For 69 years, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial exhibition has helped shape the United States' perception of important developments in contemporary art. This year's Biennial, opening 20 March and expected to draw 200,000 visitors, is already sending a strong signal: Keep an eye on work utilizing digital technology, as well as pieces focusing on how new media affects our culture.
"The fact that the curators even looked at and considered multimedia-related work for the Biennial is significant," observes Johanna Drucker, associate professor of art history at Yale, who regularly has her students analyze Web sites as "works of art." She will present a lecture at the Whitney entitled "What's New? Making Sense of Art in the 1990s." "They didn't categorically exclude work incorporating multimedia or high-tech themes, even though this is so brand new and is such an overly fundamental part of our lives that it would seem difficult to seduce viewers by attempting to frame it as 'art.'"
Included in the high-profile Biennial are Dan Graham's recreational space for video and sound, incorporating CD-ROM technology; a screening of Iara Lee's film on the cyber-life, Synthetic Pleasures; a "massive technological fantasy" by installation artist Jason Rhoades; Kristin Lucas' videos Cable Excess, commenting on the dangers of overexposure to technology, and Host, featuring a visit to a multimedia kiosk that provides online psychotherapy; and Doug Aitken's nonlinear, futuristic Web site narrative Loaded (launched on ada 'Web on 18 March in conjunction with the Biennial).
"There was no set intention to include in this year's Biennial digitally related artwork or artwork that dealt with the presence of the digital in our lives," says David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum. "The curators spent two years on the road looking at and selecting work by thousands of artists. The fact that these pieces stood out against more traditional or predictable artwork and artists' themes make them more legitimate than if they were ghetto-ized into a 'new media' show or category. And these are the standards by which new media-related works should be judged, within a broader perspective."
The curators of this year's Biennial are Lisa Phillips and Louise Neri. Phillips, a staff curator at the Whitney since 1977, garnered attention from both the art world and the high-tech world for organizing 1989's breakthrough Image World: Art and Media Culture. Neri, the US editor of the journal Parkett and program associate of London's innovative Artangel Trust, developed the exhibition around a series of questions dealing with the identity of the artist today, including "Is the approaching millennium having an impact?" and "Have the conditions for making art evolved?" The focus they decided upon was "the idea of artists' cosmologies - meticulously constructed worlds where private concerns intersect with public reality," says Phillips. A concept that, says Ross, "reflects in many ways the creation of a Web site or a CD-ROM."
In Loaded, Doug Aitken uses the Internet as a tool to prompt an "objective" critical response from - and, ultimately, an interaction with - his audience. That goal is also attempted in his video piece Diamond Sea, which paints a stark, indifferent picture of computer-run diamond mines on Namibia's Skeleton Coast. "I don't have an agenda or a PC message in my artwork. The Web and the fact that it has no designated path for the reader to discover the abstract, hard-to-describe story I present allows me to provoke thought rather than just deliver a message in a neat, shrink-wrapped package. Artists have a responsibility to communicate with their audiences, not just dictate. The Web breaks down this barrier - and all barriers - more than other forms."
Kristin Lucas says that, with her video adventures in technological pathology, she is asking viewers to become aware of their exposure to media. "It's so pervasive in our lives. We're extremely intrigued by it. But are we equally as critical? My motivation is to interrogate high technology and help people look at it from every angle, to see it as a tool and not be simply mystified by it."
