State of the Art
Dec 1994
Digital technology is eroding the foundation of the elite contemporary art world - and the very concept of art as a commodity, threatening to make the overheated art market of the '80's seem like the last gasp of tulipomainia.

The physicist Werner Heisenberg and the assassin Jack Ruby sing to each other from beds anchored to the surface of the moon. Their songs describe a collaboration: working together, they are trying to build a nuclear bomb, a maze of metal pipes and fuel rods that slowly assembles itself, on the bleak lunar landscape, around the aging scientist's bed.

This is just one of the scenes in artist Ronald Jones's Petrarch's Air, a virtual reality opera that the Brooklyn Academy of Music intends to transform into an actual production in 1997. Like the works of avant-garde spectacle-maker Robert Wilson, Jones's opera will turn a collage of historical fact and poetic fantasy into an allegory on contemporary life. Sitting in front of a PowerPC in his immaculate SoHo loft, Jones flies me through the sets and acts of his new creation. "No one has ever envisioned an entire opera through a computer before," he says. His general demeanor shows the effects of having spent drawn-out days and nights fixated by his terminal: a heavyset man in his 40s, he has long scraggly hair and several-days' worth of stubble. " Until I began working with computers, I had never given opera a thought. Now I think that opera is made for virtual reality and vice versa."

Three years ago, Jones had never given computers a thought, either. He was, at that time, a successful conceptual artist and a "card-carrying" member of the élite contemporary art world. For those unfamiliar with its workings, this milieu can appear to be something of a cult, a network of insular museums, galleries, critics, artists, and wealthy collectors. It is a world of cliques and subcliques, whose language is the jargon of critics and theorists, the "artspeak" found in magazines such as ArtForum and FlashArt.

This international community doubles as a distribution system for what is often called advanced, or avant-garde, art. Only a handful of the art world's chosen few - a group that includes artists such as Jenny Holzer and Jeff Koons - have managed to become famous beyond this small coterie. Theart world's specialized nature turns off many outsiders and commentators. 60 Minutes's Morley Safer devoted a television segment to ridiculing it; virtual reality pioneer and artist Jaron Lanier considers himself part of it, but also describes it as "that thing that I think should die."

This clique, whose very exclusivity defies the expansive name ("the art world") that it bears, expressed only condescension toward "computer art" up until the end of the 1980s, when an awareness dawned that the growth of digitally-based media may in some way upset the structure of the museum and gallery system itself. "The art world is scared to death of this stuff," says Laura Trippi, a curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, a SoHo establishment that showcases the cutting-edge in artists and ideas. "We are seeing a breakdown of the art object which reflects the fact that the field of fine art is itself breaking down."

Digital art is the apotheosis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. The very distinction between original and copy becomes meaningless in a digital world - there the work exists only as a copy. And yet, artists, like the rest of us, remain uncertain as to whether the new information universe is merely an impoverished shadow of some other, more corporeal reality.

Taking advantage of this uncertainty, a number of Jones's contemporaries have appropriated computer technology for work that conforms neither to techno-utopian visions nor to art-world commonplaces. For example, a group of artists have started their own BBS called The Thing, inspired by German artist Joseph Beuys's idea of a "social sculpture." With nodes in Cologne, London, and New York, and a small, exclusive membership, The Thing envisions itself as a work of art. Today's radical artists are stuck smack in the middle of a classic 20th century artistic dilemma: how to remain disassociated from corporate pressures while at the same time succeeding within an art establishment that is dependent on corporate and institutional largesse. The digital revolution has sharpened the point of this problem, since the tools of digital culture - rendering programs, photo and video applications - are developed in the context of commercial art.

Anybody who has visited the art galleries at industry shows such as Seybold knows how distant the workaday core of the digital community is from the rarefied atmosphere of New York's Whitney museum. And yet, a number of artists on the fringes of this culture, especially young artists of the rave/neo-psychedelic scene, are twisting digital tools to serve their own evolving personal visions. Conceptual artists such as Jones, Perry Hoberman, or Laura Kurgan come at the same problem from the other direction, by appropriating digital tools. The digital revolution may eventually blur the boundaries between radical and commercial art. On the Internet, communal aesthetic forms have begun to surface. The dream worlds of MOOs and MUDs, for example, allow users to create their own content. Net surfers around the world are exploring - and inventing - this new terrain.

