Museums in the Era of the Unreal
Bitstreams, The Whitney Museum of American Art, March 22-June 10, 2001
by Craig Reynolds
In 1997, when developing Murder the Word, I conjured up the heavy-handed subtitle “a multi-media celebration of the unreal." The intention was to situate the event within the theoretical investigations of the great Buffalo postmodern novelist and critic Ray Federman, whose novels invert the modernist fetishization of subjective “reality” in favor of the more fragmented, artificial “unreal reality” of the postmodern condition. Unreality was a post-surrealist interzone of unfettered potential, where one’s imagination could find its own form like fire, and the breakdown that postmodernism catalogued ironically promised creative rebirth. And although the initial impetus was literary, the ease with which our concept connected with other non-literary developments in late 20th Century culture helped me understand how much presence the "unreal" had developed in artistic circles. The 21st century was developing into one defined by the unreal reality of synthetic identity, digital abstraction and seemingly, unfettered creativity, and it was good. The pessimistic postmodernism of the ‘70s and ‘80s had birthed a new consciousness in which uncertainty and fragmentation could be embraced, and shards of yesterday’s reality provided raw material for a multiplicity of new realities--unabashed fictions--liberated, through synthesis, from overarching systems and designs.
I was well primed, therefore, for Bitstreams, the Whitney Museum’s formal induction of contemporary digital art into traditional museum culture. The show’s introductory remarks pushed all the right buttons for me: “While photography revolutionized the arts by superseding painting’s claim to represent the ‘real,’ digital technology has become the ultimate tool for capturing the nuances of the ‘unreal,’” adding at the end: “these works also reflect the pervasive sense of irreality that has come to suffuse our everyday lives in this dawning digital age.” I was immediately hooked. The glossy sheen of new media created an aura of freshness appropriate to a show purporting to document a paradigm-shift in the contemporary creative climate, and I for one was happily blinded by the flashy veneer of 21st century futurism. It didn’t take long to realize, however, that even a show overtly concerned with artifice and surfaces must produce content worthy of big time museum treatment, and in this regard we were in trouble. More impressed by the startling tricks mastered by digital artists than new insights made possible through the utilization of new media, Bitstreams played like a technology exhibit at a children’s science museum, cautiously celebrating the mechanical potential in digital media without significantly engaging deeper issues related to art and culture as a whole, nor to the specific content of the individual works on display.
Bitstreams served first and foremost as a primer for those who cling to institutional endorsements in defining significant contemporary art. To be sure, there is some pleasure in finding one’s artistic heroes included in a museum show of this size--even the most jaded of hipsters likes to see his or her favorite artists legitimized with star treatments--but the work selected for Bitstreams reflected an endorsement of the potential in new media to create relatively typical contemporary work, while the radical cultural shifts engendered by the use of digital media went almost completely ignored. The digital revolution has begun to change the way we live, but Bitstreams seemed content to reveal how new media might someday change the art we see.
Divided between computer-generated visuals, video, sound art, work that conceptualized the role of digital media in the contemporary landscape and art whose final form revealed the intervention of computer processes, the Whitney’s Bitstreams at first glance appeared to cover a lot of ground, but little actually represented the cutting edge. To begin with, I felt as if I had seen much more exciting examples of digital artwork in the commercial realm, particularly in the fields of film/tv commercials/music videos, graphic art and recent web design. In 3 different pieces, for example, artists digitally erased significant elements of traditional photographs to create “startling” new imagery. One was Inez van Lamsweerde, who removed her boyfriend’s face from the image utilized in the piece Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately), a processed photo in which only the imprint onto the artist’s profile of her lip-locked lover’s face remains. Beautiful, and kinda cool, but anybody who’s ever watched MTV’s “Making of the Video,” or an HBO feature on the special effects wizardry behind a summer blockbuster would likely be unimpressed by this rather simplistic use of technology. Sure, the content in Hollywood films and MTV videos leaves much to be desired, but the disjunction between what we know can happen visually and what seems to be happening conceptually is a major factor in how we perceive the work.
Sally Elesby’s Hand to Mouse Drawings, each of which begins with the word “line” written in various fonts, further evidence a kind of simple fascination with the technology that is somewhat laughable to those who use it daily. Over and around the letters, Elesby used her mouse to draw extra layers until a new form--basically a doodled shape--had emerged. “The Hand to Mouse Drawings,” writes Elesby, “demonstrate how computer technology objectifies the usually subjective drawing process while offering superficial evidence of a human hand.” Yeah, right. Neither visually nor conceptually does this work offer any new light into the medium nor into the artistic process, nor does it achieve its professed goal--and to conceptualize the disjunction between human beings and their machines as solely a digital issue is overly simplistic. Any tool used in creating an image--any mechanical object at all--could be said to evidence this point, even the paintbrush that the mouse supposedly replaces. To me, it would be more interesting to investigate this concept outside the digital realm, in terms of a non-art tool such as an automobile, which objectifies subjective desire and simultaneously stifles and propels human momentum.
