NETWORKS AND THE WORLD-WIDE WEB

Grey Gallery: Closed for Repairs on the Square, Open for Business on the Web

Frank Poueymirou

[Ed: Links to web pages and/or e-mail addresses which have become inactive since the publication of this article have been enclosed in curly brackets { }. Replacement links have been provided where possible.]

One such initiative was the design and production of a Grey Art Gallery Web Site. This article reviews the Gallery's thinking about the site that preceded its initial foray onto the World-Wide Web.

Innovation to Do the Things We Do

Helping us to "do the things we do" is the raison d'etre of the Grey Art Gallery Web Site, soon (as I write this) to be completed.

How Much Work Is a Web Site?

In many ways, the Gallery was better suited than most to tackle such an assignment. For years, we have been using desktop-publishing applications to design printed matter, and are proficient users of PageMaker, Photoshop, Corel Draw, and Adobe Illustrator. We are experienced in dealing with intellectual properties, and we know how to manage production schedules, print or otherwise. And, by the very nature of museums, we are in the business of aesthetics, of presenting ideas, providing instruction, and telling a good story within a visual context. Most important, we are replete with juicy content. Given our strengths, I considered what additional knowledge and skills were required to do the job. First, we needed to acquire a basic understanding of client-server networking as it related to the Internet, and we needed to get ourselves hooked up, so that we could begin to survey, critique, and learn from sites on the Web. Learning HTML (the relatively easy markup language of the Web) was another task that had to be accomplished, and we wanted the ability to incorporate video, audio, and multimedia elements into our pages.

Coming up to speed in these areas would require a substantial amount of work, but more important was the commitment that was required to maintain the speed. The Web is a dynamic environment, as is an art gallery. HTML becomes more sophisticated week by week, it seems; new browsers, editors, and converters that increase production efficiencies are rapidly coming to market; the results of CGI scripting (which allows a server to offer things beyond the level of the basic HTML protocols) are being achieved with procedures that are more easily implemented; the practices and technology of commerce on the Web are evolving; and hardware requirements never cease to be more demanding. Thus, we considered serious commitment to be an essential ingredient to our recipe for success.

Why Should a Gallery Go on the Web?

For the Grey Art Gallery, we wanted more than a presence on the Web; we wanted the new technology to "help us do the things we do." For instance, take the task of product research that precedes the purchase of a new piece of equipment. I now find that by going to the manufacturer's Web site, I can sometimes save myself many phone calls and many delays in reaching the people with the right information, as well as delays in waiting for information to arrive by mail. In this case, the Web has, in addition to providing me with information, increased my productivity as it directly relates to my job.

More and more museums are making their collections available on the Web. While this provides an educationally rich experience for the public, it also can directly affect the productivity of a museum's registrar. Registrars often receive calls from other registrars requesting information about works in the collection that are being considered for exhibitions. Do you have a particular painting? Is it in condition to travel? Could a photograph be made available? If we decide to include the work in our show, would your museum agree to the loan? What are the costs associated with the loan? Can you send me the paperwork? These are the questions typically asked, all of which could be answered by a Web site.

Can the Web or some other form of communications technology help the Gallery's director-curator with the formulation of exhibition ideas, with the actual process of planning an exhibition? In short, can it be a tool applied to the art of curating? Can the new technologies help us to sell art catalogues and place traveling exhibitions, to generate earned income? Can they help us generate contributed income through enticements such as acknowledging sponsors and donors? Could constituent groups be developed around the Web?

Without belaboring the point, it is these kinds of uses of the new technologies, the kinds that have a more direct impact upon the Gallery's day-to-day operations, that capture at least our managerial imagination.

As for our aesthetic imagination, on the other hand, it is captured by the creative potential implicit in the medium - one that has failed to be explored by American museums. As Robert Atkins writes in the December 1995 issue of Art in America, "most museums seem to regard their Internet outposts as vehicles for the dissemination of publicity and programming information. . . . Few contemporary-art curators have shown electronic - much less online - art works." Atkins goes on to say, "The most stimulating exception to the U.S. museum world's lack of imagination in Internet programming is the interactive examination in text form of the ethics of bioengineering (http://www.exploratorium.edu)."

Just as museums turned a part of their attention to the existence of special requirements of photography, conceptual art, performance art, and video, at different times in the development of these art forms, so too will attention turn to this new electronic medium. How the Grey Art Gallery responds to the new territories now being explored by artists will depend on what the Gallery finds in its own explorations. After all, "independent art works created to run on a computer," as the New Voices/New Vision competition recently defined the medium, are relatively new. Much work will be required to review and survey, to compare and analyze - in short, to study and understand this new art form so that an informal critical structure evolves, the existence of which prefaces informed critical opinion.

Constantly posing questions like these, we venture onto the Web. We are both early adopters and naysayers, and we look forward to the shake-out.