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An Orchid in the Land of TechnologyCurated by Joseph R. Wolin
April 5 - 28, 2007 The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology. . . . Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art. When Benjamin wrote in 1936 of a vision of the world that acknowledges the mechanical processes that engendered it, he noted that vision's sheer exoticism and fragile beauty. He had cinema in mind (either as his bÉte noire or his ideal - it's a little hard to tell with Benjamin; he is equivocal), and its careful framing of its subjects that crops out all traces of "camera equipment, lighting machinery, staff assistants, etc." But he might as well have been writing about our own time and much recent art, which, following Hollywood's cues, slickly excises all vestiges of the technology used to produce it. The artists in this exhibition, however, embrace technology, not only as a means of creation, but also as sign. In their work, generated by methods unimagined seventy years ago, seamless visions appear, but underlying modes of production remain in the foreground. Technology for them is not only a necessary evil in the realization of their art, but it is also their subject, possessed of its own poetic logic. Oliver Warden is a documentarian of the virtual world, shooting "photographs" in online computer games, far away from the narrative action. As his online avatar ROBOTBIGFOOT, he travels deep into uninhabited landscapes, searching for glitches in the program, artifacts forgotten by the designers, and the edge of the world. Similarly, Dan Torop essays the sublime in the form of straight photographs of the real world, their simple beauty sometimes transcendentally serendipitous, sometimes helped along by the addition of cardboard cut-outs or plastic animal heads. He has also created an interactive computer simulation of the ocean, its phenomena and moods manipulable but, perhaps, no less affecting for that. Marc Handelman explores the dark underbelly of the technological, using anachronistic means from before the age of mechanical reproduction - let alone that of digital replication - painting and drawing. His works abstractly picture the siren song of Fox News graphics or the bombastic spectacle of the searchlight memorial for the World Trade Center or the effect of an illumination round over a barren landscape, all with one eye on the visual rhetoric that gives these events, and the conventions used to depict them, their chillingly seductive power. Benjamin Sloatand Steve Aishman's video Offspring examines personal identity. Two young men, each of "half Asian" descent morph into one another and back again, technologically multiplying the effects of genetics and imaging hybrids of hybrids. Sloat's portrait photographs, mounted on Chinese scrolls, subtly play with their subjects' personae through both digital and mechanical manipulation. In Adam Shecter's animations set to songs by Antony and the Johnsons, music videos, Saturday morning cartoons, Pop Art, and fairy tales come together with heartbreaking results. Prints of two cloudless skiescone starry blue, one twilit goldenccondense the animations' emotion and magic. Taking the form of a text message, Christopher Heynen's work elegiacally embodies the interrelationships among technology, the work of art, recent history, and the political and economic state of the world. An Orchid in the Land of Technology is organized by Joseph R. Wolin, an independent curator and critic based in New York. He is a visiting member of the faculty at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. |
Benjamin Sloat, Gerontion, Giclee print mounted on silk scroll, 2006 |
