How the Debates Over Art, Race, and Tech Have Changed

0:01Right now I'm feeling like making objects and works doesn't feel sufficient.

0:05Aria Dean:Sufficient to what? Like I think sufficient for like how much research I like to do, how much I want to be engaged with by a public or by like whatever the audience is, however small or large in terms of like critique, I guess.

0:21Aria Dean:I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from ArtNed News.

0:32Aria Dean:If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been the center of both these conversations. As a theorist, Dean's essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important venues advocating for digital art. As an artist, Dean has been in many important shows, from the Hammer Museum's Made in L.A.

1:10Aria Dean:Biennial to the Whitney Biennial here in New York. Recently, for the Performa Biennial of Performance Art, Dean staged The Color Scheme, a two-person theatrical work which is also set to tour to Berlin later this year. The color scheme focuses on an imagined meeting in the 1920s in Berlin between two black intellectuals, one called the poet and the other called the philosopher. It may be as close as Dean has come to totally fusing her work as a thinker with her work as an art maker. It literally stages a conversation about black culture, politics, and art. Yet the color scheme also plunges us a century back in time, very much away from the world of digital culture she has written so much about.

1:53Aria Dean:It felt to me like a continuation of the important debates Dean has been a part of, but also an attempt to find new perspective. And it seemed like a good cue to talk to her about how she's viewing art now, why she's looking to art history, and how her views have evolved over a tumultuous decade. Aria Dean, thanks for joining me on The Art Angle. Thank you for having me. Where are you calling in from today? I am in Princeton, New Jersey. Well, I want to talk to you about your career and your thinking and this new work of art that I saw. But let's just start with a little about you. Tell me about your journey as an artist and as a thinker.

2:35Aria Dean:What drew you into art? So I went to Oberlin College, started in 2011 and graduated 2015. And I guess I got into art like in a proper sense there. I was like a kid who had drawn and painted and written a lot throughout my life. But then I think my entry point to like really starting to, you know, give a shit was like Oberlin has a long history with like, you know, conceptual art movements and, you know, the 20th century because they have the Allen Art Museum and did a lot of exhibitions or early collectors of that work. And so we had this like really heavy emphasis on conceptual art in all of our studio classes.

3:10And so I guess like I encountered people like Saul Lewitt and then like later people like Robert Smithson and my all time favorite Robert Morris and got really obsessed with these artists who had a command of language, sort of quote unquote dematerialized and at times relationship to art practice were expanded. and whose work really was sort of like, to me appeared to be like a series of philosophical postulates that often involved material. So that was like when I fell in love with art, I guess, was when it seemed to look like philosophy.

3:42Aria Dean:Yeah, yeah, high conceptualism. Right, yeah, yeah. And then also I wanted to be an architect when I started college. And so I was like doing a lot of architectural theory. Oberlin doesn't have like an architecture program at all, but I was interested in that. And so I think the architecture stuff led me to like media theory, which led me to the world of like net art. And so then that was like soon after I got into that stuff. And that became like the world that I got, like sort of, I guess, various periods of conceptual art. So you're interested in this classic conceptualism and then you graduate into what art historically we think of as the post-Internet moment.

4:18Aria Dean:And were you organically seeing connections between those two periods? You know, conceptualism was exploring new media's impact on visual art. And then some of that translated naturally over into that moment of digital culture. Yeah. I mean, I think I saw some connections, you know, hindsight 2020. But I had a professor, someone Julia Christensen, who's wonderful. And she taught media art focus classes at Oberlin. So the way that she taught that stuff was through this lens of like it's related to or an extension of conceptual art and also like experimental film practices. Like, you know, early works like Oya Lealina, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, which has this like montage theory.

4:59Aria Dean:So like - A net artwork of some note from that, maybe a little before, maybe the 90s even. Yeah, like early 90s. But so I guess it's to say that that was happening. And then also Oberlin has this curious history of net art and post-internet relations as well because Corey Archangel went to Oberlin and as did Lauren Cornell and Jacob Chiachi. so there was like this built-in legacy there that julia my professor was very keen to explore with us i think cory was maybe one of the first like net artists who i heard about through the oberlin portal but to answer your question more specifically i think like i don't know if i was drawing those connections i just knew i liked all of that stuff i guess and then whatever connections were drawn by the artist who was reading or i was looking at i think early on i don't know how but I stumbled across Seth Price dispersion, which is still a little bit earlier, of course, but that was like mind blowing text to me, you know, remained seminal.

