There were a small number of artists working in the 1970’s who started out in their practice using digital systems, even a few in the 1960’s. There were, similarly, a small number of artists who emerged in the 80’s who were using networks from the start. Bunting is an example of this ­although his early network practices did not engage the internet but telephone networks. Paul Sermon is another (very different) example. However, the emergence of a generation of network savvy artists, with a culture attached, didn’t begin until well into the 1990’s. The associated buzz, involving the engagement of theorists and cultural commentators, intensified after that time. In this sense I’d assess Varnelis’s observation that these technologies “cultural implications (were) confined to niche realms for enthusiasts” more or less correct ­ although I¹d move the dates back a little to the early 90’s or even the late 1980’s and identify 1993 as they key year in terms of impact, when the first web browser (Mosaic) became publicly available.

There were a series of events and developments, in the late 1980’s, when the key players in what was to emerge in the 1990¹s, with net.art and related practices, started to meet, communicate directly with one another and inform each other’s work. It is no accident that many of these people were Eastern or Central European or were based in what had been cold-war border cities, like Berlin and Ljubljana. A few of these artists did replay historical tropes. Shulgin’s playful refigurings of Suprematism is an example, although as much concerned with developing a commentary on his personal sense of national heritage at a time of social turbulence, post 1989, than formal art-historical deconstruction. It can be argued that the emergence of new medialities and formal frameworks are often associated with artists revisiting the past. Picasso’s confluence of Cubism and African art is perhaps an example. Again, it would be dangerous to consider this as simply or even primarily formal aesthetic experiment. Picasso, like Shulgin, lived in a social and political context and he drew inspiration from the excitement and conflict he experienced living within it.

Contemporary network culture is a very recent phenomenon. Perhaps we forget how fast things have changed and what seemed odd or futuristic to many until only a few years ago is now commonplace. There is a turbulence associated with that rate of change.

Varnelis’s piece attempts to connect artists practice with digital networks with examples of practice from a more mainstream art world (you can’t get more mainstream in the UK than the work of a Turner Prize winner). To some degree this approach is illuminating, allowing some novel connections to be made. Zittel and Auerbach’s work sits interestingly alongside Halley’s or Estes’s. It is also clear that mainstream arts practice of the early post-modern period (1960-1980) was an influence on many artists who were associated with the 1990’s emergence of art practices situated within a networked cultural context.

However, it is important to remember that many of those artists chose to work with digital and communications systems in large part because they were disillusioned with the mainstream artworld. Here I am not talking about art practices but the artworld itself. These artists sought out of a parallel system that would allow practitioners to work, communicate and facilitate new audiences without the mediation of the institutional framework the artworld was/is composed of. This activity is traceable to earlier examples, some of which explicitly join up, with practitioners associated with artist run initiatives like The Kitchen and Film-makers Coop in New York or London Video Arts and Film-makers Coop in the UK (amongst many other activities around the World during the 1960’s and 70’s) being part of the development of the prototype digital and networked culture of the 1980’s which Shulgin, Bunting and many others are associated with. This is arguably a stronger lineage of historical precedent than that which connects Peter Halley to Josh On and in this sense Varnelis’s piece risks being revisionist. But it can be hard to establish new historical connections without taking such a risk.

However, as was pointed out in the first paragraph above, nothing is linear or simple. Whilst many of the artists associated with net.art and similar activities did seek alternate models to the dominant artworld market model others sought to play with it and turn the system to their own advantage. Vuk Cosic is an example here, his provocations and interventions functioning as both critique of the dominance of market thinking in the creative arts and an attempt to grab some of the associated limelight. He played this double edged sword with some skill. It is perhaps too early to evaluate whether Shulgin’s more recent work with easy to consume electronic multiples is as clever and destabilising as Cosic’s practices (he made sense of what he was doing by Oretiring young) or whether he risks repeating the failures of Kasemir Malevich, the Suprematist Shulgin parodied in his Oform artworks, who, after a blazing period of creativity retreated into politically-correct folk-art.

To me this sort of art-historical connection evidences a “born digital” art criticism which Varnelis’s essay perhaps fails to do.

Offering to “pay good money” is kind of a “bourgeois rise to power” gesture, however, so I’ll have to settle for making this affirmative social-media comment.