SCENE & HEARDSCENE & HEARDVirtuality has become the capital trend in France. This past winter I
discovered, at a topsy-turvy round of conferences and exhibitions, just
how broadly the stupefying effects of dematerialized economics have been
embraced by French culture; mainly it seems for their marketable eccentricity
and luxe. By "virtuality" I mean the generation of a space of
action within a person's imagination that substitutes for an actual, physical
space. Virtuality is a leap of faith, a constellation of perceptions and,
fundamentally, an artistic phenomenon, which is what I suppose attracts
the Cartesian French. Virtuality exists between the ears--that is in the
mind's eye, which is where the perceptive French prefer to have their experiences.
I am writing this dispatch from a hotel-room-terrace in Morges, overlooking
beautiful Lake Geneva and the Alps, in Switzerland--that land of good sense,
discretion and monetary soundness. As I write, I realize with a start how
facile is my immersion in the French virtual world, predisposed as I am
to a mooniness quite at odds with my supposed American practicality and
stoicism. Thinking back, I realize now that I decided to make sport of my
wintry Parisian melancholy by heading toward the sunny South to investigate
some of the unexamined freedoms which the new digital technology might bring
to bear on the realm of the senses, the land of ardor.
My lackadaisical and opportunistic escapade actually began while still at
home in Paris at the "Art ou publicite?" exhibition, a "retrospective"
of painted images used by Coca-Cola to advertise its sugary, brown product,
as well as an assortment of video clips culled from the archive of Coke
commercials--all in the Louvre, no less! Granted the "exhibition"
was mounted in Le Carrousel du Louvre, which resembles nothing so much as
a winsome Shopping Mall in Oak Brook, Illinois, but still....Now we have
the Louvre simultaneously according credibility to commercial art, taking
the zing out of Pop Art, and even removing that question mark from the show's
title! Downright infelicitous, the exhibition struck me as an egregious
breach of decorum, of which the French are usually most exacting. Such a
show might have been expected to provoke nothing but incredulity and airy
disregard, just as the Centre-Pompidou exhibition, "Feminin-Masculin,
le sexe de l'art," might affront Puritanical, American standards. But
exhibition-visitors seemed pleased with this display of crass commercialism.
I, on the other hand, found it tormenting. This response paled compared
to that generated by the deeply sentimental display of obeisance paid to
bad taste, American-style. Worse still, the show's investigation of the
virtual unreality of American commercial art suckered me into the commercial-cultural
domain. Off I soared towards the Mediterranean and into the architectonics
of cyber-myth and virtuality also known as "cyber-opportunity."
How plentiful, it seems, are the occasions to profit!
MILIA (the International Publishing and New Media Market) is the premier
get-together for multimedia publishing professionals from around the world.
This year's third annual confab in Cannes, which ran from February 8-12,
was focused on online opportunities for cultural marketing, making it the
perfect place to procure and sell rights, form strategic alliances, scout
fresh talent and negotiate distribution agreements.
For four wine-soaked days I explored this showcase of new projects from
high-tech companies frantically trying to establish their international
identities, and, in the process, make more contacts in just four days than
in the other 361 days of the year. Yes, I was there to discover the hot,
new market trends. But given the abundance of champagne, and topless and
g-strung honeys and hunks peppering my mid-day siestas, the new electronic
economy became for me what the information commodity has all along revealed
itself as: a process of quantitative intoxication, an erotic dream.
But when one has good sex or a profound aesthetic experience one loses track
of time, space and physical reality, and enters another state of mind. Great
sex or painting shatters the sphere of actual time, transforming it into
the deep space/time of virtuality. When I looked at the Art on (flashy)
display at MILIA '96, this never even came close to happening. Although
bristling with the rhetoric of transgression, the aesthetic position of
most of the new cyberworks is only a summary of established visual prejudices
and familiar strategies. But consider this a cautionary tale. Stepping back
and pondering the debased image of Art the new electronic media assumes,
we might begin to formulate a response to the calamitous union of art and
money with which we must (increasingly) contend.
My second foray into the the sun took me to Monaco for Imagina. This conference
purported to address how technology is transforming our economic existence.
From February 21-23, I was treated to discussions of virtual banks and cyber
casinos, in other words the new computer-graphics-laden world of "art"
and high-end special effects. Fatuous and glittery commercial art adorns
communication furthering the nexus of cybercash and even "free"
money; witness casinos opening in the Bahamas and virtual lotteries organized
in Lichtenstein. Imagina attendees pondered First-Virtual-CEO Lee Stein's
remarks about his bank--the first truly virtual one of its kind--and Digicash-CEO
David Chaum's discussion of economic dematerialization and even the potential
loss of the nation-state's traditional autonomy in the minting of money.
We also viewed Toy Story's state-of-the-art, 3D animation. But the most
enticing thing I saw, which had nothing to do with art today, was the creation
of a facsimile of the Cosquer
cave recently discovered in Provence. One of the major painted caves
of the Paleolithic era, its inaccessible, partly submarine location prompted
the Ministry of Culture and the city of Marseille to commission a laser
survey of the cave in order to create a virtual reality facsimile.
The non-problematized use of the metaphor of "space" within the
concept of "cyberspace" abounded at Imagina. The chief pitfall
in this unreflective application of spatial metaphors is that they implicitly
reiterate the asymmetries of domination inherent in the established public
discourse, something I'd discovered when I spoke at a colloquia organized
by the Association of Economic Financiers as part of the Virtual Finance
conference at the Bourse (or Paris stock exchange), in February. After four
hours of cybercash-chat I offered the money handlers my definition of "virtuality,"
an artist's vision. To speak to them in terms they might understand, I suggested
that in a rudimentary economy, the commodity object represented a surplus
beyond the necessities of survival. The production of commodities--including
art for the past 500 years--implies the exchange of varied products among
independent producers.
For centuries, this remained a sort of marginalized craft production, in
which its economic nature was masked. But when information-commodity production
met the social conditions of large-scale information distribution--with
the newly added element of agile, post-communist capital--the "virtual"
seized dominion everywhere, yielding what I called "the parsimonious
daydream of profit wish fulfillment." The audience laughed feebly,
so I attempted to reassure them by explaining that similar considerations
apply to the ambition to make art relevant to contemporary monetary concerns.
What makes art that deliberately comments on its time by entering directly
into the mass marketplace more than entertainment, I wondered aloud? As
Goethe put it, "only the mediocre talent is always the captive of its
time and must get its nourishment from the elements that time contains."
This said, the insistence that art reflect the tangled (virtual) realities
of contemporary life inside the new-media, corporate-infrastructure is a
disenchantment that most cyber-artists would do well to embrace. To not
do so is a prescription for the production of entertaining ephemera and
kitsch masquerading as bona-fide art.
Joseph Nechvatal is
currently exhibiting robot-assisted paintings, "ALT.SEX," at Gallery
In Situ in Aalst, Belgium. It is a collobarative project with the
artist Matthias Groebel.
