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> [ part4 ]
Untraditional Activity...Media Art(ists)
JD: We can now show the Whitney Museum Web site,
if you like?
DR: Oh!...That's fine. Why don't you just scroll through some
stuff on it. But you know that the Web site is not just the extension of the
traditional responsibilities of the museum.... That's our home page, and that's
the little blue ribbon indicating that we are fighting censorship on the Net. Why
don't you click on the building? I am not sure if this is a public experience,
really; it's sort of like reading in public, and it takes so much time. Click on
exhibitions if you like, and we will look at something traditional. People can
get a preview of information about exhibitions that are available at the museum;
this is fairly standard, and is part of our public relations responsibility to
promote the traditional activities of the museum in the best way possible,
bringing people into the building to experience works of art in the flesh. But
for me what is most interesting is the idea that museums can open up a new space,
analogous to the kind of activities that Benjamin will describe later in his
activity which I admire a great deal on ada 'web. An artist can be commissioned
to do new works, specifically for this new medium, and the museum can point to
other works being done at ada 'web or at other sites around the world. I think
looking at the Web in this public context is completely tedious, and actually I
am not interested in doing this. It is not really a theatrical experience. It is
a mistake to try to turn it into one; it involves too much reading, too much
personal choice. What you can do with an audience on the Web--- the way an artist
can move an audience from site to site, that you can walk in the front door of
the Whitney and leave through the back door of the CIA headquarters--- these are
things you cannot do in physical space. I mean not today, at least.
DIA has done some wonderful things. I think immediately of Tony Oursler's piece in which
sound and text are used. Julia Scher and Jenny Holzer have started to tap into
some of the distinctive qualities of the medium that I am anxious to see other
artists start to explore. In Jenny's case ,she gave up authorship of her Truisms.
She just put them out into the Web space, and you can grab them and rewrite
them, and put them back. In a way, it suggests the end of that Holzer project;
Jenny is probably done with Truisms now. Julia Scher has had a longstanding
interest in security and observation and the way electronic systems, like the
Web, the Internet, work both to liberate but also to observe and constrain us;
she has created another one of her completely impossible failures that are both
delightful and entrancing, and at the same maddening because of the way that they
collapse within themselves. For me that level of failure and being able to
program that into work as elegantly as she does is a sign of a rather
extraordinary artist. I look through the Web a lot, and not very much blows me
away. I believe that work will start to emerge in the next year or so, that will
start to grab our attention and do important things to our consciousness.
The Whitney, and hopefully other institutions, will find ways of supporting, of
rewarding, artists who enter into the dialogue with this new set of tools; to
support artists who explore this new medium's distinctive qualities, and who
examine the creative potential of the Web.
