In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new way of making art would harness the world wide web, take the form of exciting online projects, bypass traditional galleries and be accessible to all with a dial-up connection. ‘Net.artists’ were self-styled radicals particularly fond of that most modernist of tropes, the manifesto, which they distributed via electronic mailing lists or electronic bulletin boards. These artists adopted funky, web-style names such as ‘Irational.org’ and ‘VNS Matrix’ and showed their work online at similarly funkily named websites like Rhizome, Suck and Echo.
But there was, alas, a gap in the Matrix, to paraphrase Keanu Reeves’s finest film. As the art world boomed in the first decade of the 21st century, internet art dropped almost entirely out of view. Now, though, it’s back in a second incarnation. The somewhat confusingly named ‘post-internet art’ has, over the past couple of years, become the latest buzzword in contemporary art. The term seems vaguely absurd as, of course, the internet is in no way over, and there is still a significant minority out there who are positively ‘pre-internet’. To make things more confusing, most of the art labelled ‘post-internet’ takes the form of painting, sculpture and installation rather than something accessed via Internet Explorer. Two solo shows have recently opened in London featuring artists who might be described as ‘post-internet’ — Austin Lee at Carl Kostyál and Ed Fornieles at the Chisenhale Gallery — and these throw some light on this new term.
Austin Lee’s exhibition is a salon hang of paintings of various sizes across two rooms. The majority feature cartoonish, out-of-focus faces emerging from very flat picture planes. Most are brightly coloured, with a pleasantly lurid effect that comes from Lee’s use of spray paint.
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