The art market has greeted this emerging culture with a certain anxiety: how to use it, how to embody it, and how to sell it. Jones reflects this anxiety in Petrarch's Air, whose title alludes to the Renaissance poet Petrarch. He thought, Jones says, that he could learn Greek by always carrying Greek books with him, although he never opened them. Osmosis may have sufficed for the Italian poet, but it's hardly adequate when it comes to learning new technologies. Jones is staking his future on his ability to actually crack those books himself and adapt his work to a shifting techno-cultural landscape. "There is an ever-growing gap between those disciplines that are comfortable with advanced computational tools and those that are not," he says. "It is like the separation between the First and the Third Worlds. I worry that the art world is going to be on the wrong side of that gap." Jones is determined to fight his way to the right side.

The Disappearance of the Art Object

Historically, the existence of the art world has relied upon the immense value accorded to paintings and sculptures as precious and irreplaceable commodities. Sure, the art market may have seen its peak in 1990 when tulipomania drove the price of a van Gogh at auction to US$82.5 million, but a work by Jasper Johns or Cy Twombly can still sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"The art world maintains a bias towards the notion of handcrafts," says David Ross, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, whose 60-year mission has been to build the nation's definitive collection of modern and contemporary works. "People want to buy objects that are shaped in some way by the hand of the artist."

Certainly, digital artists aren't the first renegades who have tried to crack the art-world oligarchy. Conceptual and Minimalist artists of the 1960s also attempted to critique art as supercommodity. When Carl Andre unveiled a piece consisting of a stack of bricks, when Lawrence Wiener pinned a note to the wall stating that his work "need not be built," they were attacking the sanctified aura of art. Andy Warhol lampooned the idea of originality itself with his Brillo soap-pad box and Campbell Soup paintings, substituting an impersonal, mass-produced aesthetic for the artist's individual "style." Yet the art market co-opted their efforts: ultimately all of their pieces could still be sold as originals or collectibles to museums or private patrons.

But a work created through a computer leapfrogs over these archaic notions of originality, commerce, and style. Today, many artists see digitization as far more than just another tool like a new printing press. "A computer is a device that can simulate anything, including itself," says Gregory Rukavina, an artist who is equally versed in the latest trends in technology and continental philosophy. "The material of traditional art has disappeared." A digitized artwork has no intrinsic status as an object, as it consists only of information that can be molded into a picture, a sculpture, an animation, or any other imaginable form. Any particular version of a piece can only be arbitrary, transient, accidental. Digital art is no longer object-oriented. So what has it become instead?

Whether they are exploring virtual reality, 3-D modeling programs such as AutoCAD, bar-code wands, or a new Internet browser, artists working in this medium are searching for such definitions. Peter Halley, a painter whose abstract, hard-edged images first attracted attention in the mid-1980s with the emergence of the "Simulationist" group that included Jeff Koons and Haim Steinbach, asks: "If you use computer graphics, does the work remain on the screen? What happens to the Modernist tradition of tactility, scale - all of the elements that fall under the rubric of presence?"

Relying on metaphor to define their work, some digital artists refer to a kind of mapping. For example, the South Africa-born, New York-based artist Laura Kurgan, who approached art through architecture, describes herself as "a cartographer of different virtual realities." In shows at noncommercial spaces such as The StoreFront for Art and Architecture, she has set about charting the constantly fluctuating parameters of cyberspace. In You Are Here: Information Drift, she linked her exhibition room to the network of Global Positioning Satellites, a military technology now available for commercial use. Display monitors in the installation showed how the satellites' transmission changed randomly over time, as the signal seemed to emanate from anywhere over a 100-meter area.

Despite an enthusiastic critical response about this exploration into the architecture of information, Kurgan's work has so far been ignored by galleries. "One dealer said, 'I love all this new technology stuff,'" Kurgan notes, "'but how can I sell it?'" Producing digital art, though it may defy the old art-market rules, doesn't necessarily consign artists to commercial failure. Ronald Jones, for instance, takes objects out of his virtual reality sets and has them made into sculptures to sell as high-priced traditional art works.

Michael Joaquìn Grey, who manipulates genetic algorithms and neural nets, has programmed a supercomputer to simulate the evolution of "life forms" that are first plotted as simple shapes, such as spheres or ovals. These shapes begin to deform into blobs, and then become more complex as random numbers are fired at them. The resulting appearances range from jellyfish squiggles to primordial alphabets, which Grey can "photograph," or transform into 3-D sculptures using stereolithography, a process involving lasers.

