by A. D. Coleman
Montage 93, which subtitled itself the "international festival of the image," was an ambitious effort to grapple with and illuminate these early days of what the author William J. Mitchell has dubbed the "post-photographic era." Seven years in the planning and making, this complex, multi-layered event -- the brainchild of Nathan Lyons, founder and director of the Visual Studies Workshop -- aspired to be nothing less than a watershed in the emerging dialogue on the subject of photography in the electronic age.
* What's past is prologue: On the night of July 19, a group of a dozen mentally challenged people, out on a field trip with their nurse and an aide, stand transfixed before Canadian artist Wyn Gelense's installation in the former repair dock of Hallman's Chevrolet, a now-defunct auto dealership. By comparison with what's on view elsewhere in town, this piece is so low-tech as to be practically antique: merely a film loop rear-projected onto a shaped sheet of sand-blasted plexiglas that's suspended in the darkness of the bay. The film shows a close-up of a hand caressing, over and over again, a framed photo of a child sitting in a toy car. Seen in passing, from the street, it is at once riveting, meditative and melancholy. These spectators talk about it among themselves -- I hear Star Trek mentioned several times -- and then ask the docent (a local woman, a banker, one of a cadre of some 900 volunteers from the community) what it means. She turns the question back to them, and they propose possible interpretations as we continue to watch the huge, slowly moving hand obsessively touch the past.
* "We are entering the virtual age. Everything you know is about to be wrong, and much of it already is. This is the biggest thing since fire."
The speaker is John Perry Barlow -- Montana cattle rancher, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an ardent explorer/advocate of what is called cyberspace. What exactly is cyberspace? It seems to be a hypothetical or imaginary location in which real events take place. Barlow, talking in the Eastman Theater, defines it operationally: "Cyberspace began right here [in Rochester], when Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson had that first phone conversation at a point somewhere between two rooms."
Barlow is leading off a weeklong string of lectures addressing such issues as interactive telecommunications, virtual reality, and civil liberties in the computer age. He could be described as an electronic libertarian, whose EFF was created to combat government intrusion into and corporate control of international computer networks and other cyberspace territories. "Our motto is: U.S. out of cyberspace," he announces. And, "In cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance." And, "The evidentiary nature of anything -- thanks to events that started out in this town -- is increasingly suspect." And, "Much of what's wrong in America is the result of television being a one-way conversation." Like many of those on the outer edge of these technologies, he's hyped on something that's loosely referred to as interactivity, which they understand to be directly connected to true democracy and/or healthy anarchy. I am not yet convinced, but one thing is clear: these new forms are attracting people who are eminently quotable.
* "We can understand the history of technology as changes in social interactions," artist/critic Joanna Frueh tells a rapt audience at the student festival, just before breaking into an a cappella version of "I Can't Help Falling in Love with You" in a rich, vibrant contralto. It's just one of many surprises and challenges they'll be offered during the week. "New Arts/New Worlds," the student festival, is severely under-attended. Montage's staff had expected a minimum of one hundred and twenty, were prepared for quite a few more, but end up with only three dozen -- and only one of them, a Texan, from the U.S. This is surprising and inexplicable, given the richness of the program, the relative inexpensiveness of its fees, and the extensive mailings. To their credit, everyone involved puts as much wholehearted effort into it as they would have for an overflow crowd. As a result, the registrants -- some of whom are photo students and some photo teachers, and who have flown in from Finland, Spain, Australia, Brazil, South Africa and other distant points on the compass -- get a remarkable bang for their buck: morning symposia with people like Frueh, Brian Wallis of Art in America, and picture-makers like Evergon, Carrie Mae Weems, Esther Parada and Paul Berger; discussion groups; portfolio reviews; informal encounters with assorted photo-notables; and passes to all the festival's other lectures and events. Much of what these students and teachers are seeing and hearing is brand-new to them -- including not only the new image technologies but also the debates over critical and theoretical issues that are now standard fare in photography education here in the States. Most of them have had, or are presently undergoing, a traditional education in photography, grounded in silver and aniline dyes. Only the Finns, who are from the Nykarleby School of Arts, appear to have much familiarity with digital imaging; they come bearing gifts, in the form of a limited-edition book they produced for the occasion via desktop publishing, a lovely little image-text fictional-mythological work (based on altered Edward S. Curtis photos) whose production was funded by the Finnish government. They give copies of it to some of us as a way of saying thanks, but clearly they -- and the other participants as well -- feel that they've received something of great value during their stay: they're exhausted, their circuits have clearly been overloaded, but they're energised and enthused about the future of the medium they've chosen, even with its ground rules changing before their eyes.
