leisurely disappointment

maybe the new york city art world has a weakness for work that utilizes the latest technology. you know, those cool installations that everyone talks about and wait in line for hours to see because only a few people are allowed at a time. the media and general word of mouth tend to fuel the hype. for example, doug wheeler's "immersive light environment" at david zwirner last year was given to me as an option for a review assignment. i already knew there would be a long wait, but i went anyway. seeing the line for myself, i said fuck it, i won't buy into this hype. when christian marclay's the clock premiered in chelsea for the first time, i went on one of the first few days of its opening, and there was little hype and no line. i enjoyed a few hours in a relatively empty room. i actually thought the work sort of interesting. then i heard about the long lines later, about its return to moma and the ridiculous wait there, and started to not like it so much.

but maybe by placing judgment on the work purely based on the hype and limited capacity, i miss out on some good ones.

so i decided to go see the rain room at moma by random international. i had a strong feeling this was going to be the kind of hype that i hate: all "cool" but little else. luckily for me, i had member privileges so i did not have to wait in line for very long, considering it was also a monday afternoon. very lucky, because i hated it.

i understand why people would find it worth their time to visit the room. the technology, at least theoretically, is very cool. heavy rain drops fall from a large square close to the ceiling but the water makes way for you when you enter. like moses.

don't we all imagine that happening? as a joke we might say, i wish that rain would not fall on me during a heavy storm. kind of like that cloud in a cartoon perpetually hovering over a depressed person, except an umbrella version of it.

how fitting for a narcissitic generation. the inconvenience of natural discomforts will not effect ME. 

how fitting for a generation obsessed with new technologies to enhance the comfort of our lifestyle so that we can focus on more important things. automatically flushing toilets, for example, spare us the trouble of having to push down on a lever, which may make our hands even more disgusting. voice commands on our mobile phones spare us the trouble of having to use our hands to write with a pen on paper. automatic doors spare us excessive physical exertion. you get the idea.

now rain that parts without our telling it to do so? how satisfying. probably even more so because the drops are so heavy.

it also helps that it's summer in nyc, when the heat can get suffocating just from the concrete. it also helps that, to help visitors shield themselves from the sun while waiting in line outside, they offer very black moma umbrellas to absorb even more heat. once you get into the room, of course it's refreshing. it's even better that the technology actually DOESN'T work very well so you do get rained on. hard.

i wore shitty sneakers, just in case i got wet, but wore a watch that may or may not be waterproof and a dryclean-only dress. well, i was very annoyed when i got poured on. it was safest to go where others were already standing, but the sensors are not sensitive or fast enough to keep you completely dry. to experience the "cool" effects, you have to get wet first, wait, then walk very very slowly. otherwise, good luck with your watch and cellphone.

aside from the refreshing and "cool" technological aspect of the room, the installation looks cool. there is an oppressively bright light at the back of the room, aiming straight toward the entrance where visitors must still wait their turns and watch others "have fun." the backlight effect makes those "experiencing" the work look holy, in a sense. you can only see silhouettes moving through the space with very long shadows stretching toward those watching in line. the splatter from the water hitting the ground also creates a mysterious mist / fog with the light, so the whole scene appears dream-like or otherworldly.

once inside the rain, the sight is infinitely disappointing and even vulgar. standing close to and facing away from the bright light, you get to see everything: the lame rain fall ("why the hell would i pay to stand in rain??") and a clear view of every visage in the room. the experience is kind of like conjuring fantasies of a handsome man you meet in a darkly lit bar, then seeing a very plain or ugly face outside under a streetlamp. or better yet, meeting him for an actual date next day when it's bright out, and you can't even recognize him.

maybe that is the point? the antithetical nature of such "new technology" installations and the hype that surrounds them. but i have the feeling that the work is not intentionally self-reflexive. the writing surrounding it seems to emphasize "experience" and the only experience i had was a feeling of annoyance from the "cool" technology not working properly.

moma seemed to have been experiencing problems with people staying way over their desginated limit of 10 minutes. i gladly gathered my things after 10. eager to leave the wet room, i approached the exit. when the guard opened the door for me, it was pouring outside too.

the weather forecast did not warn me about rain, so i had no umbrella. even more annoyed by my visit, for a second, i was convinced that the rain room brought actual rain. 

oh well. this might prevent me from going to another "cool" and limited capacity "immersive environment" for a long time.

but if anyone is still interested in visiting after reading this, the work is on view until july 28th at the museum of modern art.

venice biennale and icp triennial

the last post did not do justice to the impressiveness of the venice biennale. the scale and organization of the main show for one, but the "narrative," as i called it before, is not as bland as i made it out to be. the shared experience, archival tendencies of human beings are placed in an interesting dialogue across time. the show presents a sort of naive "primordial" shared unconscious in conjunction with a more bleak one of the contemporary era. 

if the giardini show presents more of this collective unconscious through images and dreams that surface across people and times, the arsenale introduces a more explicit relationship between the observation of our natural surroundings and science / technology.

auriti's "absurd" dream of an encyclopedic palace of the world becomes a nightmare, a source of our own fall from paradise. the limits of science and rationality emerge more prominently here. our desire to know reveals itself as detrimental to us and nature, to which we have long ceased to belong. 

