NEW YORK -- Just when it seemed like new media art is old news, suddenly it's become big news again.
At least that's how the organizers of the 2002 Whitney Biennial -- considered a survey of what's hot in American art -- would like the public to consider the works utilizing new technologies selected for its most eclectic Biennial to date.
The curators have proudly announced that the exhibition features "the largest representations ever" of new media art, as if bigger means better. The list of artists was just announced this month; the show opens on March 7, 2002, at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.
It's an astonishingly diverse roster in terms of media and styles. And as Lawrence Rinder, chief curator of the exhibition, said, "the Biennial will expose multiple, sometimes conflicting currents, as well as extraordinary works that fall outside of any conventional aesthetic definition."
The list of 113 names (the longest in 20 years) ranges from well-known traditional artists such as Kiki Smith, who will present bronze sculptures of mythological creatures in the Central Park Zoo, to Yael Kanarek, a Net artist relatively unknown beyond new media circles whose narrative, fantastical website World of Awe -- already online for nearly two years -- will now be reframed as art with a capital "A."
The previous Biennial -- the first to include Net art -- was criticized for its poor display of websites in a separate small gallery that was often closed due to technical difficulties. Christiane Paul, the Whitney's adjunct curator of new media arts, says lessons were learned.
"Net art will be integrated into the 2002 Biennial," Paul, who wasn’t involved in the previous exhibition, said. "It should be interesting to see it in the context of more traditional media."
Some will be featured in more imaginative, sculptural installations rather than simply on public computer terminals or in large-scale projections.
John Klima's "Earth," for example, won't be available free online like most Net art, although it actively makes use of the Internet. Instead, "Earth" -- described as a geo-spatial visualization system that presents layers of information about the environment -- will be shown on a customized, limited-edition computer.
"It will be an intimate installation," says Klima, who adds that the small scale of his piece is due to the physical constraints of such a large exhibition.
Indeed, even among the new media works alone, the scope and breadth of pieces is potentially overwhelming: Beyond the Net art works, visitors will encounter such diverse pieces as Ken Feingold’s "If/Then," two robot heads that listen and respond to each other, and Chemi Rosado Seijo's multimedia project that includes the digital scrambling of TV signals.
While it's great that new media artists aren't ghettoized within this Biennial, could their works now simply get lost amidst paintings, photographs, videos, sculptures, architectural drawings, and bizarre performance pieces such as "Crawl" -- in which artist William Pope.L will dress as Superman and ride 22 miles around Manhattan while lying on a customized skateboard?
Some art world insiders think just getting the Whitney’s stamp should be gratifying enough for the artists, no matter what flaws a supersized Biennial might potentially have.
"I welcome the apparent diversity and only feel concerned that as an exhibition, the 2002 Biennial may have cast its nets too wide," states Rachel Stevens, a curator who teaches Digital Media at Brown University. "But inclusion in the Whitney is still good PR. To use old dot-com jargon, it means lots of sticky eyeballs."
