Franco techno art

Afterimage, Summer, 1996 by Jay Murphy

Curated by Thierry Prat, Thierry Raspail and Georges Rey, this exhibition followed the path laid out in the second Biennial, that Prat and Raspail curated with Dada historian Marc Dachy, which took its theme from a poem by the Living Theater anarchist impresario Julian Beck - "Et tous ils changent le monde (and they do change the world)." With a judicious selection of works, that second Biennial examined the artistic evolution of the modernist style - from Duchamp and Malevich, to Beuys and Cage, to Boltanski, Kruger and Kawabata - proposing an unbroken if extremely complex line of structural developments of artistic creativity (seemingly unbeholden to any notion of postmodern breaks), with a distinct bow to movements like Dada and Fluxus, that at the same time at least implicitly argued for the innovative force of contemporary art as a powerful social corrective. The claim that artists can provide "democratic" responses, as well as creative form, to advances in new technologies cropped up in many of the essays in the accompanying 575-page catalog for this third Biennial, although arguably it was less evident in the works themselves.

For all the considerable critical acumen and historical knowledge of the curators, this comprehensive media-dedicated Biennial seemed to provide less analysis of specific forms of media and uses of the moving image than say, the 1990-91 "Passages de l'image" (organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou), and less inquiry into the new technologies and their technical effects than the 1995 Kwanju Biennial in Korea (dubbed with the similar theme "InfoART"). To peruse such an large scale exhibition (the largest since the 1986 "Les Immateriaux" exhibition at the Pompidou), primarily filled with video art and video or virtual reality installations, may sound like a hopeless task for the viewer, yet perhaps due to the constraints or possibilities of this "megashow" museum format, the curators took perhaps too much care in selecting works that spectators could quickly view and understand.(1) Even crowd-pleasers like Paul Sermon's interactive virtual-reality installation Telematic Vision (1993), where viewers in two locations share space and exchange gestures on a couch via video technology, acutely posed questions about the body, the role of the "informatic" artist in a media age and what artist Gary Hill has called video technology's peculiar property of "the simultaneous production of presence and distance."(2) Issues such as these served to churn up what Rey termed "the existentialist orientation" of the Biennial.(3)

The various new technologies have especially challenged and made urgent both personal and social conceptions of the body. Dilemmas of hybridization and the challenges offered to orthodox notions of the body were starkly illumined by Stelarc's video Psycho/Cyber (1992-93), documenting a bizarre choreography that was triggered by Stelarc's body being hooked up with a pre-programmed medical robot and a virtual third arm, moving or dancing either to steps motivated by his heartbeat or from robotics, surrounded by an electronic network of sound, light and cameras all connected to the artist's involuntary/hybrid body-as-"video mixer." In his most recent performances, Stelarc's movements are motivated by Internet users connected via computer to sensors located on his body. Stelarc's enthusiasm for electronic body modification was complemented by the far darker, virulent vision of Orlan, whose in a while . . . you won't see me anymore in a while . . . you'll see me again . . . . (1992-95), an extensive fashion "make-over" dictated by art historical conventions of feminine beauty, was displayed on the ceiling in a manner intended to recall the Sistine Chapel. Catherine Ikam's "virtual portraits" featured empty, revolving, digitally formed, lacquered casts of faces with voices stripped of their usual human inflections, echoing Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's notion of "faciality": "The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start . . . if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escape the face, to dismantle the face and facializations, to become imperceptible . . ."(4)

This exploration of subjecthood, as the Biennial amply demonstrated, was present from the earliest days of what used to be called "video art." Although concentrating all the historic pioneers of video or "informatic" art in one location, the Musee d'Art Contemporain, had the inevitable effect of making the emerging, younger artists in the Palais de Congres look more tentative or less significant, it did provide a pedagogical, genealogical basis for looking at artistic work in the new genres. Beginning with Nam June Paik's 10 Pieces Shown in Wuppertal in 1963 and Wolf Vostell's 6 TV De-collages (1963) the exhibition showed the two complementary directions artists would take: Paik's deconstruction and manipulation of the electronic image as means toward a new kind of painting or visual art; and Vostell's aggressive "anti-television" that produced a strong social critique of the new technology. How these concerns were easily melded with those of the new socius (or changes in social relationships), interactivity, and body-perception, was shown in the '60s and early '70s by artists like Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Dan Graham, or in the extraordinary performances documented by Marina and Ulay Abramovic, while more formalistic experimentation with the capability of video technologies was the hallmark of artists such as Michael Snow, Piotr Kowalski and Woody and Steina Vasulka. It is one of the great achievements of this Biennial to have collected so many of these influential works in one locale. Nevertheless, the exhibition was symptomatic of the curators' concern for validating various works as "art," to demonstrate a modernist continuity - all at the expense, ironically, of pursuing experimentation (in the end, the number of computer-assisted works presented was relatively small).