Peter Sinclair: Searching for satisfying net art

GraphicJam is part graffiti, part jazz ... a place where visitors contribute to an evolving collaborative drawing — a 'wall' where a private gesture becomes part of a public design."

I'm reading these words by Mark Napier, described as "renowned on the web," at www.potatoland.org, in the course of a frustrating search for satisfying net art, by which I mean "art which is worth looking at," as opposed to the various communal art-forms currently in vogue. It seems to me about time the web produced some unique genre which doesn't make you reach for the aspirin.

GraphicJam and a companion work, Shredder — in which you can collage the contents of any website you like — are receiving critical praise from the e-cognoscenti. Napier's work is soon to be featured online by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in an exhibition binarily entitled 01.01.01.

Viewing this sort of thing, you can't help feeling there's something wrong either with you or with it. But they're all doing it — even the Guggenheim has commissioned the New York firm Asymptote Architects to design a new Virtual Museum in cyberspace, "a morphing structure that is in constant flux," which sounds neither particularly restful nor especially artistic.

Praise has been heaped on London's new Tate Modern (these days, they prefer to call it just "Tate"). A sort of Te Papa-on-Thames, it's housed in a converted power-station.

More adventurous readers may enjoy Mongrel Tate, a centrepiece of the site, in which the gallery has "mongrelised into its own past and present with the mud, skin and scabs of the Thames." This charming conceit can be examined at the Mongrel Tate website, together with the gallery's first venture into net art, Uncomfortable Proximity.

After an hour or so in which I became convinced that the electron has no business intervening between the soul and its expression, it was a relief to receive e-mail from reader Harold Coop.

For the internet has brought him a new career, a new life, and genuine artistic fulfilment: "I've just joined SeniorNet Eastern Bays and thought your readers might be interested in my new website [New Zealand Painting]."

Grant Sidaway of Telecom [who sponsor SeniorNet] uses it in his talks as an example of how the net can facilitate transition from one's trained occupation to an exciting time in the third age.

"I was an eye-surgeon, and am now a fulltime artist/painter ... since my emphasis is on colour, the site is not only good stimulation for the retina, but may brighten morale during a bad day at the office."

It certainly would. Designed by his son Philip, the website intersperses the fresh blues and greens of New Zealand with the fauvist vitality of France. (Another son, Graham, practices law there. When I met him he was starring on the Auckland team in University Challenge and Harold visits often.)

Now, thanks to the web, he has an international audience — some of his work is currently on show in Bristol. He told me he intends to investigate digital art when he finds time and software.

Harold, please don't. There's nothing wrong with representational art. Leave "ongoing collaborative work that evolves and disappears as visitors contribute their scribbling energy to it" to the Mark Napiers of the net.

Links:

www.potatoland.org

Shredder

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Guggenheim

Tate Modern

Mongrel Tate website

New Zealand Painting

Peter Sinclair e-mail: petersinclair@email.com