* "Interactivity" is the buzzword of the hour, but no one seems willing to define it -- beyond asserting that it's brand-new, unprecedented and good for us. The implication is that none of the preceding media have been interactive, and that our relation to all those older forms -- paintings, photographs, books, movies, television as we've known it -- therefore was and is passive, absorptive, disempowering: they talk, we listen.
I'm having trouble with this, because I'm convinced that when I'm sitting in the Thalia with tears pouring down my cheeks as Bette Davis's face goes out of focus at the end of Dark Victory, or making my argumentative marginal notes in John Berger's Another Way of Telling, or spending half an hour studying a Susan Meiselas photograph, I'm interacting. I'm not an empty vessel into which someone else's ideas are being poured; I am, as the late I. A. Richards (among others) would have argued, making meaning from what's been presented to my perceptual system.
I make no claim to expertise on matters computer-related, nor have I experienced widely any area that could be considered state-of-the-art. Still, very little of what I see in the exhibits or at the trade fair, and hear described in such glowing terms by speakers and panellists, seems to me like anything I'd consider a major breakthrough. Mostly it's bells and whistles and buttons to push, lots of buttons to push: everything here hums and clanks and flickers and turns on and off.
Somehow I don't feel any more empowered by a video installation programmed to start up when I enter its space than I do when I make eye contact with a silver-gelatine print that remains, as it were, permanently turned on regardless of whether or not I'm in the room. "There's a tremendous breakthrough awaiting us in this decade. We're still just bottom-feeding on this idea of interactivity," admits the entrancing Brenda Laurel (who gave us the home version of Pac-Man, surely a dubious blessing at best) at her lecture; I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one who thinks there must be more to it than this.
The most convincing demonstration of the possibilities in store, for me at least, is a videotape that Jaron Lanier runs during his lecture. Billed as "the founder and recently deposed CEO of VPL Research, . . . the first vendor of complete VR systems," Lanier looks like a large, plump troll with waist-length blond hair in cornrows; he has the body language of a flower child, the spacey speech patterns of a benign acid-head, a collagist's way of thinking and distinct flashes of genius. In addition to being a computer whiz and an inventor, he's also a musician and composer who's devised, for his own pleasure and use, a virtual-reality environment in which various instruments float: something vaguely saxophonish, a synthesiser keyboard, and a kind of tambourine. The tape shows him in performance, sitting on a stage, wearing virtual reality's trademark gloves and helmet, improvising -- as, on a video screen above him, a 2-D video projection shows the audience what he's seeing: the virtual-reality versions of his own disembodied hands playing these instruments to make the music they're hearing. As an amateur musician myself, I'm fascinated; video games may not tempt me, but this looks like an adventure.
* Interactive artworks confront audiences and presentational venues with a number of new challenges. Scheduling, for example. A dozen people can look at length and simultaneously at one of Ansel Adams's larger prints of "Moonrise over Hernandez." But only one can be strapped into a VR device at any given moment. So people start lining up at 8 a.m. outside the Strong Museum -- which won't even open until 10 -- to register for five minutes on the VR device that's part of the group show there, ponderously titled "Perspectives, Proximities, Perceptions: Expressions in Three-Dimensional Graphic and Electronic Media." By 10:30, it's booked for the day, every day. The same thing happens with the VR device made available at the trade show by New York's CyberEvent Group. (VR is the cutting-edge technology of the moment; Jaron Lanier was also the hottest ticket among the evening lecturers.)
Moreover, these and numerous other works at the various exhibits require time -- time to learn how they work, as well as time to absorb their content. Most are determinedly innovative and idiosyncratic in their operation. Many of them have a fixed and not inconsiderable duration: Alan Rath's electronic sculpture, a meditation on the Challenger explosion, for example, runs about twenty-five minutes. Those with audio components take it for granted that one will be able to listen to their soundtracks without interruption from other sound sources. Quite a few -- such as Daniel Reeves's storefront installation "Eingang / The Way In" -- are predicated on the viewer establishing a slow, continuous, meditative and even solitary relationship to them.
Which is to say that they don't do particularly well in the Max Headroom/video-arcade atmosphere of the group show, where they compete with, distract from, and sometimes drown out each other, and where one feels impolite if one spends more than a few minutes of exploratory time on anything when other people are lined up for their turns. Nor do they thrive on crowds. The installation displaying Grahame Weinbren's film, Sonata, uses laser-disk players and infra-red sensors; it is activated by the viewer pointing to different sections of the video screen, which generates shifts in the point of view from which the narrative is seen and told. This is intriguing and, in fact, truly interactive. But it takes at least one viewing just to get the hang of the system, and another to put what you've learned into practice, which is impossible under the circumstances; and it would help if its soundtrack were not constantly overwhelmed by the noises from the six other devices elsewhere in the same room at the Memorial Art Gallery's show, "Iterations: The New Image," a travelling exhibit co-curated by Timothy Druckrey and Charles Stainback.
