institutions of the art world is also highly problematic, but that's something that we were actually talking about and working on before NFTs came along and I think that it's important to underscore the work that has been done and to continue to amplify the work that's being done on that rather than just dismissing it all out of hand and saying, well, we're just going to completely burn the system down because I'm afraid that the new system we're building in its place is not necessarily any better, or at least the early indications are that it's not necessarily any better. I would say gatekeepers have a role to play essentially that part of the value of art, for example, derives not just from its market value, you know, thinking about free market economics and basically the value of art is whatever the market will bear. The value of art also derives from the art workers, including curators and critics and art historians, and gallerists who, you know, basically argue for that works cultural value, its cultural relevance. And this is not even to mention the people who like materially steward the work and conserve its sort of value by taking care of it and making sure that it's archived safely and documented. I guess that that would be sort of the main thing I try to harp on is that I think a lot of us have similar objectives. Like I too want artists to eat and pay their rent. I too want digital art to have a higher profile in the discourse of mainstream contemporary art. I too want digital artists to have their work acknowledged. Some of them have said to me explicitly that their participation in the NFT scene is motivated in part by revenge, right. By a desire to basically prove that this mainstream art world that dismissed them for so long was wrong. But I would just say to that, and I have said it, you know, privately and publicly, um, that it's not the case, that there was a universal dismissal. Right. I mean, you and I have both worked institutions that have allowed us to work on digital art that have exhibited digital art like our own CVs show that that's not the case.

So I'm a little bit concerned that in this rush to paper the mainstream contemporary art world is not only one that's like completely predatory on artists. For example, like some galleries actually help steer an artist's market and protect their market so that the market doesn't grow too quickly and then collapse because once it collapses, it almost never recovers and that's a problem for an artist it hurts their long-term career for short-term gain. So there's that galleries also can actually help an artist develop their practice. Like a good dealer will work with an artist to, give them feedback on their work, to get them connected to other critics and art historians who can give them feedback and who can help them grow their practice and also give them the time and the space to grow their practice because they're taking care of all of the administrative work of sales and inventory and insurance and things like that.

Just to say that there's a certain role that can be provided that is beneficial to the artist that is not exclusively predatory and also that the art world itself has not exclusively ignored digital art that important gains have been made and that I truly have faith that even if NFTs hadn't come along. We would have seen, uh, just an acceleration, maybe not exponential, I don't know, but some sort of acceleration of institutional support for digital art of more exhibition opportunities of more market opportunities for digital art in the years to come because that's the trajectory we were already on. 

One more thing I would add is that, you know, there's real value, pardon the pun, I think in the kind of meaning that is created by the context of a curated exhibition. I know that there are platforms in the crypto space. I know that there are new companies that are startups that are, you know, specifically trying to incentivize curation or to create opportunities for curation. But I think that this idea that like, we don't need any of that. We can just list works on open sea and that's fine. It doesn't track with how I think meaning is created. Right? When we look at a work of art, like, I don't think meaning derives from its market value. In fact, I like knew nothing about the market value of even the works of art that I was actually studying and devoting my life to, until I became a curator and had to start thinking about market value, because I was put in the position of having to propose acquisitions. You really learn something about a work of art when you see it in dialogue with other works of art. This is like the cliche of the side by side comparison in an art historical lecture. And what we see now is that digital art is being presented exclusively through the kind of infinite scroll of social media, where there is a kind of context, right?

Is the context of open sea or the context of Instagram or whatever. But that context is one that flattens artworks literally making them sort of fit within a kind of template. Whether it's like the square box of Instagram, or flattening them because the kinds of associations that can be made between them are either one totally arbitrary, it's completely chance based how you get, from one work to the next, or it's determined by the algorithm. And at least for now, I am not willing to see that the making of meaning should be done by an algorithm. When it comes to interpreting and making meaning, I think that we learn more when we think about artworks as existing in a kind of context, whether it's, an institutional context an art historical context, the context of other works of art, the context of an artistic movement, or even just the architectural context, right, that we put it into. In fact, I don't believe that any art objects, including digital art exist outside of a context. The question is, are you putting them into a context that is generating meaning in a sort of productive way? Or are you putting them into a context that is flattening? That's the question? 

[00:59:31] Ben: Yeah. Amen. So Tina, what's coming next for you?