Similarly, Jon Haddock’s Photoshop cartoon renderings of news stories, such as the Rodney King beating and the assassination of Martin Luther King, are supposed to offer a critique of our understanding of violent events in a world defined by virtual reality. The effect, however, has nothing to do with modern reality. Haddock’s pieces could just as easily have been conceived as traditional cartoons or constructed from newspaper imagery to the same effect. By Pop-izing serious subject matter, Haddock offers a critique lodged for years against modern media in all its guises, and the use of Photoshop, a computer program, does not render the piece particularly fresh, nor does it adequately update this tired critique for the digital era.
More serious problems abound with the show’s sound art component. An exciting range of artists and musicians are included, many of whom work in both commercial and cutting edge capacities (such as Jim O’Rourke, John Herndon of Tortoise and DJ Spooky). Updating P.S.1’s Bed of Sound exhibit, where listeners could relax on a large padded bench while listening to headphones plugged into various sound samples, Bitstreams offered a corridor of dangling headphones. Listeners were encouraged to lay against the stylishly padded wall while observing the flashing neon of the room-sized Bitstreams sign greeting viewers as they entered the gallery.
Sadly, I already owned a good handful of the pieces we could listen to, such as the Matmos song “L.A.S.I.K.” from their most recent CD, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure. The other works--even those that weren’t already commercially available--seemed no more or less representative than the CDs that are; and unlike reproductions of traditional work--say, paintings for example--which suffer greatly from their distance to the originals, digital works exist in the realm of the easily-transactable unreal. More on this in a minute, but first let me just say that I didn’t need The Whitney to introduce me to Stephen Vitiello, Elliott Sharp, Marina Rosenfeld, Ikue Mori, or to explain to me the meaning of “Illbient” music--and in this regard I don’t think I’m being all that. DJ Spooky has led thousands of thousands of clubbers and ravers to the peaks of sonic ecstasy while O’Rourke, especially now that he’s a member of Sonic Youth, has played to arenas packed with sophisticated listeners of new music.
What’s more, to represent digital music through a stylishly updated Tower Records-style listening booth is to miss the point of the digital revolution entirely. The fact that we already have access to this music reveals a crisis in institutional identity completely ignored by The Whitney. What is the role of an institution in presenting work that does not depend on that institution for credibility, nor for presentation or distribution? The Whitney itself almost demanded to be criticized this way by graciously providing a wonderful website in which all the music from the show is made available for your home listening pleasure, negating both the museum and the accompanying Whitney-marketed CD. One could argue that the museum still functions as a cultural locus that helps collectivize current cultural trends, but I would suggest that this work has already found its mode of collective mobilization in the clubs, raves and alternative spaces (and virtually, websites) that regularly attract large audiences, which in turn “curate” each next show through applause, the click of a mouse or the flailing of dancing feet.
Other significant paradigmatic changes could have been easily addressed, although to be sure these concerns aren’t simply aesthetic in nature. Digital sound, which can be cheaply reproduced and transferred without loss of quality, negates traditional vehicles for music distribution, but also compounds a larger debate about the role of the artist in the digital age. Accessibility to work in the era of Napster has once again challenged the value of the individual art object, neatly entwining itself with other raging arguments about intellectual piracy in the realm of samples. Who owns sound? And how can we attribute authorship to a work digitally generated from samples of the environment, the media and other musical output? The Whitney attempts to solve this problem by treating readily available soundworks as traditional art objects, even as the works themselves resist this categorization, and those of us accustomed to experiencing their aesthetic pleasures in much less stuffy confines have no choice but to wonder why we visited a museum in the first place.
As the battle over Napster made clear, digital media tends to empower audiences, sometimes in defiance of the artists themselves (even as it is also artist-empowering), and always in contrast to the corporate/institutional structures that traditionally define/confine cultural tastes. In this regard, Jim O’Rourke’s piece, “May ‘00”--which samples John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts (1950)--is a perfect example. Cage is the author-less composer to end all author-less composers in Modern music in so far as he created compositions in which chance methods defined the work and the musicians playing his music were asked to use similar techniques to access the unexpected. O’Rourke’s piece begins conceptually by recognizing the fluidity of the non-composition, and then cuts it up and pastes it back together into a new cultural artifact, but one that functions merely as an accumulation of cultural currency rather than a fixed cultural artifact.
Following the implications of this work further, wouldn’t it have been much more interesting if The Whitney’s curators had accessed works that allowed for creative input, such as those websites that allow you to remix songs by running your mouse across an icon-filled screen? Of course not, because that would negate the museum and negate the museum-going experience, even if the best CD-roms and interactive websites might in fact represent the cutting edge, completely aloof from the endorsement of institutional culture. While O’Rourke probably would have offended Cage by allowing his own personal taste to shape the work, the way that he employs new technology in order to crack open the cultural endgame of fixed institutionalism is proof of something revolutionary about digital culture. It’s impossible to fetishize O’Rourke’s recombinate work in the era of the re-mix, just as it was impossible to fetishize one particular Cage performance in the era of chance (that is, without missing the point). By presenting open-ended, recombinant works as fixed art objects, The Whitney ignores a century’s worth of cultural development, not to mention committing the ultimate sin: codification of the perpetually unfixable unreal.