Detail from Virtual Concrete, 1994, VICTORIA VESNA, mixed media approx. 168 x 72 x 10 inches Courtesy the artist, Santa Barbara
VEERED SCIENCE
Colette Gaiter
Michael Joaquin Grey
Tim Hawkinson
Laurel Katz
davidkremers
Joseph Nechvatal
David Nyzio
Alan Rath
Pauline Sanchez
Joseph Santarromana
Rodney Sappington
Rachel Slowinski and Jesse Cantley
Christine Tamblyn
Victoria Vesna
Gail Wight
Organized by Marilu Knode, Curator
Huntington Beach Art Center
538 Main Street Huntington Beach, California 92648
Excerpted from "Veered Science, Weirder Still." Marilu Knode. Veered ScienceCatalogue, 1995. Huntington Beach Art Center.
Physics tells us that in Nature there is no action without its consequent reaction; motion moves from a point of impact in ever widening waves. It should not be surprising, then, to find this rule applying also to culture, that natural byproduct of one of earth's most industrious animals.[1]
Artistic working practices have, like all other activities of the general population, evolved based on the availability of new materials and processes generated from scientific innovations, from the simple shift from oil paint to acrylics to the widespread use of electricity in art work after World War II.[2] It can be no surprise, therefore, that artists explore, context, or fight the influence of science and technology on contemporary life, art forms, and human relations. Veered Science focuses on impure "hybrids" that incorporate and at the same time critique these "hard sciences." These artists are clear about the elements of scientific endeavor that are appropriate or inappropriate, though they flirt with the object of their critique, hoping to elucidate some "truth" about human existence.
There is a contingent quality to both art and science, each partially determined by historical pressures from a variety of places (for example, from the ruling class, popular culture, the effects of war or revolution). In the current climate of interdisciplinary analysis, critics from different fields deconstruct or breakdown the languages of science and art. Fresh energy and vocabularies invade foreign disciplines through this new understanding of the mechanics (some structured, others chaotic) of science and the arts. The artists in Veered Science use the cracks in the ideology of science and art to explore the limits and impact of technological growth.[3]
The works in Veered Scienceare high or low-tech, from CD ROMs to surreal assemblage, both ruminations on our world as mediated by human structures of science. Artists use the abstracted codes of science while looking for a human face-, these scientific codes are divined from nature by human nature and sometimes produce the unnatural. The artistic idioms in the show are influenced by forms and processes from art of the 1960s and 1970s. Minimalism, conceptualism, process art, and body art, were partially rooted in scientifically-generated systems from mathematics to industrial processes. That generation of artists twisted and turned these rigid systems but also celebrated the liberating aspects of discipline and systems theories to Produce nuanced mutations. Like artists from the I960s and 1970s, the artists in Veered Science celebrate the human potential Of scientific products but are also critical of its rampant growth, like a virus with no natural predators.
But -just as technology's forms are mutated in Veered Science so are the forms of painting and sculpture. Vesna's "concrete" work is a complex amalgam of base materials with digital and mechanical overlays, and Sanchez's spiral universe seeks to upend the gallery space with hand and computer-generated galaxies describing a private metaphysics. Ultimately these artistic admixtures are as dense as the vocabularies of science: both are influenced by outside forms and deserve, or even require, a broad range of ideas to decipher their full meaning. Despite the object of this exhibition being science and technology, the more high-tech work still avoids the "conscious novelty" of technology in its developmental stage.[4] Included are CD ROMS, computer-generated images, demonstrations of science-like projects whose goal is to develop a new vocabulary that somehow more specifically addresses the creative aspect of scientific research or the more disciplined side of artistic production.[5] Science here is adapted and made to veer by adopting, in some instances, the "face" of science and twisting all of our assumptions around. The artists included in Veered Science make interesting art, that most interesting of sciences
Skepticism about the social, economic, and environmental costs of technological development has become a permanent, often militant, feature of public consciousness.[6]
It would be safe to say that the paradigms of human life are changing, based on the technologies of science (chemistry, physics, medicine, engineering, virtual reality) and communication (e-mail, satellites, world wide computer networks). The computer is a powerfully evocative tool whose abstract and mutable language is ripe for manipulation by artists who seek to develop a new language for the exchange of information...
... Victoria Vesna critiques the unique experience of the human body in relation to technology in her Virtual Concrete (1995), a complex walkway/highway with digitally-produced photographs of a nude man and woman laminated onto cement, wired for sound and activated when the audience steps on the work. A metaphor for the information superhighway, the human figures are flattened and abstracted, manipulated through mechanical reproduction. The experience of the work is then further abstracted: a camera mounted above the work feeds a signal into a computer, siting the work onto Vesna's page in the World Wide Web where audiences from around the globe will have access to the piece. Playing off the "virtual" and the "concrete" Vesna prompts the viewer to question where do they fit in amongst all this science and technology? It seems a real human is not needed in this complex melding of conceptual art, body art, architecture, science and technology The dense layering of the work proposes the mind/body split, the split between the conscious and unconscious mind, and the affect on the body in the disembodied realm of communication whether by phone or computer. What, too, is a "real" art experience in the face of these tools that remove the viewer from the viewed? Vesna investigates the uses of silicon (from computer chip to cement) at the same time she explores the social and cultural climates that have produced and directed the dramatic shifts that are occurring in our technological world.
The work in Veered Science is humanist with a latent socio-political edge. Each piece reflects and defines the culture from which it draws ideas and materials. Can art soften or mold the look, feel, and action of domesticated science and technology so the "face" of the future is more palatable? Does use of this technology make the art work more accessible to audiences who are distanced from a visual heritage (outside of television and movies)? Pushing assumptions of limitless scientific experimentation to its extreme, as in the work of Laurel Katz, shows the oddness of such creative expenditures. In simulating scientific products these artists provide a sometimes mordantly witty, a sometimes bittersweet comment on human nature. A good model this for this type of artistic practice is like that of Michael Joaquin Grey, who is trying to reverse the cycle of science and technology, to reverse the process to "observe, explain, describe and exploit.[7]
But beyond this cultural context is the troubling, and widening, gap between technological initiates and those on the outside. Despite the ubiquitousness of these technical, special, and digital tools, very few have actual command of their language. One of the goals of this show is to question the direction of science and art, to wonder at the moral use and function of science and technology, and to begin creating a visual world that will explain the technical one we are facing. Art is bracketed between nature and science, and in order to rehumanize science rooted in nature these artists demystify its mythical, utopian impossibilities and bring it back to real human experience.
Notes
I . Muffet Jones, "Fetish, Process, and the Waster-Stream: Artists' Anxieties and Contemporary Art" in New Observations. #81, Spring 1991, p.2.
2. For further reference material see Pulse-2 report on a phenomenon. Santa Barbara: University Art Museum, 1090, p.72-75.
3. Andrew Ross, Strunge Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in the age of limits. London and New York: Verso, 1991, p.74.
4. Quote from conversation with Paul Tzanetopoulos, February 16, 1995.
5. CD ROM (Compact Disc Read Only Memory) is computer storage for digital information which can contain textual, visual and audio information.
6. Ross, p. IO.
7. Conversation with the artist, April 24, 1995.