From "The Pander", Jul 2001
Computer Love at the Venice Biennale
by Chris BarkerHarald Szeemann prefaces his Biennale, 'The choice of the artists at this 49th International Art Exhibition are not determined by any set theme; it is rather the artists themselves who represent a dimension in their works.'[1] In its abandon, Szeemann's claim is specious. But, experientially, with so many artists and so much work - the guide lists 123 in Szeemann's curated show alone, and a total of 328 artists with the inclusion of the national pavilions - it is horribly true. Save utter exhaustion, the visitor is denied any meaningful constellation of ideas. Behind Ron Mueck's powerful Untitled (boy), the flagship of the show, the vast corridor of the Corderie literally disappears into the distance, exceeding 300 metres in length before turning the corner. Immediately the visitor realizes the awful truth of the passage ahead. Café/revival stations strategically placed in the Arsennale and Giardini allow one to reflect on this performative aspect of Biennale-going, while sipping espresso - standing up, of course - a piquancy served to enhance the torture, keeping you moving, unable to rest your aching legs.
But, for a Bienniale of this size with ostensibly 'no set theme', there was an uncanny preponderance of video work and, especially, digital, computer-assisted work. Was Szeeman secretly championing some notion of the progressivity of new media? And yet a great deal of this high-tech pageant was distinctly un-progressive, if not retarded. The critic Daniel Soutiff characterized his experience of the Biennale as 'bearing witness to the sinister apotheosis of the remote control'.[2] And justly so: the digital worlds on display relied on the deployment of conventional, figurative syntaxes, their perspectival spaces and frames recalling art and architecture's first steps into cyberspace. This work pointed rather to the sophistication of the few painters and sculptors included in the exhibition (notably the veterans Gerhard Richter, Cy Twombly, and Richard Serra) than to its own conceptual acuity. These slick video works, like so many moving paintings, presented what felt like a return to Paul Valéry's notion of art for art's sake, where art's worth depended on its 'perfect adaption in the sphere of perfect uselessness', at the expense of any engaging exploration of the place of new technology in our lives.
Fortunately, there were exceptions. In the French pavilion, Pierre Huyghe beautifully installed a network of video loops, soundtracks, and polarizing glass screens around his Atari Light / Pong (1999), a gridded ceiling that eerily doubled as the vintage video game of the same name. Cybernating the elements of this ensemble with some invisible servomechanism, Huyghe's installation eloquently evoked a chilling, HAL-like artificial intelligence; its computations, represented in the smoothly gliding pixels of the Atari Light above, ominously manipulated the visitor's cogitations below. As Benjamin Buchloh gloomily extolled: 'Thus the modernist promises of emancipatory inscription and ludic self-realization returned here in a nightmarish hybrid where spectatorial participation only furthers the subject's seemingly inexhaustible submission to the mechanisms of the societies of control.'[3]
Of all the digital wares on display at the Biennale, only one work offered bona fide computer art; that is, art reliant upon, and only to be found within, the digital environment. Curated by Aurora Fonda, the Slovenian Republic's Absolute One, brought together artists responding to and operating within the 'globalization process'. Included were the collective machinations of the web-based artists and programmers 0100101110101101.org and epidemiC [4]. Together, the collective scored biennale.py, a self-copying program or virus, 'released' from the Pavilion on the first day of the Vernissage. Biennale.py shirked the public image of the virus as an anarchic signature, forgoing it for a more reasoned philosophical behaviour. Thus; 'The creation of a virus tout court, free and without an end or a goal, is in the worst case a test, a survey on the limits of the Net, but in the best case is a form of global counterpower, generally a pre-political form, but one that resists the strong powers, it puts them under a new balance, it shakes and reassembles them. A new idea of a "virus that is not just a virus" is gaining acceptance, and that it can represent the outbreak of the social into the most social thing of all: the Net.'[5]
Operating within the Python language syntax, upon its execution biennale.py proceeded to 'tag' vulnerable Python files by inserting its own chain of commands at the head of the existing instruction sequence.
While the virus was effectively harmless, biennale.py still inflicted a loss of time, that scarcest of commodities, upon the computer user whose hardware it infected, causing a very human disruption within the relentless and undifferentiated flow of globalized capitalization.
In a cynical gesture toward the art market, the source code for biennale.py could be bought, printed onto t-shirts, and burned onto a limited number of disks. Duping adventurous collectors and curators into confusing the copy for the original, biennale.py bluntly drew attention to an art form that has little in common with many of the media traditionally exhibited at the Biennale. Darkly 0100101110101101.org and epidemiC jest, 'To buy a computer virus is probably one the most exciting investments one could make today.' One can be sure that the irony of employing old-fashioned sloganeering to promote a counter-discourse within the new economy was not lost on the artists.
Notes
[1] Guide, La Biennale di Venezia: 49 Esposizione Internazionale D'Arte (Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, 2001).
[2] Daniel Soutiff, 'Pick to Click', Artforum, September 2001, Vol..XL, No.1, p160
[3] Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Control, By Design', Artforum, September 2001, pp162-3
[4] The inclusion of non-nationals within the Slovenian Pavilion recalls 1999's Toi Toi Toi exhibition, where Rosalie Gascoigne and Boyd Webb were included within Rene Bloc's 'aborescent' genealogy of New Zealand art. In his commentary of the exhibition's staging at the Museum Fredericianum Kassel, David Hatcher noted of the artists' inclusion, 'Welcome relief from nationalizing, essentializing clichés, it's interesting to consider whether this is a gesture only an 'outsider' would have made.' ['of the things of which we may doubt,' The Pander, Issue 8, Winter 1999, p28-9.]
In an event of the Biennale's scale, where themes of nationalism consistently take pride of place, especially within the crisply defined cultural hemispheres of the Giardini, Hatcher's consideration seems particularly apt. Like New Zealand, the Slovenian Pavilion exists on the Biennale's fringe, tucked away in a dealer gallery (Galleria A+A) in another sestiere (district) of Venice. Off the strip, such countries have the liberty of not treating their pavilions as pavilions, and their art as products in a trade show. It is a shame then that New Zealand, in contrast to the adventurousness of the Slovenian pavilion, and to its own inventiveness at Kassel, so intently did the 'right thing' at Venice.
[5] Press Release, Pavilion of the Republic of Slovenia, 49th International Art Biennale of Venice.
Links
www.biennale24.com - Interviews, comment, and the opening parties
www.labiennale.org - The official site
www.mariangoodman.com - Marian Goodman Gallery represents Pierre Huyghe in Paris and New York
www.0100101110101101.org - 0100101110101101.org
www.exibart.it - A forum, in and around the Pavilion of Solvenia's Absolute Zero.