This is only one of eight group shows included in the festival, all of which -- even those that fail -- merit individual discussion that space does not permit. Of these, "Iterations," which concentrates on digital imaging, is the most clangourous; in addition to the projects of Rath and Weinbren, it includes works by Esther Parada, George Legrady, Keith Piper, Jim Pomeroy, Carol Flax and quite a few others, fifteen artists in all.
To provide, much too quickly, a sense of what the exhibits encompassed, here are some brief synopses: * "Interior Dialogues," at the Pyramid Arts Center: a juried show of work by twenty-four recent graduates of M.F.A. programs, all but four from schools here in the States. A cross-section of typical current student work. Most interesting: Kristin Anderson's intelligently seen small-camera black & white images of boys; Young Kim's melancholy assemblages on the loss of her identity as an expatriate Korean; Chuck Samuels's stylistically accurate, biting, parodic re-enactments of iconic images by Ralph Gibson, Man Ray, Edward Weston, E. J. Bellocq and others, with himself in the female roles. Worth noting: four of those chosen by the jury got their degrees from the School of Visual Arts in New York. The show's "sponsor and organiser" is the M.F.A. photo program at that school; the show's director (though not a juror) is Charles Traub, who heads that program; and its two curators are graduates of that program. Also in the same space: an eerie, grim installation by Sherwin Mark, "Remembering Forgetting," centring around a photograph of the 1911 lynching of a Black man, Zachariah Walker, by a mob of steelworkers in East Fallowfield, Pennsylvania -- the crowd of murderous men all posing proudly for the camera.
* "Copigraphic Interconnections," at the Visual Studies Workshop: a loose survey of "copy art" -- works produced on assorted electrostatic reproduction systems -- by 18 artists from many countries presently living in Toronto. Curated by Monique Brunet-Weinmann. My favourites: Franziska Megert's video installation, "Arachne-Vanitas," in which the silhouettes of spiders crawling on the screen transform a nude young woman into an old one (its relation to copy art is marginal); Boris Nieslony's disassembled Xerox copier, spread out like a dissected cadaver on the floor.
* "Perspectives, Proximities, Perceptions," previously mentioned: a reasonably comprehensive survey of work produced with current 3-D imaging systems, curated by Lance Speer and Louis M. Brill. Worth noting: Rebecca Deem's "Leap of Faith," a small installation I'd seen a few years back at the now-defunct Museum of Holography in New York; the late Jim Pomeroy's modified View-Master images; curator Speer's stereopticon made from a human skull, constructed so that one looks out at the image through the skeleton's eye sockets. The exhibit includes a most instructive and useful timeline recounting the evolution of 3-D still photography and film, with examples of the consumer-market cameras and their results. It also offers a useful handout lucidly describing the various processes, from anaglyphic imagery to assorted forms of holography.
* "The New Images," at the International Museum of Photography: a shapeless, sprawling smorgasbord curated by Ginette Major and Herve Fischer. Ninety-six works by twenty-six artists and/or organisations from five different countries. Holograms, 3-D television, computer animation, stereo images, 3-D and 2-D computer images, and lots more. Much kitsch. Best in show, hands down: Evergon's 1989 triptych of enormous transmission holograms, directorial images representing a river god at three stages of his life.
* "Electronic/Mail Art," at the Damon City Center: no less amorphous, but in this case on purpose. An open invitational exhibit, organised by Kathleen Farrell and George Campbell McDade, who -- so far as I could tell -- put up everything they received from what seem to be hundreds of folks from all around the world. Since "mail art" (which now includes faxes, E-mail, and other newer forms) is inherently antagonistic to institutionalised aesthetic standards and curatorship, their hands-off no-editing policy is appropriate. The results are, to say the least, uneven; but taken as a whole, the show makes it clear that creative energy flows everywhere, through all of us, and it doesn't take anything more technologically complex than imagination and a postage stamp to unleash it. In the context of Montage 93, it's a much-needed antidote.
* So, in a somewhat different way, is "Retratos y Suenos/Portraits and Dreams: Photographs by Mexican Children," at the International Museum of Photography. Curated by Arthur Ollman and Wendy Ewald, this show documents one of MacArthur Foundation fellow Ewald's most recent projects. The children of San Cristobal de las Casas, a small village in Chiapas, Mexico's southernmost state, were taught photography by Ewald and turned loose in their own context. They photographed their friends and family, their pets, their homes, the things they loved -- and their dreams and imaginings. Then they wrote about their pictures. Presenting this work in the form of large, exhibition-quality silver prints may distort it somewhat, but what pulses through is the exuberant spontaneity of young people given their first opportunity for the visual interpretation of their own lives. For anyone worried that, in the digital era, what we once thought of as photography has no function in the world anymore, this show provides not only a respite but also a cause for optimism -- and rejoicing.
