Though there are no computers at the sprawling New York Art Exchange exhibition in the financial district, their influence can be felt almost everywhere. From the soft-focus oil paintings of Sheldon Drake (done "by somebody who has stared at a screen too long," said one observer) to Casper Stracke's film loop of the cascading Netscape comets projected on a hanging tile of burnished glass, the show pushes a kind of carnivalesque intersection between information technology, fringe art, and the corporate culture of Wall Street. And judging by the line snaking around the corner at the opening reception Wednesday night, this outsider techno-art is quickly becoming mainstream.
The two-week show at 67 Broad Street, sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown and the Information Center for Technology, bills itself as an "alternative (alternative) art fair." With more than 50 different dealers represented, the show - all seven floors of it - claims every available space of a near-abandoned skyscraper with canvas, installations, photographs, and even asphalt (one section was paved like a parking lot).
The show features much traditional work by luminaries like Cindy Sherman, but the real draw is the 13th floor's Cascade Lounge, where club kids, art connoisseurs, and button-down brokers seemed to wait - hesitantly - for the rave to begin. "We wanted to create a '60s happening in a way that would facilitate interactions between musicians and technologists," says dealer John Good, who organized the event. "It's supposed to be an 'environment.'"
Energized by aural artist David Linton's ambient sound, the Cascade Lounge displayed a group of outsider works by artists who have no representation in the art world. One of the more engaging installations, "Where" by the art group 3-legged dog, had crowds circling its interactive bed. Users lie down, regard a hanging TV screen, and channel surf between "here" (a camera shoots back an image of you), "there" (cheesy New Age fantasy), and "somewhere" (cable-access shows) on the remote module fixed into the bed. "It's about displacement, like being in a German hotel room and you're channel surfing hoping that something good will come on, but there's nothing," says Mike Taylor of 3-legged dog.
The chaos of the show stems from the fact that the artists had little time to prepare their work in the space. Vinny Ray Fugere, of the art group Antenna Tool & Die, which presented its "Sound Mural" in the show, likens the loosely curated exhibition to graffiti. With only a couple of days, Fugere says, the artists "have to jump into this space and define it under a time limit.... It's really challenging for the artists."
With art crowding every corner, it can be difficult to know where one work ends and the next one starts. "It can be hard to tell the frontiers between the art and who's work is what," says Fugere. "Everybody's work has its own concept - their own microenvironment."
Unlike last year's show just a block up the street, this year's technology focus marks an explicit sell to Silicon Alley start-ups to lure them to downtown real-estate. The Alliance for Downtown New York works to draw new-media firms to the underdeveloped Wall Street area through its Plug 'N' Go program, which wires offices with high-end connections before tenants move in. After the stock crash and real-estate bust, the financial district has been struggling to redefine itself, says art dealer Good, and one of the ways Wall Street is doing that is through technology. "It's a clash of culture," Good notes gleefully, "and the Wall Street culture is being forced to change because they absolutely have to."
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
