TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/122589/12258900.020

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6KB | 119 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 93

Mucking with Media


The Whitney offers a long trek through the alien goo

By Robert Hughes


    "What?" hisses the staring comic-strip villain in the Roy
Lichtenstein. "Why did you ask that? What do you know about my
image duplicator?" A fair question, given the show this
26-year-old Pop classic finds itself in. Maybe there could
(just) be a lazier treatment of a moderately interesting subject
than the Whitney Museum's current effort, "Image World: Art and
Media Culture," but it has to be one of the poorest on the
Whitney's recent record -- which is indeed saying something.

    The relations between art and photography, movies and TV
are part of modernist history and as old as visual mass media
themselves. They run from Edgar Degas and Pierre Bonnard with
their Kodaks, through the Dadaists (John Heartfield, Hannah
Hoch) and their clipped collages of news photos in the '20s, to
Pop art in the '60s, artists' video in the '70s and a whole slew
of artists today whose work, in one way or another, "addresses"
questions of imagery and social power raised by TV and
advertising.

    The Whitney show gives a truncated and spotty version of
this long history and is unlikely to persuade any discriminating
visitor that, as its catalog claims, "the overpowering presence
of (mass) media . . . is arguably the most important stimulus
to the development of new art forms and practices." Of course,
the show itself has little to do with aesthetic discrimination
-- an activity that, to the Whitney's present curators, seems
about as "relevant" as chipping flint arrowheads. No: the
important thing is to contemplate the media overload and make
suitably radical noises in imitation of the French essayist Jean
Baudrillard's pseudoapocalyptic mots, which pimple the catalog.

    "Image World" does have an argument, of a rudimentary kind.
It is that the world, and America in particular, is now so
saturated in TV that mass media have become reality. Nature is
dead, culture is all; representation, not direct experience,
determines all meaning. Hence the only way that art (which of
course the curators winsomely call "so-called high art") can
engage with general perception is to step out of its own
"elitist" traditions, lose its prejudices, get brazen and follow
the Yellow Brick Road of the "cutting edge" that leads through
Deconstruction Flats and the Forest of Signs to Jeff Koons'
porcelain pigs.

    This line of argument, or fantasy, is itself unreal. That
the journey might produce an art of diminishing returns does not
seem to have occurred to the folk who cobbled this affair
together. But if the show itself suggests anything, it is that
mass-media sources, far from affording artists continuous
inspiration, let alone fostering a critical sense about the
ravages of TV, have become a dead end. One starts at the height
-- American Pop art in the early '60s, with some first-rate
works by Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Lichtenstein and
Edward Ruscha -- and from there it is downhill all the way. To
the point where the "appropriations" of Richard Prince (glossy
Cibachrome blowups of details of landscape and galloping horses
from Marlboro-country ads) are credited with value as art.

    Twenty-five years ago, the fine-arts tradition in America
still had enough strength for a Rauschenberg or a Rosenquist to
stay balanced inside it while peering into the "floating world"
of fictive paradises promised by the media. But in 1989 the
average American spent nearly half his or her conscious life
watching TV. Two generations of Americans, including American
artists, have grown up in front of the tube, their consciousness
permeated by its shuttle of bright images, their attention span
shrunk by its manipulative speed, their idea of success dictated
by its collapse of fame into celebrity, and their anxiety level
raised by its sheer pervasive power.

    TV is stupidly compelling in a way that painting and
sculpture, even at their sentimental worst, are not. No work of
art can change this: the static visual arts cannot furnish an
answer to big media, or even an effective debunking of them. The
working relation of most '80s artists to mass culture is that
of a fairly tough fly to flypaper. It now seems that if one
opens "art" to include dominant media that have little or no
basic relation to art, the alien goo takes over and the result
is, at best, a hybrid form of short-impact conceptualism trying
to be spectacle.

    One saw this in Robert Longo's work in the early '80s, a
weird mix of technical sophistication and coarse sentimentality,
with maximum wallop and minimum resonance. It comes, in a
reduced form, in Barbara Kruger's posterish knock-offs of
Heartfield, with their smugly "challenging" slogans about
manipulated identity. It is even purer and duller in Jenny
Holzer's plaques and diode readouts (LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE
FATAL, etc.), failed epigrams that would be unpublishable as
poetry but survive in the art world, their prim didacticism so
reminiscent of the virtuous sentiments American daughters used
to embroider on samplers in pre-electronic days. Probably the
only '80s artist in America who has managed to introduce a real
shudder of feeling into media-based work is Cindy Sherman,
enacting her parade of roles, gender-caricatures and
grotesqueries for the camera.

    The long trek through the latter part of the show is
enlivened by two haunting, unsettling video installations (by
Bruce Nauman and Bill Viola) and one lone flash of wit, Mark
Tansey's Action Painting II, 1984. The rest is gaudy fribble.
For art requires the long look; it propagates images that can
be returned to, contemplated, examined in the light of their own
history; it absorbs time, rather than skating along time's
surface with quick icons. It finds the ground of its survival
in being what mass media are not.

    The general insubstantiality of this show puts one in mind
of the sad Russian joke about the miracles of communication: now
you can order a steak by telephone -- and get it by television.