Hans Haacke, creator of the controversial artwork "Sanitation." (Photo by Chris Hondros/Newsmakers)
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NEWS
Edited by Robert Atkins, Media Arts editor
Biennial Rites Of Spring
New York Mayor Rudolph "Let's close down the Brooklyn Museum" Giuliani is back in the art news. But this time he's the subject of a controversial artwork, rather than its object-er.
"Sanitation," an anti-censorship agit-prop piece by the venerable German-born conceptualist Hans Haacke, brings the mayor into this year's edition of the always high-profile "Biennial" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Haacke's stage-set installation features a collage of news clips relating to the mayor's assault on last fall's "Sensation" show at the Brooklyn Museum, inscribed with a passage from the First Amendment. The gallery is filled with the sound of marching troops emanating from trash cans. Its back wall bears images of American flags of diminishing size and scurrilous attacks on art from cultural warriors of the Giuliani-Pat Robertson-Jesse Helms ilk, printed in Franktur, the Nazi's favorite typeface.
This time around, the mayor, a still undeclared senatorial candidate with an unattractive propensity for losing his cool, kept it. But the Whitney's strategy of releasing the news of a potential brouhaha ahead of time backfired on the privately funded museum. It unsuccessfully — and no doubt sincerely — tried to frame the debate as a freedom of expression issue, both in terms of museum policy and the work's meaning. In response, the museum garnered accusations that Haacke's work trivializes the Holocaust. Protestors included the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization, and one of the museum's eponymous trustees, Marylou Whitney, who resigned. All before Haacke had even made "Sanitation."
Ironically, the Whitney hasn't even seemed to notice another potential controversy. Was the museum so clueless about online art that it didn't understand the risks of including RTMark, the group of media-arts pranksters and hackers, in the online section of the show? To say that the Web artwork by this spirited group of international young artists embraces the open nature of the Network is to be guilty of serious understatement. The culture jamming collective invites groups or individuals to submit Web sites which are randomly and briefly displayed on the RTMark/Whitney site. The hundreds (thousands?) of sites that have been submitted by artists, site producers and exhibition visitors run a broad gamut of the non-commercial Web, and the provocative and controversy-inspiring abound, including the real Web site of Bob Jones University and "My First Anal Sex."
Seminars Abound
April is a big month for media-art gab. Many of these schmooze-fests embody the hybrid art/communication/mass media concerns of this undefined and shape-shifting field. Upcoming conferences will focus on wide-ranging topics including privacy — "Privacy and New Media Technologies," on March 29th, 8 pm, at the New School, 66 W. 12th St. in New York City and then online through April 13 at www.dialnsa.edu — and the compelling-sounding "Networks and Markets" e-forum, which brings together cultural and business arbiters to explore the "declining importance of history in the face of market ideologies, as well as their delocalising effect." Organized by artist Jordan Crandall for London's Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and the Blast Foundation, "Networks and Markets" is an online forum with a stellar crew of rotating, weekly moderators that continues until May 23. To subscribe to the email discussion, contact Crandall at crandall@blast.org
At another epochal juncture in media history, back in 1983, the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis sponsored a conference called "Media Arts in Transition," which examined emerging independent film and video production. Nearly two decades later, April 6-8, the museum presents "Sins of Change: Media Arts in Transition, Again", this time in collaboration with The Kitchen in New York. This confab, comprising a cross-disciplinary mix of activists and academics, take-charge types and theorists, might help prevent history from repeating itself.
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The Arts Entertainment Network
AEN is the online component of the Walker Art Center's travelling exhibition, "Let's Entertain," and a send-up
of the commercial conventions of Web portals like Yahoo! It's got all the genre's bells and whistles: an online
store, a search engine, ad banners and the options of customizing colors or choosing a sound track
(the best is a muzak-y rendition of "Purple Haze.") The ad banners link to artworks — frequently, sites
that savagely mock e-commerce. The Walker's collection of Web works — some new, some
commissioned for the show by curator Steve Dietz — is an excellent overview of the state of online art,
including media artworks by RTMark, Mongrel and Mark Napier. If the offline version of this
exhibition/examination of "pleasure zones of today's entertainment-driven consumer society" is as
good as AEN, I'm hopping a plane for Minneapolis tomorrow.
From Walker Art Center
More about:
Advertising/Commerce,
Media Arts,
Multimedia/Internet
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©BOTS
"©Bots" is the latest online mischief from Mark Napier of Potatoland.org in collaboration with Yael Kanarek. The corporate ownership of images is the theme of this piece, aptly described by the artists as "part artwork, part conspiracy theory." Taking meme theory — the notion that cultural ideas spread like viruses and attach themselves to us like leeches — and blending it with robotics, the site invites visitors to build their own humanoid pop-culture "icons" from a database of familiar components, then spread these icons into the collective cultural consciousness via the Web. The process is billed on the site as "memetic awareness therapy," and it is oddly satisfying.
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Carnival In The Eye Of The Storm: KOSOV@
The unusual spelling of Kosovo/Kosova is meant to reflect both the "o" of the Serbian and the "a" of the Albanian spelling of the name of this troubled region. But it's also a key to the show's theme: "The role of new communication technologies and the absence of the political in the media coverage of the Kosov@ war," an important, if arguable, thesis put forth by Trebor Schulz, the exhibition's East German-born curator. Renowned and little-known artists from the United States and five European countries will display their art in the galleries of Pacific Northwest College of Art, 1241 NW Johnson Street, Portland, Oregon, an extensive film series about Kosovo will be hosted and co-sponsored by the NW Film Center, and a companion conference is slated for April 14-16 at the Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center.
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Dead Diana
Kate Pendry channels the late Princess of Wales. The disembodied voice speaks to us from our screens via the artist's Dead Diana site. The satirical, sometimes irresistible project features Pendry performing as Di in streaming video, while it celebrates the princess in necrophiliac images and text. In "The Dead Celebrity Diaries," Diana hangs out with the famous dead — from Richard Burton to George Bernard Shaw — fully cognizant that, even in the celebrity hereafter, there's always someone more famous than you.
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Tenacity
"Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information and Biotechnology" is a smart show (organized by Yvonne Volkart) about the role of telecommunications and biotech in the increasingly global economy. Lots of frequently exhibited artists concerned with the communications half of the show's equation — including RTMark and Ricardo Dominguez — are represented here, which is how it should be, given the intelligence of their work. The biotech-oriented Bureau of Inverse Technology's look at the gendered commodification and distribution of sperm and ova shouldn't be missed. The exhibition is at the Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway, New York, NY, through May 13th, but some online works are available at the show's Web site. Check out Chris.053, Jenny Marketou's bot — an artificially intelligent agent — who sneaks into chat rooms and CU-SEE ME teleconferences. This is real-time lurking at its best.
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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE
MEDIA.
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"Memes, memorable fragments of pop-culture imagery, bombard us every day through ads, logos, packaging, in TV, film, magazines, and billboards .... They influence our behavior, and may direct our decisions, yet we do not own them and have no say in their design." - Napier/Kanarek |
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"I have asked Lucrezia Borgia whether she has seen Mary or JC in the last few weeks. She said, 'No, no-one has seen them. Don't ask these questions — you English people are so rude.'"
- Di/Pendry |
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