5:53Aria Dean:It's come up a bunch on this podcast. A lot of people are looking at that text, which is about how images spread in new ways and have multiple lives. And it just is interesting because that was a concern of conceptualism was like how the image and the representation of the image became a whole new aesthetic of its own. and then that replicated itself in that post-internet period in ways that were both conscious and unconscious, I feel like. Almost like sometimes people looking back to like rules-based art like Solowit and then thinking about that in terms of code. And then sometimes the echoes were just very unconscious.

6:29And as well, I think then like groups like think more like the high post-internet period. The jogging was a huge touchstone for me, which was Brad Tramone, Josh Zarela. Which was a Tumblr blog, an art Tumblr blog. One of my best friends growing up was when Christine Jackson, she went to UCLA for college and she ended up kind of in that scene in LA. And so I was getting a lot of stuff from her and her friends from just talking throughout the semester. So I was like stuck in Oberlin, but then was like getting all this like LA post-internet stuff. And then through all these things, like through the formal education and then that started being rhizome and was kind of got into that world.

7:06When you look back, the jogging in particular, I think is an interesting example.

7:11Aria Dean:I mean, it's so not discussed now as a project, but I mean, the writing that Brad and Lauren were doing and that everyone was thinking about like the way that images circulated was like an obvious precursor, I think, to me. Like that was how I got interested in the circulation of images online. I understood that I could take the things I was learning from my explorations of like 20th century conceptualism, as well as from architectural theory. And then I was doing also a lot of philosophy. I would do like an intensive like independent research project on phenomenology and ethics and aesthetics of like built environments so I was like really invested in Heidegger and I think all these things came together or also just like this through naivete like I just saw like that's all of this in some sort of continuum because I was just like oh yeah well I'm interested in all these things they must be like kind of historically related to one another in that period I think that was just the stuff that we were like eating up and then my friend and I my friend Casey Silverstein and I started a project space at Oberlin.

8:07We started bringing a lot of people from the post-internet scene to campus.

8:11Aria Dean:Well, you were in college? Yeah, we had this project space called Storage. Before that, another friend and I started this thing called Don't Unplug Me that was about women in experimental media. And we brought Martine Sims, who I knew through the Ooga Booga orbit in LA. I interned at Ooga Booga, the Monday House bookstore. We were both from the Pasadena area, so we had that connection. And then we brought Andrew Moore Wilson. We brought Amalia Ullman, Devin Kenney, some Bruce High Quality people. The people who were big in that time period, in the early 2010s, exploring ideas of image circulation and how it intersected with the gallery, the space, essentially.

8:48In that period, everyone was talking about how you didn't have to live in New York or LA or Berlin. So we were like, well, then we will, from Oberlin, Ohio, create this node in the network and try to become an inflection point or somewhere people were meeting.

9:02Aria Dean:Did you find that not to be true, ultimately, that you did need to be in New York? I think it probably was true for people a little bit older than me. It might have been the case that between 2010 and 2015, it did feel that way and that people's practices were able to circulate. I graduated into a version of the art world and the internet that was becoming a little more centralized. The advent of the feed logic and that it wasn't so much about pockets. something like Tumblr logic, which was more like people gathering in these like, you know, different blog, like sort of blog culture, the sort of end of that.

9:34I feel like I graduated into like the Instagram feed and like Twitter and it felt kind of like things were happening in these major centers. I mean, I remember like people were moving to Chicago after graduation because Chicago felt like the place that was in the U.S. like where if you were like 22, like queer thoughts, the gallery was still there, like all this was happening. I mean, part of it was I like needed a job and I was from LA and I wanted to like live at home. And so I did that. And I feel like in the following five years, it felt like things were happening. You weren't hearing about like a project space in like whatever little city anymore as much.

10:08Aria Dean:It's interesting. I've never thought about it this way before, but I guess in some cases, what we call the post-internet art world, which is again, the early 2010s, I've never thought about it that way, that it's actually also the pre-social media art world it might it might have been sort of like a moment of digital culture production before social media made like the persona and the uh the performance of your life central and that changed things again yeah it's like that period when you know in any again then you think about like art and technology the history of art as a history of like techniques or whatever and like how people engage with the technology it's like early video art or something And when people were like, oh, okay, this is new, like, let's play with it.

