Everything Has Been Done Before
"Everything has been done before." It is a quote, that if you
are attending art school somewhere you will no doubt have heard at
one time or another. I'm going to let you in on something: it's not
true.
"Everything has been done before" is a way to let you, as a
student, know that it is okay if you are working on something that
someone else has already explored. But everything has not been done
yet. Part of the reason it is not true is that there is a lot out
there to make work about. But the other, more important reason, is
that both our culture and human behavior are changing drastically
and at a speed that is startling. There are all sorts of new
behaviors and technologies that can be investigated. For example,
there was no art being made with Flickr or Twitter seven years ago
because, seven years ago, there was no Flickr or Twitter. Now we
have artists like Christopher Baker and his Murmur
Study, "that examines the rise of micro-messaging
technologies such as Twitter and Facebook's status update," or Erik Kessels'
installation at FOAM last year exploring the vast amounts of
digital image making and sharing using Flickr. In this installation
he printed out every photograph uploaded to Flickr in a 24-hour
period. These are new and unique pieces of art. They explore
aspects of our human culture that were non-existent only a few
years ago.
As another example, someone like Michael Wolf could never have made his
Street View series without the advent of Google's
technology. He could have traveled around Paris and made
photographs, but that has been done before, many times. He
could have tried to explore notions of surveillance; that imagery
would have been drastically different. Instead he was presented
with a new "thing", saw the way that it could comment on the
ever-surveilled nature of our society, and used the "thing" itself
to make that comment.
These are the arguments I bring up when I hear someone say,
"everything has been done before." I cringe when I hear it. Many
ideas have been explored, but we, as a culture, are continually
moving forward. This constant progress creates new problems and
issues that art can attend to. Those that say, "everything has been
done before" are resigning themselves to the idea that nothing new
can ever be made. I would find it hard to make work, and really
what would be the point, if I believed that to be true.
Can I tell you what to do? No. Can I tell you what the next
major issue to explore will be? No. But what I can tell you is that
if you sit in the edge of what's happening in regards to the
progression (and in some cases regression) of our every increasing
digital culture and keep your eyes open to the world around you,
you will see new avenues opening all the time. I find the most
relevant work is made in this space because it talks about how we
as humans relate to the world around us, a world that is
ever-shifting. So take heart that there is always something new
around the corner, waiting to be discovered, and there is always
more art to be made.
Evan Baden (Foam Magazine #22/Peeping)