Jennifer Steinkamp's new show, Stiffs, opens Saturday, February 12th and
runs through April 23rd at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery at Art
Center College of Design, 1700 Lida Street, Pasadena, CA. I wrote the
following piece for the catalogue, and thought that the idea of
triangulation might be of interest.
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Jennifer Steinkamp: The Poetics of Triangulation
Space, movement, form, color, sound, interaction–synesthesia has been
refined for the networked age. But everyone knows that the light show
that plays you is already the future present. From the fishbowl TV
studios ringing Times Square–the new peepshows of celebrity–to the
animated canopy of Las Vegas's Fremont Experience to the pixel overdose
of the Ginza and Piccadilly Circus, architectural hardscapes fuse with
dynamic imagescapes wherever global capital senses the potential to grab
eyeshare.
What's the artist to do in times such as these? One strategy is to
maximize the minimal, to make work that slips into the interstices, that
waits with baited breath for the attention the general public may no
longer be capable of bringing to bear. This is an honorable choice, with
links to the tradition of the artist as obsessive individualist or as
avant-gardist working outside or against the mainstream. Other artists
choose not so much to duke it out with the spectacle as to tag along,
like lonely little siblings. But often they end up playing a game they
can't win, offering amateur theatrics masquerading as installation,
performances that play like bad stand-up, and representational imagery
that can only be termed orphaned illustration, without benefit of a
paying client.
Another alternative has emerged for artists who wish to relate to the
dominant technologized entertainment culture. I refer to this strategy
as triangulation, a term derived from a method used by navigators and
surveyors to determine the distance between points on the earth's
surface by dividing up larger areas into a series of connected
triangles. In a like manner, artists can span the territorial divides
between art and entertainment by negotiating a series of strategic and
interconnected forays from both sides toward new ground. Artists who
master the means of media production–computer graphics, animation, film
and video editing, projection equipment, sound technologies, interaction
design, and so on–without falling into the wormhole of contemporary
celebrity culture's banal self-referentiality have been able to capture
the excitement of the electronic, weaving their work all the while into
larger cultural and aesthetic contexts. Triangulating toward meaningful
work requires a sure hand to escape art world insularity, on the one
hand, without sacrificing seriousness of purpose in the Narcissus pool
of mass media culture, on the other.
So what work effects this triangulation? It's not painting (this isn't
to say that painting is dead–it never was, except for a fifteen-minute
coma in the early 1970s). It's not sculpture or photography, either,
though both are also doing quite well, thank you. Net.art is fun, and
may someday be important, but it's still too enthralled with its own
technical whizbang to grab the distance needed to triangulate. No, the
defining works of our time are the video installations that have
mastered the poetics of triangulation. Here I'm speaking of the work of
artists as varied and loath to be lumped together as Gary Hill, Steve
McQueen, Shirin Neshat, Diana Thater, Jane and Louise Wilson, and of
course, Jennifer Steinkamp.
The more you see, feel, and interact with Steinkamp's installations, the
more you appreciate her dedication to craft and finish. The integration
of the varied components of the work stands as Steinkamp's signature.
Even if you don't know that she models the physical spaces of the
installation first on the computer, you sense that–like Alfred
Hitchcock's obsessively preplanned films–the work is somehow fully
finished before it is even begun. Like a director, Steinkamp understands
the importance of collaboration and works with talented sound artists,
which explains why her installations are such full experiences: there is
an intricate and sophisticated aural environment that itself
triangulates with the physical spaces and their mediated skins.
More than any of her peers, Steinkamp has harnessed the computer and its
inflected media to the experience of installation art. The dynamic, and
now interactive, imagescapes she creates are seamless and enthralling,
bowling you over with their ingenuity while at the same time plumbing
your reservoir of references. It's here that her particular strategy of
triangulation comes to the fore.
On one's first encounter with a Jennifer Steinkamp installation, the
kinesthetic rush will indeed bring up everything from MTV to Lasarium
shows to Times Square's pop-tech explosion. But Steinkamp wants to do
something other than simply give you more of what you're already
getting. Her spaces become even more luminous as their complex relations
unfold. Abstract painting, from Abstract Expressionism to Op Art, is a
vital influence (and one that has been much noted by critics), but her
ancestry is far more nuanced than that, encompassing the experimental
animation of Oskar Fischinger, the dynamic color studies of Len Lye, the
Whitney brothers' early computer-generated works, Paul Sharits's avant-
garde flicker films, not to mention the work of Steinkamp's own
contemporaries. Harnessing the tools and power of electronic media
without succumbing to their increasing vapidity, drawing from a long
history without wearing her smarts on her sleeve, Steinkamp pulls off a
particularly adroit triangulation, from inside the spectacle to outside
to somewhere in between.