* "Projects: Within Memory," at the Midtown Plaza Mall. Curated by James Sheldon of the Addison Gallery of American Art, this was the most tightly edited and thematically coherent survey show of the festival. Those represented were (with few exceptions) addressing the issue of individual or collective memory via photography. Notable among them: Joachim Schmid's typologies based on "found" photographic imagery; Pedro Meyer's family-album CD-ROM project, I Photograph to Remember; Patti Ambrogi's understated, angry anti-rape piece, "Not Seriously Injured"; Yasumasa Morimura's "The Death of Father," a parodic reinterpretation of a classic example of Western painting; and Joan Fontcuberta's send-up of archaeology, a pseudo-report on the primitive people of Retseh-Cor (Rochester spelled backwards) from the fictitious 'Rochester Institute of Prospective Anthropology.
In the student festival's handbook, approximate viewing times are proposed for all the exhibits; none is longer than an hour, and few attendees will actually devote that much attention to any one show. Yet in fact, whether they reward it or not, most of the shows --indeed, many of the individual works on view -- demand far more time than that. What these group shows are, then, are occasions for "grazing," not unlike the skimming through channels that remote controls make possible on our TV sets. Who is at home with all this? So far as I can tell, only the young (by which I mean those under 25), who are present in droves, and who dart and flit from one device to another like shoppers at the mall. At one of the afternoon symposia, Maricia Battle, Assistant Curator at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., asked, not sarcastically, "How do you attract an audience with an attention span of three seconds?" The answer would seem to be, "With aggressive, rackety, complicated artefacts that encourage a hands-on relationship." But a parallel question is "What audience will these strategies drive away?" I pose this to the panel, but no one wants to touch it. All the festival's solo shows are multi-media installations; these range from the Gelense projection to such elaborate fabrications as Mary Lucier's "Oblique House (Valdez)," Francesc Torres's "Too Late for Goya," and Dawn Adair Dedeaux's "Soul Shadows: Urban Warrior Myths," the last of which occupies an entire warehouse. They exemplify what Joseph Marshall recently referred to as "the fact of the transformation of 'photographic art' into an art of montage in response to mass media. "Lucier's work is comprised of video interviews with residents of Valdez, Alaska, who lived through both a major earthquake and the more recent oil-spill disaster; these are activated and orchestrated by the viewer's movement through the structure housing the monitors. The Torres work projects along one wall, in extreme slow motion, film footage from six major twentieth-century events, ranging from the Russian revolution of 1917 to Gorbachev's 1985 ascent to power. (Just outside the space in which it was installed at the Memorial Art Gallery, coincidentally, is an example of the historic origin of the pixellated image: a Roman mosaic.) And Dedeaux's raw, powerful scrutiny of urban gang warfare, which grew out of a collaboration with inmates in the Orleans Parish Prison, incorporates videotapes, audiotapes, enormous hand-coloured still photographs, bookworks and other material into a gritty, raucous bottom-up vision of street and prison life (and death) in the African-American communities of New Orleans. Groups of young people from Rochester and the surrounding region have already made arrangements to attend en masse.
* With all this whirling in my head, it's something of a relief to discover that the transition into this new imagistic universe is going to be gradual. Much of the work on view in the exhibitions has been produced with comparatively traditional tools and materials. At the trade show, I learn to my delight that Henry Wilhelm has at long last completed and published his definitive study, The Permanence and Care of Color Photographs: Photographic and Digital Color Prints, Color Negatives, Slides, and Motion Pictures, one of whose aims is to ensure the preservation of our photographic past. The folks from an outfit called EverColor Pigment Prints give me the rundown on their method for making permanent colour prints that will endure "for centuries," which combines digital scanning with carbon pigment printing; the latter process dates back to the late 1800s. And, at the adjoining expo, Pierre-Yves Mah, founding director of S.P.E.O.S., a new photo school in Paris, logs me onto a real-time transatlantic discussion with a colleague in France, via phone and computer-imaging system; this makes possible an intercontinental version of that ancient ritual, the portfolio critique. Plus ça change, plus c'est le méme chose.
© Copyright 2001 by A. D. Coleman. All rights reserved. By permission of the author and Image/World Syndication Services, imageworld@nearbycafe.com. www.nearbycafe.com/adc/adc.html
The Digital Evolution: Visual Communication in the Electronic Age : Essays, Lectures and Interviews 1967-1998
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