Networked Art

by Craig J. Saper.
U of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2001.
198 pp., Illus. Paperback.
ISBN 0-8166-3706-7; ISBN: 0-8166-3707-5.

Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be

At first, I thought it was a bit overzealous to call networked art in all its appearances 'the artform of the second half of the Twentieth Century', but I must admit that Craig Saper's analysis makes this an acceptable proposition. At least if one accepts his encompassing definition of what network art is and can be.

Saper discusses a wide range of artistic activities where networks of social relations, whether very specific, between individually identifiable people or very general and abstract, between members of a society are used as a canvas or a medium. Since social networks are the fabric of this artform, he also calls them 'sociopoetic'. Whenever artists create or employ what he calls 'intimate bureaucracies', in which communication and interaction between the participants glues them together in a non-trivial and non-standardised way, resulting in a highly personal exchange of meanings, there is networked art. The three elements constituting an exchange: the sender, the text and the receiver - where 'text' can be practically anything from a string of words to an object to a musical score to an image or a fanzine - form the basic triangle from which more complex networks are constructed. Drawing on Roland Barthes' distinction between writerly, readerly and receivable texts, the author attributes a distinctive quality to this kind of communication: while making use of and even mocking the established institutions and bureaucracies of late capitalist society it escapes assimilation or recuperation by them.

"Of course, all art and literature intends to move its audience, but in intimate bureaucracies, the work is about the interaction among distribution systems, a community of participants, and the poetic artisanal works. When the social situation [becomes] a canvas for art and poetic practices, the trappings of bureaucratic systems [look] ripe for appropriation. Reading these works requires an approach that is different from contextual analysis or textual close readings, because now the poetic work itself (in, for example, a work that examines postal systems) is about the context and the frame of reference. Other works, especially on the conceptual art of the twentieth century, have much in common with this sociopoetic approach, but intimate bureaucracies more forcefully stress this particular type of social construction." (pp. 151-152).

The book doesn't follow a strict chronological line in describing artists and works deemed to be networked. It starts with an overview in three chapters of the essential characteristics and workings of intimate bureaucracies in mail art and fanzines and 'Strikes, Surveillance, and Dirty Tricks' (about art strikes and the reactions of the establishment against assumed subversive mail-art projects). In the second part, "From Visual Poetry to Networked Art", Saper goes on to describe and analyse other forms of networked art. 'Processed Bureaucratic Poetry' is mainly about early developments: visual poetry and poésie concrète and its influence on later movements like Fluxus. 'Intimate Poetry' follows lettrist poetry and the influence of Asger Jorn and the situationists from the 50's and 60's till today. Chapter 6 is dedicated to Fluxus and the final chapter is about 'Assemblings as Intimate Bureacracies'.

In his conclusion, the author considers the possible future of intimate bureaucracies and networked art. He quite rightly stresses the fact that sociopoetic works resist mechanical and digital reproduction, opening the way for a critical evaluation of web artistic projects calling themselves 'networked'.
Unfortunately, Saper did not try to connect his analysis of works of the past to more recent projects by and around, among many others, Heath Bunting, Vuk Cosic, antiorp or even mailing lists like [7-11]. They indisputably prove that one of the many futures of networked art lies in the (mis)use of email and the web.

Because of its encyclopedic scope, this book will certainly appeal to the general reader who is interested in the origins of networked art and the contributions by renowned artists, from Bauhaus to Fluxus and from Beuys to Bleus. On the other hand, it lacks the rigour and detail to be a real lexicon and its sinuous argument makes it sometimes difficult to follow.