Virtual Body of Juxta
By Andrey Velikanov

It is a common thing that new informational technologies develop new means for the self-expression of an artist. Of course, each piece of art is made with the help of certain tools and materials. It is clear what we have in mind if we say oil and canvas or pencil and paper. But in our epoch this classification has lost its meaning. It is quite unimportant with what means modern artists produce their products. However, if we ask which material is the most congenial for modern art, it is certainly information. Consequently, we can expect that media art is the field in which the most interesting art works will be produced

On the other hand, we have learned that the technological approach prevails in net art. As a rule, it is more important by what means these works were produced than in what environment and with what ideas. In general the scene of net art looks very primitive. As a rule, it is something like disco-acid snot. Technological aesthetics predominate over everything else. The so-called ASCII ART and use of the graphic elements of Internet browsers, and HTML code itself as a means of self-expression and the outstanding concept of “zero content” -- all this as a whole presents a picture of a children's hobby group where young boys construct models and young girls embroider in silk. So let’s leave technological experiments aside, and see instead whether it is possible to make something adequate to the modern situation. A modern human being exists under the influence of great number of illusions. Here is one of them - if I am associating with another person and say to him A, then he will hear exactly this A, and if he answers B, I will understand him clearly. If we hold this opinion, then of course we should believe that the means of modern communication offer fantastic possibilities for intercourse and a long life for technical progress! But I will try to doubt this.

I’d like to call your attention to the point that information is not a simple linear material with which one can do everything that is in one's power. The matter is not the simple resistance of material but some fundamental character of information itself. I could give many examples of what happens with notorious information when it streams on modern, superfast, communicative channels. But I don’t want to loose time with meaningless texts from the gutter press. Everybody can recall a good ridiculous example of distortion of information, which took place due to the incompetence of a reporter or the idiocy of an editor. Perhaps only an old Russian anecdote can provide a good example of the messages in the media. One hussar says to another -- have you heard what happened yesterday? Our captain played over 100 thousand in the officer clubhouse. Oh yes, answers another, but it’s not quite right -- not yesterday but two weeks ago, not in the clubhouse but at the ball of the governor-general, not played over but got drunk as a pig, not the captain but the lieutenant, and the rest is correct.

Nevertheless it’s not a prerogative only of the yellow editions. Very refined and intellectual media could give us wonderful burlesques. My beloved example is a phrase from the translation of Foucault (from Russian into English) in one of the Moscow art magazines. The very simple English word "juxtaposition" turned into “position of Juxta” as though this Juxta was a great thinker and his portrait should hang somewhere between the portraits of Plato and Aristotle.

The subject is not factual mistakes or incorrect translations, the subject is that information itself begins to live according to own laws. It streams on those superfast channels toward a tremendous ocean, on which waves and waterspouts fly independent of concrete human beings or powerful institutions. It’s possible here to remember the thinking ocean by Stanislav Lem or the artificial intellect from the serial "X-files." But I would offer another model. Permanently, from birth to death, we are situated in this ocean. We are permanently exposed to its influence. And if we open our mouth to say A to our interlocutor then can we trust that the information ether will bring to him exactly this A? And what will be if a couple of news- or PR-agencies are somewhere in the chain between a correspondent and an addressee? And then, if our interlocutor says B, and we, as it were, are sure that we can listen well and make no mistake, can we be sure that it is really he who says it, or perhaps that he has simply opened his mouth and the words of the great primordial text have flown from it? So if the thing is so complex, polysemantic and indirect, then the appropriate question arises -- how should an artist behave in this situation?

Let have a look, which possibilities exist. Formerly art was impersonal, theocentric and occupied itself with the imitation of the world, created by the Supreme Being. The personality of an author did not matter. To create something beautiful meant to approach God, but the ideal was, of course, unattainable. Then as a result of the natural development of philosophical ideas, there arose the ideology of modernism, according to which an author is a genius, not equal to God but a substitute for him, who is able to form and rebuild the world according to his own conception. But there are too many ingenious authors and they, of course, enter into competition. Only a single metanarration is impossible in the postmodernism, but there are a lot of equitable conceptions that can enter into the struggle. If we try to consider the subject on an economic level, we can say that modernism is a period of creation of values, and that postmodernism is a market period, a period of the change of commodities. And in the period of religious art everything was free, gratis, simply from God. The artist's idea of himself corresponds to each of these periods. And the main fact of the matter is that an artist necessarily had his own position. It could be principle of revolt or of worship, but the principle itself had to be necessary.

