Brian Schrank - Avant-garde Videogames: Playing with Technoculture

Playing with Technoculture

Brian Schrank

Foreword by Jay David Bolter

Jay David Bolter

Among the growing number of books offering to explain the importance of videogames, Brian Schrank's Avant-garde Videogames stands out. It is perhaps the only one that engages the history of twentieth-century art in a serious way. The author's knowledge of videogames is broad and deep; he always finds the appropriate example to illustrate his points about the formal, political, or narrative structures of games. At the same time, his understanding of major figures and movements in the twentieth-century avant-garde allows him to argue for videogames as an avant-garde (or rather a set of avant-gardes) with a sense of history that is rare, if not unique, in the area of games studies.

This book belongs to games studies, and it will be read and debated largely in that community as well as by the larger world of digital media and design. I imagine that few students of traditional art and art history will pick up Avant-garde Videogames. That is unfortunate, because this book is evidence of an important change in the status of art in our media culture today-a change that the art world has still not addressed. From the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, art occupied a special place in the culture of Europe and North America: it was assigned the task of elevating both the individual and the culture as a whole. Various theorists called attention to this belief in the "autonomy" of art. In its extreme form-for example, in the writings of Matthew Arnold-art replaced religion. The historical avant-garde, such as the Futurists, Dadaists, and surrealists, who Schrank describes briefly and effectively in the chapters that follow, thought that they were challenging such "bourgeois" notions. They believed that their absurd performances as well as strange paintings and assemblages would help to destroy the institution of Art with a capital A, and replace it with practices that could integrate art into everyday life. The goal of deinstitutionalizing art also motivated the second wave of the avant-garde in the 1950s and beyond: the Situationists, Fluxus, at least some performance and installation art, and so on. In fact, the institutions of art (the gallery and museum system) addressed these avant-garde assaults with the oldest strategy in the world: taking the most compelling avant-garde artists into the galleries and museums, and making them part of the mainstream.

The avant-garde therefore influenced the practice of art throughout the twentieth century, but did not succeed in changing its cultural status. The diminishing status of elite art beginning after the Second World War and accelerating in the 1960s was the result of a complex of economic and social forces. The elite arts of painting and sculpture, literature, and classical music were challenged by the truly popular forms of film, rock music, and television. In any case, the elite arts lost their capital A, as the avant-garde had hoped. Many people continued to go to art museums, read canonical literature (especially in school), and listen to classical music. But it became hard to sustain the notion that one had to do these things in order to live a rich cultural life, and hard to believe that our culture as a whole needed painting, classical music, and canonical literature in order to thrive. The change did not happen all at once, and within their own community, artists and critics have often continued to assert their belief in the centrality of art. In order to see that elite art has lost its status, though, we need only look at how the terms art and artist are used today throughout our media culture. Rock musicians are now routinely interviewed about their art; in fact, artist has long been the term for the performer in popular music. In the iTunes interface, for example, there is no real provision for classical music, in which the composer and performers are both artists. The term popular culture itself seems obsolescent, because it has lost its counterpart. In general discourse, elite now refers to the best in any field, especially sports, such as elite quarterbacks in football, elite swimmers, or elite golfers. The phrase cultural elites is reserved for the disciplines of economics and sociology.

Between 2005 and 2010, film critic Robert Ebert enraged the game community by claiming that videogames could not be "art or at least not high art." Until his death, Ebert continued to assume that high art was still possible. For him, although most movies were popular entertainment, film could itself attain the level of high art, but videogames could not. The irony is that what was obvious to Ebert (that, say, filmmaker Ingmar Bergman is a great artist) was itself the result of the breakdown of cultural hierarchies in the 1950s and 1960s. For those who still believe in elite culture, film has joined literature and traditional classical music "above the line." When Ebert denied that status to videogames, he himself played a familiar game: the latest members of the club are the most vigilant about upholding its exclusive standards. When, in turn, game designer Clive Barker took on Ebert and defended videogames, he did so not by acknowledging that the terms art and entertainment are now more or less interchangeable but rather by insisting that videogames can indeed be art. Barker wanted access to the club for videogames.

Although Ebert and Barker did not realize it, the area of agreement between them was more important than their disagreement. Both of them believed (and Barker continues to do so) in the cultural significance, the specialness, of art. Both of them inherited, in other words, the key assumptions of an elite culture, which sixty years ago would have regarded both of their arts as mere entertainment. When elite culture began losing its status in North America (and more slowly in Europe) in the 1960s, the assumptions and rhetoric of elite art did not disappear. Instead, they filtered "down" to the producers and critics of popular entertainment. What filtered down were in fact the assumptions of the then dominant movement in art: modernism. By the 1970s, most of those in the professional art community generally had a more modest view of their own art. For many (perhaps most) in that community, art was no longer universal in its claims to relevance and value. Postmodern art was frequently eclectic and particular. Art did not save culture in general, although art, such as feminist performance art, could still perform a critical cultural function. It was writers on popular media who took up the principles of modernism as self-evident. Popular writers did not-and still do not-always know where these principles came from. They tended to state them as if they had been valid in all times and places, and they combined them arbitrarily with cliches from the nineteenth century about the inspiration of the artist and his or her status as a kind of secular prophet. This variety of popular modernism has survived high modernism by several decades.