What was Post-Internet?: An Interview with Ann Hirsch and Parker Ito
I conducted the following interview with Parker and Ann in March 2022 in what I’d hoped would be a series of interviews with various people involved in shaping what came to be known as Post-Internet. My motivation was simple: Post-Internet in no small degree begat and animated my own interest in art. It acted for me as a threshold to a deeper immersion in art’s history and significance. But it seemed to have been truncated in some way. The MCA Chicago show “I Was Raised on the Internet” (2018) was like going to a graveyard. By then academicism had sapped whatever dynamism had existed there before. Something had changed, something had ossified. But it was also clear that most of the art being made at that time owed something to Post-Internet art or was in some way responding to it. Those suppositions beget a series of complicated questions about modern art, originality, and historicism: To what extent is Post-Internet derivative of Contemporary Art? To what extent is Contemporary Art derivative of Modern Art? What questions were asked when Post-Internet had vitality? What questions are left untouched?
In 2021, just over a year ago, New York was still high on the potential of alt-lit 2.0 and the institutional artworld was getting super high on NFTs. I hoped that a series of interviews would begin the task of critically historicizing Post-Internet art, of posing to a new generation of artists what Post-Internet’s blindspots may have been, what questions were left unaddressed, what paths were left untrod, but also how it transformed accepted strategies of making art, and perhaps even reorganized the rubric for aesthetic valuation. I am incredibly grateful to Parker and Ann for giving me this interview, which I believe sheds some light on the underlying dynamic realities of the Post-Internet era. If it doesn’t conclusively answer these questions, it might at least begin to seriously suppose them.
Ann Hirsch live video chat performance at Avatar 4d curated by jstchillin, 2010.
Grant Tyler (GT): At the top of Parker’s website, there's some scrolling text that reads, in all caps: “DOES SOCIETY STILL HAVE A NEED FOR ART???!!”. I’d like to pose that question first to Ann, and then to Parker. And elaborate, if you would, on the nature of that necessity or lack of necessity.
Ann Hirsch (AH): Art is necessary now more than ever. Art and the art world need to change. Society is hungry for that change to happen.
GT: What is the nature of that change? What about the artworld is lacking?
AH: I was thinking, where we are in an art historical period, we are in a regressive period. Like the return to painting in the 1980s. We are in a similar place, but maybe coming out of it. My hope is that art can be more progressive in both form and subject matter. In terms of the artworld, it’s been building and building and getting worse and worse. I do think a big change is coming. The NFT thing is a big disruptor. We will see changes that we do not really understand right now.
GT: Parker, do you think society has a need for art? I think you do because if you click the no button on your website it redirects to a scene from Equilibrium with Christian Bale.
Parker Ito (PI): I’m constantly updating my site. It used to say something different there. Then when I was updating it one time, during peak COVID lockdown, and that’s when the artworld and art felt pretty unnecessary. I just put that up there as like a joke or something. I don’t know. But Equilibrium is about a society without culture because no one’s allowed to have any feelings. I might change it now, I forgot that was up there.
GT: No, no, no it’s good. It’s exactly what I want to talk about when it comes to Post-Internet art. Personally, I think part of the crisis of modern art, going back to the mid-nineteenth century, is its right to exist, its necessity.
PI: Well, when we talk about art, we are considering the contemporary art world, in which we operate. But art is much bigger than that and is much more profound. Maybe the premise I am putting forward on my website is more about the artworld as an institution. Obviously, humans are always going to have the need and desire to create things.
GT: Well, what if we could do away with the artworld and be left with only movies like Equilibrium or reality TV shows produced by Netflix? Would people want art?
AH: I don’t think that’s possible actually. Art is the first place that culture is invented and then it spreads out.
PI: It used to be! Now it’s the Internet.
AH: That’s why Post-Internet art was so important. That’s what it did. It considered these things on the Internet as important and you have to pay attention to them. Post-Internet art helped people realize and understand that.
GT: It makes me think of Clement Greenberg’s essay “Counter-avant-garde”, where he talks about how Duchamp inaugurated the era of Contemporary Art which is merely parroting “shock-value” as an end-in-itself without any relationship to beauty or aesthetic development, and that this “shock-value” undermined the entire trajectory of Western Art.
For him, this meant that the old dichotomy he considered in his classic essay “Avant-garde and Kitsch” (1939), no longer applied and that rather all you get is kitsch everywhere. In the past, the culture industry would leech off of the avant-garde to rejuvenate itself. Now we see more of an ouroboros or a vicious circle of kitsch. So, it’s interesting to think of Post-Internet art, or the Internet in general, as a disruption to that dynamic.
PI: Didn’t Duchamp respond to criticisms such as Greenberg’s? Didn’t he say that he had made the toilet specifically in response to aesthetic concerns, as an attempt to “de-aestheticize it”, yet that gesture had itself become so aestheticized that it now functions in the opposite way? The way we look at it now is as a highly aestheticized object.
