Some artistic mediums are better suited to certain kinds of content than others.
Photography, for example, can reproduce the visible world more easily than painting. This doesn’t mean paintings can’t succeed at the same effort. It means only that photographers will achieve the goal in a way that appears clear, inevitable and fitting. Seeing the two together makes the photograph and the visible world seem made for each other.
The same sort of pairing is appropriate to last week’s International Symposium on Electronic Art, which brought Chicago not only hundreds of people active in the field but also dozens of exhibitions with the latest work from artists in several countries.
Now that a generation of artists has grown up with electronic technology, what have they achieved that’s positive and natural to their medium? Some of the symposium’s larger exhibitions — at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Art Gallery, University of Illinois’ Gallery 400 — gave at least a provisional answer.
Electronic art has been with us for about a quarter-century. Theoretically, it includes any kind of work powered by devices, circuits or systems that have been developed through electronics. But machine art, such as kinetic sculpture (which includes one of the shows’ robots and another’s mechanism for making drawings), occupies a small place compared to that of pieces centered on video and computers.
These works take many forms. Some are two-dimensional prints that extend the historical line that comes from handmade graphics. Others are recordings that may be played at home or in galleries. Still others are installations that incorporate television receivers, speakers, live performance, computer monitors, even sites on the Internet.
Prints and videotapes have the same sort of relationship to a viewer as posters and films; once on display, they become objects of the viewer’s scrutiny.
Computer art, on the other hand, requires participation; viewers interact with the works by means of a keyboard or various sensors including cameras, microphones, even bar-code readers familiar from supermarkets.
In the early years of electronic art, artists used computers to generate images on an oscilloscope. When printers could be linked to computers, artists created electronic drawings. Then came the Quantel Paintbox, an interactive graphic computer that permitted artists to make video images and color prints.
Evidence of the hand of the creator was primary in each of the stages; it created both geometric patterns and representational images. In that sense, computers represented an electronic extension of the artists’ chalks and pigments. No matter how dazzling technically, results showed a lineage that went back to other famous marriages of art and science, such as Luca Pacioli’s 1509 treatise on the Golden Section.
Perhaps the best-known contemporary form of this kind of work is the hologram, a flat image that catches light in such a way as to appear like a sculptural relief. In the 1970s, holograms were all the rage; a museum of holography even was founded in Chicago. Artist Ed Paschke showed an interest — as indeed he did with the hologram’s digital successor, the cologram (seen at the State of Illinois Art Gallery). But such objects only give the illusion of painting or drawing in space, and they remain objects that address the viewer in fundamentally the same way as do cave paintings.
In the 1990s, when personal computers became widely accessible and computer courses entered art and design education, a different relationship began to be established between a work of art and its viewers. Electronics gave a special twist to pieces requiring physical participation that had been around since the 1960s.
The model for the new relationship placed viewers in front of a computer screen at a keyboard. And no longer did viewers merely look. They acted, pushing buttons and executing commands, as if working out a program on a word processor.
At the Betty Rymer Gallery of the School of the Art Institute, the exhibition demonstrates that interaction is central to the strongest branch of electronic art. In most cases, viewers interact with the work as they would with any new piece of computer software. Some works on view are activated not by touch but sight or sound. No matter. Interaction is the issue, not the way one goes about it.
Electronic art that reveals itself in stages through a give-and-take process appears, for the moment, more meaningful than, say, the world of virtual reality (found at galleries on the UIC campus) because it ties into an idea about artmaking that has had a profound effect on the content of artworks for nearly a decade.
In the late 1980s, artists started shying away from the kind of all-encompassing statement that once gave form to what we might call a philosophical world view. This kind of expression was one of the major achievements of art of the past; because of it, viewers could look to artists as interpreters of life not just inventors of formal patterns.
Take an example from the recent history of representational painting: English artist Francis Bacon. He created images that dramatized the existential condition. Each painting was a coherent whole in the sense that, whether or not we liked its vision, it still was fully realized from a point of view that was crystalline and unmistakable.
Years before Bacon died in 1992, the impulse of artists to put themselves on the line with world-defining statements was waning. Instead, artists avoided artistic and philosophical resolution in favor of open-ended possibility. We were told each artwork was deliberately left incomplete; viewers themselves had to sort out fragments, opposing tendencies and contradictions.
Electronic art is perfect for communicating this kind of content. No other medium conveys it as well because the interactions of electronic art proceed by fits and starts that follow no linear pattern. Viewers make choices, but they advance randomly, picking up information that may or may not be crucial to meaning. Each artwork becomes an investigation or exploration rather than a resolution.
A CD-ROM proves a better conveyor of open-endedness than a painting precisely because it involves our decisions on many points of access. Viewers really do have to shoulder responsibility for making sense of the piece; without it, a step-by-step examination cannot continue. Electronic artists have forced us to assume more control of the mechanisms that withhold or reveal even the most trivial information.
The range of expression in the works on view — from a CD-ROM based on writings by Walter Benjamin to a dance club movement-sound-and-light show — blurred the distinction between “high” and “low” art, as younger artists in all media are wont to do. But, again, this process seems easier and more natural to electronic art, given that we already know the electronic dissemination of information is anything but elitist.
What, then, was the impression left with an interested observer? Namely, that electronic art serves especially well the late 20th century artist’s world view of diminished expectations. Those who feel life is too complicated for all-embracing statements have at last found the ideal conveyor of tiny, ill-fitting bits and pieces, the flashes and sound bites that are among our preservable shards of contemporary experience.
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For details on continuing exhibitions, call 312-345-3602 or access the International Symposium on Electronic Art 97 Web site at www.artic.edu/(tilde)isea97
