Olia Lialina Overview

Olia Lialina is a brazen new voice whose emergence is owed to the World Wide Web. An artist and polemicist, she is seemingly everywhere in on- and offline discussions concerning the development of Internet art, or as she calls it, "net.art."... [more]

Olia Lialina is a brazen new voice whose emergence is owed to the World Wide Web. An artist and polemicist, she is seemingly everywhere in on- and offline discussions concerning the development of Internet art, or as she calls it, "net.art." From her home base in Moscow (Lialina is Russian-born), she posts rants to the world against the current state of Net art in charmingly fractured English. Charm, however, is not her only quality. The fearlessness of her attacks on other artists and theorists makes her appear, says colleague Michael Samyn, 'like a very cold-hearted, arrogant woman who eats men for breakfast." Lialina's attitude can be summarized as a distrust of the claims and definitions so far imposed on Net art. She is annoyed with the most common rhetoric associated with the Net -- coming, ironically enough, from traditional artists, critics, and curators -- which vaunts it as a liberating new form of expression that will make the traditional institutions and markets of the art world obsolete. She is also irritated with the theoretical debates surrounding Net art, which have focused primarily on abstract questions, like "What is it?" and "What are its implications?" instead of examining its actual implementations. Lialina describes the problem thus: "A year ago it was so sweet to announce that art theory, the art system, art commerce -- [that] all these are relics of the real art world system, a heritage to forget. But in fact this statement only brought some variety to offline art institutions, not an alternative." To counter the treatment of Net art at the hands of the Old Guard, Lialina has deployed the Net itself in audacious and unexpected ways. She created Teleportacia.org, the first online gallery to showcase original pieces of Net art. Then she took the gallery commercial, putting the art up for sale -- never mind that the pieces can still be viewed and even copied for free. Teleportacia.org became an experiment in "Internet art haute couture,' a new model for the distribution of Net art that insists on its monetary value and the importance of mediating access to it. Paradoxically, Lialina sticks fast to some very old-fashioned notions: she is adamant that critics are necessary to ensure the quality of the art, and that Net art should not be purely design-driven -- it should communicate feeling and emotion, regardless of the audience's connection speeds or system capabilities. Otherwise, Lialina argues, Net art will never be more than a dependent, a hanger-on of the current art world with no viable realm of its own. To prevent this fate, she wants to infuse Net art with the prestige and aura that traditional art critics have long denied it. The first requirement, she believes, is that Net art develop its own language, its own theory. The lack thereof could be fatal: "In brief, with no theoretical support inside, Net art meets only vulgar, one-season interest from the outside world." Lialina's career as a Net artist (which interestingly did not stem from either art-school training or experience as a Web designer) started with her most acclaimed piece, a project entitled "My Boyfriend Came Back from the War." Her oeuvre now includes projects such as "Agatha Appears' and "Heaven N Hell.' Most of her works are Web-based, interactive multimedia pieces that employ stark, avant-garde aesthetics and random, choppily poetic phrases. [show less]