review: 'written in stone, a net.art archeology' at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo

Norway: it seems too far away sometimes. But now there is a
nice reason to visit it. A week ago (March 23rd) a remarkable
exhibition opened at the Oslo Museum of Contemporary Art. Artist Per
Platou has curated an exhibition on net.art which is an odd mixture of
artistic installation and almost archeological introduction to what
was probably the most infamous period in network art: net.art. The
exhibition shows work of Jodi, Alexei Shulgin, Heath Bunting, Olia
Lialina and Vuk Cosic. The largest part of the exhibition is not about
the art works though, which is what is so extraordinary, even strange
if you will. Most of the exhibition is taken up by a trip through
memory lane, by objects and paraphernalia which somehow reflect the
atmosphere of net.art in the mid nineties.
The first thing you see when you enter the exhibition is a small white
pillar with a Perspex cube on it. It stands, all alone, in the middle
of a high, nineteenth century space. In it we see a small golden marble
or ball on a red velvet pillow. It represents the dot in net.art. It
is the dot, the dot on a velvet pillow. If that is not ironic enough,
behind the golden dot are five more pillars, with objects representing
the five (or six, since Jodi are two people) artists in the
exhibition. There is for instance a knife, for Heath Bunting, who got
into a lot of trouble for carrying a knife in Great Britain. (Later
on in the exhibition you will find prints of the whole story behind
the knife, copied from Bunting's web site.) There is also a dried bunch
of roses, representing both the roses Vuk Cosic placed at the Jeffrey
Shaw/Benjamin Weil installation at 'net_condition', the huge
exhibition about net culture at the ZKM in 1999, to mark the death of
net.art, and the roses Cornelia Sollfrank gave to Vuk Cosic at the
opening of his net.art pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001. The
strangest objects at the exhibition however must be the little busts
of every individual artist. They were created from photo's taken from
the web, photo's of Olia Lialina, Joan Heemskerk, Dirk Paesmans, Heath
Bunting, Vuk Cosic and Alexei Shulgin. The result is six oddly
similar looking heads. Some with glasses, some with slightly longer
hair then the rest.
The title of the exhibition points at the ironic work by Joachim Blank
and Karl Heinz Jeron (in collaboration with Alexei Shulgin and Natalie
Bookchin) called 'introduction to net.art', which shows this well known
text by Shulgin and Bookchin carved into stone tablets. The tablets
are hanging behind the 'dot', opposite the entrance. Seeing them
there, with the objects representing the artists (a typewriter with
a sheet of paper full of gibberish to represent Jodi) in front of them,
the little busts to the right and screenshots of well known web sites
in heavy golden frames (Jodi's '404', Lialina's 'Agatha Appears' and
more) to the left of them, creates a feeling of romantic nostalgia and
an almost painful sense of decay at the same time. This exhibition has
little to do with any historical overviews or theme shows of net.art.
This exhibition is almost all atmosphere and personal experience. Even
if this is what makes it most vulnerable, this is also what makes it
strong. I have seldom seen a net art exhibition that convinced me and
I am beginning to think this is why: exhibiting net art is all about
commitment, because it is simply not possible to avoid interpretation
if you want to exhibit this art in a way that engages the audience
in an exhibition space beyond the click of a mouse. What is interesting
about this is that it brings the curator very close to a net art
experience on line, the curator somehow reveals her or his individual
approach and motivations, even more so then with creating an exhibition
of existing material objects. The difference for the audience, between
visiting such an exhibition and experiencing different projects and art
web sites on line, is that the audience is at the mercy of (or rather:
captured by) the approach of the curator.
In this case the curator has chosen to pay a very personal tribute to
a period of net art he loves, showing the art works from this period
from three different perspectives. I have already described the main
room of the exhibition, but there are three more. Two of these are
filled with small paraphernalia, leftovers and 'souvenirs'. Here we
find anything from the original workspace poster and the Polish CD-Rom
that was created from Vuk Cosic's hijack of the Documenta X web site
to small material works created by other artists then those who are
represented in the main room. Here we find for instance the paper
shopping bag by Mouchette, with the image of the woman sticking her
tongue to a glass plate. There is also a photo of Cornelia Sollfrank
hugging a keyboard and of the performance group she used to be part of:
Innen. Etoy is represented by a Lego truck which one can order from
their web site. Thomson and Craighead have their tea towels with images
from the 'E-Poltergeist' project hanging on the wall. RTMark's cheap
watch in a golden cardboard box with the text "Time isn't money" is
also in one of the displays. Watercolors from Hakim Bey's office, a
Superman T-shirt worn by Vuk Cosic and a vest worn by Olia Lialina are
mixed with prints from mailing list texts by Netochka Nezvanova,
Tilman Baumgaertel or the (fake) books on the history of net.art by
Vuk Cosic. Especially the room with Lialina's vest is a trip down
memory lane.
Then the third room is where the audience can experience net art
closest to its original form. This is a video room, in which a video
of somebody browsing the web sites of the artists is shown. The
computer has simply been connected to a VCR, so we see what happens on
the screen of a computer. Showing net art with a beamer is always
dangerous. Some works become much stronger, especially those that are
mostly dependent on simple or abstract visuals. It is harder to show
more complex works this way though, especially work in which the
audience is asked to participate somehow. Choosing to record a
personal journey through some artists' sites is, like this entire
exhibition, a way to reveal aspects of the works in question which an
exhibition audience often would miss, because it is too inexperienced
or uncomfortable to explore something on a computer in a public
setting. To me this room felt a bit odd though. Maybe here the
experience of someone else browsing for you becomes too close to ones
own experiences, threatening it somehow. Funny is that the rest of the
exhibition did not have this effect on me. I remember seeing 'Net
Affects', an exhibition in which five beamers showed the work of
twenty artists. There the works had been taken off the web too and
played from stand alone computers. Whereas the video in 'written in
stone' shows the works in the pace of one person browsing, at 'Net
Affects' the artists had been asked to create 'self-refreshing' html
pages which jumped from one web page to another, without any further
human interference, creating a film or video like experience as well.
It was very impressive, and some works really stood out, making me
appreciate browser based art more then I did before. I am not saying
I did not like the video set up in Oslo, it just somehow made me feel
uncomfortable.
Yet the entire exhibition is on the edge of the acceptable, but in this
case (comparing it to for instance net_condition) the edge is not an
unpleasant place to be. For instance: net_condition was 'unbrowsable'
and impersonal. It in some ways exhibited an overkill on correctness,
in avoiding the horrible A-word (art) by talking about 'exhibiting net
culture', and it tried to show everything at the same time, erasing the
possibility to pay respect to individual works. 'Written in Stone' is
humorous and personal. It is an extraordinary exhibition, even if I am
tempted to call a large part of it an art installation by the curator.
One interesting detail to it is that the audience can create its own
catalogue on site, but also on line. On site, at the museum, two computers
which are on line, a printer, a copy machine and the possibility to bind
the pages you have selected create something highly unusual: different,
individual catalogues which all have the same ISBN number. Unfortunately
the ISBN number is something the on line audience has to do without.

exhibition web site (all in Norwegian, but still browsable):
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/

articles on the web from which a catalogue can be compiled:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/artikler.htm

works represented in browsing video:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/videofilm.htm

dot on velvet pillow:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/bilde21.htm

Jodi in golden frame:
http://www.student.uib.no/~stud2081/utstilling/bilde11.htm

Net Affects
http://www.pavu.com/netaffects/

net-condition
http://www.zkm.de/net


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