[00:59:36] Tina: I have a project right now in development. It's a major historical thematic survey of art from the 1960s to the present. And it's still about three years off on the calendar. It is an exhibition that, like a lot of my academic work and a lot of my work as a critic is going to insist on the, the proximity of the discourses of media art and contemporary fine art. That's going to place these things into dialogue with each other, and to explore the history of that sort of communication and the porosity between these worlds. If you look back at the historical record, in fact, it's not as segregated as it became. I like to emphasize to people, like we talk about like the art world and the crypto world, but in fact, there's this whole world of like digital art that has its own institutions, its own festivals, its own Canon, its own collectors. I mean I mentioned ZKM earlier, but you know, ARS Electronica, the ITT center, HEK in Basel, Interaccess in Toronto, you know, Eyebeam, Gray Area, Further Field in London. These institutions have been around from anywhere to like ten to, you know, 30 years and even longer. So there's this whole community that has existed for a long time. And just to say that at many moments there has been contact with the contemporary fine art world. It's those moments of contact have not been privileged in the art historical narrative but have nonetheless existed and so one of the things I'm really interested in doing right now, also outside of the context of this exhibition that I'm planning is thinking about these sort of forgotten case studies, when there was a sort of crossover, and particularly looking at crossovers that push us to think about what digital art even is or can be.

So for example, I wrote an essay a couple years ago on the artist, Matt Mullikin who's, you know, definitely known in the contemporary art world and, sort of most famous, maybe for his, drawing practice where he sort of goes into a trance, and makes work in a sort of alter ego mode. In fact, in the late eighties, he was working with a computer corporation to make VR environments, and , that VR environment, by the way, it was exhibited at MoMA in 1989. But there's these moments in the history that, outside of these sort of you know, isolated moments, that's not like really common knowledge. So picking up on these these sort of alternate moments, right. And thinking about what they tell us about the history of media art and the history of contemporary art is sort of the project right now.

[01:02:18] Ben: Wow. So you heard it here first folks, Art and Obsolescence exclusive: major Tina Rivers Ryan show in three years, top secret. Is there any advice that you'd like to impart to artists listening to the podcast?

[01:02:35] Tina: I think whenever there are major shifts in the market, whenever there's major shifts in the discourse. It can be a little unsettling. It can make you sort of question the path that you're on. I mean, it just so happens that this is one time where the shift actually has made me feel. Oh yes. Well, I did do the right thing when I decided to write a dissertation on digital art, you know, like 10 years ago, that was the right move, Tina. But I think sometimes, it's easy to feel a bit buffeted by the winds and to lose faith or to have a kind of crisis of confidence. And I think that the important thing to remember is that the work is the work and that doing good work is the most important thing and that there will always ultimately be, and I truly believe this, there will always be an audience for good work. You may not find that audience immediately, but I think eventually the work is seen and appreciated. I've known too many amazing media artists who were making art in the sixties who had nobody show up for them for a long time only to have their retrospectives, you know, 40, 50 years later.

 So I think that just, if you believe in the work that you're making, I think you stay the course and I'm not saying to not be open and receptive, but to not be so easily shaken. And to also understand that the discourse that's happening right now, you know, there are many art worlds and there are many audiences. And just because your work isn't for everybody or isn't for a particular moment or particular curator or particular collector doesn't mean it won't find its audience. It won't find its people. And so I think community is actually one of the most important things in art, in any art world, whether it's the crypto space or the mainstream art space or the digital art space or whatever that, you just have to find your people and, you make art for yourself and for them. And what happens beyond that? You know, it, I don't think it's worth really worrying about. You don't need to necessarily worry about fitting into an existing discourse. You make the discourse, right. You change the conversation. It's an incredible privilege if you're able to do that but I think if you really believe in what you're doing, you have to have faith in that. 

[01:04:49] Ben: Well, Tina Rivers Ryan, thank you again so much for coming on the show. I really appreciate it.

[01:04:54] Tina: Thank you so much, Ben, it's been a real honor and like weirdly fun. 

[01:04:59] Ben: And thank you dear listener for joining us for this week's conversation. If you liked what you heard, I hope you'll consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, it really does help other people discover the show. If you want to keep the conversation going, you can find the show on Twitter and Instagram @artobsolescence. and lastly, do you have any questions for me or do you want to comment or respond to something you heard on the show? You can leave us voicemail at 1-833-ART-DATA. That's 1 8 3 3 2 7 8 3 2 8 2. Thanks again so much for listening friends, my name is Ben Fino-Radin, and this has been Art and Obsolescence.