I apologize for very reductive and even primitive presentation of the history of art, but I need its main points to draw the following conclusion -- in the modern world an author position is in principle impossible. We are situated in an information ocean and we can only come into resonance with this or that type of moving information, but we cannot produce an action which would be our personal intention. The best model which we could offer for this situation is that this notorious information thinking-ocean is a new God, a new Supreme Being, the Great Creator. He alone is able to create, but we, mere mortals, are deprived of this possibility and this right. We can only fall prey to him and be his slaves. The new God has impregnated our brains with homogeneous information feces. Vulgar identity is our destiny. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, we could say that not only an artwork looses its originality, but we all loose our originality. Although there is the possibility of entering the priestly caste for honorable apostolic service -- it is perhaps only one possible path for an artist. He can only express his inclination toward the perfection of the Supreme Being, as a medieval artist once did, for whom the beautiful was that which God created. And in general, in spite of the fact that the impossibility of the author position rejects the ideology of the former periods, the modern situation is in some sense their synthesis. As for the Supreme Being itself, I would suggest not to follow the example of the ancient Jews, who feared to call their God by his name. I offer to name him Juxta, in the name of that mythic personage who appeared in Russian translation of Foucault and found his own life.

Roland Barthes wrote the essay “La mort de l’auteur” in 1968. This essay established the death of the modernist author, the genius-individualist, and the phrase itself -- the death of the author -- became sacramental. Nevertheless, an author as someone enjoying the full rights of a creator and demiurge continues to exist and to sign his masterpieces with his useless name. The conclusion of Barthes’ statement means that an author died in order to pay with his death for the birth of the reader. According to the poststructuralist tradition, an author is unworthy of his creation because he cannot control all the senses and connotations of his text, and sometimes does not realize what is quoted and how it is quoted in his work, but a reader is that area in which the text finds its unity. But this point of view implies the existence (as they say in business) of an end user and his consumption of the information product. But in our case to consider that a reader or spectator or user consumes a piece of art is the same as to consider that a parishioner praying in the church consumes a devotion written by a medieval monk. This reader itself is the author, or rather one of the authors of the common production, and at the same time is no more than a mechanical doll, into which flows the stream at 28Kbps, and that is when the connection is good.

We can maintain boldly that we are all equal for our Lord Juxta, we are all his children and each of us will receive a grain of his body. But this implies that we are thus identical, that our differences for the most part are exterior differences and, most importantly, that communication is impossible. To say to somebody A generally is senseless; our addressee has already got this information. According to Barthes, the only possible form of communication is the rare verbal form named the performative, used only in the present first person singular, in which the denotation is equal to the connotation. For example, it is a sentence “I hereby declare” in the mouth of a king. But we can say now that for the production of the artwork we need no king, no poet, and no artist. The information field is so complex and self-dependent that it can entirely generate characters, texts, and events, which could be perceived aesthetically as artworks. So the position of an author formulated as an imperative is generally absurd, and even the performative offered by Barthes for this purpose is highly doubtful. An artist who think that he is like a forbidding rock of truth, represents a mountain of absolutely dried and even petrified substance.

A single appropriate question follows -- are there any artworks adequate to the present situation? We have in view not only net art, but generally all artworks from archaic painting to modern technological experiments. Alas! I would say that most of representatives of actual art are found in the less adequate position as representatives of net art. These last can at least work off their childish zero-content that is, if nothing else, food for our Lord Juxta, but actual artists for the hundredth and thousandth time can reproduce only the motions already invented some time ago by someone else. So their practice looks like a folk trade of decorative art, in which an assumed pattern is permanent reproduced. Nevertheless we are all equal for our Lord Juxta, he needs all of us. The adolescent, pimply hacker putting in order (or disorder) some web server provides him medical care. The pirate unduly selling non-licensed software helps him to occupy new living areas. The radical artist who perform some useless action with mutilation, stirs slowly the information bouillon. And the specialist in black PR is generally speaking his main organ - a blind gut.

The fundamental peculiarity of this situation is that we continue to think that there are free producers and grateful consumers of information and that information itself is a commodity that can be bought and sold. At the same time, all participants in this performance, including the information field itself, behave as if there were some information God and as if they are his mediums, who on account of some reasons have access to the holy of holies, and as the parishioners of the church who every day turn on the TV set or computer in order to set their souls under the life-giving information stream.

Of course I would like my words to generate some reciprocal reactions. How wonderful it would be if I could discuss the complex problems of the modern world and the tendencies of modern art with other mediums (please pay attention to the fact that this word comes from media). But according to my own theory this discuss is impossible. If some reaction comes it will be only several drops in the information ocean, for example somebody will represent the computer as the altar of a new faith, and compare the mouse pad with the praying rag of Moslems, and declare the program scripts of Microsoft as new symbols of faith. So I say that I am not going to declare myself a prophet and look for twelve disciples and speak in parables. But I will conclude so -- Praise be to the Great and Almighty Juxta!

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