Grey's method mimics that of scientific research - but for artistic ends. Like a botanist or zoologist, Grey breeds and obsessively catalogs the new forms he creates, examining thousands of variations before finding a series that particularly appeals to him. "Science offers only one kind of narrative," says the 31-year-old Grey, who studied genetics and art at the University of California at Berkeley and at Yale University. "I wanted to be a heretic to science and create my own cosmogony."

His diaphanous shapes, displayed at the juried, highly competitive Whitney Biennial Exhibition, reminded me of viruses, as though offering a metaphor for the alien beauty of these ancient human predators. Like the work of Karl Sims (Wired 2.09, page 115), Grey's project also suggests a new kind of art that attempts to embody otherwise abstract structures of information. The formal lessons of art history - the way objects can create an emotional impact when presented in the "white cube" of a conventional gallery or museum setting - might provide the framework for works that change as the data available to them changes.

This kind of aesthetic activity might generate less a single precious object than a continually evolving network; the artist becomes less the solitary master of Modernism than the system's builder and administrator. Other digital artists search for parallels in the history of earlier mediums. Gregory Rukavina's computer animations and large-scale prints explore the development of montage - the system of editing film that eventually became the dominant language of cinema. He seeks to "break down" film technology in unfamiliar ways: "

One early movie theater in Japan had seats perpendicular to the screen," he explains, citing a film theorist's essay on Japanese cinema. "They weren't sure if the beam of light from the lens wasn't as aesthetically important as the image on the screen." Such seemingly blind alleys inspire Rukavina to investigate nonlinear aspects of the film medium -- he splices the soundtrack, for instance, back into his visual images.

Rukavina, like Grey and Jones, ends up with analog works that can be shown in traditional gallery settings. However, some critics think this kind of solution is provisional at best. "Transforming the new medium back into traditional forms is really awkward," says Lanier. "That's going to last about five minutes." Not that he has an answer: "At the moment, the new media confounds the economic system of the art market."

Museums Foray into Cyberspace

Since galleries refuse to handle most digital projects -- especially if the work lacks an analog component -- museums and other institutions are taking the lead in commissioning and showing works in this area. Last fall, the Guggenheim museum responded to all the hype about virtual reality with an exhibition of VR work at its SoHo location.

The exhibit included works by Thomas Dolby and Jenny Holzer, as well as a VR walk-through of an Egyptian temple built at Carnegie Mellon University. I visited the Holzer piece - which consisted of a fuzzy, bombed-out, Bosnia-like landscape in which disembodied voices spoke of unspecified tortures from empty houses. Although Holzer may have meant to comment on the fact that VR was developed by the military, the work seemed to me to be an unhappy conjunction of a trendy new technology and a stridently charged subject matter.

Lanier, virtual reality's first crossover, believes that the medium's artistic possibilities have yet to be discovered. "There hasn't been any virtual reality art made yet, in my opinion," says Lanier, "and the way museums and other patrons have handled virtual reality is stupid and insulting to the artists. They've defined the importance of the artists in regard to their celebrity rather than their work."

Kai Krause, the software innovator behind Kai's Power Tools for Photoshop, describes most of what has been produced so far as "contrived plays with technology for its own sake." Krause estimates it maybe at least 15 years before "deeper artistic expressions will emerge." Perspectives like those of Krause and Lanier may be correct, but they are also premature. At least some artists should get the opportunity to play with this expensive new form - whether or not VR becomes the 8-track tape of the 1990s.

The Banff Centre for the Arts in Alberta, Canada, has put the tools of VR in the hands of artists, after purchasing an ONYX Reality Rack with funding from the Canadian government. The eight projects commissioned over a three-year period for the center's Art and Virtual Environments project included works by Native American painters, multimedia theorists, performers, and installation artists. (The projects were completed last spring, and documented in Immersed in Technology: Art, Culture and Virtual Environments, to be published in 1995 by The MIT Press.)

One of the Banff artists is Perry Hoberman, whose earlier work featured karaoke machines and floor sensors that activated household gadgets. Hoberman says he arrived at Banff unwilling to entirely follow the center's program. "The assumption was the pieces would use headmounted displays, but most of us balked at that. We tried to find ways to subvert their program."

