The consumer picks her way among the products, weighing
them in her hands, feeling the seams and surfaces of the packaging.
Maybe she is there with a friend; she makes fun of an unlikely toy;
she shakes a box of cereal. The everyday license to handle these feels
super-sensual in the gallery environment with its don't-touch taboo.
In the spirit of Marcel du Champ's ready-mades, the products are recreated
by their display. They become ciphers, portentous, but they are transformed
differently than ready-mades were. This audience for contemporary American
turned that oft-imagined gasp of old-fashioned gallery goers in to
the fragile object of display. Here there is no shock, but rather a
great ease, an ease alienated by the environment of the gallery.
The exhibit's look is clean Ð
no exposed chords, no robotic stacks of machines. At the same time,
though, the fake-wood monoliths and the scratchy speaker fabric, which
conceal compact computers, and such details as the 1970's-style earphones
make the technology feel bulkier, uglier than it really is. Hughes has
cited Bond movies as an influence on the design, and the exhibit shares
a Bond set's improbably slick surfaces that evoke the blinking, humming
myths of computing that are invariably concealed within. It's an understated
comment on the glorification of technology so prevalent in digital art,
a reminder of an outdated deification.
The products, on the other hand,
emphasize their being brand-new. Unlike a "found" object re-presented
in a gallery, they have no human history; theirs is a genealogy of marketing
strategies and focus groups, product lines and commercials. They have
a Warhol blankness or nihilism, except that there is no process involved
but the actual industrial process. So, the nihilism belongs to another
system than the aesthetic one. Not the Factory but the factory. The
product arrives in the gallery without any trace of having ever been
anything but what it is now. The only clue to its birth is the suggestion,
in the packaging, the name and its lettering, of what niche market it's
aimed at, what desire it attempts to satisfy or to create.
We scan the products, figuratively
buying them, in order to see their respective commercials played up
on the screen Ð a reversal of the usual order of operations in which
advertisements make us want to buy a particular good. The visitor scans
the product to ask Ð how should I desire this? The answer is
mixed Ð playing the real commercial, but with an ironic distancing accomplished
through the two LCD stations, one showing the disjunctive close-ups,
the other with soundtracks that make fun of it. The ironic distancing
doesn't stop the consumer identification though; the visitor is simultaneously
attracted to the product and critical of it, with no use value present
in the gallery setting to make that experience feel natural. The installation
experience is low-risk, fun, interactive, relaxed, as people mill around
watching the commercials from one another's "purchases." But
the punctuation of the paintball gunshots becomes a reminder of the
alienating element of the show.
