Curator Conversations: Richard Rinehart on “Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age”

To help inaugurate Curatorial’s most recent touring exhibition, Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age, we sat down with co-curator Richard Rinehart to discuss some of the show’s underpinnings. Of course, our year under COVID has taught us that to sit and talk often means to zoom, and we don’t need to meet to have face time anymore. Screen Time brings together artists from around the globe who playfully react to our digital condition with wit and self-awareness while critiquing the ubiquity of the very media they use to make art.

Richard Rinehart, who curated an earlier exhibition with us, Dusk to Dusk: Unsettled, Unraveled, Unreal, is the Director and Chief Curator of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University and author of the book, “Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory” from MIT Press[MOU1] .

Dusk to Dusk: Unsettled, Unraveled, Unreal (Installation view, Otis College, 2015)

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Curatorial:    Whereas “Dusk to Dusk” dealt with anxieties facing the human condition at the turn of the century, the artists in “Screen Time” offer a more fun and subversive take on the role of photography and film/video in an age of digital communication, appropriation, and memes. What was the inspiration behind this alternative take on new digital media art in the 21st Century?

R. Rinehart:    Photography and video art have often been referred to as “media art” in museum curatorial contexts, whereas digital, internet, and multimedia art are “new media art.” At what point, I wondered, are “new” media no longer new? Most of the new media formats we use (digital images, video, etc.) were invented in the last century. When does new media art join its older siblings in the canon? And, then, what’s the difference anymore? That’s not a rhetorical question nor is the answer given; I’m curious to know.

Photography, video, and film are art genres related to relevant popular industries through the direct connection of their base mediums but also through social and artistic exchanges and mutual influences. As these media are extended to digital versions, they have recently gained a new set of relationships; to hi-tech industries and internet cultures. With this exhibition, I hoped to further explore these new influences.

C:     What do you look forward to as art morphs and evolves in the digital age?

RR:    I look forward to seeing what artists do; to their continuing innovation and critique. As technology continues to rapidly evolve and to impact culture at an equally quickening pace, artists offer critique, ethics, and imagination to the conversation.

C:        Especially given your interest in digital media, why do you think the experience of physically visiting a museum is important?

RR:      I am interested in digital/new media art, but not exclusively! I love a 19th century landscape painting in lush oils or an ukiyo-e print in delicate washes too. I’m biased, but I think museums as physical spaces with physical artifacts are even more relevant in the digital age to ground our own physically embodied experience of the world. Not in a reactionary sort of way, but rather to continue to explore increasingly complex questions about how our bodies relate to a proliferation of symbolic spaces. Before new media, conceptual artists, I think, were asking the same kinds of questions about the nature of physicality in relation to art.

C:        What part of your career has surprised you?

RR:      That I ended up a curator and museum director! My undergraduate degree is in studio art and I had planned to be an artist. I grew up in a working class environment so careers like “museum curator” were not even on my radar growing up; people thought I was weird enough for wanting to be an artist but at least they knew what it was. I am incredibly lucky and privileged to get paid to spend my time with art and artists.

C:        What is a common misconception about new media – film, video, and digital art forms?

RR:      That digital or new media art is all about the technology. Most of the discourse around painting is not about ground pigment and different kind of weaves for canvas, but with media arts the technological novelty continues to distract us into that kind of reductionism. Of course, new media art *is* about technology both by intent and due to underlying reasons (this is part of the premise of “Screen Time”) but it’s almost never exclusive or literal in that sense. As with all art, the use of materials in new media art operates both literally and symbolically. I think when we’re tracing the history of new media art, I would propose that Duchamp is a forerunner of new media artists as much as Jean Tinguely.

C:        What does a typical day look like for you versus an exhibit opening day?

RR:      I work in an academic/college museum so opening days function a little differently for us. For instance, the best time to install exhibitions is when students are away during winter or summer break (to minimize the time we’re closed to them during the year.) So, our shows usually open on the first day of classes. However, I would never schedule a reception for the first day of classes; everyone on campus is too crazed. So, we wait a week or two after our “soft launch” to host any kind of opening event. That means, to answer your question, actual opening day can be quiet for an academic museum and we’ll generally have lived with an exhibition for a while before sharing it in a big way with an event. Even those later opening days are not so different than a typical day for me because no two days are alike anyway!

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Richard Rinehart is Director and Chief Curator of the Samek Art Museum at Bucknell University.  He has served as Digital Media Director & Adjunct Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and as curator at New Langton Arts and for the San Jose Arts Commission. He juried for the Rockefeller Foundation, Rhizome.org, and others. Richard has taught courses on art and new media at UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Art Institute and elsewhere. He served on the boards of the Berkeley Center for New Media, New Langton Arts, and the Museum Computer Network. He lead the NEA-funded project, "Archiving the Avant-Garde", to preserve digital art and has co-authored a book with Jon Ippolito for MIT Press on collecting and preserving media culture, “Re-Collection: Art, New Media, & Social Memory” https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/re-collection