Hoberman has his own views about VR. "Not only is the image quality of virtual reality still so poor, but also I hated the idea of doing something for just one person to see." In the end, Hoberman's Bar Code Hotel did away with the immersive headset, substituting a 3-D projection screen and glasses. In the piece, several viewers are given bar-code wands and put in one room covered with bar codes that have simple directions such as "grow" or "fight" or "suicide." Using the bar-code wand, each participant creates an object (a common thing: a paper clip, hats, or sunglasses) that appears on screen. The viewers direct their objects to interact with each other through the bar-code command. Besides its high entertainment value, Hoberman's work also comments on the sad, almost suburban, emptiness of VR. "I called the piece Bar Code Hotel to reflect the limits of interactivity," says Hoberman. "When you say something is interactive, it sounds like you should be able to change it somehow. But generally the choices are very restricted, and leaving is like checking out of a hotel room: the work returns to its pristine condition, and there is no evidence you were ever there."

Hoberman says that he has received more attention for his Banff piece than for his earlier work, simply because it involves a costly high-tech system. This irritates him somewhat, because, like most of the artists I spoke with, he is skeptical of the glitzy technology that may attract attention but that can never substitute for genuine artistic vision.

At the Whitney, David Ross dismisses VR. "Virtual reality is such a costly tool that you either get an analogy for what somebody is doing in another format or a room with things in it," he says. "An art medium really can't flourish until it reaches a level of personal capacity, until it becomes like a crayon or a pencil." Ross has saved up his enthusiasm for the artistic potential of the Internet - both as a medium and as a future distribution system. "The video artist Nam June Paik used to say that someday the TV guide would be as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages and that every artist would have his or her own channel - this could soon become true if every artist gets his or her own SLIP connection."

Although Ross doesn't foresee artists beginning to make money through the Internet in the short term, he thinks eventually pay-per-view systems may become popular ways of attracting an audience. Last summer, the Whitney Museum opened a conference on Echo, a small but culturally hypercharged online service based in New York City. Ross and members of his curatorial staff presented forums on subjects such as race and pornography, allowing Echo members to interrogate and second-guess the experts. I tuned in, fascinated by the specter of the director and curators of the venerable Whitney fervently defending their positions against Echoids with names like neandergal and Richard Milhouse Headcharge.

The Whitney, Ross tells me, is also developing a Web site. "A lot of the work that interests me in this arena can't appear within the museum's solid architecture, but only within the invisible architecture of the Internet," he says. His inspiration? The File Room, a work developed by Antonio Muntadas, a New York- and Barcelona-based artist, in conjunction with the Randolph Street Gallery. A Mosaic site, The File Room archives material about art and censorship from around the world. "We are going to commission artists to create works for the Whitney site," says Ross, who plans to tap "the 'A list' of artists you might want to see in this medium, from Laurie Anderson to Robert Rauschenberg."

Although Ross's engagement with the medium demonstrates courage and foresight, it will be a shame if the Whitney resorts to his "A list," which will only further centralize power around a few "art stars." Art-world politics might force places like the Whitney to promote the same old celebrity system. But the almost unlimited distribution power of the Internetcould give artists a chance to reach a vast new audience, if they take matters into their own hands.

Technology and Craft

It is, perhaps oddly, the Renaissance artists that I kept thinking about as I explored the issues of art and digital technology with contemporary artists and theorists.

During the Renaissance, art and science fit together in a confluence not seen since - breakthroughs by Masaccio, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Leonardo da Vinci were both artistic and scientific revelations. Rules of perspective formulated by the architect Leon Battista Alberti in the mid-15th century offered artists an objective system for making paintings based on Euclidean geometry. Opposing the flat anti-illusionism of medieval panels, Alberti noted that painters should compose their works as if facing "an open window through which I see what I want to paint." It hardly seems a coincidence that the most common graphical interface for today's computers is called Windows -- information-age windows that open to reveal packets of data rather than realistic pictures.

Eventually, computers and the Internet may force artists out of the increasingly esoteric discourse of the art world. A broader audience may demand that they reintegrate their work with larger issues related to science, technology, and humanism. "I would like to see a return to that classical breadth of inquiry that artists were able to make in the Renaissance," says Michael Joaquìn Grey.

Computers may also force radical artists to return to a notion of craft. In the contemporary art world, painstaking studio process oftenseems to matter less than an up-to-the-minute ironic pose. Artists of the past had to grapple with techniques ranging from draftsmanship to fresco painting if they wanted to achieve greatness. Their creative inheritors may have to master digital tools if they hope to reach beyond the restrictive walls of galleries and museums.