camille henrot's film, grosse fatigue (2013) tells the story of our "beginning," where yahweh decided to rest when he saw the human race had brought sufficient amount of violence and moral pestilence into the world. the narrator lists the animals and lives there were in the beginning while the film shows images of dead birds (all carefully labeled) pulled out from drawers and he speaks of the creation of earth and mountains while a map identifies percentages of people with bipolar disorders and schizophrenia around the world. 

at a few galleries farther down, millet mounds (2012), a video installation by xuan kan exhibits the futility of our attempts to collect, classify, and salvage history, despite our technological advancements and number of record-keeping devices at our disposal. a long stretch of small monitors flicker through thousands of images like a choppy film, yet they cannot retrieve the aura or meaning of these historic locations. 

harun farocki's video ubertranung [transmission] (2007) shows the ways in which people interact with the historic monuments that do remain--a strong tendency for touch, a desperate desire to shorten the irreparable gap between the holy past and decrepit present.

later on, one passes through the ryan trecartin "hell" room, as holland cotter put it in his new york times review. the "human circumstance" is rendered more depressing as the issue of human agency (in collective memory, identity, etc.) seems an irrelevant question. passing by wade guyton's printer-made paintings and albert oehlin's collages from pages of magazines, books, and supermarket ads, i wondered what this may really mean for art. a complete destruction of the romantic notion of artistic genius? or an extreme exaggeration of it?

the ominous but fascinating film, da vinci (2012) by yuri ancarani warns us about the machines threatening to take over and eliminate us from the world of our own construction. in the second to last room, there is dieter roth's solo szenen [solo scenes] (1997-1998), a video installation of 131 monitors displaying cctv footage of men in their offices. watching the men file papers at their desks, drinking coffee, and pacing around the rooms, i was left without a doubt that i was to regret (on the behalf of humanity) indulging in the obsession to know everything.

but is there some sort of hope? walter de maria's golden rods at the end of this journey seemed to lead somewhere less bleak. i walked out to the open air, toward the boat docks of the arsenale. smelling the salty sea, i felt relieved that it was over.

it's already been 11 days since i returned from venice, and today i decided to pay a second visit to a show i did not have time to see in its entirety the first time. the international center of photography contributes to the discussion (lesson?) raised by the later part of the venice biennale's arsenale show. the title of the icp's triennial, a different order of things, suggests a convergence in their subjects of interest, on the role of art, images, and photography now. 

some works included take similar positions as the venice biennale. roy arden's the world as will and representation--archive 2007 (2007) is a 96-minute rapid slideshow of 28,144 images of "things." it evokes the flashing speed of xuan kan's installation, but arden's gives the impression of going through "everything." i did not stand to watch for the whole duration of the piece, but when i paused to watch multiple times, it went through images of guitars, portraits of families, dildos, boats, you name it.

this archival tendency appears more humorously absurd in another work, michael schmelling's images of hoarder's dens. they are a part of his series the plan (2005-2009), in which he documented raids into homes of people who cannot throw anything out. collecting as societal disease. i could not help but smile in remembrance of the "cosmic" section of the venice biennale when seeing one photo which showed a box of books titled numbers: rational and irrational, the telescope, and earth, moon, and planets.

much of the work are concerned specifically with the role of the camera in documentation, memory, and cultural production. jim goldberg's small portraits and sometimes written stories of migrants fill one wall. titled proof (2013), they testify to the artist's encounter with his subjects. markings on each (a check mark, an x, question mark, outlines and borders) by his hand attempt to recreate the contact he had with them--human gestures of intimacy through the alterations of the documenting medium. 

like goldberg, others display a consideration of their own presence (intrusion?) during the process of photographing or filming. gideon mendel's portraits of flood victims around the world are not simply ethnographic documentations; the eyes and expressions on the faces betray a well of feelings (some accusatory, others more resigned but still resentful) toward the photographer and, by extension, the viewer as their bodies stand half submerged in water. the title of each portrait begins with the name(s) of each subject, sparing them from becoming another number in statistical data. 

the formally abstract work, such as trevor paglen's drone images, takeda shimpei's nuclear imprints, and lisa oppenheim's smoke prints, have elaborately political back stories that implicate the viewer in the consequences of their viewing. the impeccably manicured hand in thomas hirschhorn's video, touching reality (2012), nonchalantly flips through gruesome war photographs on an ipad, occasionally zooming in to take a closer look at spilled guts or a cellphone still clutched by stiff fingers of corpses,

oliver laric's video installation of two works, versions (2010) and versions (2012), presents example after example of appropriation (deliberate or not) and recurring images throughout visual mediums in history. there exists no such thing as originality and we always take from history, laric seems to say. the "archive" is made of the same repeating images. is there such a thing as discovery and human agency?

i like the show at icp for its complexity, and perhaps, greater optimism than the biennale's take on some of the issues. human beings, art, images, have more power. photography and seeing are actions which have consequences in the real world. sometimes they do violence and destruction, sometimes they bestow power and create potential for changing the world.

this post may be very scattered and grammatically incorrect. but i wanted to get some notes down before my desire to write about this show went away completely.