In a recent Guggenheim press release Matthew Drutt wrote:
In collaboration with the 16th World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam,
the Guggenheim Museum and Society for Old and New Media present BRANDON,
a public interface/installation at Theatrum Anatomicum, DeWaag from
September 18 to September 21 with an Opening Party on 17:30 September 19
and a netlinked forum entitled "Digi Gender Social Body: Under the
Knife, Under the Spell of Anesthesia." Held simultaneously in Theatrum
Anatomicum, DeWaag (Amsterdam) and the videowall at the Guggenheim
Museum Soho (New York), the forum invites interface/intervention from
the net public.
September 20, Sunday, 1998
Guggenheim Museum SoHo14:00-16:00
575 Broadway (at Prince Street)
Theatrum Anatomicum 20:00-22:00
DeWaag, Nieuwmarkt, Amsterdam
log on: http://brandon.guggenheim.org
The forum, held in conjunction with Shu Lea Cheang's "Brandon: A One
Year Narrative Project in Installments" at the Guggenheim Museum,
relocates the 17th century public dissecting lessons held in Amsterdam's
Theatrum Anatomicum as a digital-age net spectacle. Moderated by Lisa
Cartwright (author: A cultural anatomy of the Visible Human project)
with cultural critics, genderists and biotechnologist (in New York: Lisa
Cartwright, Jennifer Gonzalez, Vernon Rosario, Allucquere Rosanne Stone,
Jennifer Terry; in Amsterdam: Jose Van Dijck, Ruth Oldenziel, Susan
Stryker), this forum convenes a virtual surgical operation on the theory
and construction of technosocial bodies. Members of the public will be
invited to participate on-line as well.
+ + +
After the Guggenheim event on the 20th came a flurry of conversation
relating to "Brandon" and also to artist Laurie Anderson. Robbin Murphy
was first:
Aymon and I went to the BRANDON teleconference at the Guggenheim Soho
yesterday afternoon. There were two stern-faced "gender studies" women
(sisters of Monica Lewisnsky) from Rochester on the panel plus a man in
a wig who lectured about how to reconstruct a penis from the muscles of
the forearm. (You grow it on the arm then attach it to the groin and cut
it from the arm. The result looks like a very big pink sausage). The
operation was shown on the video wall. Otherwise, the visuals consisted
of Shu Lea Cheang in Amsterdam yelling via chat at the poor young woman
trying to input questions from the audience in New York.
Aymon asked me why they would use the Internet to do something so
boring, why don't they do Moobird instead? Or jodi or any of the people
who have actually been involved in creating net.art?
Matthew Drutt didn't show up, the wimp.
Stacy Pershall wrote:
I was just a few blocks away at Artists' Space watching Laurie Anderson
play her violin, wearing ice skates frozen into blocks of ice (early
'70s flashback) and talk about how she was sick of stereo and rectangles
and she was ready for the backlash against computer art to begin.
G. H. Hovagimyan replied:
How far do you want the backlash to go? How about a new cabinet post,
Secretary of Media & Morality. This could have religious leaders to
watch over America's media and technological excesses. While we're on
the subject of Laurie Anderson. She is an artist who benefited
tremendously from her lover's techno wizardry. He's the one who built
the various interfaces to alter her voice and use the violin as a midi
controller etc..It's incredibly dangerous to pander to resentment and
fear. That's mob psychology. Watch out. The next election will have the
Luddites and anti-Gore forces out. Looks like Laurie Anderson has
shifted her allegiance to the religious right. I always thought she was
rather conservative.
Stacy Pershall replied:
Y'know, every time I post anything to RHIZOME, I do so with a knot in my
stomach, knowing that what I take as a humorous observation is going to
be pounded to death by the Intelligentsia-with-a-capital-I. That aside,
I am not advocating backlash–I'm not Laurie Anderson, I'm simply
quoting her words. In fact, let me do so in full. From the
September/November 1998 Artists Space bulletin:
"Claudia Gould: Do you talk to young artists? And what are they
interested in?"
"Laurie Anderson: Computers. It's hard to avoid doing digital things
today. I'm waiting, of course, for the backlash–which I believe is just
around the corner."
Back to the Brandon topic, G. H. Hovagimyan wrote:
I agree with Rob [Murphy] that Brandon is a failure. It's boring, the
interface sucks. The sexual politics, body replacement stuff has been
done to death by the whole art world. Whenever I see art work of this
ilk I say the same thing. Daytime TV talk shows do it better.
The original Brandon project was for a personal diaristic type film. It
should have stayed in that medium. There's no really deep issue here
other than fear of the stranger and homophobia. That's a perennial
concern.
Robbin Murphy replied:
I don't think Brandon is a failure. I think it is overpackaged for
insitutional presentation, like so much art these days. I hesitate to
criticize artists for being obscure or difficult (Gertrude Stein said
artists don't need criticism, they need support) and would rather hold
the Guggenheim responsible for not providing a curatorial "interface"
for the project. Curators are there to be criticized because part of
their job is to be advocates for the public.
My initial response to seeing a preview of Brandon last spring was that
it was using this kind of mass media as working material rather than
sexual politics etc. and I still feel that way. To some degree it even
acts as an alternative lens to view the current "billandmonica" crisis.
It will be interesting to see how the promised forum on the "Legal Body"
in the spring develops.
Continuing the Laurie Anderson thread, Chris Paul wrote:
Seems to me Laurie Anderson has always maintained a respect for ideas
and spirit, and for drawing with pencils and paper for that matter, and
that she has been espousing these un-digital ideas for some years while
including both electronics *and* ideas in her own practice.
Which seems OK to me at least. The Green Room tour included stories of
real life at its heart. Great story telling. Projections of pumpkins,
LambdaMOO URLs and other stuff, and wicked-old-snow-white-
step-mother-queen synthetic voices were just dressing up. It was the
stories that mattered. Getting down off a mountain in Tibet, asking John
Cage if we (people) were getting better etc etc.
What's your point GH? Can't we have people-stuff and machine-stuff and
people-machine-stuff? And can't we switch happily between them as we
chose? Do we need to be either digital or analogue? Is the former
progressive and good, the latter conservative and bad? Do you believe
that Laurie Anderson believes the vice-versa pairings? Or is she even
actually renouncing the digital order for her personal practice? Or for
everyone?
G. H. Hovagimyan replied:
If you want you can use Laurie [Anderson] as a benchmark where artists
begin to interface with tech. The rest of the stuff is facility
(pencils, drawings, violin playing, political dialogue etc.). Laurie has
made a career out of the anecdotal. I see her as the end of a long line
of perfomance art starting with the Dada and Surrealists ball moving
through Fluxus and early Kitchen events. Jeff Gompertz of FPU says that
Charlotte Moorman's cello performances made it possible for Laurie to
incorporate the violin into her oeuvre. I see this as wonderful and
positive. I also think that it's time to throw away the trappings from
previous art mediums and get focused on the future.