GT: That makes sense, right? He was all about the dissolution of life and art which I think still exists in Post-Internet art. I think there’s something to that. Do the two of you think Post-Internet art is an adequate term to describe your practices?
PI: When I hear that term I have three different meanings in my head.
GT: I was hoping you’d go here! I remember you said this on New Year's and I couldn’t recall the three different types.
Parker Ito’s website.
PI: The first one is the most important, and it is the way that the term is used most correctly: Post-Internet as state or period that we are living in that is applied to everything, not just art, but to the world. If we think about it in those terms, then every single artist ever in the history of art is a Post-Internet artist. The Post-Internet era changed the way that we perceived and understood art. Now you can look at cave paintings magnified by a thousand times their original size online. That is more about a historical condition which we are living through and looking at art through. You may or may not know of these “Agony and Ecstasy” paintings that I made, the reflector paintings. This was specifically trying to map Post-Internet as a phenomenon that we now view not only art through but also our lives.
The second meaning of Post-Internet would be as a term developed and mostly used by the artworld to identify a movement for market purposes. For exhibition making and money reasons. That boiled down to an aesthetic sensibility and, I think by that criteria, Ann and I don’t actually fit into it. I was probably more of a zombie-formalism-adjacent artist, if anything. That was happening concurrently with Post-Internet art. I was never in those shows. When I talk to collectors and artworld people who are not part of the scene that Ann and I were a part of, that’s what they were particularly describing. That’s where the term is contentious, because it's talking about an aesthetic more than anything. The artworld needs these movements. Essentially, you don’t really have movements after post-modernism. It becomes hard to find them.
The third category is Post-Internet/net.art which is a scene of people, or a community of artists. That’s a way for people who are in the scene to communicate and relate to each other about that time period, which was roughly 2006-2014.
AH: Would you consider yourself part of that third meaning?
PI: We’re all a part of the first one. I would not consider myself being a part of the second one, either in terms of aesthetic or conceptual similarities. I was very much a part of the third one.
GT: Ann, are you one and three also?
AH: Yes. And to elaborate on Parker’s first definition, Post-Internet is about a time when the Internet became the place we escaped from instead of the place we escaped to. It’s a time when the Internet became everyday life, instead of an escape from it. That’s how my husband, Gene McHugh, and I define it.
Gene wrote about an idea in Post-Internet that people don’t talk about much, but I believe is especially important. The entire practice of artists in the age of Post-Internet is one performative stream. Now everything you do is being documented and put out, so that instead of isolated, self-contained works, it’s become one constant stream, in the same way we’d think of online branding or self-promotion.
Two paintings from Parker Ito’s series “Agony and the Ecstasy," 2013.
GT: Gene’s underappreciated point in Post-Internet — that one’s development as an artist becomes the total artwork of one’s life — reminds me of something the German art historian Arnold Hauser wrote about modernism in general. He said that it can be fundamentally characterized as possessing a mania for totality. It’s the withdrawals of a secular society no longer having the totality of religion to guide the aesthetic visions of artists: they’re driven to maniac dimensions in search of a unified, whole experience of aesthetic form.
One of my big questions about Post-Internet art is whether it's fundamentally new and different, or whether it's merely a new stage on which to enact the same conflicts that have arisen since the mid-nineteenth century.
I want to ask Parker about his first category of Post-Internet: the notion of a new, historically specific subjectivity, following the saturation of the masses with the Internet following its increased accessibility with Web 2.0. Is technology driving this change in subjectivity? Or is it a change in subjectivity that gave rise to the new technology? Is this new subjectivity the consequence of Web 2.0 or is it the consequence of other factors, for instance the financial crisis of 2008?
PI: It’s Web 2.0. Well, it’s probably both. It’s hard to think of another invention in the history of human evolution, with maybe the exception of language, that has impacted how we understand the world as much as the Internet has. I am certain that this is a new thing in history, completely unlike anything we have ever understood before. The art world still functions on a model from the 1950s. This is why NFTs are interesting. The model we’re using is pretty outdated. But the way that we encounter art has totally changed.
GT: You periodized Post-Internet art as 2006-2014. What are the criteria for that?
PI: Maybe it ends in 2016. As an online scene, 2006-2014 is more or less accurate. One of the things worth noting about the group of people that Ann and I were a part of is that half of them wanted to be practicing professional artists, like myself. The other half were simply being creative online with the new tools the Internet had to offer.
It functions very differently from traditional art historical movements because, in the past, movements were unified by a common goal. They were trying to have a specific dialogue with the artworld and with art history. This was not the case with the online scene. It is hard to define because I’m limited only to my own experience of it. Once I entered into the mainstream artworld, I was no longer a part of that scene anymore. A lot of those people transitioned into the artworld. Some of them didn’t.
GT: I always hear that the 2016 DIS Biennale was the end. Everyone felt it was over then.