10:50And how it disseminates information and images. And I think that the tail end of post-internet stuff was more like that. Like, you think, like, Amalia doing the Excellence in Perfections project.

11:00Aria Dean:Which is an Instagram-based performance where she staged herself moving to New York, or a character moving to New York as an Instagram character. Right. That project, I think, was such, I don't want to say novel, because that sort of, I think, trivializes it. but there were net art projects that did something like that before, but the sort of realism, I guess, and also like the sort of situatedness of it and the straight face deadpan felt completely new. And I think it was also because the platform didn't have conventions yet, you know, where there wasn't an Instagram orthodoxy of like how people posted.

11:34It was just kind of like, this is life.

11:36Aria Dean:I think it might've happened before the term influencer was even a thing. Yeah, probably. Yeah. I've seen at least, And this is meeting like all like unk, like annoyed. But I feel like I've seen three or four projects in the years since then that have done something similar without any historical knowledge of the original Molly Ullman project. But it's interesting seeing people try that over and over. It's just a different thing each time. And it's not more interesting. It seems more naive because it's like the structure of Instagram in that regard. It's not an interesting inquiry or something in the same way.

12:11Aria Dean:Well, I know you were flirting with writing a book on post-internet art. I mean, do you think it's because there's not a history of that moment that things repeat like that? Yeah, I think so. I think there's like an oral history within a certain scene. Like, I feel lucky and sort of am in an interesting position because I think I'm like, myself and a few friends of mine are probably the younger edge of the people who were active in that period. I've been like disparagingly called a post-internet artist by people online. And I'm like, that's funny because I wasn't really there. I was like a kid looking at it and I was obsessed with that work.

12:43And I became friends with a lot of those people then through my job at Rizome after I'd graduated, but I was really young. And, but I think that it lives in this scene of people that are all connected through that period. And a lot of people are in the film world. A lot of people are not podcasters. A lot of those people are like writing novels or doing theater. Like they're all over the place, but there isn't a centralized attempt to write it down. I mean, the Net Art Anthology project that Michael Connor and I did at Ryzone, which was modeled after the Anthology Archive, like, you know, 100 films list.

13:14We did like 100 works of net art and a sort of a canon, non-canon thing that could continue to expand. There was like some post-internet stuff in that in the later sections, but it was also really hard to get people to want to talk about it because the post-internet, even the term was so contested and so unappealing to people. And then also socially and emotionally, interpersonally, it was all very complicated. So what could have been a history kind of didn't happen in that portion of that project because it seemed like no one wanted it, which was interesting.

13:45Aria Dean:Well, maybe when the wave of early 2010s nostalgia hits in 10 years, that'll kick it. I was reading you talking about the latest work for Performa, which is a theatrical work that's a dialogue. And you said something to the effect of you're interested in people who can't help but talk about ideas. I think people can probably hear already that you're very much like that you're very much someone who goes between thinking and making. So how did you become a maker and how do you think about making? You also seem to move between a lot of positions, like some of those artists from the conceptual art generation in the 60s that you admired, like Robert Morris and Saul LeWitt and so on.

14:23Yeah. I mean, right now I'm speaking from Princeton, New Jersey, where I'm in my second semester of PhD program. So I think that always

14:31Aria Dean:has something about how I'm relating to it at the moment. For a long time, I felt like they were not distinct. In writing, I was always more interested in writing about the outside world and not about my own practice and writing about things that just got stuck on, like, you know, just like things that irritated me enough to like, irritated, like in a negative sense or in a positive sense, just like an irritant that I needed to explore. But I also think that looking back, I thought that was very separate from the making in some ways, but also like these two things were like churning material. I would write and then if I couldn't write something, I would make something.

15:08When language failed me, that was when I felt most compelled to make stuff, especially in a sculptural sense. But I think as I started to move towards more film and performance stuff that has more narrative and more language in the work itself, I feel like it relieved some of that. Whatever I couldn't say, I was starting to say it in different ways. I was it into dialogue and it was, you know, giving characters like these things to work through. So it sort of shifted what I was using writing for. But I think then I started just thinking also, I think right now I'm feeling like making objects and works doesn't feel sufficient.

