TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/122589/12258900.020

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 108 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.