PI: That makes sense because Post-Internet crashed in the market. Still, no one’s done a proper show about what Post-Internet actually means.
GT: I’m curious what both of your experiences were like back in the day. Parker, you said that the attitude was freeform, a sense of spontaneous creativity that didn’t necessarily cohere around career goals or addressing art history. You made an 8-hour film called America Online Made Me Hardcore in which you film your friends hanging out for 8 hours, in a kind of Warholian gesture. But it strikes me that there were horizons at the time for changing the artworld and changing the kind of art that was being made: that as a scene there was the idea that you could make art that was better than what you were seeing in the establishment venues.
I’ve heard this characterization also from people like Brad Troemel and Jon Rafman. Did you ever consciously consider what you were doing at the time as an attempt to redefine what good art was and looked like? Was there a conscious attempt to become more than a countercultural phenomenon? Were you trying to change the history of art? If so, what was your attitude to Contemporary Art at the time?
Poster for Avatar 4D, group show curated by jstchillin, 2010.
AH: I definitely was trying to do that. I was getting my MFA when I started making my first Post-Internet artwork, which was Scandalishious. Artists weren’t using YouTube yet, and I thought that there was a lot of potential as a place to show artwork. It allows a way of filming and distributing ourselves that’s radically different from what was done before technologically and socially.
Even at that time, in 2008, people would be scared to put their own profile picture on Facebook. People had this shyness and humility complex associated with putting themselves online. That’s obviously changed radically. I was making artwork about that change, understanding also that no one was doing it yet.
I loved Contemporary Art. I was very much inspired by other Contemporary artists doing similar things at the time, just not on the web. Jill Magid was a huge influence on me. Laurel Nakadate was also a big influence on me. Andrea Fraiser was a huge influence. Cindy Sherman also. I just did what they were doing, but I did it on the Internet.
Rhizome rebuild of the Scandalishous Youtube page.
GT: Ann, you remade Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen as Semiotics of the Camwhore, which stood out to me as posing the question of the relationship of Post-Internet art to the legacy of Contemporary art point blank. In some ways, what you’re talking about with the problem of the venue of Post-Internet art is anticipated with the earlier media artists of the 70s, 80s, and 90s who challenged the white cube in their own ways.
PI: Even within the scene there was controversy about what legitimized a work as net.art or Post-Internet, especially once gallery shows began to solidify and “selling out” became a possibility.
It starts with the Web 1.0 era, the era of OG net artists who are all Gen Xers or older. A lot of them had a sophisticated understanding of the technology. They knew how to program. They weren’t just posting to a blog. They had to understand code to make artwork. Then you have people like Cory Archangel, who were born in the late 70s and early 80s, who are the bridge between that Web 1.0 generation and the later Web 2.0 generation. This middle era is the era of surf-art and nasty nets. It’s the default era and leads directly into Post-Internet. Everyone was into using the prefabricated tools and user-interfaces that were developed to enable ease of Internet use with the masses. This is the dawn of Web 2.0, the earliest version of what we have now. That started around 2006. Around 2008-2009 there were more people like me who were focused on becoming professional artists.
I wanted to connect to people who were like-minded but also saw this as a new frontier with a lot of possibilities for art making. I do think there is a kind of disconnect between those two things. I always knew I wanted to be an artist and function in the professional art world.
GT: I think the reason why I’m so interested in Post-Internet art is that it always struck me that it was the first group to reject Contemporary Art, the first group to think that Contemporary Art was not exciting anymore. But Post-Internet has always been judged according to the rubric of Contemporary Art. There’s still potential for Post-Internet art. I think there’s more that it could do to change the way we have aesthetic experiences, the way we make art, and the way we reflect on it. That hasn’t yet been digested.
PI: The history is a divergence between the scene and the market. And since it’s a fairly recent history, a lot of it is not historicized, and people don’t know about it or don’t remember it. Jogging 1.0 was kind of insane. It’s hard to find people who know what that is. No one in the art world would know what I’m talking about unless they were specifically a part of that scene. So there’s all this history that happened so quickly and in such a short period of time, so accelerated. I feel like the artworld could only handle so much of it, so it took the most digestible things and made it the most palatable for a mainstream audience. It did a lot of disservice to it.
AH: I completely agree with that. The market helped kill the scene in two ways: one, the works that were profitable just maxed out the market, the market created a bubble around those works, and then when it dropped, people were like “Well, that's done anyways because there’s a big stupid market bubble around it and we’re not gonna pay attention to that because that’s bad.” And then the market also excluded a lot of works that weren’t market-friendly. And as Parker says, everything was so sped up, so these works that were more ephemeral, more Internet-based, and less object-based, didn’t have time to evolve and grow.
Still from Semiotics of the Camwhore by Ann Hirsch.
Parker Ito is an artist who lives and works in LA. He recently had a show in my apartment gallery.
Ann Hirsch is an artist and is the host of “The Hirsch Truth” a regular review of NFTs.