15:42Aria Dean:Sufficient to what? Like I think sufficient for like how much research I like to do, how much I want to be engaged with by a public or by like whatever the audience is, however small or large in terms of like critique, I guess. Like I feel like writing as an artist, I've found that it feels like people are like, I guess in a way like provincialize what you're saying. And it's not taken as like, I've made a theoretical argument. Here's what I'm saying. It's kind of always feels like it's been tinged with this like, oh, you felt that way or like that describes what you were making. And I don't think that's always the case with how my writing has been treated.

16:14I know that people have experienced those things as like useful in a variety of ways. But in terms of like, even like giving a paper or a presentation, I started to feel like I wasn't getting the feedback that I wanted. And I wasn't growing necessarily also through that kind of engagement. But I think that was just a me thing. Like, it was like, I wasn't really interested in, like, just publishing into, like, this sort of shrinking sphere of, like, online art publishing or whatever. And, like, having people read it or, you know, whatever. And I think the way that value is produced through publishing right now is frustrating to me in terms of, like, what criticism does.

16:51I'm sure you have also feelings on, you know, how things have shifted over the years.

16:56Aria Dean:I have feelings in my bones. I feel it in my body how things have shifted how attention has shifted I mean there's something like you showed a piece in the Whitney Biennial this Little Island Gut Punch from 2022 which was kind of like a post-minimal work of art it looks like an obelisk a green obelisk kind of like a green screen and it's the product of you warping something or simulating collision inside what digital simulation and it sort of functions as a illustration of a thought you had or an experiment you were doing yeah I mean I think that like at the time I feel like I would have been like no absolutely not it's its own separate thing and I'm just like compelled to make stuff you know going back to this sort of like poor reading of conceptualism when I was like 19 years old where I was like oh these guys are just doing like philosophy but I mean in a way it is but it also like that's kind of not enough of a it doesn't fully describe it but i think in some ways that is often what i'm ending i end up doing in making works it's like i'm thinking about how an object function i mean for a long time it was like i was thinking about how blackness functioned in the world and i think like writing pieces like poor meme rich meme for instance or notes on black acceleration these were like these attempts to theorize the structural qualities of blackness and using object lessons that you know sort of put in fact back on that and then i think with making objects for a long time I was like okay so like I'm applying these structural qualities or these structures to making a thing so the thing is going to do the same thing and like what happens if an object does those things in real space which I thought that was bad or something because it seemed like not creative I mean I guess there's a romantic idea that artists are like feeling things or expressing things but I was pretty like I'm testing like I'm doing tests like seeing I think with sculpture that's how I relate to it because it's like a sculpture is an opportunity to explore a kind of presence, you know, or how something operates or how things operate together in space.

19:03Film and video, different.

19:13Aria Dean:I do want to talk to you about your essays, like Rich Meme, Poor Meme, and Notes on Black Acceleration, which are in Bad Infinity, your collection of essays, partly because I think they'll tee us up to talk about your new play, which is in some ways about representation. But these were essays from the 2010s that were very much you thinking about the stakes of how images of blackness, black suffering, and black culture in general circulated on the internet and were affected by digital culture. And I feel like that was a very important conversation. Obviously, that was the era of Black Lives Matter, which, you know, merged out of a hashtag.

19:57Aria Dean:What was the argument in your head that overall you were trying to get at or make through those kinds of essays? Yeah, so that was 2016. And then, you know, some black acceleration was like the following year, I guess. And I've been working on them like pretty much like boom, boom, like in succession. But it was like that sort of peak Black Lives Matter beginning of like Trump 1.0 or is about to be that period. The argument I was trying to make, I think, was always, again, like a structural one. I noticed that it seemed like in my readings about blackness or an experience of it and cultural objects, etc.

20:29and lived experience. And then as well, in my understanding of images online through my interest in media theory, it just seemed like there was structurally something similar between memes and blackness. And I was like, well, that's weird. And then also the fact that like black people were like excelling, I guess, like the Vine era, et cetera, excelling at producing online content at the very same time as like police brutality videos were the other major thing we were seeing everywhere. The thing that I thought is most salient to me still, and I think that I really was trying to figure out was like, okay, like this meme stuff seems like blackness isn't always just attached to black people, right?