38 Summer 2013
Art In-Formation
American Art under the Impact of New Media Culture
With the spread and increased accessibility of new communications channels in the mid-
twentieth century, many conceptual artists began to explore the network structure of
technological media. By the end of the 1960s, the notion of the information society had
entered the social theoretical discourse, inspiring artists to experiment with public com-
munications systems, including print media (newspapers, journals, artists’ books, multiples,
copy art, billboards), postal services (mail art), television and fax transmission, and com-
puter technology (net art) as avenues of creative expression and as potential tools for critical
engagement. e eld of information, previously considered to belong to the sphere of
mass communication and thought to contradict genuine artistic endeavor, surfaced as the
new cultural a priori, which challenged and redened artistic practices. Anticipated by the
programmatic agenda of media interventions by the Situationist International movement
in France, artists in the United States—among them Dan Graham, Richard Serra, Allan
Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Hans Haacke, Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Robert Smithson, Sol
LeWitt, Vito Acconci, Stanley Brouwn, On Kawara, and Lawrence Weiner—responded
to the aesthetic, ideological, and political challenge posed by information technologies by
actively engaging in their organizational dynamic. Since information and communication
were being discussed as key issues in society’s ability to maintain control over economic and
social relations, the role of art and creative processes had to be redened. e potential of
information to facilitate economic advancement and social emancipation became a central
aspect of public debate on the new technoculture. Developed alongside Marshall McLuhan’s
thesis, articulated in Understanding Media: e Extensions of Man (1964), that informa-
tion could function instrumentally as a form of innovation and resistance, the trope of the
information society not only shaped the collective imagination but also contributed to the
fascination with the reality-shaping myth of codes and data that facilitated the advancement
of high-tech production modes and the appropriation of them in the formulation of a new
perspective for artistic practice.
1
In fact, McLuhan’s ideas signicantly inuenced a newly
envisaged liaison of art and communication media conceptualized as aesthetic interven-
tions, if not as overtly political activism. Art as information could be practiced in collective
constellations while connecting far-ung locations, diverse environments, and distant tem-
poral zones, which, in McLuhan’s vision, converged in “the total involvement in all-inclusive
nowness .”
2
e notion of unlimited communication and transport, often referred to in con-
temporary rhetoric as the new frontier of late capitalism, envisioned the world as a global
system in which the media enabled the ow of information and capital to break free from
national boundaries.
Conceptual art and its transmissive logic of “dematerialization” proved to be highly
compatible with the structural components of information media.
3
During the 1960s
Dan Graham experimented with words and ciphers arranged in patterns that resembled
units of information, formatted to enter the channels of media distribution. Graham’s
graphic structures—texts, diagrams, charts, typographic patterns, photographs, and
questionnaires—were expressly designed for reproduction in the pages of magazines
and were meant to integrate seamlessly with their platforms of display. Such concepts
aspired not only to the sign structure of informational language but also to the idea of
omnipresence in the public domain. Beyond their formal features, which assimilate the
algorithms of computer programs through the systematic accumulation of letters and
Ursula Anna Frohne
Volume 27, Number 2 © 2013 Smithsonian Institution